As part of my preparation to submit a proposal for a religious biography of H. L. Mencken, I ran across a back issue of Menckeniana which had Jonathan Yardley‘s talk at the 2010 Mencken Day. The book critic for the Washington Post, here is how Yardley described his first encounter with Mencken:
I was absolutely bowled over. The power, wit, and originality of Mencken’s prose seized me and shook me to within an inch of my life.
Yardley would eventually pitch a biography of Mencken but could not complete the project. In turn he encouraged Terry Teachout to pick up the task. Yardley concedes that Teachout wrote a better book than he could have. One indication may be this astute observation by Teachout about Mencken’s style and its journalistic genesis:
It is, in short, a triumph of style. The fact that this triumph was the work of a common newspaperman has long served to obscure its singularity, especially among academic critics. “The smell of the city room,” Charles Angoff wrote in 1938, “was in everything he put between book covers.” But what Angoff meant as deadly criticism is in fact central to Mencken’s appeal. It was the discipline of daily journalism that freed him from the clutches of the genteel tradition. The city room was for Mencken what Europe was for Henry James: the great good place where he became himself.
And what would a post on Mencken be without a jolt of that prose? Here is Mencken on the joys of newspaper work when he started to write:
I believed then, and still believe today, that it was the maddest, gladdest, damndest existence ever enjoyed by mortal youth. The illusion that swathes and bedizens journalism, bringing in its endless squads of recruits, was still full upon me, and I had yet to taste the sharp teeth of responsibility. Life was arduous, but it was gay and carefree. The days chased one another like kittens chasing their tails.
Old Life 