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H.L. MENCKEN REVISITED PART 2
LET’S CONTINUE ENJOYING the acerbic wit of H.L. Mencken. One excellent source of this is his Chrestomathy, (from the Greek adjective chrēstos, “useful,” and the verb manthanein, “to learn), now in its second edition.
A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, by H.L. Mencken, edited by Terry Teachout, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
On Writing for a Living. “I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.”
Er…, burp.
On Not Being a Republican. “In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”
On Puritanism. “… the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
On Prohibition. “A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn’t care to drink with, even if he drank.”
Image from goodreads.com.
On Marriage. “No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.”
No problem. Innes Ireland taught Wife Dottie and me to savor The Famous Grouse. Innes taught us “Slange-e-va!” to which one responds, ”Slange-e-vor.”
Portrait of H.L. Mencken by Edward Steichen from condenaststore.com.
On Opera. “The opera is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.”
Gee, I wonder which operas he liked best. He also said, “Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.”
Sei fuori!
On Cuisine. “There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.”
A rare non-acerbic observation?
Image from Baltimore Magazine.
On Age and Wisdom. “The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”
Yet, His Preferred Epitaph: “If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.” ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025
Simanaitis Says 
I enjoyed Terry Teachout’s Mencken biography, “The Skeptic.” Paul Johnson said of it: “His life is worth recounting and is here expertly and fairly summarized.”
I wanted this book for both the Mencken story and the Baltimore backdrop, my hometown. But the clincher was Terry Teachout’s writing. His work as drama critic at the WSJ was mandatory reading, until his passing in 2023.