1 /“The Steady Reaching Out for New and Vivid Forms”

H. L. Mencken and the American Revolution of the Word

American thus shows its character in a constant experimentation, a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid forms. No other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and phrases more readily; none is more careless of precedents; none shows a greater fecundity and originality of fancy. It is producing new words every day, by trope, by agglutination, by the shedding of inflections, by the merging of parts of speech, and by sheer brilliance of imagination.

—H. L. MENCKEN, THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE (1919)

The fallout from Eugene Jolas’s “Revolution of the Word” manifesto was both swift and palpable. Shortly after the publication of this famous issue, which included Irwin’s “Slanguage: 1929” among its experimental pieces, the leftist journal the Modern Quarterly took issue with the manifesto’s bold proclamation in a fall 1929 symposium devoted to transition’s “Revolution of the Word.” If anything, Jolas’s 1930 response to his Modern Quarterly critics produces a stronger bond between transition’s avant-garde literary polemics and the innovations of the American vernacular. Titled “The King’s English Is Dying—Long Live the Great American Language,” Jolas’s point-by-point response to V. F. Calverton concludes with a memorable invocation. He writes,

The mysticism surrounding the “purity of the English language” has, I believe, lost its force. In the crucible of the immense racial fusion of indigenous and immigrant America there is occuring [sic] today an astounding creation that ultimately will make the American language, because of its greater richness and pliancy and nearness to life, the successor of British English. This is already happening in speech, and as soon as the age-old delusion that there must be a difference between written and spoken words has had its day we will probably see the American language colonize England and all English-speaking countries.1

In making these claims, Jolas provides a telling footnote: “See H. L. Mencken’s The American Language.” Jolas’s argument here is not far off of Mencken’s in his masterwork; Mencken too would celebrate the American language for what Jolas called its “immense racial fusion of indigenous and immigrant America” and for its ability to colonize, to become globally dominant. What is striking in this, however, is Jolas’s insistence that the American language, with “its great richness and pliancy and nearness to life” is, in effect, the lingua franca of modernism itself. He concludes the essay by claiming that the intersection of racial and immigrant groups in the United States “will bring to fruition the language of the century to come.”2

Jolas’s invocation brings Mencken and his American Language squarely into the discussion of avant-garde aesthetics. While this might seem surprising, particularly to modernist scholars who have largely ignored the importance of Mencken to the period, it is not unique. Mencken was a veritable obsession among writers and intellectuals of the modernist era, and Jolas was not the only avant-garde figure to cite Mencken’s popular linguistics as a useful analogy for experimental writers. A 1923 article by Matthew Josephson, editor of the little magazine Broom, claims that “the temper of the age, which is one of prodigious social transformation, must be contributing far more in the way of new names, technical and colloquial, new compounds, neologisms, word-structures. Another period of language expansion, such as occurred in the sixteenth century, has set in. (The reader is here referred to H. L. Mencken’s The American Language).”³ If anything, Mencken’s linguistic work provided modernists like Jolas and Josephson a popular and well-respected analogue for the innovations they championed in little magazines like Broom and transition. At the same time, it reinforces the strong connection between manifestos like the “Revolution of the Word” and slang and vernacular dictionaries like Irwin’s “Slanguage: 1929.”

This chapter considers the popular linguistics of H. L. Mencken, whose landmark study The American Language offers a theoretical voice to the concept of vernacular modernism. Additionally, the chapter serves as an extension of the theoretical issues raised in the introduction and a practico-theoretical bridge between the introduction and the case studies that follow. Mencken’s work, however, would not likely have been possible without the influence of writers like Mark Twain. Twain’s literary praxis operates as a precursor to vernacular modernism, critiquing the linguistic assumptions of realism from within a largely realist framework. In what follows, I consider Twain’s linguistic experimentation in texts like Roughing It (1872) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) as a background to the linguistic and philological work of Mencken, whose American Language (1919), researched and published at the birth of high modernism, operates as a vernacular modernist manifesto. In analogous modes, Twain and Mencken sought an American “Revolution of the Word,” one that punctured the pretentions and elitism of dialect realism, offering in its place an experimental American vernacular that would provide the raw material for a peculiarly American modernist innovation.

“The Vigorous New Vernacular”: Mencken Reads Twain

A nation’s language is a very large matter. It is not simply a manner of speech obtaining among the educated handful; the manner obtaining among the vast uneducated multitude must be considered also.

—MARK TWAIN, “CONCERNING THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE” (1882)

For the purposes of this argument, it is a rather convenient coincidence that the year 1910 witnessed two crucial moments in the history of the American vernacular: the death of Mark Twain in April and the first of H. L. Mencken’s Baltimore Evening Sun articles on the American language in October. Mencken was soon to become the editor of the Smart Set and later the American Mercury and well on his way to becoming one of the most prominent cultural figures of the 1920s, and these publications would be the first in a lifelong engagement with questions of language and culture in America. Though Mencken’s bombastic and polemic writing style shared little with Twain’s work, it was clear in Mencken’s multiple appreciations of him that Mencken saw Twain as the greatest American writer to date. Twain was, according to Mencken, “the largest figure that ever reared itself out of the flat, damp prairie of American literature.”4

For Mencken, Twain’s literary genius rested, unsurprisingly, on the latter’s distinct prowess in the use of vernacular language. Twain is one of Mencken’s major sources in his popular linguistics, and he singled Twain out in the early editions of The American Language, noting that “in all his writings, even the most serious, he deliberately engrafted its greater liberty and more fluent idiom upon the stem of English, and so lent the dignity of his high achievement to a dialect that was as unmistakably American as the point of view underlying it.”⁵ Here Mencken highlights Twain’s early travelogue Roughing It, where he notes that Twain was “celebrating ‘the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains’” (AL 1:16–17, AL 2:20, AL 3:21). These celebrations of Twain tie Mencken’s popular linguistic project to Twain’s work, collecting and reproducing the vernacular speech of the West and old Southwest; they also point to Twain’s thematic concerns, which, in Mencken’s reading, overlap with his own intellectual project.

Like most American literary critics of the early twentieth century, Mencken’s literary assessment of Twain found its primary source in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In 1913 he called the novel “one of the great masterpieces of the world . . . the full equal of Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe,” and in 1919 he wrote that it was “a truly stupendous piece of work—perhaps the greatest novel ever written in English.”6 Mencken’s estimations of the novel anticipate later celebrations of it by modernists like William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, who claimed in Green Hills of Africa that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huck Finn.”⁷ While the study of Twain has long moved beyond the exclusive consideration of his masterpiece, it is important to reconsider and reconstruct Mencken’s reading of Twain—and of works related to Huckleberry Finn—as central to his own popular linguistics, and, by extension, a vital precursor to what I have termed vernacular modernism.

