About That Call From H.L. Mencken

Maybe the trace of a rural upbringing’s slight twang in his speech patterns had detracted from this messenger’s rarefied communication, almost whispered.

An almost holy message; that might have accounted for the softened delivery, the half-embarrassed tone. But not this embodied three-dimensional live being’s message. No.
I mean the one entrusted to the graduate assistant who’d just given it to me.

“You write more like H.L. Mencken than a…lawyer…” he allowed to pass the pursed lips of a face which seemed as surprised as mine must have to him. His hand seemed to very slightly tremble as it delivered the now graded paper I’d submitted for the bulk of my credit in the course known as ‘ConLaw 1’, the numeral signifying first-year law school sequencing out of a total of three. That Menckenesque paper’s title had employed the word ‘cornucopial’ in reference to impeachment as the ultimate check on executive power’s abuse.

It was 1968 and Nixon had begun a paranoid political Presidency which would lead both to his downfall and my ironic service in his Administration as a government attorney/advisor.

Ever since boyhood I have dreaded not knowing the meaning of words, any word; insecure to the point of obsession, I soon acquired the habit of instantly hunting down meaning. That boy would grow to understand that meaning was far more elusive than the nearest dictionary. (Of course, even limited to lexicography, meaning liked to hide in its own childish way, proper spelling—the bane of every young student—being the key that unlocked that meaning; I now see this as a metaphor for the adult version of the search, where nothing is exactly as it sounds, or seems).

I remember reading the headline in ‘The Washington Post’: “HIGH COURT AGAINST NIXON 9-0”

And, it was then, it seemed that Mencken’s message, the one he’d seemed to have whispered to me through that confused young graduate assistant, began its recurrence and this time without the distraction of someone else’s lesser voice: “I believe that all government is evil and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.” I didn’t exactly hear ‘cornucopial’ or any such word, but I thought it was there, hidden like those meanings I’d searched for as a boy and then a man; abundant, yes, government’s power, increasingly unchecked especially as the governed grew in number, further and further away from the source of that power, its control.

I thought I ‘Felt’ more and more uneasy about this plenteousness, this presiding over masses of people, people also searching for meaning so busily that they could be more and more easily fleeced. The image of sheep only made these thoughts more perilous and concerned with those fleeced people blindly trusting from so corruptible a vessel of popular plenty’s containment.

“Psst, hey, kiddo……….” meets my ear as I sit dining at nearby Baltimore’s ‘Marconi’s’ restaurant, the Baltimore Sage’s old haunt whilst courting his beloved Sara. I’d sought it out for that sentimental reason, despite the 30-mile drive from Washington.

“No healthy man in his secret heart is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.”

Then and there, before my table, a dessert cart from which I averted my eyes, a puerile smile confirming its already shaking house’s disappointing message to the waiter that my continued relative health would govern the body whose mind craved a loftier destiny than some rush of soon indigested sugar-coated gratification might offer. My small oral sign of discipline was rewarded aurally by the Sage:

I believe it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous, and the latter safe.

I decided to resign the next week and hoped that whatever dangers dwelt in my consequent freedom had something–anything–to do with my love of language, and meaning.

Ahead lay the until then healthier corpus whose mind’s horizontal meanderings variously flew through and beyond, to and fro-ing beyond hospital walls. The prostatectomy I there underwent wasn’t the only phenomenon worthy of the dread appellation ‘radical’; old doc Mencken had prescribed my rehabilitation:

To the man of an ear for verbal delicacies–the man who searches painfully for the perfect word and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said–there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of a happy accident.

Two years later I found myself invited to The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, ‘Guest Artist’ writ upon a laniard’s laminated pass, festooning a neck I’d stuck out some time ago in writing of cornucopial presidencies, a neck whose crown relished that not-so-sudden yet happiest of accidents which had decidedly changed its owner’s life.

I’d been meaning to visit H.L.’s gravesite, in Baltimore; instead, he met me on the road, at the crossroads of Discovery & Accident.

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