Andrew Holter at the Boston Review:
Today we’re about as far from Mencken’s death as Mencken was, when he was my age, from the death of Edgar Allen Poe. It’s been over twenty years since an article by Hilton Kramer appeared in The New Criterion under the headline “Who Reads Mencken Now?” And the Mencken Room here at the Pratt was disestablished and rededicated last year to honor another formidable reporter from Baltimore, DeWayne Wickham—though I don’t think that was any injustice. Remember that Mencken esteemed few historical figures more than that critic of all statuary and compulsory veneration, Thomas Jefferson, who believed, as he wrote to James Madison at the time of the French Revolution, that “the earth belongs always to the living generation.” The Pratt is no exception. I think that to memorialize Mencken too well, too protectively, is to risk entombing him, and I suspect we honor him best in the breach, by permitting his ghost to loiter a little outside of respectability.
It’s my feeling that Mencken is still relevant today, but the question is which Mencken. None of his biographers tells us that his Weltanschauung was philosophically all that consistent or that his politics were especially coherent.
More here.
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