Additionally, Mencken’s understanding of Twain shares an affinity both with his own intellectual project of the 1910s and 1920s and with influential critical readings of Twain that coalesce around concepts like “genteel” and “vernacular.” For Mencken, Twain is the model of the debunker:

What a sharp eye he had for the bogus, in religion, politics, art, literature, patriotism, virtue! What contempt he emptied upon shams of all sorts—and what pity! He regarded all men as humbugs, but as humbugs to be dealt with gently, as humbugs too often taken in and swindled by their own humbuggery. He saw how false reasoning, false assumptions, false gods had entered into the very warp and woof of their thinking, how impossible it was for them to attack honestly the problems of being; how helpless they were in the face of life’s emergencies.⁸

Mencken cannily anticipates mid-century readings of Twain, such as Henry Nash Smith’s influential thesis that Twain’s work is structured around the conflict between genteel and vernacular values, generally siding—in his most celebrated work, at least—with vernacular characters and language. Channeling Van Wyck Brooks’s argument that bifurcated the nature of American life along the terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” Smith emphasizes that Twain’s work charts the “two levels of experience”: “the realm of the ideal, the locus of values, and the realm of everyday reality, the locus of facts.”9 Twain scholars—including James M. Cox, Michael Egan, David R. Sewell, and many others—have long been indebted to this particular characterization of Twain, even if they have complicated and revised Smith’s initial argument.¹⁰ Sewell, for example, situates Twain’s work in the complex nineteenth-century relationship between speech and writing and complicates Smith’s hard-and-fast distinction between these vernacular and genteel registers.

Smith’s argument has been adapted since its publication in 1962, but it continues to structure readings of Twain, whether those oppositions are seen in terms of vernacular /genteel or oral/written.¹¹ What remains suggestive about Mencken’s reading of Twain is the way in which this celebration of Twain’s ability to debunk pretention and hypocrisy is connected to his strategic and virtuosic use of vernacular language. Mencken’s description of Twain’s virtues uncannily resembles Mencken himself; this is in fact a version of Twain crafted in Mencken’s own image. Compare his description of Twain’s value, for example, to Mencken’s own assessment of “the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly” of life in the United States: “the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, or aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances.”¹² For Mencken—and for Mencken’s reading of Twain—the exposure of what he called the “boobus Americanus” is somehow subtly linked to the celebration of a “vigorous new vernacular” that would become Mencken’s American Language.¹³

Because Mencken tied Twain’s genius to Roughing It and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a reading of such texts—along the lines Mencken might have read them—will serve as a useful means of conceptualizing the development of vernacular modernism (and of Mencken’s linguistic studies) from Twain’s experimental model. Given the underlying assumptions of this project, it might be better to describe Twain’s work as representing the limits of dialect fiction, rather than exemplifying that of the vernacular. Of course, Twain’s rampant experimental use of dialect blurs these boundaries and gives rise to further experiments in vernacular fiction of the twentieth century. It remains important, however, to see Twain operating in a tradition that encompasses both dialect fiction and the literary realism of figures like his friend William Dean Howells. As Jonathan Arac has written, “Only during Howells’s own career, beginning after the Civil War, did an ethnographically serious dialect literature arise, what we call local color.”14 For, while popular humor movements of the first half of the century turned on dialect to mark racial and regional difference (and the political and social hierarchies such difference suggested), the rise of a realist aesthetic in the 1870s and 1880s meant that literary work—determined to represent the real world in mimetic forms—would also begin to include the “commonplace” language that had previously been excluded from serious literary endeavors. In efforts to democratize literary representation, realism often went beyond the simple inclusion of a dialect-speaking servant figure or backwoodsman; serious novelists began emphasizing dialect in protagonists, and talented dialect writers like Mark Twain became literary sensations. As Gavin Jones has argued, “Late nineteenth-century America was crazy about dialect literature.”¹⁵

The link between dialect writing and realism is unmistakable: both depend on photographic (or phonographic) representation, both assume the ability of language to accurately represent this world, and both orient themselves around hierarchy within linguistic groups. So, even in the most genteel of realist texts, the introduction of commonplace language, whether marking country naïveté or ethnic difference, marks social differentiation, education, and value of characters. As Elsa Nettles has written,

Howells’s faith in the power of realism to promote brotherhood seems based on an unswerving allegiance to principles of unity and equality which he championed throughout his life. Yet his theory of realism, when put into practice, reveals an inherent conflict. . . . As his own fiction shows, nothing more immediately establishes differences among characters than different habits of speech. Unless all the characters speak in the same way, dialect at once divides the speakers of the standard language from the nonstandard speakers.¹⁶

Even in realist texts where the protagonists are marked with dialect (like Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham [1885]), these characters are routinely judged—and in Lapham’s case, ultimately banished—by the genteel narrative voice. The major realist writers of this era generally held to this particular sense of language hierarchy, where, according to Gavin Jones, “the assumption of Howellsian realism that dialect was democratic, energetic, and native means of expression was undercut by another view of nonstandard speech as the humorous sign of cultural degeneration.”¹⁷

Howells and Twain were closely associated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a fact solidified by Howells’s publication of his tribute My Mark Twain in 1910, almost immediately after Twain’s death. Mencken’s reading of Howells’s relationship to Twain varied over his career. In The American Language, he linked them as champions of the American language over British English. There, he called Howells’s novels “mines of American idiom,” and noted that “his style shows an undeniable revolt against the trammels of English grammarians” (AL 1:17, AL 2:20, AL 3:21). Earlier, however, Mencken saw these figures as crucial opponents in an American linguistic legacy. In a review of Howells’s My Mark Twain, Mencken highlighted what he called “the abysmal difference between the straightforward, clangorous English of Clemens and the simpering, coquettish, overcorseted English of the later Howells”18 Certainly, this distinction—on the basis of language—is a crucial one in that it parses the difference between Twain, whose “clangorous English” is far preferable to the “overcorseted” language of Howells, echoing descriptions Mencken would later give British English. Not surprisingly, Mencken was at the beginning of his research on the American language when he reviewed My Mark Twain, and, despite his endorsement of Howells in later linguistic work, this dichotomy is not only a useful way of understanding Twain’s relatively radical realist aesthetics: it also anticipates critical assessments of Howells that highlight hierarchical character distinctions modeled on linguistic stratification.

For Mencken, Twain is both an integral part of the Howellsian realist tradition that elevated “commonplace” language to the forefront of American literature culture and the purveyor of a sophisticated autocritique of that realist aesthetic. For, while Howells could, on the one hand, produce “mines . . . of the American idiom,” his work could also—in contrast to Twain’s—seem conservative and “overcorseted.” Twain, then, operates within the tradition I have described as dialect realism, but he constantly pushes the boundaries of this tradition, producing a “clangorous English” that can barely be contained by the realist aesthetic that defines it. It is in the two Twain texts most celebrated by Mencken that these challenges to traditional dialect paradigms become clearest.

