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The Impossible H L. Mencken
A-4
707 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1991
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156 people want to read
About the author
H.L. Mencken
636 books727 followersHenry Louis "H.L." Mencken became one of the most influential and prolific journalists in America in the 1920s and '30s, writing about all the shams and con artists in the world. He attacked chiropractors and the Ku Klux Klan, politicians and other journalists. Most of all, he attacked Puritan morality. He called Puritanism, "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
At the height of his career, he edited and wrote for The American Mercury magazine and the Baltimore Sun newspaper, wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column for the Chicago Tribune, and published two or three books every year. His masterpiece was one of the few books he wrote about something he loved, a book called The American Language (1919), a history and collection of American vernacular speech. It included a translation of the Declaration of Independence into American English that began, "When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody."
When asked what he would like for an epitaph, Mencken wrote, "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."
(from American Public Media)
At the height of his career, he edited and wrote for The American Mercury magazine and the Baltimore Sun newspaper, wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column for the Chicago Tribune, and published two or three books every year. His masterpiece was one of the few books he wrote about something he loved, a book called The American Language (1919), a history and collection of American vernacular speech. It included a translation of the Declaration of Independence into American English that began, "When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody."
When asked what he would like for an epitaph, Mencken wrote, "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."
(from American Public Media)
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 20, 2018
p.25 We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement.
p.28 Me, I like it because it amuses me. I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs.
p.168 He has no one to blame for his miseries, present or to come, but himself. He walked straight into the buzzsaw, his eyes to the front and whistling gaily.
p.170 I don't recall a single masculine figure created by a woman (writer), from Daniel Deronda to Ethan Frome, who was not, at bottom, an ass.
p.286 Is there any reason to believe that, among lawyers, the best are much better than the worst? I can find none. All the extravangance and incompetence of our present government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones.
p.354 For the plain people of the world are always looking for messiahs, and whenever one wears out they resort to another. They are never content with hard diligence and common sense; what they always pant for is magic.
p.442 So much for Law Enforcement in the Motherland (England). The laws there, like the laws everywhere else, are enforced only in so far as public sentiment is behind them.
p.465 No theologian not in his cups would insure me against hell cent for cent.
p.562 Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed.
p.620 No normal human being wants to hear the truth. It is the passion of a small and aberrant minority of men, most of them pathological. They are hated for telling it while they live, and when they die, they are swiftly forgotten. What remains to the world, in the field of wisdom, is a series of long tested and solidly agreeable lies.
p.626 Wars, indeed, are soon forgotten, else there would not be so many of them.
The most simple comparison to H.L. Mencken is Hunter Stockton Thompson. The link is too obvious to ignore, even their interests are the same: boxing, politics. Also, like Hunter, Mencken has a tendency to back the loser, giving a different twist to the political angle. Hating on politicians is a favorite past time for both authors.
The author covers the political conventions, both Republican and Democrat, between 1904 and 1948. The political section covers a vast array of the most important moments from America's political history. Mencken divulges the personalities of the some of the political leaders from the past, not often in flattering terms. The third election of Roosevelt is a highlight.
Mencken reported from the Scopes Trial in Tennessee. The reports are fantastic reading with the author melding his prejudices and indignity to create a ripping account of the trial and the key players in the trial.
p.28 Me, I like it because it amuses me. I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs.
p.168 He has no one to blame for his miseries, present or to come, but himself. He walked straight into the buzzsaw, his eyes to the front and whistling gaily.
p.170 I don't recall a single masculine figure created by a woman (writer), from Daniel Deronda to Ethan Frome, who was not, at bottom, an ass.
p.286 Is there any reason to believe that, among lawyers, the best are much better than the worst? I can find none. All the extravangance and incompetence of our present government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones.
p.354 For the plain people of the world are always looking for messiahs, and whenever one wears out they resort to another. They are never content with hard diligence and common sense; what they always pant for is magic.
p.442 So much for Law Enforcement in the Motherland (England). The laws there, like the laws everywhere else, are enforced only in so far as public sentiment is behind them.
p.465 No theologian not in his cups would insure me against hell cent for cent.
p.562 Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed.
p.620 No normal human being wants to hear the truth. It is the passion of a small and aberrant minority of men, most of them pathological. They are hated for telling it while they live, and when they die, they are swiftly forgotten. What remains to the world, in the field of wisdom, is a series of long tested and solidly agreeable lies.
p.626 Wars, indeed, are soon forgotten, else there would not be so many of them.
The most simple comparison to H.L. Mencken is Hunter Stockton Thompson. The link is too obvious to ignore, even their interests are the same: boxing, politics. Also, like Hunter, Mencken has a tendency to back the loser, giving a different twist to the political angle. Hating on politicians is a favorite past time for both authors.
