# The Young Mencken Collected by Carl Bode **URL:** **By** John Chamberlain **Published:** April 1, 1974 --- “Mencken was the best of the newspaper-trained critics, and I think, in my condition of galloping gafferism, that it was he who saved my generation from the perils of turning politicians into gods.” “Yes,” said the veteran Washington correspondent Arthur Krock, speaking of _The Alternative_, “it has a Menckenian touch.” Meaning, of course, that its reverences and irreverences are set forth in a saucy vocab-ulary (“tony dolts,” “patheticoes,” “moron ACLU lawyer”) that would have delighted the Baltimore denigrator of the gelehrten whose early works have been exhumed by Carl Bode from newspaper and magazine files to make up a beautiful book called _The Young Mencken_. It is fitting that a new Menckenian organ exists in the land to give hos-pitality to this book which exposes, in a leisurely unfolding, the growth of a great original. Before the coming of Mencken there was only academic criticism in the United States, and it was dull, dull, dull. The academics of my youngest years sneered at people who, as the saying had it, got their education in public, but if it had not been for a whole generation of news-papermen who took to book reviewing, building up their backgrounds as they went, it is doubtful that we would ever have had the literature of the twenties and the thirties. Have the newspaper critics been forgotten? Burton Rascoe, Floyd Dell, Francis Hackett, Harry Hansen, all out of Chicago? Mencken’s _Smart Set_ sidekick, George Jean Nathan? The ebullient steeplejack of the _Seven Arts_, James Gibbons Huneker? These and many others lacked formal credentials, but they brought gusto to criticism, created readers by the dozen, and gave that miraculous impetus to the Knopfs, the Heubsches, the Pat Covicis, the Albert Bonis, and the Horace Liverights of the new publishing companies that sprang up in the earliest twenties like flowers in Baja California after a rain. Mencken was the best of the newspaper-trained critics, and I think, in my condition of galloping gafferism, that it was he who saved my generation from the perils of turning politicians into gods. We read him in the anarchistic years just after Versailles, when one laughed at Cal Coolidge. When Mencken praised Coolidge for turning the White House into a peaceful dormitory, we thought it a superb piece of satire. Little did we note that Mencken meant every word of it when he credited Silent Cal with reviving the lost world of Thomas Jefferson. Appreciating Mencken for his manner more than for his libertarian matter, we went on into the thirties, actúally voting for the planners who planned us into the forty-year inflation that shows no signs of abating. But something of Mencken’s distrust of the politico stuck, and when Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and later, Murray Rothbard came along with their reasoned variations on the theme of _Our Enemy, the State_, we were ready to recover our nerve and, along with it, our tradition. Mr. Bode’s collection of the young Mencken’s news articles, Sunday features, Baltimore Sun “Free Lance” columns, epigrams, _Smart Set_ reviews, Kiplingesque poems, Dreiserian fiction, and essays on American manners and morals makes us privy to the evolution of a style. Also of an education. Mencken was always good-humored, feisty, and beery, but his latter-day trick of delivering the most outrageous statements as if they were the soberest truth had to be cultivated. Talking about Nietzche in 1908, Mencken is just a competent neophyte. But when he writes an essay for the _Atlantic Monthly_ in 1914 called “The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet,” using Nietzche as an excuse to get into the subject of post-Bismarck Germany, the prose moves with a zing and a zest that shows Mencken has finally mastered his medium. Mencken, a German by an-cestry and by a genuine passion for gemütlichkeit, rather hoped the Kaiser would win his war. Well, the Kaiser, unlike Hitler, was at least a gentleman, so we can excuse the Mencken wish even though we deplore it. The point to be made here is that by 1914 Mencken had achieved his style. He was no longer “just a newspaperman.” The new words come like pellets along about page 358 of Mr. Bode’s gatherings. Hunkerous tumbles after brummagem, saints and succubi contend for the heathen, and snoutery is abroad in the land. Amateur Messiahs strive to convert osseocaputs, and a common beating becomes a rowelling. The German words and phrases—_wille zur macht_, _saufsch-wester_, _katzenjammer_—are sprinkled around like paprika. But the Teu-ton learning is deployed as humor, not as pretentiousness, and a gorgeous buffoonery masks the serious thrust. Mencken fought the booboisie (the word was his coinage), and, though the boobs are still with us and congregate daily around the boob tube, he succeeded in leavening the lump. Maybe he succeeded too well. The enemy today is the intellecualoid (_The Alternative_’s coinage), which means that some of the booboisie have been educated beyond their in-telligence. The critical scene has passed back into the hands of the pro-fessors, some of them worthy. But the worthies tend to be specialists, called upon by our book supplement editors once and twice a year to set forth esoteric matter. We could stand some of those self-educated news-papermen of the teens and the twenties who became the Burton Rascoes, the Francis Hacketts, and the H. L. Menckens of an era that gave us identifiable critics who contributed an exciting continuity to the reviews that are no more. _Reviewed by John Chamberlain / Literature (600 Pages) / BFL Price $15_