Dreams of Mencken

We did manage to finish reading 32 Yolks, Eric Ripert’s recent memoir of becoming a professional chef, and after that, Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, chiefly about Provençal subcontractors and their lunches. But generally it’s been a knee-scraping stumble from one tome to another.

We started down the run of great French food partly out of my consideration of my own situation; if I can’t eat what I want to eat (and as you’re likely tired of hearing, I can’t), I figured I would at least read to Mom at night about the culinary quest whose trail my stomach has lost. She, after all, started me down the path of reading Calvin Trillin when I was a teen.

So, in that nightly space where we yawn at each other across the cell towers or down her Ikea sectional – depending whether I am with her merely in spirit or in the flesh – we went from Trillin’s Tummy Trilogy to Ripert's 32 Yolks. From there Mom requested the Illiad, and I tried, I really did try, starting with the long introduction to Fagles' translation. We made it to page 62 before I begged off and asked if we couldn’t please read of something less terrible. I didn’t spell out for her in too many words that I couldn’t take reading to her of war, plunder, the choosing of which captured woman to rape, for it all felt too close to that time in the dining nook of her Westbury retirement condo in the early 2000s when she had told me of how her mother used to smear herself with mud when the Nazis showed back up in the village, and I had stupidly asked why.

I tried then (after putting down Fagel) good old M.F.K. Fisher, but somehow quickly ran headlong into Fisher's stories of her hopeless marriage to a man who was probably gay and was certainly very sexually repressed. That would have been bad enough (I don’t really feel like talking about Dad and those days too much, nor does Mom, I think). But then I was innocently reading along in Fisher's The Gastronomic Me chapter by chapter when we hit a story I had somehow completely forgotten about from reading it 20 years ago, of Fisher’s childhood and her grandmother’s cook, a woman who had an odd affect and one exceptionally good knife, a tool she finally used to cut her mother into small bits. I didn’t catch where this was going before I read it aloud, and my mother gasped so. In horror, I wondered what she thought, her complicated, hungry daughter reading her this.

It was then that I remembered Mayle, and how harmless the man was, and so I ordered him up lickity-quick express from Amazon (no time to wait for the local), and we made it through that humorous trifle just fine. But then I was stuck searching again for something to read, and soon bashed right into the same old problem of the skinned knees: I used Project Gutenberg to download to my phone a collection of humorous American short stories and started reading to Mom from about 1850 on, but it turned out what counted as funny to the anthology’s editor was people being ruined by thieving land speculators (which my mother’s father was with a bit of swampy land in Saratoga in the 1960s, though the thieving land speculator was his closest friend) and children being beaten into learning by a young schoolmaster with a carnivorous leather belt.

In exasperation at the literary world’s assaults on my attempts to take my mother to the park, last night I read to her from a book a friend trying to help lent me from his own collection, Newspaper Days. The pages of my friend’s copy are the color they used to dye Breyer’s French vanilla ice cream, though that was done with turmeric, I suspect, and this book comes by its sepia hue honestly, for it is a 1955 edition of H.L. Mencken’s 1941 memoir, this particular copy de-accessioned from the library of Our Lady of the Lake University of San Antonio.

The friend didn’t lend me this one for Mom – in fact, for Mom he specifically lent me Wobegon Boy, a dreadfully flat novel by Garrison Keillor. We tried four chapters of Wobegon Boy before I asked my mother if we could stop, apologizing for calling a halt to yet another literary trip. Not only were the characters mere props for Keillor’s 1990-vintage satire of earnestly progressive public radio and academic feminism (though God knows I appreciated those attempts), the book was drifting into more and more frank sex, with the main character dropping his pants and dripping wine on the nipples of his live-in, and I found myself having to do so much editing on the fly to jump over those bits lest I run into the carnal equivalent of the cook with the good knife. For heaven's sake, couldn’t I find a text where I wasn’t having to run into so much sex and death? It might be okay if the sex were bad and the deaths good, but no, always the other way around. No wonder I had unthinkingly gravitated to food memoirs at the start of all this.