The author covers the political conventions, both Republican and Democrat, between 1904 and 1948. The political section covers a vast array of the most important moments from America's political history. Mencken divulges the personalities of the some of the political leaders from the past, not often in flattering terms. The third election of Roosevelt is a highlight.
Mencken reported from the Scopes Trial in Tennessee. The reports are fantastic reading with the author melding his prejudices and indignity to create a ripping account of the trial and the key players in the trial.
March 3, 2023
Have to ask myself why a collection of articles by a guy writing in newspapers (Baltimore
Evening Sun and syndicated in many other places including the Chicago Tribune) a hundred
years ago (+-20yr--i.e. ~1900-1950) may be relevant? Well, the wisdom of ancient Greeks
or the Bible remains relevant and in and in that vein this is practically 'breaking news'. Yes, that favored moniker of what passes for relevance in our current journalistic enterprise. Of course I had heard the name 'Mencken' and even if you have not, several of his most famous quotes have entered the lexicon of American witticisms. And there are SO many that are deserving of preservation.
Just google it! You would save yourself nearly 700 pages of an anthology but there is something to be said for a thing called 'context' and you get plenty in this collection. Incidentally, a few of my favorites (which correspond disturbingly close to today's realities):
1) 'The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule'. Whew!
Spot on does not do that one justice after the great scamdemic.
2) 'For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.' See
above.
3) The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out...
without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes
to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
Enough said. But there is of course so much more. He writes of diplomacy--the 1921-22
Disarmament Talks) and the Pan American Conference of 1928 are two examples. American
duplicity, belligerence and interference are exposed repeatedly and brilliantly. His description and analysis of U.S. Political Conventions from 1916 to 1948 (with a few sadly missed) are treasures of history. The crowded and boiling convention halls (before AC and all those bothersome carbon emissions), the pompous speechifying, the brief moments of electric excitement. At least it appears to resemble 'democracy' in action as opposed to the approved, sterile, and corporate versions of today. His dispatches on the 1925 Scopes trial--hilarious, disturbing and pitiful at the same time.
The news stories of the 1910s, 20s and 30s--war, prohibition, evangelists, Wall Street booms and busts, depression, the presidential parade of characters (especially good on Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and most of all FDR) all with a 'you are there' feel that only a current observer can bring. And what an observer! All of it is worth a read or two, I could read it all again. The book has an outstanding foreword by Gore Vidal and an Introduction which both serve as excellent 'Cliff Notes'.
You may not agree with Mencken, I certainly do not on some things. But do I welcome his willingness
to say what he perceived and observed with little to no regard to how someone might 'feel'. It's called courage and I understand it is in short supply but we are desperately in need of an infusion of Menckenism into our national discourse!
Evening Sun and syndicated in many other places including the Chicago Tribune) a hundred
years ago (+-20yr--i.e. ~1900-1950) may be relevant? Well, the wisdom of ancient Greeks
or the Bible remains relevant and in and in that vein this is practically 'breaking news'. Yes, that favored moniker of what passes for relevance in our current journalistic enterprise. Of course I had heard the name 'Mencken' and even if you have not, several of his most famous quotes have entered the lexicon of American witticisms. And there are SO many that are deserving of preservation.
Just google it! You would save yourself nearly 700 pages of an anthology but there is something to be said for a thing called 'context' and you get plenty in this collection. Incidentally, a few of my favorites (which correspond disturbingly close to today's realities):
1) 'The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule'. Whew!
Spot on does not do that one justice after the great scamdemic.
2) 'For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.' See
above.
3) The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out...
without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes
to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
Enough said. But there is of course so much more. He writes of diplomacy--the 1921-22
Disarmament Talks) and the Pan American Conference of 1928 are two examples. American
duplicity, belligerence and interference are exposed repeatedly and brilliantly. His description and analysis of U.S. Political Conventions from 1916 to 1948 (with a few sadly missed) are treasures of history. The crowded and boiling convention halls (before AC and all those bothersome carbon emissions), the pompous speechifying, the brief moments of electric excitement. At least it appears to resemble 'democracy' in action as opposed to the approved, sterile, and corporate versions of today. His dispatches on the 1925 Scopes trial--hilarious, disturbing and pitiful at the same time.
The news stories of the 1910s, 20s and 30s--war, prohibition, evangelists, Wall Street booms and busts, depression, the presidential parade of characters (especially good on Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and most of all FDR) all with a 'you are there' feel that only a current observer can bring. And what an observer! All of it is worth a read or two, I could read it all again. The book has an outstanding foreword by Gore Vidal and an Introduction which both serve as excellent 'Cliff Notes'.
