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Kathryn Jean Lopez: What made you decide to write about Mencken? Terry Teachout: Back in 1990, I wrote an essay about "The Diary of H. L. Mencken," which had just been published, for The New Criterion. Elaine Pfefferblit, who was my editor at the time, saw the piece and suggested that I should write a biography of Mencken. Up to that moment, I'd never seriously considered writing a biography of anyone, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Not only did I find Mencken hugely interesting, but I was also struck by the fact that our careers had followed similar paths. Like him, I'd worked for magazines and newspapers as both author and editor, covering politics as well as the arts. It seemed to me that this similarity might help me to write about Mencken with the kind of imaginative sympathy it takes to bring a biography to life. So I said yes, and in the fall of 1991 I went to work on what eventually became The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken. It took a decade to write — I finished it a week before 9/11.
Lopez: What was your favorite part of writing The Skeptic? Teachout: I spent the better part of five years sifting through the Mencken Collection at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library, to which Mencken left most of his private papers — manuscripts, scrapbooks, cancelled checks, even one of the ancient portable typewriters he carted around to the presidential conventions he covered for the Baltimore Sun. It's housed in a wonderful old room that looks like the library of a shabby but distinguished men's club, and the walls are lined with books from Mencken's personal library, many of them inscribed to him by people like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theodore Dreiser. To sit in that room day after day, reading and writing about Mencken, was an extraordinary experience — sometimes I felt as though he were looking over my shoulder — and I also got a kick out of showing the collection to friends who happened to be passing through Baltimore. I gave Bill Buckley a tour of the Mencken Room a few years ago, and he still talks about it.
Teachout: The thing I like most is his ability to get himself — his personality — onto the printed page. His style is amazingly vital, in part because he held back so little. He said and wrote exactly what he thought at any given moment. That kind of frankness is exhilarating. It hasn't dated at all, and I don't think it ever will. Reading Mencken when he's at his very best gives you an almost physical sensation of excitement, like driving a really fast car around a really tight corner. "He achieves his effect," Joseph Epstein once said, "through the magical transfer of joie de vivre." I can't put it any better than that. What I like least about Mencken is his coldness. He was ambitious and self-centered to a fault. In his private writings — his diaries and the memoirs he wrote in the Forties and placed under time seal until 1991 — he sometimes said shockingly callous things about people who had thought themselves his bosom friends. And what he wrote about World War II is more than just shocking — it's appalling. One of his unpublished memos from the Forties is, in my opinion, the most offensive thing he ever wrote: "I find it difficult to work up any regret for the heroes butchered in World War II. Anyone silly enough to believe in such transparent quacks as Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill leaves the world little the loser by departing for it." My hair stood up when I found that memo on the top shelf of the closet of the Mencken Room, neatly tucked away for posterity to behold. Lopez: Was there anything you were particularly surprised to learn about your subject? Teachout: I was quite surprised by the sharp contrast between the aggressive nonconformism of Mencken's public persona and the conservative, even genteel way in which he chose to conduct his private affairs. He talked a much better game than he played. He was a family man and a mama's boy — in fact, he lived with his mother until the day of her death in 1925, and to the best of my knowledge was perfectly happy to do so. What's more, he didn't marry until he was 50 years old, and his wife, Sara Haardt, was a chronic semi-invalid to whom he proposed under the direst of circumstances — she had just undergone a life-threatening operation. As the kids say, how romantic is that? I should add that the marriage, though short-lived (Sara died just four and a half years later), appears to have been idyllic. Lopez: Among writers today, are there any who remind you of Mencken? Teachout: Tom Wolfe. His two novels, The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, though of course they don't sound anything like Mencken, have something of his directness — his willingness to write about men and institutions as they really are — as well as a good deal of his stylistic vitality. If Mencken was America's greatest journalist, as I believe, then Tom probably ranks third, right after A. J. Liebling. And someone else who has a touch of Mencken is Andrew Ferguson. Lopez: You seem to be everywhere and see everything before I even know it exists. What does your critic/writing schedule typically look like and how in the world did you keep it up while working on The Skeptic? Teachout: The Bradley Foundation, bless them, made it possible for me to take a six-month-long sabbatical from freelance writing in the summer and fall of 2000. Otherwise, I wrote every word of The Skeptic in the interstices of my life as a working journalist. That's one of the reasons why it took me ten years to finish! I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — the right nostril of Blue America — and I'm usually out on the town four or five nights a week, going to concerts and clubs. I write every day (and sometimes late at night), and I have the gift of facility, which comes from having spent years writing for newspapers, including a six-year stretch knocking out foreign-policy editorials for the New York Daily News. But that didn't make it easy to write The Skeptic. It was a hard row to hoe, and I still can't quite believe it's done. Lopez: Do you have a favorite Mencken piece of writing? Teachout: Mencken's first two volumes of autobiographical essays, "Happy Days" and "Newspaper Days," are the best things he ever wrote — classics of American reminiscence, though not yet widely recognized as such. I think his most underrated book is Notes on Democracy, a powerfully concentrated statement about the problems of popular democracy. It's also a funny book — Mencken was never at his best when pounding the pulpit. If I had to pick one essay that shows him at his most characteristic, it would probably be "On Being an American," from Prejudices: Third Series. And I also want to put in a plug for his New Dictionary of Quotations, which is that most miraculous of literary achievements, a reference book with a personality. Lopez: Do you have a most-telling Mencken anecdote or story? Teachout: That's a tough one. I like to think the whole book is telling, if you see what I mean. But here's a detail of which I'm especially fond. In 1948, Mencken suffered a stroke that deprived him of the power to read and write — a fate worthy of Greek drama — and spent the last eight years of his life unable to practice his trade. In order to amuse himself, he was forced to go to the movies. Until then, he'd dismissed Hollywood as a purveyor of machine-made fodder for the booboisie, but he found, much to his surprise, that the movies weren't nearly as bad as he'd claimed. Among the most charming things I saw in his scrapbooks was an interview in which he listed some of the films and performers he liked best. I don't want to give the surprise away, but I will tell you that one of the movies he singled out for high praise was Walt Disney's The Lady and the Tramp. Lopez: Is there anything you had to cut out of the final cut of The Skeptic that you wish you could have had in in the end? Teachout: No, not really. Needless to say, I know a lot of interesting things about Mencken that didn't get into the book, but that was by design. When a biography is more than 500 pages long, it usually means the biographer didn't do his job, which is synthesis and interpretation. I don't like reading (or reviewing) that kind of book, and I didn't want to write one. From the outset, I meant for The Skeptic to be concise, and to have the sweep and immediacy of a good novel. I made only minor cuts in the final draft that HarperCollins sent to the printer last spring, and the finished book ended up being 411 pages long, which is almost exactly what I had in mind. I did have to cram some nifty bits into the footnotes, though, so be sure to read them all!
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Teachout, a prolific journalist and critic, is author of the new book,
