Cascadia Calling, 2026.6.2
"The time has come to see to my shutters."
Brigid and I spent Memorial Day weekend out on Anderson Island, staying a friend’s cabin. There’s not much to do on the island other than read and watch wildlife. We saw seals and a variety of birds. At one point we put down our books to watch a crow wrestle with a snake that it apparently wanted to turn into lunch. It would pick the snake up in its beak, the snake would begin to flail and writhe, and the crow would lose its grip and drop it. This happened a few times before the snake apparently got away into some brush nearby. The crow spent a couple of minutes hopping about the brush, investigating things, but the battle was over.
I spent the weekend switching off between reading the diaries of H. L. Mencken and the first Dungeon Crawler Carl book. It made for a surreal juxtaposition. Mencken, even in his diaries, has a journalist’s punch and an editor’s eye for a story. Matt Dinniman, on the other hand, clearly fell in madly in love with an idea and let it run away with him, thanks to the editor-free magic of modern self-publishing. The style, tone, and subject matter of the two books couldn’t possibly have been more different. So much so, that I began to suspect that I was being unfair to Dungeon Crawler Carl by unintentional comparison. I decided to put DCC aside for a bit and come back to it with a clean palate.
“It takes three generations to make a real agnostic.”
I came to H. L. Mencken earlier than was healthy. Like a lot of young nerds on the early Internet, I first encountered him through decontextualized quotes. Mencken is not only a great writer, but he is particularly gifted with in forging quips. As someone who was enchanted early on in life by the magic of great line, I think I was uniquely susceptible to falling in love with Mencken as a stylist. As I got older I read a few of Mencken’s books, but it’s hard to be a Mencken completionist, even for someone who finds his writing to be charming. Mencken was in the habit of writing and editing for 8 or 10 hours a day, almost every day of his adult life. His series, Prejudices, published in his 40s, runs to 1,400 pages. His treatise on The American Language, plus its two supplements total over 2,000 pages. In total, there are probably 50 or so books of his writing, published either by himself or collected posthumously from his long career in essay writing and newspaper work.
Over the last years of Mencken’s life, he gathered together his massive collection of papers, notes, personal correspondence, and the journals he kept in the latter part of his life and deposited them in the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, with a complex schedule of instructions about when various things can be unsealed. For his journals, the unsealing date was 25 years after his death in 1956. Shortly after the journals were unsealed in 1981, another Baltimore native, Charles A. Fecher, collected them, edited them, and abridged them. This edited edition was put out in 1989 by Alfred A. Knopf, Mencken’s longtime publisher on whose board he sat for the latter years of his life.
This abridgement presents some challenges. For one thing, it’s hard to trust the sensibilities of an editor, born in 1917, who is a fan of his subject. By his own admission, Fecher cut out about two-thirds of the material, for purposes of reducing repetition, especially around accounts of illness and the banalities of business.
Still, that is a vast amount of material to cut and the fact remains that the man doing the cutting is a scholar and fan of Mencken’s work. (Fecher previous wrote a book entitled Mencken: A Study of His Thought). This means that any conspicuous gap in time or subject matter immediately becomes conspicuous. Mencken references sex and the possibility of relations with women after the death of his wife Sara, but never comes close to mentioning them actually occurring. Is that because he was celibate? Because he had relationships after Sara’s but didn’t commit them to paper in his journal? Or because they were bowdlerized from the text by Fecher wanting to preserve the privacy and dignity of a writer he admired?
Fecher, to his credit, acknowledges the more telling lacuna. There is a complete absence of any articulation of Mencken’s opposition to World War 2. Mencken’s rejection of the American entry into World War 2 is one of the most fascinating blunders of his life and one that anyone who regards Mencken as intelligent (as I do, and I’m confident Fecher did), has to be deeply curious about.
Fecher shares my bewilderment at this gap, calling it out explicitly in the introduction to the book. Mencken several times refers in the abstract to “his reasons for opposing the war”. He writes in great length about avoiding public presentation of his objections. When pressed by a colleague at the Baltimore Sun to engage in a public debate, Mencken, normally not one to shy away from throwing elbows over social or political matters, demurred. He avoided opportunities to write about his views on the war, and states in the diary that he felt he couldn’t write about them until the war was over and the subsequent period of patriotism that he was sure would follow had all died down, by which time he planned to be dead.1
He makes no mention of Pearl Harbor, or the dropping of the atomic bomb, or the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. His entry marking the announcement of the end of the war mostly complains about the noise made by celebrations in his neighborhood. He seems to be generally dismissive of the Nazis and their sympathizers, but never expresses his own views on the matter other than the background derision that he has for most people and most ideas. A typical entry on the topic is that of November 18th, 1944:
Joe Hergesheimer was here a couple of weeks ago. He told me that the most violent of all the Nazis in Washington is an old woman named Lee, the widow of a grandson of the General. She has a fine house and plenty of money, and has now reached such an age that she can safely speak her mind freely. Joe said that she insists at dinner parties on arguing that the greatest man living in the world today is Hitler.
