Damning Words

September 12, 2016
For this biography of prolific American writer H.L. Mencken, Hart (Calvinism: A History) depends so greatly on Mencken himself, as well as on other biographers and critics, that much of the book reads like a research paper with no specific aim. But then comes the conclusion, “Learning from H. L. Mencken,” in which Hart resounds with purpose to drag a loudly unwilling Mencken into academe, church, and 21st-century politics and religion. Hart’s chronological telling progresses doggedly from Mencken’s birth in Baltimore in 1880 to death in 1956. Hart presents Mencken, baptized an Episcopalian, as reacting to the reserved Victorian culture of Christianity in which he came of age; although religious, he was more likely to wisecrack and parody cultural movements than suggest improvements. However, Hart concludes, Mencken’s despair remains a “useful reminder of the antithetical character of Christianity”—a religious tradition that fosters the creation of communities at the same time as instituting exclusionary beliefs and policies. Hart neither apologizes for quoting great gobs of Mencken nor competes with them, but he occasionally insinuates his own fillips amid persuasive analyses.