D. G. Hart has, and acknowledges, a problem which is introduced in a question on the first page of this biographical study. Posing it is the editor of the series in which it appears, the premier historian of American religion, Mark A. Noll: ‘Whatever in the world could lead the Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company … to sponsor a volume on H. L. Mencken in a series of religious biographies?’ And, he also asks, what would possess Darryl Hart, who has authored several worthy books ‘on the virtues of historical Calvinism’, to think that anyone could be interested in a religious biography of H. L. Mencken, who is known most ‘for his assaults on the Christian faith?’
Compounding the problems which these two historians acknowledge is Hart's accurate assessment that H. L. Mencken ‘remains a figure on the margins’, whom he treats as a fading and, indeed, a faded character on the American religious scene. Awakening may await readers new to the scene: between those quoted first and the last lines of the book (pp. ix, 251) are ten illuminating chapters about a figure who cannot fail to attract and hold attention. That figure is Henry Louis Mencken, a Baltimore journalist who could not restrain himself from constant attacks on religion. Mencken belongs to a cast of characters called, variously, ‘agnostics’, ‘atheists’, ‘freethinkers’, ‘sceptics’ or, as I referred to them, according to the language usages of the United States from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, ‘infidels’ (The infidel: freethought and American religion, 1961).
Hart introduces Mencken with informative personal references and weaves his biography throughout the book. Most ‘infidels’, popular as the ‘New Atheists’, fit the pattern of the ‘apostate’, as described by the philosopher Max Scheler. The apostate is someone who leaves and then abhors a faith only to spend his whole subsequent career attacking his own spiritual past. But Mencken had no conventional spiritual past. His forebears were extravagantly anti-religious German immigrants. Throughout his life, the journalist published regularly in the daily press and notable contemporary literary magazines, such as Smart Set and the American Mercury. This career left him time to publish a couple of dozen books whose titles fairly indicate his interests and themes: The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Treatise on the Gods and a determinedly godless Treatise on right and wrong.
One proper name in those titles suggest that Mencken was at home with formal philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche. But Mencken was himself no philosopher nor academic. He plucked low-hanging fruit from growths in many branches of learning, and marketed them wherever he could find an audience or a readership. Much of that readership was made up of fascinated and shocked religious citizens, who could not resist his acidic, often funny, intentionally outrageous aphorisms and pokes-in-general at the pious. We picture Hart having to restrain himself from extending his tempting mini-anthology of Menckenisms, such as ‘Christian – One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife’; ‘Creator – A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh’; ‘Show me a Puritan and I'll show you a son of a bitch’.
We learn from Hart key features of Mencken's life, which mixed intense work with intense play through most of his decades. Late in life he married a woman fifteen years younger than he, and then revealed some thoughtful and loving dimensions of character which most of his cynical, wise-cracking and hyper-judgmental writing obscured from view. Hart is patient as he sees the recklessly protean Mencken through the ups and downs of his then-celebrated career. He is often generous to a boisterous man who was anything but interested in gaining favour from the American public at large, most of them dwellers in a society spiritually shaped in a large measure by Christianity and often focused in judgemental forms of that faith such as Puritanism.
As Mencken, when aged, suffered loss, he became preoccupied with death, dying and decline of many sorts. Still he was in no way drawn to the faith which offered comfort to the majority around him. Hart probes what one can reasonably deduce from Mencken's writings to learn what brought him any cheer at all in his late years. There was very little. By then he could no longer thrive through devotion to the zealous life of working that had enlivened him in his literarily productive years. In the end the great quip-maker comes across more as an entertainer than a thinker with any sustaining vision. Yet, fade though he must within the shadows of his being a writer ‘at the margins’, as Hart calls him, he is likely to amuse a readership, including a religious clientele who, after the years since his death in 1956, no longer fears his darts. They will indeed be entertained and, we picture, may enjoy some chuckles during moments in which one can recognise the follies of the neighbour and, one hopes, of oneself.