About this period, Fecher himself says:
There is no mention in the diary of the German invasion of Poland which began [WW2] or of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which brought the United States into it, or of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima which brought it to an end. There is hardly any mention of Adolph Hitler. He seems to have had no conception at all of what a German-Japanese victory would have meant to the civilized world[.]
“Scotch does not suit Bach. His music demands malt liquor.”
The diary, of course, is not without its charms. In addition to the normal voyeuristic thrill of reading a diary, Mencken’s off-the-cuff comments on his social circles and society are fascinating. The diary is at turns detailed and dishy, serious and lighthearted, morose and suffused with a clear passion for life. It covers the goings on of the Sun papers and the Alfred Knopf publishing company in immense detail or years, and intersperses such sagas with cast-off details, such as the fact that F. Scott Fitzgerald once got drunk at a party, dropped his trousers, and showed the horrified partygoers his “gospel pipe”.
Even writing in an unvarnished fashion about pedestrian matters, Mencken is an excellent writer. The most surprising parts of his diary, however, are when the full weight of existence forces him to address things beyond mere banalities. When writing of the crushing loss of his wife Sara, he says:
Her ashes are buried at the foot of the grave of my mother, and beside her there is room for mine. Thinking of her, I can well understand the great human yearning that makes for a belief in immortality, but I do not believe in it, and neither did she. We have parted forever, though my ashes will soon be mingling with hers. I’ll have her in mind until thought and memory adjourn, but that is all. Whether or not it is better so I do not know, but there is the fact as I see it. We were happy together, but all beautiful things must end. Entbehren sollst; du sollst entbehren.
The last line comes from Goethe: “Deny yourself! You must deny yourself!”
Even god, it appears, begins to profiteer.
I was also charmed by the anxieties on display in the diary. For all of his public bravado and self-confidence in matters of politics and culture, Mencken was neurotic about matters of health. He records at length bouts of hay fever and heartburn. A blister at the base of his tongue becomes a recurring character. He spends years convinced that he is on the brink of death. He carefully scrutinizes the ages and manners of death of his relatives to try and define his own future.2 He lists the ailments of his friends and relations in minute detail. Behind social calls and the business of writing, illness is easily the third most popular topic of the journal.
Mencken also betrays the sort of superstition that he railed against in others. He was paranoid about the number 13, commenting on it whenever he sat in seat 13 in a train car or when one of his manuscripts had a 13 in the page count. He had a set of rules and beliefs around alcohol to rival the personal arcana of any serious drinker. He accuses cocktails of “playing tricks on him” and at one point blames his heart trouble on Scotch specifically, noting that it doesn’t flare up as often when he drinks bourbon instead.
Probably the strongest expression of Mencken’s superstition is his nationalist race essentialism. He had an understanding of national origin that verged on that of a video game character creation screen. He talked viciously of Anglo-Saxons3 like they were goblins—stupid, selfish, stunted creatures unfit for civilization. He cast broad pronouncements about his black employees and neighbors, casting them all as childlike and simplistic. He had detailed prejudices of all the different nations of Europe, almost all of them unfavorable, except of course the German stock from which he himself came. He never mentions a Jewish person without also mentioning they’re a Jew and, therefore, in his estimation, a socialist.
I don’t mean to lump Mencken’s clear racism in with his more harmless superstitions, but reading his diary I get the distinct impression that they come from the same place. His confidence that he’d die shortly after his 60th birthday share a common root with his belief that the English were uniquely perfidious and good at propaganda. His racist views seem to come from the same mystical place that all personal ritual and silly superstitions come from. That he himself was a staunch atheist and lambasted superstitions and follies of thought in others, makes this personal oversight so much more revealing.
In the end his diary seems to show that he wasn’t really against delusions and fancies as such, he was just convinced that his delusions and fancies were the only obviously correct ones.
There’s a standard reading of Mencken’s opposition to the war. It goes something like this: Mencken was always a staunch and principled isolationist. During World War I, a war which he felt was ludicrous and monstrous, he and other German-Americans were subjected to anti-German bias, which made him inherently suspicious of anyone accusing Germany of warmongering, repression, etc. He had also regularly censorship and oppression laid on the American people with war, with the war as a handy excuse. Additionally, he found Hitler to be a particularly odious and clownish figure and largely assumed that he was incompetent and no one would really follow him, which blinded him to the true horror and menace of the Nazis. As far as I can tell, this has largely been stitched together by later biographers, and it’s not clear to me how much of it is true. What comments I can find publicly by him (and I’m far from a Mencken completionist) seem to indicate that opposition to censorship (actual or perceived) and the danger of war-time political powers were his principle objection. But none of that is evident in his diary. I’m sure this model of his opposition to America’s involvement in World War 2 is grounded in some truth, but I also don’t think that Mencken was a particularly rigorous or rational thinker when it came to his national and political prejudices.
He was convinced he would die of a stroke shortly after he turned sixty. He did have a stroke in his late 60s, but lived relatively comfortably for many years afterwards, dying in his sleep at 75.
The primary component of my own heritage.