This article in the Smart Set mentions that for the past ten years, the H.L. Mencken House in Baltimore has been closed to tourists, due to lack of interest. It’s a shame, but I have had the fortunate experience of visiting the Mencken House myself.
In 1997, I was a junior in college, and I was in Washington, D.C., for a seminar. I went in a day early to visit the Mencken stuff in Baltimore, and when I arrived at Hollins Street, I was about an hour early for the museum to open. So I sat in the park: Union Square, it’s called, and it today looks almost exactly as it did in Mencken’s day, and just as he describes it in his memoir Happy Days. Even the cast-iron Greek temple housing the water fountain is still there. And just as Mencken describes the “Arabs” (actually black men) of 1880s Baltimore, who would sell oysters from the backs of horse drawn carts, so they are there today, and they still use horse drawn carts, and they’re still, for some unknown reason, called “Arabs” (pronounced “Ay-rabbs”).
Anyway, as I waited in the park, a gentleman came up and asked if I was there to see the Mencken House. I said yes, and he explained that it had just been closed. “I came all the way from California,” I explained. But the man lived in the neighborhood and knew the caretaker of the house. He offered to give the guy a call for me and see if he could arrange to have me take a look inside later that week. We went in, made a phone call, and I made an appointment to come back to Baltimore on Thursday and have a look.
In the meantime, the kindly neighbor’s wife decided to show me around town. We drove up and down the neighborhood looking at the old row houses, and then she dropped me off at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, which houses the Mencken Collection, including his personal library. I thanked her and said good bye and went up to see the Mencken room.
Alas, it was closed. The fellow at the information desk explained that it only opens on Mencken’s birthday, in September. But as I stood there looking disappointed—utterly defeated in my Mencken quest—three other people spontaneously came up and asked to see the Mencken room. Flustered by what must have been the biggest demand for Mencken in recent memory, the guard made a couple calls, and got permission to let us in.
One wall of the Mencken room is filled with his personal library. Since Mencken was the nation’s leading book reviewer in the 1920s and 1930s, this library contains priceless signed first editions of works by Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Conrad, and other legends. These books alone must be worth several million dollars, considering how many there are. On the other side are Mencken’s scrapbooks, filled with his own writings. He put these together after his 1948 stroke left him permanently unable to write. Whole shelves are full of books that just say “Editorials, 1928,” and “Editorials, 1929.” Mencken had a colossal output.
At the end of the room is the man’s personal typewriter, and above that, his portrait in red suspenders (given to him by Rudolph Valentino!)
Thrilled by my brush with greatness, I went on with my week and came back up for my surreptitious visit to the Mencken House. It was delightful. Beethoven’s death mask. The sign warning prohibition agents about his deadly booby-trap.... It was all as it should have been. What a shame that the house remains closed a decade later!
The best part was yet to come, however. In talking to the friendly neighbor’s wife, it turned out that her sister was married to an English professor in Minnesota who by coincidence is a big fan of Mencken. In fact, he’s such a fan that he does Chautauqua-style one-man shows dressed up as Mencken! He was, of course, delighted to learn a few years earlier that his sister-in-law had moved into HLM’s old neighborhood.
Well, I went back to school at the end of the summer, and was about my business when one day my English professor called me in my dorm room. “Tim,” he said, “I know you’re a big H.L. Mencken fan. Well, I thought you’d like to know that we’re having this guy come to campus who does this show as H.L. Mencken—dresses up like him and everything....” Same fellow. He was rather astonished when I came up after his show, shook his hand, and said, “I know your sister-in-law!”
Here is the website for Friends of the Mencken House.
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