An editor, critic, and longtime journalist with The Baltimore Sun, H.L. Mencken had a knack for both inspiring and infuriating readers. Though he died ("deoxidized," he would say) over half a century ago, his rip-roaring style--witty, combative, yet graceful--continues to "stir up the animals" and attract fresh admirers.
An Extravagant Prose Style
Mencken's prose style is often marked by unrestrained hyperbole--an "extravagant accentuation in degree," as he once defined the trope. Through exaggeration he conveys a sense of energy and delight.Consider his habit of pairing adjectives alliteratively and sometimes redundantly: "ignorant and ignominious," "succinct and savory," "faint and feeble," "seduced and soul-sick." As one critic noted, Mencken was never content with one word "when he could inflict greater derangement and disparagement with two." Similarly, he often amplifies modifiers in thesaurus fashion: "In brief, the whole story is apocryphal, bogus, hollow and null, imbecile, devoid of substance" ("How Legends Are Made").
The effect of such extravagance is usually playful, even comical. In this harangue from the opening paragraph of the essay "On Being an American," Mencken's hyperbolic denunciations are downright exuberant:
[T]he American people, taking one with the other, are the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the Middle Ages, and . . . they grow more timorous, more sniveling, more poltroonish every day.The mounting superlatives, the archaic "poltroonish," and finally the repetition of the derisive adjectives contribute to the sense that Mencken is not so much venting his spleen (in classical terms, bdelygmia) as he is strutting his stuff.
As he admits a few paragraphs later, a "certain sough of rhetoric may be here. Perhaps I yield to words as a Chautauqua lecturer yields to them, belaboring and fermenting the hinds with a message from the New Jerusalem." Or to put it another way, as he once said in a letter, "a good phrase is better than a Great Truth--which is usually buncombe." The rancor that seems to lie behind Mencken's diatribes is often undermined by the comic hyperbole of his self-deflating performance.
A Student of Language
A serious student of language (see his ground-breaking work, The American Language), Mencken was keenly aware of its limitations. "Words are veils," he wrote in a letter to critic Fanny Butcher. "It is hard enough to put into them what one thinks; it is a sheer impossibility to put into them what one feels." Such skepticism, however, never kept him from trying.
For a taste of Mencken's prose, read "The Hills of Zion," one of seven pieces of Menckeniana included in our collection of Classic British and American Essays. The occasion for the piece was the notorious Scopes "Monkey" Trial of 1925--but frankly the topic itself hardly matters. As Mencken famously observed, "There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers."
And if you're ready for some invigorating lessons on how not to be a dull writer, consider spending an evening with the Sage of Baltimore. The essays linked below are a good place to begin. Many more can be found in the collection The Mencken Chrestomathy (Random House, 1949), assembled by Mencken himself shortly before he suffered a cruel stroke that left him unable to read or write.
Essays by H.L. Mencken:
