By Keith Otis Edwards (1998-09-06)
Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H. L. Mencken by William Manchester.
Originally published by Harper Brothers, New York, 1950. Reprinted in paperback in 1962 and 1967 by Collier Books under the title H. L. Mencken: Disturber of the Peace.
Currently published by Commonwealth Classics in Biography under the original title.
First, let me warn off serious students of Mencken that this is neither a detailed account of his life nor a serious consideration of his writings. Those seeking either are referred, respectively, to Fred Hobson’s biography, Mencken: A Life (Johns Hopkins, 1994) and Charles Fecher’s Mencken: A Study of His Thought (Knopf, 1978). This book spends less time discussing Mencken’s literary criticism than it does on his practical jokes.
This biography has also been criticized as a youthful attempt to imitate Mencken’s style, to which I answer, so what? If the mature Manchester hadn’t as yet ignited I can’t think of a better style than Mencken’s to imitate. I confess to doing much the same myself (unintentionally, of course).
Putting such caviling aside, what we are left with is the fact that this book is nothing less than the America’s greatest living historian writing about America’s greatest non-fiction writer of the century. And if that isn’t bold enough, I’ll immediately raise the stakes further and add that this book is the most entertaining biography ever written. If you doubt one man’s word consider that Richard H. Rovere, reviewing it in the New Yorker, called it “A first-class piece of entertainment."
One thing which would seem to recommend this account of Mencken’s life is that Manchester was the last Mencken biographer to interview Mencken before he was incapacitated by a stroke. It might be assumed that this would produce a wealth of details concerning Mencken’s personal relations with important authors of the time. It does not. If anything it results in a plethora of somewhat dubious but entertaining anecdotes. But rather than detract from the work this combines with Manchester’s youthful enthusiasm to produce a joyous celebration of H.L. Mencken. That is why this book is the perfect introduction to the entire spectacle of Mencken.
If you are only vaguely familiar with the name of H. L. Mencken and have only some idea that he was sort of right-wing and bigoted, you must also be wondering why there are so many Mencken zealots wandering around loose. Why, for that matter, is there even a Mencken Society and no Westbrook Pegler Society or no Sidney J. Harris Society? This book provides the answers for you. Mencken was more than just a great writer—one of the great stylists of modern English—he was a unique phenomenon; a massive energy force, a supernova, which radiated out from Baltimore and took hold of the literate minds of America during the Roaring Twenties. Believe me, you’ve never read anything like this before. This is no exaggeration.
Mesmer called it “basic animal magnetism.” Bergson called it “L’elan vital.” Whatever it was, Mencken had it. Walter Lippman said of him, “This Holy Terror from Baltimore is splendidly and exultantly and contagiously alive. He calls you a swine, and an imbecile, and increases your will to live.” The other biographies, in a desire to be scholarly and hence respectable, miss this. But Manchester, in his youthful enthusiasm, captures it in all its excess. Here we witness a vivid picture of Mencken at his irreverent and blasphemous worst: “I hear the Presbyterian Holy Ghost has a naughty disease,” he confides to a friend; Mencken in his derision of American society: “A culture that … is in three layers—the plutocracy on top, a vast mass of undifferentiated human blanks bossed by demagogues at the bottom, and a forlorn intelligentsia gasping out a precarious life in between"; Mencken the eternal foe of all politicians and reformers alike. Some of us agree with Mencken’s harsh and extreme conclusions and judgments, others do not. But we are all, each one of us Menckenites, drawn back to him, to read our favorite of his works again and again because we are intoxicated with the lingering energy of the man.
William Manchester never lost his enthusiasm for Mencken either. Required reading for all seasoned Mencken zealots is the moving account he wrote years later of Mencken’s crippled last years entitled “My Old Man” which can be found in his collection of essays, Controversy and Other Essays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976). But for the Mencken neophyte the book to get is Disturber of the Peace: the Life of H. L. Mencken. I seriously doubt that you’ll be disappointed.