In his 1872 Western travelogue Roughing It, Twain begins his earnest experiments with language and narration. From its first scenes of difficult communication, through Horace Greeley’s unintelligible handwriting near the conclusion, questions of language and communication help structure the text. Critics like Lee Clark Mitchell have noted how important language is to Roughing It, calling it “the west of words”; indeed, the twists and turns of language is one of the major themes throughout the book.¹⁹ Twain not only draws on the conventions of Southwestern humor, he also foregrounds these conventions as they occur. The speech/writing divide in nineteenth-century dialect writing is at the center of this text; Gavin Jones has noted that the text “is a remarkable document of philological self-consciousness that enacts, rather than merely refers to, the linguistic debates of Twain’s era.”20 Twain uses his narrator’s encounters to suggest the inadequacies of standard language in the new western environment, the new rules surrounding discourse in the West, and the problematic assumptions of dialect realism in general.

Twain’s emergent critique of dialect realism begins at the onset of Roughing It’s loosely organized plot. Hardly out of the St. Joseph, Missouri, stage station, the narrator and his brother soon encounter a radically different linguistic world. Sharing the coach with these two figures are three days’ worth of mail bags, “almost touching our knees, a perpendicular wall of mail matter rose up to the roof” of the stage, as well as an unruly “Unabridged Dictionary” that will soon injure them on their bumpy travels.²¹ But the written word—the correspondence of the east intended for points west—is not all that will accompany the narrator on his first day in the stage. In the evening, a woman boards the coach for a short time. The narrator refers to her as the “Sphynx,” because her stony quiet disturbs the narrator and the other passengers. As the passengers sit through a lengthy silence, the narrator finally breaks the ice, resulting in an absolute torrent of language from the Sphynx. Her language—riddled with the grammar of a backwoods dialect—immediately becomes the focal point. She was just as confused about the silence of the men as they were about her. She says, “Fust I thot you was deef and dumb, then I thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin’, and then by and by I begin to reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that couldn’t think of nothing to say” (RI 9). The social and linguistic codes here are indicative of Twain’s sophisticated use of dialect strategies. One day into their journey west from St. Joseph, Missouri, the men, too proper and self-conscious to begin a conversation with this unknown woman, have already encountered new modes of discourse and new rules of social interaction. Like many of Twain’s genteel narrators, they fail to understand the codes and are made to look like “a passel of sickly fools” precisely because they “couldn’t think of nothing to say.” The inability to speak—and to speak in appropriate ways—is apparently worse than being “deef and dumb” or “sick or crazy.” It is, in fact, the worst thing one could be in the West. As Philip Burns has argued, “The Western vernacular becomes a mode of experience, an aberration that impinges upon the narrator’s consciousness,” and Twain’s narrator has yet to recognize the new linguistic terrain he has entered.²²

Despite her censure of the “sickly fools” in the stagecoach, the Sphynx is summarily dismissed by the narrator in a fashion that characterizes how dialect characters were often treated by realist narrators throughout nineteenth-century American fiction. According to Twain, “The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more! The fountains of her great deep were broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech forty days and forty nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder projecting above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation” (RI 9). Twain and his companions “suffered” at the hands of this woman and her “dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation.”23 A minor incident in Roughing It, the encounter with the Sphynx anticipates things to come, an early warning of the ways in which language will be transformed and social and linguistic codes will be upended by the West. This is far from the last time that Twain’s narrator will play the tenderfoot fool in the face of a language and culture he has not quite mastered.

As Roughing It proceeds, however, the narrator’s perspective begins a dramatic transformation. Soon, he no longer characterizes this language as “dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation,” but instead begins to speak of “the vigorous new vernacular of the occidental plains and mountains,” a phrase quoted by Mencken in every edition of The American Language (RI 26). This shift is a profound one in the context of dialect literature of the nineteenth century; it essentially inverts the hierarchies of language that underwrite dialect realism. Roughing It upends traditional expectations: readers expecting a humorous account of backwoods miners receive a rude awakening when Twain begins to appreciate and even idolize the language and customs of the West. The educated nineteenth-century reader does not find a stable point of genteel identification that maintains class hierarchies. Instead, Twain’s text increasingly becomes complicit with the corrupting influence of western dialect. In set pieces devoted to Scotty Briggs and other figures, the narrator’s conversion from genteel Eastern tenderfoot into devotee of the Western vernacular becomes obvious. No longer does the narrator look down on the language of the West; Twain starts drawing out the complexities of dialect and its connection to power relationships as he depicts other bewildered Easterners unable to adapt to this “vigorous new vernacular.”

The funeral preparations for Buck Fanshaw draw out Twain’s linguistic preferences in very explicit ways; indeed, the conversation between Scotty Briggs and the young minister, found roughly halfway through the text, is central to many critics’ understanding of language in the novel. Twain prefaces his encounter with a discourse on the importance of slang to the silver-mining communities. These communities are crucibles for the preservation and development of slang:

Now—let us remark in parenthesis—as all the people of the earth had representative adventurers in the Silverland, and as each adventurer had brought the slang of his nation or his locality with him, the combination made the slang of Nevada the richest and the most infinitely varied and copious that had ever existed anywhere in the world, perhaps, except in the mines of California in the “early days.” Slang was the language of Nevada. It was hard to preach a sermon without it, and be understood. Such phrases as “You bet!” “Oh, no, I reckon not!” “No Irish need apply,” and a hundred others, became so common as to fall from the lips of a speaker unconsciously—and very often when they did not touch the subject under discussion and consequently failed to mean anything. (RI 309)

If slang is the language of Nevada, it is also the most valued language of Roughing It, and Scotty Briggs’s negotiations with the young minister (“the duck that runs the gospel-mill . . . the head clerk of the doxology-works” [RI 310]) is Roughing It’s most explicit encounter between vernacular and genteel figures. For Sewell, “Twain’s major object in this chapter was to create a tour de force of Western slang, the success of which is certified by his contemporaries’ appreciative response. But the object of satire here is language itself, which creates as much opportunity for misunderstanding as for communication.”24 The notion of linguistic interference, of a multiplicity of viable languages, emerges in this chapter as a counterpoint to the narrator’s first experience with the Sphynx. And the minister’s bookish language, like the Unabridged Dictionary, is utterly useless in an environment of linguistic experimentation and flexibility like this one.

If Roughing It begins to challenge the dominant paradigms of dialect realism in the form of a self-deconstructing travelogue, Twain’s most celebrated novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), more explicitly dismantles these realist expectations through its sophisticated vernacular narration. This text opens in a celebrated, if peculiar, fashion. On a page titled “Explanatory,” “The Author” notes the following:

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.25

Published in 1885, a high point of realism in American publishing, Twain’s introductory remarks serve both to remind readers of the important symbiotic relationship between realist aesthetics and dialect and to satirize the notion that such a meticulous, photographic version of realistic art is even possible. Some critics have sought to identify all seven of these dialects, but such a task seems absurd.²⁶ For why would we take the word of “The Author” after the “Introductory” note (“By Order of the Author”) tells us that “Persons attempting to find a Motive in the narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a Moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a Plot in it will be shot” (AHF xxxiv)? Instead of taking Twain at his word—always a dangerous approach—we might consider this Twain’s satire of the expectations of a dialect specialist. To look for the seven dialects in Huckleberry Finn is to be taken in by Twain’s joke, like so many of his genteel narrators are by the dialect figures of the West, Southwest, and South. In this opening, Twain performs a mastery of dialect writing, while simultaneously satirizing the expectations that come with such mastery: consistency was certainly difficult for even the most talented dialect writer working with eye dialect and phonetic representations, and Twain’s opening caveat already absolves him of any inconsistencies in linguistic representation under the guise of a heightened realism.

