Who was H.L. Mencken and why do I care?

Almost nobody today remembers who H.L. Mencken was, and absolutely nobody reads him. But in the first half of the 20th Century, he was one of the most important, popular newspapermen and literary figures in the United States. He was also the model for the newspaperman in the play/movie Inherit the Wind, the true story of Tennessee’s “monkey trial” in the 1920s, where the state convicted a young teacher of teaching evolution. The play showed what a rotten person Mencken was, but not his brilliance as a wordsmith. In his hands, words and sentences were weapons of mass destruction.

Last week, I received in the mail a framed signed letter from Mencken, on his personal stationery, dated July 30, 1930, addressed to my grandfather. The letter hung in my Uncle’s house for about 60 years until he died a few months ago. My aunt thought I would appreciate having it. In this quick letter he tells my grandfather that he will “continue holding out against the radio until someone invents a silent one.” Aunt Marilyn is an expert dealer in antique books and documents, and manuscripts. If it was worth anything, she would have sold it. She said there used to be Mencken collectors years ago, but they all died.

Growing up in Baltimore in the ‘50s and early 60s, I met several people who knew Mencken, and they all had personal stories about him. He was not universally loved. In the 1930s, he was pro-German and anti-New Deal. One of my teachers recalled that Mencken used to say people were unemployed in the Depression because they were lazy. “Meanwhile, he’s making a very nice living saying people on breadlines are lazy!” my teacher said, still angry at him 35 years later.

Fifty years after he died, his archivists published his most private journals, over his family’s strong objections. He turned out to be a vicious name-calling bigot when he thought no one would ever see the venom he was spewing.

But the entire city of Baltimore cherished Mencken as a great Baltimore writer who gained national prominence and wrote often about the city he loved and never left. People called him "The Sage of Baltimore."

I read a lot of Mencken in high school and college: his newspaper columns, a collection of essays called Prejudices, memoirs of his days as a young reporter at the Baltimore Sun, called Newspaper Days, and his Dictionary of the American Language. His American Mercury magazine was comparable to the Atlantic Monthly or Harper’s today. His writing style (not his ideas) had a big influence on mine, or at least I hope it did.

A flood of associations and memories rush through my mind whenever I look up from my word processor and see the letter hanging on the wall: Baltimore, “eating divinely out of the Chesapeake Bay” (as Mencken called one of his favorite things, and mine.) I can see Mencken at his desk in his big row house on Hollis Street, sitting at his manual typewriter with a stack of mail banging out short, pithy responses the way we go through e-mail.

I don’t treasure things as a rule. I never collected anything except a preserved baseball card of Brooks Robinson, another childhood hero from Baltimore, that my godson gave me one Christmas. It takes me back to ballgame with my Grandpa Isaac, at the stadium or on TV in his den.

It gives me mental pictures of watching Brooks’s incomparable 3rd base play from over his shoulder in Section 6 of the box seats. I don’t need a baseball card to maintain those connections. I can just close my eyes. But for some reason, I find myself treasuring this 78-year-old personal letter from a forgotten writer who used to be important to me. I’d rather have it than any e-mail.