Save the Mencken House!

by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

Tracing the footsteps of another person becomes, in many ways, a treasure hunt: an effort to recreate, by selection, the texture of a life. When I set out to write Mencken: The American Iconoclast, I moved back to Baltimore to be in the city that Mencken loved, and walk the streets that he walked. My goal was to acheive what biographer Richard Holmes calls “tracking of the physical trail of someone’s path through the past, to bring it alive in the present.”

I think most biographers feel this way. David McCullough speaks of a tactile connection, the feeling that we get from working with documents and from visiting a historic place. There is the tactile connection we get with Mencken when we handle one of his original letters, and can trace his spidery signature, and, in one of them, see the circular print left by his beer mug, and see the blot of foam that has stained the stationery and smeared the ink.

That physical connection we get with Mencken is the same feeling we get when we visit his house. That is why it is such a shame that the Mencken House in Baltimore is closed — bare of the books, the typewriter, the seidels, all the layers of personal history that a biographer just can’t get from letters or microfilm. Why should we care? Because, as David McCullough points out, it is through places that we get the feeling for the personality of the person who lived there. More than anything else, they send us back to the writer’s work with renewed excitement — the same way when we visit Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, or Samuel Johnson’s house in London. Especially when you consider that the words that Mencken wrote that changed the course of American literature, that battled lynching and segregation, were all written from that same house.

Most house museums belonging to writers have one or two objects that belonged to them. But Mencken’s house was special — “as much a part of me as my own two hands,” he wrote. Save for the five years of his marriage, he lived in that same house from 1883 to 1956. All of his family’s possessions were there. Those personal objects give us a glimpse back into another time, with insights into the life and culture of an American city in the late 19th and early 20th Century.

The Mencken House is now empty, its items in storage. The walls have peeling paint and the parquet floors are being eaten by termites. Mencken predicted that one day his house would be “a wreck.” But it does not have to be that way. A group in Baltimore is trying to save the house, to make it the vital museum it once was. They would like to acquire it, restore and preserve it, making it accessible to the public in a way that makes it instructive to the life and times of H. L. Mencken. Combined with programs, the Mencken House could be a magnet that would inspire young people and help rebuild the neighborhood and Baltimore. For more information and to learn how you can help save this historic building, visit www.menckenhouse.org.

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers is the author of Mencken: The American Iconoclast.

Related post: Why is Mencken relevant today?