Anyway, as I said, the friend gave me Mencken not for Mom but for me to enjoy on my own, to treat myself. The two of us had met through the newspaper, and just before he walked over to his shelves and pulled a few things for me to consider for the night's reading, we had been talking over a spatchcocked, perfectly salted chicken about those days when the covering of East Lansing was nearly all my life. So far am I from it now, I asked him with a startle, “Wait, who was elected mayor of East Lansing last night?!” and we realized we didn’t even know. We hadn't bothered to follow it.

He pulled up his phone and informed me it was the fellow who several people had told me back in the day wanted me dead, or at least very gone. This mayorship had happened, we both knew, because the newspaper I founded and finally left (as one leaves a lover who just won’t go) hadn’t kept doing the reporting of the kind we did back then. You know how it goes. The political amnesia performed by leftist reporters in the guise of nonprofit objectivity. And these kids wonder why their rent is so high.

A few days ago, cracking open Mencken on my own after saying goodnight to Mom, I was thrown back four G’s to that time after my resignation from Northwestern, when I went so far down into the depths of local reporting, the basement of the police department where they tried to charm me out of filing another FOIA, the back rooms of shops downtown where the small business owners relayed the political blowback I couldn’t report without hurting them more, the nights of being the last man standing in the audience of City Council where they would finally reveal what the mysterious item on the consent agenda had meant.

“…it was the maddest, gladdest, damnedest existence ever enjoyed…. 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 arcana, none of them taught in schools….the reading of my teens had been abandoned in favor of life itself, and I did not return seriously to the lamp until a time near the end of this record. But it would be an exaggeration to say that I was ignorant, for if I neglected the humanities I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife. And it would certainly be idiotic to say that I was not happy.”

Though it makes me happy (genuinely) to read it, Mencken’s book is deeply strange. One can read it at night with clear and sober eyes and still never remember any of it in the morning. His prose is at once breathless – almost frantic – and yet slow as the woodchuck after a long day in the lettuce patch.

Each chapter starts as if he is going to tell you a story of one particular thread of reporting on fin de siècle Baltimore, but each tale quickly unravels to become instead a fever dream of street hangings, bed-ridden politicians, banana boat excursions to South America, and blinding, drifting, epic snowstorms. The framing is that of thrill, as that passage from his foreword (quoted above) suggests, but the reality is of hard, poorly-lit terrors, fires that consumed entire cities, malaria, and no real line between the criminal gangs and the men who marked each other with badges. He alludes to how he could not gain weight.

I have thought for a long time about writing a book about the time of the newspaper – even having done many interviews for it with the fellow lunatics I met doing the same in southern Ohio and Texas, Boston and Rhode Island – even having loaded all those interviews onto Google drive in case all of my computers and backup drives go up in a mass of municipal flames of the sort Mencken describes. But it is just that Menckenish quality of my own newspaper days that stops me.

Like Mencken, I think I would remember the thrill, and even promise it in the foreword, but in fact deliver fever dreams. Posing for a photo on the steps of the Michigan Appeals Court with my triumphant First Amendment lawyer on a day when the city had suddenly turned off the water, leaving me without a shower, with a mop of greasy hair; parking myself in the conference room at City Hall on election night, explaining to the university journalism students how the returns worked, silently wondering if we had managed to explain pension-gaming well enough to the electorate to properly take down the debt-denying, spectacularly incompetent mayor; being followed into the ladies’ room and slipped a note by the city manager’s assistant under the stalls’ divider, a tip pretending to be a tampon.

To be fair, there are a couple of chapters in Newspaper Days that do form coherent stories. (I wonder, were these firmly handled by an editor of the sort Mencken terms “literary castrati”?) Notable is the one entitled “The Gospel of Service,” a darkly funny, knowing piece about being forced by audience to deliver news of the good of humanity when all around one the stupidity of humanity is on shining display.

"The Gospel of Service" is about Mencken’s assignment to report the aftermath of the fire that burned Jacksonville, Florida, to the ground in May 1901. Mencken was sent by his Baltimore editor to send back purple prose of the destruction and especially to relay first-hand the gratitude of Jacksonvillers to the people of Baltimore for the emergency supplies sent in two railway cars, northern city to southern. His editor wanted the paper’s readers to feel ever so smug, presumably as a kind of inoculation against the usual journalism being delivered, most of which pointed to Baltimore’s dockside stench.

