The Great American Goth

H. L. MENCKEN ON MUSIC (222 pp.)--A selection by Louis Cheslock--Knopf ($4.50).

LETTERS OF H. L. MENCKEN (506 pp.)--Selected and annotated by Guy J. Forgue--Knopf ($7.95).

There are only two kinds of music; German music and bad music. Puccini was the best of the wops. His aim was to entertain well-fed folk after dinner--and he did it very competently. Verdi is not to be heard sober, but with a few whiskies tinder my belt I enjoy the last act of II Trovatore. Chopin is a sugar-teat: his music is excellent on rainy afternoons in Winter, with the fire burning, the shaker full and the girl somewhat silly.

The whisky tenor is unmistakable. To the late H. L. Mencken, iconoclastic polemic was the choicer part of criticism. His aim was to high-browbeat "the populace" with a club: to fight American Gothic, Mencken became the great American Goth. All of this, and more, is made pleasantly apparent in two excellent Mencken samplers, in which he plays at two of his favorite roles--music critic and man-of-letters.

Awed Wobbler. His interest in music started early (piano) and continued through the rest of Mencken's life; once a week he played with the Saturday Night Club, a group of Baltimore amateurs and professionals who met to drink beer and wobble through everything from Funiculi, Funiculo to the Brahms Second Symphony. Mencken's writings on music, which appeared in his newspaper columns and in the two magazines he edited (Smart Set and American Mercury), show neither the musical erudition of Britain's Ernest Newman nor the impeccable taste of that other musical iconoclast, George Bernard Shaw. Mencken's ears were pretty well shut to the 20th century: Stravinsky, he insisted, "never had a musical idea in his life," and Schoenberg was a "tinpot revolutionist" dealing in "cacophony." But he knew the music of the great 19th century German symphonists almost note-perfectly, and he regarded them with an awe curious in a man so intoxicated with words. He once wrote to a friend: "I'd rather have written the first movement of Beethoven's Eroica than the Song of Solomon; it is not only far more beautiful, it is also far more profound. A better man wrote it."

To other composers--even his beloved Germans--he was less kind. On Haydn: "The feelings that he put into tone were [those of] a country pastor, a rather civilized stockbroker. When he wept it was the tears of a woman who has discovered another wrinkle." Tchaikovsky's music was "as hollow as a bull by an archbishop." Chopin reminded him of "two embalmers at work upon a minor poet," and Richard Strauss of "Old Home Week in Gomorrah."

Revealing List. Mencken strikes the same strident tone in the 400 letters culled by Editor Forgue from his massive correspondence of 15,000. "Of my inventions," he once wrote, "I am vainest of Bible Belt, booboisie, smuthound and Boobus americanus." The list is revealing. It bears the date and the outdatedness of the '20s, along with such storied fossils as bathtub gin, the Black Bottom and the Stutz Bearcat. The fate of a successful iconoclast is to be buried with the icons he smashed.

As the man of letters, Mencken performed like a field marshal, firing off communiques to writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce as if they were his personal shock troops on the battle fronts of civilization. "Bully news!" he wrote to Theodore Dreiser upon the novelist's completion of Jennie Gerhardt. The Teddy Roosevelt-styled pep talk continues: "Give the game a fair trial; you have got the goods, and soon or late the fact will penetrate the skulls of those who have anything within." But Ezra Pound, of all writers, aroused his fury: "Everything you say has been said before, first by the war patriots, then by the Ku Kluxers, then by the anti-saloon League Brethren."

Mencken's epigrams, some pithy, some potty, stud the letters:

> "A moralist is one who holds that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong."

> "Democracy seems to be founded upon the inferior man's envy of his superior--of the man who is having a better time."

> "It is only an aristocracy that is ever tolerant. The masses are invariably cocksure, suspicious, furious and tyrannical."

Somewhere to the right of Babbitt and far more self-righteous, Mencken lacked a creative mind. The three major influences on his own thought were Nietzsche, Shaw and Ibsen, about each of whom he wrote before he was 30. In Mencken's hands, their ideas were strangely transformed. Nietzsche's Superman became a boob baiter. Shaw's Life Force became a kind of endless capacity for drinking beer. And Ibsen's realism became a sophomore's nihilism ("Life is quite meaningless--a spectacle without purpose or moral"). However faulty, Mencken was an idea carrier, and his prose was contagious. After Mencken, not every U.S. citizen was cosmopolitan, but none could be wholly provincial again.

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