Silliman's Papers

Mencken: Man of the Newspaper
By Daniel Silliman
September 29, 2003
for Tracy Simmons


Mencken was a newspaperman. He was the essayist, the sage of Baltimore, the great American stylist, but all of those things rose out of Mencken the man of the daily paper. By his own account, this American stylist was a newspaperman first. He was an author a score of times, a nationally respected critic, a philologist of historic contributions, a student of medicine and of music. But first and finally he was a newspaperman. “Nothing enthralled him as much as the sweaty, contentious world of daily journalism that he inhabited.”

Newspapers aren’t known for their style; they aren’t designed that way. Newspapers are designed to be disposable, intended to wrap fish a few days after it leaves the presses. Newspaper writing is not formed as great rhetoric, it is not meant to be framed or even famed. It’s meant to be read. The end product of a newspaper isn’t writing, as one might suppose, but the knowledge of a community. The best of newspaper writing is sharp, easy to read and tailored for the greatest impact. Mencken, formed by 35 years of newspaper work, knew all of these lessons to the fullest, putting them into practice with the pounding of the typewriter.

This is seen nowhere so clearly as in the lead. It is in the first sentence that the style of newspapers are totally separated from writing of every other kind. Newspaper writing stands on the opening lines. A well-styled opening for a newspaper isn’t the slow beginnings of a story, it isn’t the claim of an academic work, it isn’t the well wishing of a letter. The newspaper lead is a creature unto itself. The newspaper lead starts with a punch. It is short and sharp, snapping the reader into the story and immediately commanding his time, concern and attention. The greatest newspaper leads are brutal, intense and harsh. A Miami cops reporter writes “Joe died hungry” and one is driven into the story. A good lead snaps, setting up the whole story and forcing us again into the reality of what it is to be human.

Mencken’s leads display some of the best of a style formed by the newspaper. His trademark opening is with a whiskey lead, causing one to sit up, inhale, and keep going:
-“No man ever quite believes another man.”
-“Man, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged animal, never completely perfect, as a cockroach, say, is perfect.” “It was hot weather when they tried the infidel Scopes at Dayton, Tenn., but I went down there very willingly, for I was eager to see something of evangelical Christianity as a going concern.”
-“The problem with human progress is that it tends to go too fast—that is, too fast for the great majority of comfortable and incurious men.”
-“On the purely technical side the American novel has obviously made immense progress.”

Though his subject is not hard news, his style is. He writes to seize. He writes with the quick step and the hard kick of a newspaper. Menchen explains the importance of this style when telling the story of how he came to be a critic. On the first day his editor tells him that the main idea “‘is to be interesting, to write a good story. All else is dross.’” Mencken accepts the lesson, saying that the critic needs a certain ferocity.

While Mencken’s notoriety came as essayist with a honed style and an iconoclastic aggression, his formation was as a newspaperman. By his own account, he was a reporter when he was “young, goatish and full of an innocent delight in the world.” He wrote “millions of words” and learned “all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife.” He loved his days as a reporter, describing them as “the maddest, gladdest, damndest existence ever enjoyed by mortal youth… I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of the day, and getting earfuls and eyefuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcane, none of them taught in schools.” He became a reporter by a feat of tenacity—bugging the local city editor nightly for, as he tells it, a month and 10 days—and took the trade with the same fierce attitude. His first copy lead with “A horse, a buggy and several sets of harness, valued in all at about $250, were stolen last night from the stable of Howard Quinlan, near Kingsville,” an example of the hard style and solid training that would serve him so well.

To read Mencken on his days as a hoofing-it reporter is to see him drunk with the hard-bitten romance of the job, belying Mencken’s formation as a newspaperman. Mencken paid his dues as a reporter, capitalizing on the speed, the accuracy, the precision and even the style he learned working the typewriter in a Baltimore newsroom. He spent 35 years working for newspapers, and claimed to have never regretted the choice. It was a role that shaped every part of him:

"I chose newspaper work without any hesitation whatever…I have never regretted my choice. More than once I have slipped out of daily journalism to dally in its meretricious suburbs, but I have always returned repentant and relieved, like a blackamoor coming back in Autumn to a warm and sociable jail. It was the printing press that left its mark, not only upon my hands, face and clothing, but also upon my psyche."

While most of Mencken’s lasting fame came from his dalliances, Alister Cooke said he was “the master craftsman of daily journalism.” Mencken knew journalism as the trade that was learned in four days and dropped as soon a better paying job was offered, but he also knew the beauty of journalisms hard and swift pen.