HarperCollins's November release of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (Forecasts, Aug. 19) marks the end of a circuitous, decade-long road to publication. When Elaine Pfefferblit of Poseidon Press suggested to Terry Teachout in 1990 that he write a biography of Mencken, he replied, "Elaine, I have two books underway. Go away and bother me later!" True, an essay by Teachout about the furor surrounding the publication of Mencken's diary had recently appeared in the New Criterion and, like anyone with an interest in the iconoclastic critic, he knew that Mencken's two massive autobiographical manuscripts were scheduled to be opened to the public in 1991. But Beyond the Boom, a collection of essays by Teachout and other members of Vile Body, the salon for young conservatives he founded in New York City, was in the works at Poseidon, and he had signed a contract with Pfefferblit for a memoir about growing up in a small Missouri town (published in 1991 under the title City Limits). He had other things on his mind.
Glenn Hartley and Lynn Chu, Teachout's agents, urged him to give the suggestion more serious thought. "After just a few days," he recalls over breakfast in an Upper West Side restaurant near his home, "I realized what a good match this was, how much it connected with my own background as a writer and journalist." Like Mencken, who championed such pioneering modern novelists as Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis from the pages of Smart Set magazine while also commenting acerbically on current events (most notoriously the Scopes trial of 1925) for nearly three decades at the Baltimore Sun, Teachout has been a magazine editor (at Harper's), a newspaper editorial writer (at the New York Daily News) and a wide-ranging critic (he reviews classical music, jazz, dance and fine arts for a variety of publications).
He also resembles Mencken, a lifelong resident of Baltimore, in his strong attachment to his roots; though he's lived in New York for 17 years, Teachout still calls Sikeston, Mo., "home." He wrote City Limits, he says, "because the experience of being born in a small town and moving to a big city is one of the most important themes in American literature, and I thought it had not been written about with sufficient sympathy. Most of these books were written by people who hated where they came from."
He was drawn to Mencken by a similar feeling that he could bring a new perspective to the subject. "Most of Mencken's earlier biographers were academics who meshed with him in a single area. It struck me that because I've done a lot of the things Mencken did in his professional life and know these worlds firsthand, perhaps I could get this complicated man into focus better than someone who wrote about him simply as a literary man or a newspaperman. Also, Mencken was, in the most general sense, politically right of center, and so am I. As far as I know, nobody else who's written a biography of him found his views in fields other than literature at all sympathetic.
"The list of things about which I disagree with H.L. Mencken is long, but in certain fundamental ways he got some important things about public affairs right. I think that although the cast of characters has changed and the nature of puritanism in American life has changed, people line up in more or less the same way he described. They're wearing different clothes and belong to different parties, but when he singles out puritanism as his enemy, he's touching on a fundamental aspect of the American national character, and it's because of that, as much as the force of his prose, that he's still read today."
Teachout notes, "You have to put him into historical perspective. Mencken was an anti-Semite, but just to say that and stop tells you nothing. You need to know, as I have tried to explain, about his involvement in pre-Hitler Germany, about the way his fascination with Nietzsche shaped his ideas, about the historical and intellectual roots of 20th-century anti-Semitism and how common it was in Mencken's time. The surprising thing about Mencken is not that he thought blacks were inferior, but that he published them and dined with them."
The wealth of unpublished material in the H.L. Mencken Collection at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library also helped Teachout paint a fuller portrait of his complex subject. "The two autobiographical manuscripts were of the highest importance. Mencken wrote them for future biographers and historians; he put them under time seal because they were extremely candid, in some cases quite shockingly candid, about his relations with other authors and newspapermen. This material had not appeared anywhere, and it fills in all sorts of blanks about his personality; we wouldn't understand him nearly as well without them."
One pile of papers took Teachout on a lengthy detour from the biography. On the top shelf of a dusty library closet illuminated only by a 15-watt bulb, he discovered the manuscript of a sequel to the bestselling 1949 anthology A Mencken Chrestomathy. Revision and publication had been forestalled by Mencken's stroke in 1948, but Teachout felt it was too important to leave on the shelf. He took a year off to edit A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, which was published by Knopf in 1995. Reviewers welcomed it as an opportunity for a new generation of readers to discover the sage of Baltimore's "incisive, if often irksome, eloquence," as Booklist put it.
That eloquence makes Mencken likable even when his opinions are appalling, Teachout believes. "He has gusto in the truest sense of the word, and it's enormously appealing. You feel as though you are across the table from him listening to him talk—in fact, having heard a tape recording of him in extended conversation a few months before his stroke, I know that his prose really does sound like him. Mencken is read by plain folks, which is not true of many people who were writing criticism in 1920, and it's because of the personal tone of his writings, the feeling that you're engaging the actual person."
Although careful to avoid "Menckenisms" in the biography ("his style is so strong that it's very dangerous to let it into your work"), as a critic Teachout strives for the same conversational quality. "I try to sound as though I'm talking to you when I'm writing; that's very important to me. I don't have any illusions about the objectivity of criticism; I sell my taste, that's how I make my living. But I think all of the arts are accessible to anyone with sufficient interest and sensitivity." Still firmly conservative, he considers his political writing of the '80s and early '90s as a "day job" willingly left behind: "I am an aesthete; I never saw politics as central to my interests."
He's delighted that Yale University Press will be publishing A Terry Teachout Reader in fall 2003. "It's a collection of my essays of the last 15 years. There are people who read my dance criticism, people who know me as a classical music critic, people who know me as somebody who writes about jazz. I never thought I would have a chance to do a selection of my work covering everything I write about, and I'm very excited about it."
Preparation of The Skeptic has been an equally happy experience. "I know that authors are supposed to be chronically dissatisfied with their publishers, but HarperCollins has treated me like the king of the cats: good suggestions from [editor] Tim Duggan, beautiful copyediting by Sue Llewellyn, an impeccable index and the book is great to look at. I think typeface is the accent in which you speak to the reader, so it's very important to me, and every step of the way I was not just consulted, I was involved."
Looking past HarperCollins's promotional plans for him (publicity director Jane Beirn gets kudos, too), Teachout isn't sure which of several book ideas might come to fruition. "I don't contemplate writing another biography, though I'm really glad I did this one. I'm a scholar manqué, like a lot of journalists, and to do a fully annotated book based on primary source material was my chance to be a full professor without having to put up with all the nonsense. I'm not sure I need to do it again. Mencken was a very personal project: about the man I have my doubts, about the writer I have none."
