Irony and Brutal Honesty - H.L. Mencken and the Renaissance

Following up on last week’s post on Benjamin Brawley, an intellectual on the fringe of the New Negro movement, I move to another figure who has been cast off in historical analyses of the Harlem Renaissance: H.L. Mencken.

 

Mencken was a white satirist with a bitter, no-holds-barred style who was all the rage in the late 1910s and 1920s. Editor of the popular journal American Mercury, he wrote reviews and essays which defined or rocked the current literary trends. Although certainly not a nurturing personality, his honest criticism and connections to key avenues for publishing made him a hugely important ally for young black writers.

His disregard for political correctness, his use of racial slurs (for all races), and his refusal to tackle even the most serious issue without a heavy touch of irony and ridicule makes his work unappetizing for today’s critics. In the book The Sage in Harlem, Charles Scruggs investigates Mencken’s role in the Harlem Renaissance in an effort to reshape his legacy. This is one of those non-fiction books that reads like a great novel – the author is personally invested in the subject and is unafraid of putting personal opinions and flourishes into the text. I recommend it.

Mencken is distinctive because he approached blacks on equal footing – he judged their work as he would a white writer. If it was crap, he told the author so; if it had merit, he published it. While some white publishers were beginning to buy into the “primitivism/exoticism” of black literature, or publishing black works out of charity, Mencken did not degrade black authors in this way. He published Countee Cullen, George Schuyler, James Weldon Johnson and others. He stressed realism and spat on Puritanism, holding up accuracy and honesty as ideals rather than moralistic concerns. He criticized black writers for being too sentimental – basically for crying too much – and called on them to create great works that were a little rough around the edges.

In a book review, Mencken outlined his challenge for black writers:

“The thing we need is a realistic picture of this inner life of the negro by one who sees the race from within – a self-portrait as vivid and accurate as Dostoyevsky’s portrait of the Russian or Thackeray’s of the Englishman. The action should be kept within the normal range of negro experience… The negro author who makes such a book will dignify American literature and accomplish more for his race than a thousand propagandists and theorists. He will force the understanding that now seems hopeless. He will blow up nine-tenths of the current poppycock.”

Realism, detail, brutal honesty – Mencken stressed it again and again. He looked to the examples of the Russians and the realism of types like Emile Zola when crafting a critical ideal. This approach influenced Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, everyone. I imagine Mencken and Benjamin Brawley would have utterly despised each other. Dirty realism and polished Victorianism don’t mix.

.Mencken attracted the most notoriety in his career for his brutal condemnation of white Southern culture in the essay “The Sahara of the Bozart” from his book Prejudices. Here are a few bits from it which demonstrate just how harsh and snarky he could really be:

“Virginia is the best of the south to-day, and Georgia is perhaps the worst. The one is simply senile; the other is crass, gross, vulgar and obnoxious. Between lies a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy, almost of dead silence.”

“I published a short discourse on lynching, arguing that the sport was popular in the south  because the backward culture of the region denied the populace more seemly recreations… brass bands, symphony orchestras, etc”

“The southerner, at his worst, is never quite the surly cad that the Yankee is. His sensitiveness may betray him into occasional bad manners, but in the main he is a pleasant fellow - hospitable, polite, good-humored, even jovial. . . . But a bit absurd. ... A bit pathetic.”

Its important to remember this tone when thinking of Mencken’s role in aiding the budding generation of black writers – he wasn’t patting them on the back by any means, but was treating them as writers rather than charity cases or brutish animals.

Did blacks write satires like The Sahara of the Bozart ? Charles Scruggs argues that they did, but that we must expand our definition of satire to see them as such. Satire usually resides in the realm of fiction. Blacks were not writing picaresque novels or farces, they were describing daily struggles – and yet the racism they had to deal with was so absurd that irony was the most apt register for discussion. Can you sustain a serious essay arguing simply “Lynching is wrong?” Does it help if you tack on a mountain of facts to prove your irrefutable original point? No. Better to laugh and expose the desperation and hypocrisy of the Klu Klux Klan than act as if they have any legitimacy in the first place.

It would be interesting to look further into black satire during the period. I doubt I could find much in poetry – satire seems to need a longer format to develop its conceit whereas poems have to be heartfelt and concise. George Schuyler wrote satire in his “Shafts and Darts” column in The Messenger. He also published an absurd novel called Black No More in which a scientist invents a way to turn dark skin pigment white. After everyone changes themselves white, you can still tell the black people apart because the treatment makes them more white even than white people. In result, the whites discriminate against them, and the new fad among whites becomes getting a super dark skin tan to separate themselves from the chemically changed blacks. Absurd. Aaaaabsurd.

Schuyler explained his motives:

“What I have tried to do in this novel is to laugh the color question out of school by showing up its ridiculousness and absurdity.”

There are other black figures – E. Franklin Frazier, Theophilus Lewis, Wallace Thurman – who tried their hands at satire also. All of them were at the periphery of the New Negro movement but are worth a closer look. My teacher, Professor McDowell, specializes in 18^th century satire but I’m sure she would also have insights about this side of the Harlem Renaissance. It would be worth asking her and hope that she pushes me in an interesting direction.