Twain’s opening “Notice” and “Explanatory” also serve an additional purpose: they replace the standard genteel frame that accompanies virtually all dialect writing during this period. Dialect realism, with an interest in marking linguistic difference, depends on a hierarchy of voices within the dialect text. Usually, this operates in much the same way as Twain’s early work in the mode of Southwestern humor. A genteel figure—effectively the educated reader’s representative in the world of the text—typically frames the tale, and the dialect figures, themselves often storytellers like Jim Blaine of Roughing It or Simon Wheeler of “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” inhabit this world. The sharp distinction between the language of frame narration and that of the dialect storyteller re inscribes the class, regional, and/or ethnic distinctions between these two spheres, making a text of dialect realism what Bakhtin would call a “zone of contact.”27 The frame narrator, educated like the author and the reader, has the ability to represent dialect accurately; this figure is an incarnation of the aesthetics of dialect realism. Even in texts that do not employ the genteel first-person frame narrator, the language of third-person narration closely resembles the speech of educated characters, while the dialect speakers are, if not linguistically marginalized, nonetheless disposed of through narrative strategies that cannot allow such a figure to dominate an otherwise genteel realist text.

It is here that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn pushes the boundaries of the narrative frame as far as they can go at this historical juncture. Huck is ostensibly our storyteller; his relationship to the writing of the text, though, remains confusing. After all, both the “Notice” and the “Explanatory” at the text’s opening are signed by “The Author,” and neither one exhibits a language even close to that of Huck’s. That said, chapter one opens unabashedly in Huck’s voice: “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly” (AHF 1). Huck’s vernacular voice opens with a reference to the “real” textual production of Twain, and Huck challenges Twain’s veracity in telling a story that readers know full well is a fiction. Twain’s satire of realism and realist expectations is on full view here as his fictional creation challenges the creator’s ability to record fictional events accurately (“mostly a true book; with some stretchers,” Huck says [AHF 1]). But Huck’s opening lines beg the question: Who is writing this book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? While the author’s notes at the opening suggest the presence of an authorial force that looms over Huck, this authorial presence essentially vanishes throughout the remainder of the text, allowing Huck to control the narrative. But is Huck writing here, or is he telling this story to the authorial consciousness that appears in “Note” and “Explanatory”?

Twain’s less celebrated and less successful sequels to Huckleberry Finn make the relationship of author to narrator somewhat clearer. Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) is “By Huck Finn/Edited by Mark Twain” and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896) is “as told by Huck Finn.”²⁸ In both of these cases, the presence of Twain—as editor or ethnographic collector/auditor—is made clear, and Huck’s role as dialect storyteller conforms more comfortably to the standards of dialect realism. After all, realism’s strategy of class and ethnic containment generally permits dialect characters the ability to speak, but not to write. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, certainly Twain’s most ambitious and experimental Mississippi story, Huck’s role remains relatively undefined: he is both literal author (in early stages, Twain referred to the text as Huck Finn’s Autobiography) and contained dialect figure.29 Is the variation in dialect due to Huck or “The Author” of the prefatory “Note”? Is the use of eye dialect (“sivilize,” for example) meant to imply Huck’s misspelling or—as it often was in dialect work—to heighten the distance between uneducated speakers and educated readers? How do we square the seeming linguistic contradictions between the genteel prefatory Author and Huck, who speaks of “what a trouble it was to make a book” at the novel’s conclusion (AHF 362)? Anticipating what I have called vernacular modernism, Twain pushes the genteel frame as far to the margins as he possibly can and leaves readers on unstable ground in a world where dialect realism is often strictly governed by the speech/writing divide.³⁰

Huck’s most important scene of writing in the novel contributes to the text’s intentional lack of clarity. After escaping from the King and the Duke and discovering that Jim has been sold and effectively re-enslaved, Huck considers writing to Miss Watson. Another in a series of scenes about Huck’s ongoing ethical transformation (a transformation rudely interrupted by Tom Sawyer’s “evasion” plot), Huck finally decides to write a letter, telling Miss Watson where Jim is. His decision-making process begins with a failed prayer: “I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie—and He knowed it” (AHF 269). In spite of his inability to “say” that he wants to turn Jim in, Huck still manages to write the letter. As he contemplates the letter in front of him, he remembers the adventures he and Jim have enjoyed together, how Jim “would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me” (AHF 270). Huck’s memories of his time with Jim, the memories that dominate the first part of this spoken/written text, finally help Huck make a decision: he tears the letter up, and in the process resigns himself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” (AHF 271). Huck’s rejection of the written word here dramatizes Twain’s challenge to the standards of dialect realism that insists on dialect speech inside (and subordinated to) genteel writing: Huck’s writing (like Unabridged Dictionaries) would effectively support the written laws that have enslaved Jim to begin with. When Huck says, “I knowed it was a lie,” he means not only his prayerful intention to do the right thing, but the written laws that create the structures of slavery. Huck’s destruction of the letter represents a preference for the spoken and the vernacular over genteel pretention and hypocrisy in its written forms.

Ultimately, though, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ends on a comprised note, where Huck’s vernacular values are subordinated to Tom’s insistence on doing things “the way all the best authorities does”—in other words, by the book (AHF 299). Tom’s bookish principles script a story that endangers both the boys and Jim in the service of genteel cultural scenarios, the historical romances that Tom has devoured as historical truths. Steven Blakemore has written that in the “evasion” plot that concludes the novel, “Jim literally becomes the prisoner of writing, locked in a linguistic dungeon of Tom’s devising.”31 This dynamic between Huck and Tom is central to Twain’s sequels, as well, though Huck’s implicit critique of Tom’s genteel nonsense is diminished, if not completely effaced. Sewell even argues that the presentation of Huck, Tom, and Jim in Tom Sawyer Abroad makes them “disappointingly unlike the trio in Huckleberry Finn.”³² Still, at one more interesting moment, after Jim has fallen asleep listening to Tom ramble on, Huck notes that “a person always feels bad when he is talking uncommon fine, and thinks the other person is admiring, and that other person goes to sleep that way. Of course he oughtn’t to go to sleep, because it’s shabby, but the finer a person talks the certainer it is to make you sleepy.”³³ “Talking fine,” Tom’s specialty, stands in opposition to Huck’s vernacular language. When they are not putting Huck and Jim to sleep, Tom’s bookish language and logic serve, like the Unabridged Dictionary of Roughing It, to interrupt and endanger others in the service of scripted and textually licensed adventures.