You may not agree with Mencken, I certainly do not on some things. But do I welcome his willingness
to say what he perceived and observed with little to no regard to how someone might 'feel'. It's called courage and I understand it is in short supply but we are desperately in need of an infusion of Menckenism into our national discourse!
December 5, 2020
I have read this book off and on for a decade i suppose. A topical selection of his newspaper columns- arranged by Presidents, food, music, Scopes trial, Baltimore miscellany and so forth. Consistently great, if cranky reading. Has great charm in the 1st draft of history way - that is about Harding and Coolidge and Hoover and Roosevelt before they had established their reputation (none of that inevitability of history that retrospective history books necessarily use). Cranky, but light hearted - he often strikes me as a man who is paid for his opinion and even if he doesn't have a strong opinion will devolve on one - immediately - to serve his purpose (the writing of the article). Fair enough. Great writer- one wonders how he was so popular when he is insulting his readers almost constantly. I know we all see ourselves as part of the rarefied group - with Mencken, of course- who see through bunk and rise above the rabble he so disparages.
January 29, 2019
My view of the above great city, I find, shifts and varies from time to time. There are days when I long to hear that French spies have blown it up; they are other days when I cherish the theory that it is probably the most civilized town the world has seen since the downfall of Constantinople. Maybe the two notions are really not so far apart as they seem to be.
H.L. Mencken, "New York", in The Impossible H.L. Mencken
Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) is an historical American writer the world still manages to have heard of; although many copies of his attempt at a linguistics of American English, The American Language, still exist it is as an essayist of sorts, coiner of literally a thousand phrases, that he is known. Of sorts only, because nearly all of Mencken's output was hastily written to beat the deadlines of either his own Smart Set and American Mercury magazines or simply the Baltimore and New York newspapers he began writing for at age nineteen in 1899 and ceased writing for at age sixty-eight in 1948, when he had a crippling stroke. What was published in between remains an indelible voice of American prose.
Much of that half-century could be called an "Age of Mencken", where his individualistic views left an impress on the American mind it has not yet shaken off; the first writer in English to publish a book on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Mencken showed the American republic a level of irreligiosity it had never seen before. In The Impossible H.L. Mencken, published in 1991, we see how Mencken's "natural aristocratism" was set in newspaper articles for New York and the Baltimore milieu he never left (Mencken would commute from Baltimore to New York). Although many of these articles are about humdrum topics they are never boring, and some of them ("The Sahara of the Bozart", a criticism of Southern literature, and "A Neglected Anniversary", a spoof history of the bathtub) were absolutely as famous as anything he ever wrote.
(This is definitely one of my "books"; although a young man trying to do a "mash-up" of Mencken and The Atrocity Exhibition might have been a bit unbearable, the documentary value of things like Mencken's accounts of political conventions and the "Scopes Trial" is really inestimable. People who know Mencken as a hero of "conservatism" also have to tarry with his never-extinguished connection to the Democratic Party and his genuine liberalism; trash is promulgated today calling him a racist and anti-Semite, but he was both idol and supporter of Richard Wright, responsible for getting some of Wright's early work published, and in an America which had "quotas" for Jewish entry to universities Mencken's partnership on Smart Set and American Mercury with George Jean Nathan could hardly have been read as negative bias.)
January 4, 2017
Wish we had Mencken with us today - he would be having a field day.
"All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man."
"A man still has his inner integrity. Can he look into the shaving-glass of a morning? Then he is still on his two legs in this world, and ready even for the fiends of hell."
"A man's womenfolk, whatever their outward show of respect, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something not akin to pity."
"All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man."
"A man still has his inner integrity. Can he look into the shaving-glass of a morning? Then he is still on his two legs in this world, and ready even for the fiends of hell."
"A man's womenfolk, whatever their outward show of respect, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something not akin to pity."
August 6, 2011
This book should be read by every journalism major or aspiring editorial writer or anyone who has any interest at all in good writing. Even when you don't agree with Mencken reading his work is like watching MIchael Jordon play for the other team. You don't always like what he's doing, but you can't take yours eyes off of him doing it.
June 9, 2015
The perspicacity and pugnaciousness of Mencken's writing is so astounding just 50 years after his passing that it is hard to imagine that such straight talking ever existed, or was allowed to exist. This last, a sad comment on the moral and political climate of our day, Mr. Mencken would understand exactly, and denounce boldly.
June 22, 2014
A huge book but it flies. Some pieces are dated and some read as though they were written yesterday.
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September 20, 2018I just read the stories related to the Scopes Monkey Trial. Where oh where are brilliant writers like this today?
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews