A Book of Prefaces

by H.L. Mencken

Collection of literary essays including Joseph Conrard, Theodore Dreiser, James Huneker, and Puritanism as a Literary Force. According to Wikipedia: "Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken (1880 – 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, acerbic critic of American life and culture, and a student of American English. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the 20th century. Mencken is perhaps best remembered today for The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States, and for his satirical reporting on the Scopes trial, which he named the "Monkey" trial."

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Classics, American, Writing, Politics

291 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 24, 2006

About the author

Henry 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)

Reviews

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mencken’s admirable scorn for religion and moralism informs insightful, if bombastic, cultural criticism.

[Jerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is apparently not literary or poetic license; this really is a collection of prefaces, although there’s no evidence in the book that they were used as prefaces, which may be why he had the license to make them long essays. There are only four in the entire book, and while it’s a short book, it isn’t that short. The topics are “Joseph Conrad”, “Theodore Dreiser”, “James Huneker”, and “Puritanism as a Literary Force”.

Of the three authors that Mencken thought so important, only Joseph Conrad is somewhat commonly known today; and if anything, Conrad is more praised and less read than in Mencken’s day.
This would not have surprised Mencken, as he had a very low opinion of the reading public (and probably of the public in general). Each of the three author-oriented essays is as much about the authors that have been more successful financially as it is about the topical authors themselves.

In among the complaints about literary hacks, there is serious criticism here.

The world, for all the pressure of order, is still full of savage and stupendous conflicts, of murders and debaucheries, of crimes indescribable and adventures almost unimaginable. One cannot reasonably ask a novelist to deny them or to gloss over them; all one may demand of him is that, if he make artistic use of them, he render them understandable—that he logically account for them, that he give them plausibility by showing their genesis in intelligible motives and colourable events.

He ascribes to the commonly-held belief that “…the chief, it not the only difference between melodrama and reality” is that melodrama must make sense, that is,

The events of the two may be, and often are identical. It is only in their underlying network of causes that they are dissimilar and incommensurate.

But unlike the cliché, he prefers his fiction writers to be, not melodramatists, but serious writers who can portray the insensible nature of reality.

Which does not mean that they should portray reality itself. If reality needs changing to be more real, then the author ought to do that, as Conrad does. In response to complaints that Conrad misreads the “principles of Malay psychology”, Mencken writes:

Who cares? Conrad is his own God, and creates his own Malay!

He both praises and complains about the works of Dreiser as novels that “cannot be read as other novels are read—on a winter evening or summer afternoon, between meal and meal, traveling from New York to Boston. It demands the attention for almost a week, and uses up the faculties for a month.”

One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers.

But if it were easy, it wouldn’t be great.

“Now comes the public,” says Hermann Bahr, “and demands that we explain what the poet is trying to say. The answer is this: If we knew exactly he would not be a poet…”

The “Puritanism” of his final essay is the “typical literati”’s “Puritan fear of ideas”.

Some of them, in truth, most of them, have undeniable talent… But they see how small the ring is, and they make their tricks small to fit it.

They work, that is, to succeed within the publishing system rather than as authors. It is difficult not to see Mencken’s Puritanism in modern tech giants. “Puritanism has become bellicose and tyrannical by becoming rich…”

Wealth, discovering its power, has reached out its long arms to grab the distant and innumerable sinner; it has gone down into its deep pockets to pay for his costly pursuit and flaying; it has created the Puritan entrepreneur, the daring and imaginative organizer of Puritanism, the baron of moral endeavour, the invincible prophet of new austerities. And, by the same token, it has issued its letters of marque to the Puritan mercenary, the professional hound of heaven, the moral Junker, the Comstock, and out of his skill at his trade there has arisen the whole machinery, so complicated and so effective, of the new Holy Office.

…

The American, in other words, thinks that the sinner has no rights that any one is bound to respect, and he is prone to mistake an unsupported charge of sinning, provided it be made violently enough, for actual proof and confession.

…

The individual whose common rights are invaded by such persons has little chance of getting justice, and less of getting redress. When he attempts to defend himself he finds that he is opposed, not only by a financial power that is ample for all purposes of the combat and that does not shrink at intimidating juries, prosecuting officers and judges, but also by a shrewdness which shapes the laws to its own uses, and takes full advantage of the miserable cowardice of legislatures.

Much of this book was lost on me, because assuming a familiarity I don’t have with then-modern literary theory of the various national schools, English, German, Italian, French. That, plus having no familiarity with either Dreiser or Honeken, let alone the lesser lights who out-perform them in the marketplace, makes this an odd set of essays, confoundingly similar to our own time, but filled with ideas that are now foreign, in the sense that the past is a foreign country. Even in 1917, Mencken was an elitist who stood with neither the masses nor with other elitists, yet still held to a belief in the primacy of the elite.

In the United States, at least, novelists are made and unmade, not by critical majorities, but by women, male and female.

[Barron · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The American, try as he will, can never imagine any work of the imagination as wholly devoid of moral content. It must either tend toward the promotion of virtue, or be suspect and abominable.

"If any doubt of this is in your mind, turn to the critical articles in the newspapers and literary weeklies; you will encounter enough proofs in a month's explorations to convince you forever. A novel or a play is judged among us, not by its dignity of conception, its artistic honesty, its perfection of workmanship, but almost entirely by its orthodoxy of doctrine, its platitudinousness, its usefulness as a moral tract. ...

"The custom of connecting purely political doctrines with pietistic concepts of an inflammable nature, then firmly set up by skilful persuaders of the mob, has never quite died out in the United States. There has not been a presidential contest since Jackson's day without its Armageddons, its marching of Christian soldiers, its crosses of gold, its crowns of thorns. The most successful American politicians, beginning with the anti-slavery agitators, have been those most adept at twisting the ancient gauds and shibboleths of Puritanism to partisan uses. Every campaign that we have seen for eighty years has been, on each side, a pursuit of bugaboos, a denunciation of heresies, a snouting up of immoralities."

[Alex Frame · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mencken makes his thoughts known on writers Joseph Conrad and Theodore Dreiser but it's his essay on ridiculous Puritanism that strikes a contemporary nerve.
During the late 1800s in USA there were what became known as the Comstock laws which gave a group of people the right to arbitrarily censor literature, arts and lifestyles . Predated 1950s McCarthyism which attacked anyone with leftist leanings and then Tipper Gore of 1980s which attacked hard rock that appeared to worship the devil . Now today we have human segregation because of the fear generated by Covid19 and may act as a catalyst for long term human control .
Mencken makes his point validly that we lose more than we gain by government sponsored censorship that only breeds rebellion . It's the eternal game between government and the masses. Are we free or not?

[Andrew Wimbish · Rating 3 out of 5]

In typical Mencken fashion, his razor sharp witticisms, mostly never unwarranted, offer some insight into American institutions few other critics could. The final essay decries the Puritanism of Victorian-era life and culture commonplace in literature and society. If you were to read this, I'd recommend skipping to the final essay.

[Uri Cohen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is four essays: “Joseph Conrad,” “Theodore Dreiser,” “James Huneker,” and “Puritanism as a Literary Force.” I learned the most about Huneker, a critic whom I wasn't familiar with. There are lots of references to authors who were apparently well-known 100 years ago.

[Susan Molloy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A catalogue of other authors’ essays.