In Roughing It and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain inverts traditional dialect hierarchies, upsetting the classist and racist notions that inform realism’s use and abuse of dialect characters. His most innovative work anticipates H. L. Mencken’s modernist celebration of the vernacular by demonstrating the complex narratological and representational possibilities offered by vernacular protagonists. But Twain only pushes so far; it remains difficult for Twain to break out of the dialect standards, and even in Huckleberry Finn, where his experiments are most intense, he inserts a silent but crucial editorial presence that maintains a realist dichotomy between the written and the spoken word. Still, Twain pushes this editorial frame as far as it will go, allowing Huck’s language to define and dominate the linguistic consciousness of the novel. Twain would go on to experiment in most of the genres discussed in The Word on the Streets. His influence on humor writing is undeniable, and his impact on the depiction of African American dialect is also central to his critical reputation. He also crafted narratives of cultural encounter (Roughing It, The Innocents Abroad [1869]) as well as detective stories (Pudd’nhead Wilson [1894]; Tom Sawyer, Detective). But Twain’s linguistic legacy would be formidably taken up by a theorist of the American language, a critic who would expand on Twain’s practice with a serious theoretical and philological consideration of the American language in a thirty-year project that framed the “vigorous new vernacular” of America as an overt challenge to its English roots, to nineteenth-century gentility, and to realist aesthetics. H. L. Mencken’s The American Language was a vernacular modernist manifesto, rooted in the experiments of Twain and connected to the experimental vernacular that entered popular culture in the 1910s.

“When Things Get All Balled Up”: H. L. Mencken’s Modernist American Language

Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meets the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative.

—H. L. MENCKEN, THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE (1919)

Citations throughout Mencken’s popular linguistic work suggest that Mencken saw himself as the inheritor and chronicler of a tradition best exemplified by Twain. Mencken’s literary preferences ran toward the realism and naturalism of writers like Twain and Theodore Dreiser, rather than the modernist experiments that were appearing during the height of his career. Indeed, Mencken displayed a rather complex and evolving relationship toward the notion of realism throughout his career. In an early essay on Twain, Mencken linked Twain’s vernacular language with the very idea of realistic representation, asking, “Where, in all fiction, will you find another boy as real as Huck himself?”34 Later, however, Mencken followed the path of many other literary critics, who, in the 1920s, began to have doubts about the purely mimetic function of language. He began a 1926 article entitled “On Realism” with the statement, “One of the strangest delusions of criticism is to be found in the notion that there is such a thing as realism—that is, realism grounded on objective fact in the same way that a scientific monograph, say, or the report of a law trial, is grounded upon objective fact.”³⁵ Nevertheless, he reaches a conclusion that his idea of “realism” has less to do with a measurable objectivity and more to do with “intellectual honesty in the artist,” a common position among realists and naturalists of the early twentieth century.36

Despite this shifting relationship to realism, Mencken never wholly endorsed the high modernist experimentation that emerged alongside his own rising celebrity as a cultural critic. While he gave Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) a positive review in the Smart Set, noting that “there is not the slightest hint in it of the usual structure of prose fiction; it is new both in plan and in detail,” he absolutely hated Ulysses, calling it “deliberately mystifying and mainly puerile. . . . I have never been able to get over a suspicion that Joyce concocted it as a kind of vengeful hoax.”³⁷ Mencken’s own literary preferences—his prejudices, as he might call them—remained rather Victorian throughout his life. Of his contemporaries, he preferred the literary work of naturalist Theodore Dreiser and realist and debunker Sinclair Lewis, and he had little use for new experimental art forms, whether they were (like jazz) commercial products or (like Joyce’s Ulysses) emblematic of a more elite literary avant-garde.

Mencken’s literary tastes became, by the middle of the twentieth century, largely unfashionable, and contemporary scholars rarely cite Mencken as an authority on any matters of literary value, despite his influence during the 1910s and 1920s. Around the same time that his taste in literature went out of style, his increasingly controversial political positions further marginalized him in the American mainstream. His marginalization as both a literary and cultural critic and a political and social thinker has only increased with the revelation of some of Mencken’s more controversial views about Jews and World War II; for all intents and purposes, he has become a persona non grata in American literary studies. Unlike other cultural figures of the era, Mencken has not received as much attention from American studies scholars as he did from his contemporaries. In American studies scholarship of the last thirty years, only Chip Rhodes’s Structures of the Jazz Age (1998), Mark McGurl’s The Novel Art (2001), and Joshua L. Miller’s Accented America (2011) deal with Mencken at any length. This is somewhat surprising, given that Mencken was probably the most influential and well-known social and cultural critic of the 1920s and served as editor of the Smart Set and American Mercury, two periodicals that set standards for both literary and intellectual discourse in the American mainstream in the early decades of the twentieth century.³⁸ In a 1921 article, Edmund Wilson styled Mencken as a modern Walt Whitman, calling him “the civilized consciousness of modern America, its learning, its intelligence and its taste, realizing the grossness of its manners and mind and crying out in horror and chagrin.”³⁹ In the popular American mind, at least, the 1920s were not the famous “Pound era” of Hugh Kenner’s description, but almost undeniably the “Mencken era.”40

When Mencken is addressed in criticism, the results are frequently predictable. An avowed Nietzschean, contemptuous of American culture and the Americans who embraced it, Mencken’s name has become synonymous with the concept of “debunking,” a popular fascination of the 1920s. With his series of essays Prejudices (1919–27) as well as his commentary in American Mercury (on, among other things, the Scopes trial), Mencken’s reputation has long been that of the gritty and crusading realist, driven to explode myths and expose idiocy wherever he saw them. Indeed, when Mencken’s work has seen republication in the twenty-first century, it is along these lines: the S. T. Joshi edited volume Mencken’s America (2004); A Religious Orgy in Tennessee (2006), which collects Mencken’s writings on the Scopes trial; Marion Elizabeth Rogers’s new edition of Mencken’s 1926 Notes on Democracy (2008); and the two-volume Library of America edition of Prejudices (2010) all reinforce his position as ruthless critic of American culture. Unfortunately, Mencken’s status as harsh cultural critic has largely limited the ways in which his importance to the modernist era has been discussed. Beyond the hackneyed characterization of him as the ultimate “debunker” and leader of a movement that historian Frederick Lewis Allen called in 1931 “The Revolt of the Highbrows,” it is difficult to situate him in the contemporary milieu of modernist studies where race, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity constitute a cultural matrix in which modernist writers and thinkers attempt to reconfigure the changing world around them.⁴¹ As a result, both American studies scholars and New Modernist critics do not quite know what to make of him.

