A MENCKEN REMINISCENCE
By A. E. ZUCKER
I did not know Mencken very well, having seen him perhaps only a dozen
times in thirty years. But I should like to record a few items that illustrate
some of the characteristics of his vivid personality as many of us members
of the Historical Society or the Germania Club may likewise recall them.
There was his innate kindness. On the occasion of a luncheon of the
Germania Club in the early thirties a group was standing all about
Mencken, before we had sat down to table, listening to his earnestly pro-
pounded nonsense about the need of this country for a Kaiser. Father
Hacker who, because of his small stature and great modesty, was readily
overlooked, was suddenly noticed by Mencken alone outside the circle. He
then moved quickly toward the little priest, drew him into the crowd, and
said, "When that time comes, Father, we'll make you an Arch-bishop."
Yet Mencken was not one to be imposed upon. One evening he had
invited me to meet him at Schellhase's restaurant to discuss a project that
was later on efficiently realized in the publication of Dr. Dieter Cunz' The
Maryland Germans. It was about nine o'clock and the dining room almost
empty; Mencken had his special beer Seidel and before me stood one which
he had in unobtrusive hospitality provided with a legend engraved on the
lid "Dead Head." A young man came strolling up to our table, evidently
a lion hunter who wished to bask in the presence of the famous author, and
said with great self-assurance, "You are Mr. Mencken. May I sit down to
join you? "Without raising his voice, but with very chilling effect, Mencken
put the brash intruder in his place and we continued our discussion.
It is notorious that noted authors frequently affect the unusual in their
personal appearance or their dress. Mencken, as all who knew him remarked
frequently, was utterly free of any such pose. His iconoclastic writing evi-
dently imparted to some of his readers a different notion. One Bostonian
gave expression to this feeling in a parody of Keat's famous sonnet, On
First Looking into Chapman's Homer which seems to me worth reprinting.
The Watch and Ward Society had succeeded in securing a court order
forbidding the sale of Mencken's Mercury in Boston because of the alleged
immorality of the "Hatrack" story. Thereupon Mencken courageously
himself sold a copy on the Boston streets, was duly arrested but acquitted
in court, the judge ruling that the high literary quality of the Mercury
removed it definitely from the classification "pornography." The writer's
witty imputation to the editor of the Mercury of all the philistine qualities
of "Babbitt" is something which I am sure Mencken enjoyed heartily if
he ever came across this bit of verse:
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ON FIRST SEEING A CUT OF H. L. MENCKEN
Much have I heard about that bitter scribe
Who dips his pen in cyanide to pan us,
And dashes off a wild, ebullient jibe
Anent the nincompoop Americanus.
Oft have I visualized his piercing eye
And heard his savage canines snap together,
When in an inauspicious moment I
Would pull bromides about the torrid weather.
In watches of the night his gaze intense
Among the wind-blown draperies I saw;
And though, of course, it was coincidence,
At times he looked a bit like G. B. Shaw.
But this Rotarian—how can it be?
He seems a booster of the Zenith plains;
How in that pate of shameless normalcy
Can there be lodged iconoclastic brains?
You look as though you taught a Sunday-school,
And owned a Ford, and had the movie habit,
And took hot beverages to make you cool—
My God, H. L., you like G. F. Babbitt!
(H. F. MANCHESTER, in the Boston Globe)
BOOKS BY H. L. MENCKEN INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:
1903: Ventures in Verse
1922:
1905: George Bernard Shaw, His Plays
1923:
1908: The Philosophy of Friedrich
1924:
Nietzsche
1926:
1909: The Players—Ibsen
1916: A Little Book in C Major
1927:
A Book of Burlesques
1934:
1917: A Book of Prefaces
1940:
1918: Damn! A Book of Calumny
1941:
In Defense of Women
1942:
1919: The American Language
1945:
Prejudices: First Series
1920: Prejudices: Second Series
1946:
1921: The American Language, Revised
1948:
Edition
1949:
Prejudices: Third Series
The American Language, Third Edition
Prejudices: Fourth Series
Notes on Democracy
Prejudices: Fifth Series
Selected Prejudices
The American Language, Fourth Edition
Happy Days
Newspaper Days
A New Dictionary of Quotations
Heathen Days
The American Language, Supplement I
Christmas Story
The American Language, Supplement II
A Mencken Chrestomathy
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