Theater critics and H.L. Mencken

Neither do I. But to judge from last week’s passionate BSR exchange between Wendy Rosenfield (who writes freelance theater reviews for the Inquirer) and Christopher Munden, (who edits Phindie, a Philadelphia theater website that generally pays its critics nothing at all) — not to mention dozens more critics and readers who jumped into the conversation — you might think that at some point in the past (one writer suggested 1985), daily newspapers represented the apogee of cultural authority.

Saloons and bordellos

As it happens, I’m currently reading Newspaper Days, H.L. Mencken’s memoir of his early years on the Baltimore Morning Herald at the turn of the 20th century. In those halcyon days — before radio, movies, TV, the Internet, video recorders, Netflix, iTunes, and YouTube — live theater and music constituted the only available entertainment, and general circulation daily newspapers — there were half a dozen in Baltimore, not to mention 13 in Philadelphia and a similar number in New York — offered a consumer’s best source of insight.

Yet if Mencken is a reliable guide, arts critics in those days did not prepare for their careers at liberal arts colleges, nor did they spend their working days scrutinizing the finer points of Mahler, Ibsen, and Shaw. On the contrary, most of them — as well as most editors, reporters, and typesetters, not to mention most actors, singers, musicians, directors, and producers, not to mention most politicians, judges, and policemen — were drunk for most of their waking hours, often to the point of incapacitation for days on end. Indeed, an entire ecosystem existed in Baltimore and similar cities for the sole purpose of concealing and drying out these besotted cultural experts while their wives and daughters frantically searched the city’s saloons and bordellos for their whereabouts. The subtle pleasures of Shakespeare and Beethoven, apparently, were no match for the immediate gratifications of John Barleycorn.

Ah, yes — the good old days.

Reviewer’s advice

Mencken was 19 in 1899 when he left his family’s tobacco business to pursue his dream of becoming a reporter. The Baltimore Morning Herald agreed to take him on as its youngest reporter, although he’d never taken a single college course — but then, few journalists in those days went to college. Within a year, Mencken was assigned to cover city hall. But when the Herald’s regular theater critic left for a more lucrative job (as press agent for a traveling company), Mencken was moved over as the paper’s backup theater critic. The job of covering theater in those days was not full-time, so Mencken was also asked to write editorials. And when he was made Sunday editor in the fall of 1901, he “continued to do the theaters and also to write for the editorial page.”

(If this career path sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Howard Shapiro, who now reviews theater for WHYY’s Newsworks, spent more than 30 years covering everything from education to transportation to travel to restaurants for the Inquirer before that paper, in its wisdom, anointed him its full-time theater critic — its last full-time theater critic, as things turned out.)

The Baltimore Herald’s managing editor, Robert I. Carter, doubled as the paper’s first-string theater critic in his spare time. He took it upon himself to instruct young Mencken in the technique of reviewing:

“He believed, and taught me, that a dull notice, however profound, was not worth printing. ‘The first job of a reviewer,’ he would say, ‘is to write a good story — to produce something that people will enjoy reading. . . .Exact or scientific criticism is not worth trying for, especially on a provincial paper. Don’t hesitate to use the actors roughly; they are mainly idiots. And don’t take a dramatist’s pretensions too seriously; he is usually only a showman.’”

Critics as playwrights

In those days, Mencken recounts, the older drama critics wore “opera coats and plug hats, and looked a good deal like melodrama villains. They were mainly ignoramuses, thought some of them could write.” The dean of the corps, William Winter of the New York Tribune, “would sometimes take three of the wide columns that his paper then affected to review a Shakespearean performance. Four-fifths of his critique, of course, was written in advance, and consisted of a pedantic discourse on the play. He was a violent opponent of all novelty in the theater, and spent his last years denouncing Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Shaw. He died in 1917, aged 81. If he had lived into the Eugene O’Neill era he’d have suffered so powerfully that his death would have been a kind of capital punishment.”

Most critics fancied themselves better writers than the playwrights they covered, and many tried to write plays themselves, with scant success. In 1903, Mencken relates, he and two New York critics organized a national association called the Society of Dramatic Critics Who Have Never Written Plays, which sounds like a possible precursor of today’s even higher-minded American Theatre Critics Association.

Freelance envy

Granted, Mencken was an incurable cynic, inclined to exaggerate the miseries of the world around him. And granted, the professional quality of daily newspaper journalism did improve vastly through much of the 20th century, thanks in part to Mencken himself. After the Herald folded in 1906, he joined the higher-toned Baltimore Sun, where for 18 years his celebrated weekly column critiqued works of literature while humorously questioning popular political, social, and cultural views. But Mencken knew better than to invest all his intellectual energies in a daily newspaper: Concurrently with his Sun column, he edited The Smart Set, a literary magazine, and also started his own monthly magazine, The American Mercury.

Mencken’s weekly column at the Sun, incidentally, was titled “The Free Lance.” Mencken seems to have envied those writers who could practice their craft on their own, safely removed from the madhouse pressures of a daily newspaper that drove so many of his colleagues to drink. Only now that daily newspapers are retreating in the face of the Internet do arts writers miss the job security, support network, and fringe benefits of a large organization. The grass is always greener. . . .