Unlike so many other major figures in the American 1920s who were literally trying to make the world “new,” Mencken remained locked into a schizophrenic Victorianism. While railing against an American “boobacracy” of Puritan values in his work, he lived much of his private life in line with nineteenth-century genteel bachelorhood. Because of these contradictions (as well as the controversy surrounding anti-Semitic remarks in his posthumously published diary) biographies of Mencken outnumber critical studies of his work by more than two to one. Of course, the inconsistencies in a subject’s life are far easier to explore than are contradictions in his work and thought. And Mencken’s work is almost unbelievably varied: his writings encompass reportage, literary journalism, philosophical biography, literary criticism, popular linguistics, cultural criticism, travel writing, memoir, and dramatic burlesques (among others). The studies that do attempt to bring together Mencken’s varied work inevitably end up in a familiar place. Writers like Frederick J. Hoffman in The Twenties (1965) and Edward A. Martin in H. L. Mencken and the Debunkers (1984) essentially reinscribe Allen’s 1931 thesis that Mencken was “the keynoter of this revolt [of the highbrows], its chief tomtom beater.”42

Almost inevitably left out of any “comprehensive” study of Mencken’s work is his magnum opus, The American Language.⁴³ Initially published in 1919, this book is one of the first in a series of books by major figures in American intellectual history that suggest an early articulation of American cultural “exceptionalism” after World War I.⁴⁴ The American Language does not fit conveniently into any of the rubrics for understanding Mencken as a man or as an intellectual. It is neither polemic nor burlesque; it is seldom cranky or hostile. It is, in many ways, Mencken’s most earnest attempt at creating a literary and intellectual legacy. As Raymond Nelson has noted in one of the few scholarly considerations of The American Language, “Mencken came to believe it would be the single work for which he would be remembered.”⁴⁵ Such a position does not jibe with the common notion of Mencken as the self-appointed scourge of the boobus Americanus. Even in Mencken biographies, The American Language gets short shrift.⁴⁶ The critical avoidance of this work is somewhat surprising, considering that Mencken worked on versions of it for most of his career. Beginning with journalistic musings in the Baltimore Sun in 1910, it evolved into a special series of articles in 1914 and became a book-length study by 1919. The next four years saw two new editions (1921 and 1923), and, while writing influential cultural criticism during the late 1920s, Mencken continued to amass material toward the fourth and final edition, published in 1936 at a moment when Mencken’s public reputation (and Germanophilia) had become increasingly unpopular. While this has become the standard edition (and has remained in print into the twenty-first century), Mencken published two “supplements” in 1945 and 1948 and followed these with a series of “postscripts” in the New Yorker from 1948–49, his last major publications. Mencken’s engagement with The American Language (1910–49) covers nearly his entire professional life, far more time than his influential editorships at the Smart Set (1914–23) and at the American Mercury (1924–33), or his acclaimed essay series Prejudices (1919–27). And though scholars have not managed to position The American Language within the larger corpus of Mencken’s thought, reviews of the first edition saw the study as typically Menckenian, noting that “never has the flourishing personality of H. L. Mencken been so happily exercised as in this big book on the living speech of America.”⁴⁷

More recent interest in the politics of modernist language has brought Mencken back into the spotlight in Joshua L. Miller’s Accented America, where he places Mencken in the fraught context of “English-only Americanism.” Miller’s reading of The American Language exposes the text’s notion of an exceptionalist and yet “ethnically white, masculine, normative vernacular.”48 Miller’s reading offers a valuable recovery of the importance of this text to the broader culture of American literary modernism, and it effectively links Mencken’s troubling racial politics and critical blind spots—his anti-Semitism, his ignorance of African American vernacular—to the “invention of a standardized and racialized national vernacular” in language education of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, Miller tends to overread this work as “a curiosity piece, a hair-raising, pseudoscholarly work” and ignores the long and serious prehistory of the first edition of The American Language, as well as its broad appeal across the lines of race and ethnicity.⁴⁹ At the same time, Miller’s emphasis on Mencken’s problematic relationship with ethnic and racial difference obscures the important work that The American Language does in elevating a working-class language to the realm of a national one. For Mencken, the term “English” itself posed a number of problems, as the multifaceted language he describes in his project emerged, in fact, as a direct challenge to notions of linguistic purity.

The American Language, invisible though it may be in many studies of Mencken, ought to be placed at the center of American modernist studies, for virtually no other critics of this period weave together concerns of linguistic and literary independence with questions of linguistic experimentation in quite the way that Mencken does. Moving between subjects as diverse as histories of pronunciation and debates in poetry journals about the use of slang in American novels, The American Language reinforces longstanding ideas about a modernist era in which issues of language and experimentation were paramount. The American Language consciously rejects the cultural criticism for which Mencken is better known today. His interest in language does not appear to be a part of his “mediaeval but unashamed taste for the bizarre and indelicate, [his] congenital weakness for comedy of the grosser varieties” that he describes as his somewhat perverse reasons for remaining in the United States in his essay “On Being an American.”⁵⁰ Rather, his linguistic study—as unsystematic as it is—is rooted in two other tendencies: Mencken’s desire for a unique and independent American culture, separate from English influence, and the revolutionary and experimental power of a vernacular language that is always in a process of innovation. In an era filled with bombastic attempts to define and promote new forms of linguistic and literary experimentation, The American Language assumes the form of a homespun, vernacular variation on the modernist manifesto.

Mencken’s first series of articles that would become The American Language does not strike one as necessarily revolutionary; these pieces include (as does The American Language itself) extended lists of variable meanings between American and British English. He begins this series relatively humbly: “Words change and their meanings change. Idioms decay, dry up and blow away. Grammatical forms give birth to new grammatical forms. The same verb is conjugated differently in different ages, in different countries, on different sides of the street. The English people speak an English which differs enormously, in vocabulary and idiom, from the English spoken by Americans.”51 The articles that followed “The Two Englishes” fell along the same lines, with Mencken pointing out the differences in English and American slang in “England’s English” (October 14, 1910), creating conjugation charts for vernacular American usage in “Spoken American” (October 19, 1910) and “More American” (October 20, 1910), and contrasting the variant uses of pronouns in “American Pronouns” (October 25, 1910). While Mencken occasionally exhibits some of his notorious contempt for the American public—for example, when he writes that “any spoken language, however barbarous, is worthy of investigation”—the overall impression of these pieces is that Mencken has developed a real fascination with the independence of the American vernacular from its English roots.⁵²

Indeed, Mencken would later expand his ideas and celebrate the idiosyncrasies of American English in a Smart Set article entitled “The American: His Language,” published in August of 1913. Here, Mencken notes, “Such is American, a language preeminent among the tongues of the earth for its eager hospitality to new words, and no less for its compactness, its naked directness, and its disdain of all academic obfuscations and restraints.”⁵³ Embracing novelty and innovation, rejecting nineteenth-century academicism, the American language is, in Mencken’s characterization, a language built for modernity. Strangely, this article appears in a series (entitled “The American”), in which Mencken has few positive things to say about American character. In other articles in this series, subtitled “His Morals,” “His Ideas of Beauty,” “His Freedom,” and “His New Puritanism,” Mencken savages virtually every element of American life in the early twentieth century. Only in “His Language” does Mencken praise some element of the culture he made a career out of criticizing.

