MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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writers, is simply a piece of Shavian paradox: just the way Shaw might
have eviscerated anyone who dared influence
him.
Mencken's style is his
rhythm; he repeats himself, courses his theme through endless variations
but he is never boring. As a satirist he relishes strut and pretension, adores
folly and stupidity on a grand scale. No one would say he is "fair" to his
subjects, but outsized characters like William Jennings Bryan, Anthony
Comstock, or Henry Cabot Lodge give him the material for vivid car–
toons as no literary subject could. Unlike merely bad writers, these men
cut a figure in the world. They unwittingly synthesized the prejudices and
pomposities of others, conveying a great deal about the mood of the
moment.
Despite this turn toward social satire, Mencken did his work as a
critic. He took up the causes initiated in Howells's and Norris's cam–
paign for realism by tirelessly promoting the work of Dreiser and Con–
rad. He shared his friend Huneker's cosmopolitan taste and loved to
lampoon American provinciality. He was a working editor as well as the
key advisor to Knopf, one of several new publishing houses that began to
bring out modern European writers along with young, unconventional
Americans. As Edmund Wilson wrote long afterward, "The publication
of Mencken's
Book oj Prifaces
in 1917, with its remarkable essay on
Dreiser and its assault on 'Puritanism as a Literary Force,' was a cardinal
event for the new American literature." As late as 1950 Wilson would
pay tribute to Mencken's old battle against "the genteel-academic
culture that had done so much to discourage original American writing
from about 1880 on," adding, "he was without question, since Poe, our
greatest practicing literary journalist."
Yet Mencken's essay on Dreiser is more vivid on Dreiser's faults,
such as his style, than on his virtues. He offers up a small anthology of
Dreiser's sins with the note that "every reader ... must cherish astound–
ing specimens." Dreiser's worst novel,
The 'Genius
"
sends him building
towards a Homeric riff: "There are passages in it so clumsy, so inept, so
irritating that they seem almost unbelievable; nothing worse is to be
found in the newspapers." The book's structure fares no better: it "is as
gross and shapeless as Brunnhilde. It billows and bulges out like a cloud
of smoke, and its internal organization is almost as vague.... The thing
rambles, staggers, trips, heaves, pitches, struggles, totters, wavers, halts,
turns aside, trembles on the edge of collapse." But Dreiser is not to be
dismissed. Mencken, a great stylist himself, never mistakes style for great–
ness. Keeping his balance, he criticizes Dreiser's vision of the world but
without confusing the philosophy with the fiction.
Along with Brooks and Wilson, Mencken was one of our last true
men of letters. He takes us back to a world where newspapermen
could