According to Mencken, while the city of Jacksonville was indeed shockingly destroyed by fire (the way a swath of Baltimore would be just a couple of years later), the fire moved slowly enough that the people there were left mostly unharmed. Awkwardly, they had little need of the “medical and chirurgical” supplies sent from Baltimore, particularly not the crate of wooden legs. It being May in Florida (the temperatures “a rising 80”), they most certainly did not need the heavy, used, woolen horse blankets donated by Baltimore’s racing stables, any more than they needed the coats and mittens sent by the Christian do-gooders of St. Paul and Montgomery, respectively.

Jacksonville’s mayor, Mencken recalls, was particularly unhappy to hear news that he would be receiving, on behalf of his people, one hundred cases of Maryland rye, which he understood would just lead to the Florida militiamen sent to help getting snockered and accidentally shooting each other. (At least then, the chirurgical materials might find a use?)

The whole thing reminded me of the absurdity of East Lansing, the progressive earnestness Keillor rightly mocked as amounting to neighborhood kids in the summer putting on a show, the middle-of-the-night bumping up of railway cars of unneeded supplies against stalled cabooses. Still, lacking anything else to offer at the moment, and maybe looking for my mother to witness a little of what she didn't really see over the decade I ran the newspaper, I read her “The Gospel of Service” last night. She laughed a little but not nearly as much as I did again, particularly at the problem the Jacksonville mayor faced of receiving a truckload of champagne, a drink that would only cost him politically because “champagne was still regarded by the decent people of Florida as a lecherous drink.”

Even that chapter of Newspaper Days – a chapter otherwise relatively quite coherent – ends in a literary unraveling, with Mencken recalling in a distracted aside that he missed getting to report on Mount Pelée’s spectacular eruption because he had just been served a subpoena related to his father’s estate. As I read through to that conclusion, my mother (a writer and editor herself) justifiably wondered aloud why the story of Jacksonville’s mayor’s predicament was brought to that far-away pole to be tied up.

I thought, well, that would be exactly my problem in trying to tell of my own newspaper days. They don’t cohere, really, because they were always first drafts of history. There was always an unrelated volcano erupting, a subpoena having nothing to do with the story being served.

I said to someone quite recently, referring to writing a Newspaper Days of East Lansing, that there are things you have to be a few years past before you can really know what they were about. But that isn’t quite right, is it.

The truth is you know what they were about, and you can’t tell that story. It remains and perhaps must always remain a fever dream of street protests, face-masked politicians in a pandemic, the Winter Solstice ice storm at the birth of it all, the power line on my street rising up and smashing back down, thrashing about, throwing its hellish bright white juice every which way, giving off a terrifying electrical growl, as if someone had accidentally turned on a giant’s mosquito zapper. The red fire truck coming and then slowly backing away.

What troubles is not the lack of coherence, because there are still the war veterans around me willing to remember the trenches with me when I need to know they were real and, yes, lasted a decade. What troubles me is the feeling of having been doing something important and perhaps no longer – of doing something no one else was going to do, and now doing something someone else really could do.

“...I was young, goatish and full of an innocent delight in the world. My adventures in that character, save maybe in one or two details, were hardly extraordinary; on the contrary they seem to have been marked by an excess of normalcy. Nevertheless, they had their moments – in fact, they were made up, subjectively, of one continuous, unrelenting, almost delirious moment – and when I revive them now it is mainly to remind myself and inform historians that a newspaper reporter, in those remote days, had a grand and gaudy time of it, and no call to envy any man.”

I said to my mother, “How about we read Jane Austen next?” And she surprised me – though it shouldn’t have surprised me – that she volleyed back a firm and immediate “no.” Austen’s novels, she said, convey the notion that a woman’s life should be entirely about whom she marries. As if a woman’s purpose in life is a man.

“Isn’t there more a woman could do with her life?” she asked. And I found myself reminding myself, as I often have had to do, that the smearing of mud was not for nothing in my life.