In his articles on American English, Mencken seizes upon the ways in which it quite literally declares independence from the English of England. The issue of linguistic independence, particularly in the vernacular uses of the language, remains central in all of the later incarnations of Mencken’s language studies. “The American: His Language” would become the basis of a short first draft of The American Language, written in 1915 and 1916 and held in typescript at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. In articles produced over the next two years, Mencken would continue to argue for linguistic independence in wartime articles like “Nothing Dead about Language U.S. Boys Take to the Trenches,” published in the New York Evening Mail in September 1917. In contrast to the “English dialect of English,” which is “conservative and unyielding,” “the American dialect . . . is extraordinarily hospitable to change. It bends to every wind. It absorbs every flying particle. It is astoundingly fluent, resilient and porous. . . . In slang, too, American is a much more enterprising language than English—so much so, in fact, that fully a half of the annual crop of new slang in England is imported from America.”54 Mencken’s article is illustrated by two cartoons. The first, depicting an Englishman fleeing “A New Word,” contains the caption “the English resent the use of a new word.” The second, which might illustrate much of Mencken’s evolving thought about the American language, depicts Uncle Sam bound with a gag reading “No Slang.” Its caption reads, “Without Slang America Could Not Talk.”⁵⁵ Of course, given Mencken’s own political distaste for England and oft-discussed Germanophilia, this emphasis on linguistic independence could be read as a means of extricating his own American identity from too close an association with England. At the same time, however, his interest in the American vulgate suggests a set of larger concerns about the manner in which American language provides a way out of a stale, conservative gentility that still dominated American literature and culture in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In its first three editions, The American Language takes this critique further, as Mencken develops an argument for the “superior imaginativeness” of American over English (AL 1:82, AL 2:97, AL 3:100). The early editions of Mencken’s text—more radical in their description of linguistic innovation than the fourth and final edition—consistently echo the calls for modernist experimentation; according to Mencken, Americans have no trouble making their language new and consistently remaking it at a moment’s notice.⁵⁶ As he notes, “The American vulgate is not only constantly making new words, it is also deducing roots from them, and so giving proof, as Prof. Sayce says, that ‘the creative powers of language are even not now extinct’” (AL 1:23, AL 2:31).⁵⁷ That consistent innovation of language is what characterizes the American language and what feeds into, for example, transition’s celebration of American “slanguage” published a decade after Mencken’s first edition of The American Language.

Mencken opposes this American innovation most explicitly to the “English” language. Sections of the book—as well as of Mencken’s earlier articles—use columns to demonstrate the different words used in America and England. But Mencken is not merely interested in making these distinctions; his emphasis is in associating American with change, transformation, and modernity. “English now has the brakes on,” Mencken writes, “but American continues to leap in the dark, and the prodigality of its movement is all the indication that is needed of its intrinsic health, its capacity to meet the ever-changing needs of a restless and emotional people, constantly fluent in racial composition, and disdainful of tradition” (AL 1:28–29, AL 2:37, AL 3:39). The American language, he notes here, differs from English because it is not static but ever changing. Hospitality to various kinds of foreign influence (“constantly fluent in racial composition”) and the wholesale rejection of linguistic traditions characterize American as modern, multiethnic, and multiracial.58 By extension, English, with its “brakes on,” is emblematic of a monoracial linguistic past, of the gentility and aristocracy that Mencken loathed, traditions that troubled modernist writers as well.

Mencken’s oppositions—between a static and homogenous English language and an ever-changing and racially complex American one—not only mirrored the high modernist theory of the 1910s and 1920s; avant-garde experimentalists also cited Mencken as an authority on the powerful transformations in modernist language. As noted in the introduction, avant-garde figures like Matthew Josephson and Eugene Jolas referenced Mencken in their own arguments that the American language might just be the basis of a new, experimental language for “the temper of the age” as well as being “the crucible of the immense racial fusion of indigenous and immigrant America.” For these modernists, Mencken provided more than a model of cultural critique of American Puritanism and hypocrisy; his work on linguistics offered opportunities to consider the experimental possibilities inherent in the American vernacular.

Although modernists saw immense possibility for vernacular language in their own experimental approaches, Mencken’s work charted how slowly the innovative American vulgate had entered the literature of the United States. He notes, “Literature in America, as we have seen, remains aloof from the vulgate. Despite the contrary examples of Mark Twain and Howells, all of the more pretentious American authors try to write chastely and elegantly; the typical literary product of the country is still a refined essay in the Atlantic Monthly manner, perhaps gently jocose but never rough—by Emerson, so to speak, out of Charles Lamb—the sort of thing one might look to be done by a somewhat advanced English curate” (AL 1:305, AL 2:361, AL 3:370). This characterization of most American literature demonstrates Mencken’s own sense of the modernity of the American vulgate. Outside of Twain and Howells, American literature has embodied the American nineteenth century of Emerson, the British nineteenth century of Lamb, the gentility and propriety of “a somewhat advanced English curate,” and the refinement of the Boston-based journal Atlantic Monthly (ironically enough, known for regularly publishing both Howells and Twain).59 The vulgate, largely missing from American literary production, stood ready to challenge these stultifying tendencies in American literature, and other writers and thinkers at this moment had also begun noting the potential power that American vernacular language might have in modernist literary circles.

As Mencken’s first two editions appeared, debates raged in a wide variety of publishing contexts over the trend toward the use of the American language more forcefully in serious American literary productions. In the second edition of The American Language, for example, Mencken cites a lengthy passage from a 1920 article in the journal Poetry by Richard Aldington (AL 2:19, AL 3:19–20). Aldington, Imagist poet and husband of the American Imagist H.D., had earlier pondered the literary differences between English and American writing in an article on H.D. entitled “A Young American Poet” (1915), but this article, “English and American,” articulates a position even closer to that of Mencken.⁶⁰ In the passage from “English and American” cited by Mencken, Aldington reinforces the arguments in The American Language:

Language is made by the people; it is only fixed by writers and orators. When language, especially that of the poetry, is too far removed from that of the people, it becomes conventional and hieratic, like church Latin; or languid and degenerate, like modern official French poetry. When language is conventionally used by writers it becomes burdened with clichés and dead phrases. If American soldiers, newspapers and popular novels are evidence, it is clear that the American people is evolving a new language, full of vigorous and racy expressions.⁶¹

For the English Aldington, though, this new literary language could be as difficult to follow as the most complex modernist poem. In a statement that might just as easily apply to high modernist texts like The Waste Land or Ulysses, Aldington notes, “New [American] novels are bewildering with vigorous but incomprehensible expressions.”62

Aldington’s multiple uses of the adjective “vigorous”—like Twain’s “vigorous new vernacular”—mark American as a language uniquely suited to the demands of twentieth-century modernity and simultaneously opposed to a “conventional” language “burdened with clichés and dead phrases.” Emerging from “newspapers and popular novels” and making their way into poetry and more serious narrative, these “vigorous and racy expressions” are the core of Mencken’s notion of The American Language, and the stuff of vernacular modernism itself. The “vigorous but incomprehensible expressions” mentioned by Aldington are, in effect, the same kinds of expressions that make it into the transition piece “Slanguage,” discussed in the introduction. American slang, in effect, had already been singled out as providing a possible “Revolution of the Word” long before Jolas decided to juxtapose his manifesto with a glossary of contemporary slang terms.

