A defense against H.L. Mencken
Richard Butler saw John Gould Fletcher hours before Fletcher drowned himself in a pond near Johnswood, the west Little Rock property he shared with Charlie May Simon. It was May 10, 1950, so Butler would have been 12. The boy Richard was riding in a car with his father, who was developing the River Ridge neighborhood.
The house at Johnswood still stands; it’s just above the north- bound on-ramp to the I-430 bridge, across Cantrell Road from Second Presbyterian Church.
Fletcher was born in Little Rock in 1886 and grew up in a Greek Revival mansion that Albert Pike built before the Civil War. His father, a cotton broker and honorable (in these latitudes, sacrificial) politician, wanted him to go to Harvard and become a lawyer, so John Gould was sent to Phillips Andover in 1902 at age 17. In his autobiography he says that he spent the summer before he was sent off “in intensive cramming under a woman teacher who still lives in Little Rock.”
Fletcher’s autobiography was published in 1937, long after the death of Myra McAlmont Warner and her daughter Julia McAlmont Warner, founder and teacher, respectively, of the Arkansas Female College, housed in the Pike mansion before the Fletcher family moved in. Because Myra Warner was known to have given intensive preparatory instruction (cramming, as Fletcher says) to young men after the dissolution of Arkansas Female College, I am inclined to think that she readied him for prep school.
Whoever the “woman teacher” was, Fletcher credits her with noticing that his real interests were in the humanities and that he might make a good writer. And it’s wonderful, though not surprising, that he remained loyal to her. Boarding school might sound fancy-pants, but nothing breeds a loyal Arkansawyer like being Sent Off.
John Gould Fletcher was as highbrow as it gets. And beyond the naming of a few branch libraries, we have turned our backs on him. Instead we celebrate (endlessly) Johnny Cash, Levon Helm, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But we appreciate those three and 100 others in the “Authentic Arkansas” vein thanks to the modernism turned anti-modernism of John Gould Fletcher.
H.L. Mencken was five years older than John Gould Fletcher. He was born in Baltimore and, like Fletcher on his mother’s side, was of German ancestry. I bought three volumes of his study “The American Language” at Dickson Street Bookshop in 2001, and think the best thing was his study of American names: “Rise up Daisy Bell and Proclaim the Glory of Emmanuel.” Her last name, I recall, was Jones.
David Pryor has a story of a glorious name like that, from someone seeking benefits as a veteran. I heard it from my parents when I was a child, then heard it again in school at Fayetteville. My childhood version goes something like “Jesus Christ Riding on a Silver White Horse through the Streets of Jerusalem”… Smith. Or Jones.
The wonderful Grace Netherland Heiskell Terry remembers in her oral history with the Pryor Center, a teacher at the Peabody School (public) in Little Rock looking at her, Bible in hand, knowing that her father, a newspaperman, had died, and saying, “All newspapermen are drunken bums.”
Grace understands this, with characteristic grace, as a manifestation of her teacher’s having been poor, and thinking of her as rich. He directed his meanness at her during the Great Depression, when many of her classmates were hungry.
Did Grace’s teacher know of the unkindness to Arkansas of the famous newspaperman H.L. Mencken?
In his essay “Famine,” published in the Baltimore Evening Sun on Jan. 19, 1931, Mencken wrote: “Dr. Hoover’s announcement that ‘within the last 10 days’ the food shortage within the Bible country has suddenly grown acute—this announcement simply means that the hookworm States have given up trying to feed their own hungry.”
After some remarks about the dismal state of “American peasants,” Mencken remarks, “[the] situation in Arkansas is a shade worse than elsewhere because Arkansas is perhaps the most shiftless and backward State in the whole galaxy.”
Our good soil is overworked, he says, and as for the people who prey upon the “peasants” (sharecroppers Black and white), “[two] gangs of grafters prey upon them, the one made up of professional politicians of a particularly vicious and unconscionable type, and the other composed of cross-roads ecclesiastics even worse. No state offers better pickings for evangelists.”
“It has a full outfit of anti-evolution laws,” adds Mencken, which reminds me to mention that Frank White was the source of the attack on Ellen Gilchrist that I quoted last week; the person merely distancing himself from his friend was, naturally, an occupant of the Governor’s Mansion in 1985—and had just hosted her 50th birthday party there.
John Gould Fletcher read Mencken on Arkansas, and he was not having it. His rebuttal to Mencken’s attack on our state is called “The Sin of City-Mindedness.” It’s in the Fletcher-Terry family papers at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, and I don’t think it has been published.
Prepare for the primal scream of the Arkansas highbrow:
“[Oswald] Spengler, whose classic work is a mine of information and theory on the over-development of city as opposed to country life… has ascribed the abstract quality of the modern great city and of its intellectual climate, to the rise of the higher mathematics in the seventeenth century.”
I have whined about the alienation and despair that come from wandering around the skyscraper district of Little Rock, but listen to this:
“Spengler may or may not be right about this, but he is undoubtedly right in assuming that when this tendency towards abstraction (art for art’s sake, science for the sake of science, social-service religion, industry taken as a symbol of progress) goes far enough, then there is necessarily always a reaction in the soul of man towards sheer primitivism. From the middle of the 19th century onwards, the tendency towards primitivism in all the arts has been so marked that the premature and rather theoretic primitivism of Rousseau is a pallid thing by comparison.”
What Fletcher goes on to propose is that real art, and tolerable civilization, require contact with the soil. I know it sounds romantic, backward-looking, but do you know anyone who’s happy who’s not a gardener, or failing that, an owner of farmland? Or, in some other way, grounded in our soil?
John Gould Fletcher’s sad end aside, I say that the happiest of us are those who were sent off from Arkansas at a young age, and who insisted upon coming back. To stay.