In the first three editions of The American Language, Mencken devotes a crucial chapter to the discussion of “American Slang”; this is one part of the text that grows with each edition and that assumes an even larger role in the 1936 fourth edition. For Mencken slang is rooted in individual creativity, not larger social trends. “Slang originates in an effort, always by ingenious individuals, to make the language more vivid and expressive” (AL 1:309, AL 2:365, AL 3:375). In the three early editions, he links this to the power of newspapers, and he is loath to grant the American public with the power to produce interesting slang. In discussing “the slang of baseball,” for example, he claims that “there is not enough imagination in that depressing army [of baseball fans] to devise such things; more often than not, there is not even enough intelligence to comprehend them” (AL 1:311, AL 2:367, AL 3:377). Though Mencken’s disdain for the boobus Americanus dominates this discussion, his fascination with slang as the best and most experimental example of American vernacular language remains a strong theme througout his study In “The American: His Language,” he notes that the “striving for vividness and forcefulness, when applied to the sentence instead of to a single word, produces the extraordinarily lush and vigorous thing called American slang.”⁶³ Twenty-four years later, Mencken’s argument for the power of slang remained compelling; he noted in the fourth edition of The American Language that slang “originates in the effort of ingenious individuals to make the language more pungent and picturesque—to increase the store of terse and striking words, to widen the boundaries of metaphor, and to provide a vocabulary for new shades of difference in meaning” (AL 4:563).

American slang—or the American “slanguage” as transition might have it—provides a modernist tool for countering the dead weight of realist language. Mencken’s advocacy for the “vigorous” language of American slang anticipates, in a sense, the “Revolution of the Word” manifesto, which—like Mencken’s conception of American slang—challenges “the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, [and] descriptive naturalism.” While equating Mencken’s writings on American slang with the bombastic theoretical statements of Jolas and others might seem, at first, to be a perverse use of these writers, there is some suggestion that Mencken saw his work as a manifesto of its own kind. In the second (1921) and third (1923) editions of The American Language, Mencken included an appendix titled “Specimens of the American Vulgate,” a nod toward his own proclivity for writing burlesques throughout the 1910s. Designed to display the American language in practice, these sections included pieces by humorist Ring Lardner, poet John V. A. Weaver, and Mencken himself. Lardner’s pieces, “Baseball-American” and “Ham-American,” demonstrate different kinds of specialized argot (among baseball players and actors), and Weaver’s poem shows how vernacular language might appear in serious poetry. Mencken’s pieces, on the other hand, are actually “translations” of historical American documents into the slang of the 1920s. The piece that appears in both editions, which would be later reprinted as a “burlesque” in A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949), edited by Mencken himself, is his translation of the American Declaration of Independence.

Early on in the second edition of The American Language, Mencken sets the stage for this “burlesque” by referencing a 1920 Harper’s article by Rupert Hughes (AL 2:22–23, AL 3:23). Hughes’s article, “Our Statish Language,” opens with a flourish: “A new Declaration of Independence is needed”; it proceeds to challenge prevailing notions that “Americanisms are not nice, and are not written by well-bred little writers.” After citing Mencken’s first edition of The American Language, Hughes closes on a note that seems to anticipate Mencken’s attempt to transform the Declaration into the vulgate: “Let us sign a Declaration of Literary Independence and formally begin to write, not British, but Unitedstatesish.”64 Hughes’s argument, like Mencken’s, sets American against British English and calls for, quite literally, a “Revolution of the Word.” Mencken closes his second edition by providing one. By “translating” the Declaration into contemporary American vernacular, Mencken demonstrates the vigorous and imaginative nature of what he calls “the American vulgate” and invokes the Declaration’s call for independence from British rule, aristocratic pretention and privilege, and the past. In essence, Mencken’s Declaration is the vernacular modernist manifesto for the “American Revolution of the Word.”

Mencken’s rationale for such a translation is interesting: “It must be obvious that more than one section of the original is now quite unintelligible to the average American of the sort using the Common Speech” (AL 2:388, AL 3:398). This claim of unintelligibility points toward an almost evangelical use of translation; because no one can understand this liberating document, Mencken implies, he will liberate the document (and its readers) by rendering it in a language with a more nuanced contemporary meaning. His opening operates simultaneously as a burlesque and a declaration of independence for vernacular modernists: “When things get so balled up that the people of a country have to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see that they are on the level, and not trying to put nothing over on nobody” (AL 2:388, AL 3:398–99). Mencken’s translation removes the Enlightenment language of the original document, substituting in its place a series of highly idiomatic expressions. His entire translation, full of ephemeral slang, much of which has long passed out of use, almost needs its own set of annotations for an early twenty-first-century reader. Like so many other bombastic statements in this age of manifestos, Mencken’s declaration rejects a realist language for a set of vernacular metaphors that draw attention to themselves as much if not more than the content they purport to communicate. “When things get all balled up,” as they often do in the language of genteel realism, only a vernacular language, a modernist aesthetics of slang, can liberate them.

In the context of debates surrounding the use of slang and vernacular language in American literary production, Mencken’s declaration is a manifesto, growing out of ten years of research into the ways in which the American language challenges the staleness and sterility of a nineteenthcentury American culture that modeled itself on British gentility. A language seemingly built for modernity, “American . . . shows its character in a constant experimentation, a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid forms. No other tongue of modern times admits foreign words and phrases more readily; none is more careless of precedents; none shows a greater fecundity and originality of fancy” (AL 1:26, AL 2:35, AL 3:37). The American language is also the language of modernist experimentation and aesthetic novelty, “producing new words every day by sheer brilliance of imagination” (AL 1:26, AL 2:35, AL 3:37).

Mencken’s construction of a modernist American vernacular informs the writers discussed throughout The Word on the Streets. Across the editions of The American Language, he emphasizes the importance of figures like Ring Lardner, whose baseball columns led to his own experimental humor; silent film titles, which inform Anita Loos’s work; criminal cant and popular fiction, both important to the development of the hard-boiled style in the pages of Black Mask (a magazine Mencken started with George Jean Nathan); and the incorporation and transformation of “foreign tongues” into the “constantly fluent . . . racial composition” of The American Language, issues that dominate my chapters on Jewish American and African American writing.65 In the interest of charting these relationships, for example, Mencken corresponded with Abraham Cahan, pioneering Jewish American realist writer and editor, over the interchanges between Yiddish and American English. Ultimately, Mencken’s “American vulgate” crystallizes a way of thinking about vernacular American language as inherently experimental, a modernist challenge to the prevailing standards of genteel realism. The vernacular modernist manifesto that appears in the second and third editions of The American Language shares space with other “specimens of the American vulgate,” including contributions by one of Mencken’s favorite writers, Ring Lardner. And it is in Lardner’s largely unacknowledged revision of American humor that the theory of vernacular modernism first becomes practice.