I was the features editor of the Goucher College newspaper. I decided I would do an article on Sara Haardt. It was Mencken`s centennial, and I had seen a display in our college library on Sara. She was a graduate of Goucher College. I noticed in that display that she was also a Phi Beta Kappa graduate, she was editor of the literary magazine, of the college newspaper, of the yearbook. She was also a writer and she went on to marry Mencken.
I thought to myself, ”Everyone`s paying attention to Mencken on this centennial, and no one is paying attention to Sara Haardt.”
I didn`t get around to writing an article about her until the spring of 1981. I was at the Goucher College library and I was looking at scrapbooks of Sara Haardt`s–scrapbooks of her class notes, of her short stories, all her personal things.
I went into the vault of the rare book room. I was putting away one of Sara`s scrapbooks on the shelf when I tripped over a box. I inspected it further and discovered that I had literally stumbled over the correspondence between H.L. Mencken and Sara Haardt, which had been sealed for 45 years. He had bequeathed the letters to Goucher College with the stipulation that they not be opened until 1981. I think he felt they might hurt people`s feelings if they read some of the things he said about them in his private correspondence. It was just a fluke, really. It was luck. I had discovered them in April, and they had been opened only in January. Before that, they were in the very private vault. In fact, many of the biographers of Mencken didn`t know about them. Many of them thought that they had been burned.
Later, after I`d written the article for the college paper, the president sent a copy to Sara`s family in Alabama. They wrote me a letter.
When I got it, I thought I would write a biography about Sara Haardt, because few people know that Mencken ever married, and fewer still know anything about Sara and her writing.
I put it off, of course. After a year went by, I was still at National Public Radio. I received a fellowship to obtain a master`s degree at Emory University in Atlanta. So I went there and I did my master`s thesis on the literary relationship between Mencken and Sara and how he, in fact, encouraged other Southern writers.
After that, I was at an evening class called ”How To Get Published.”
They had the New York agents there. I had typed up my book proposal and I submitted it to the one I liked best. He took it up to New York, and several publishing houses were interested, among them McGraw-Hill, which eventually published the book.
I wasn`t surprised. I don`t want to sound conceited. I was pleased and I was, of course, secretly hoping that I would get a good response. Mencken has been known for being such a cynical curmudgeon, and no one has known that he had this soft, vulnerable side. So I wasn`t surprised, but I was terribly pleased.
This is such an appealing story. It`s a love story between two famous figures. It`s about a Southern woman–very delicate, sickly, who dies of tuberculosis–and the man who was her mentor, a man 18 years older, who didn`t believe in marriage but who capitulates and falls in love with her.
Also, Sara was very modern for her time. She was a professional woman, a mixture of old-fashioned and new. The 1920s was a time that was very much like our own. Mencken was as confused about marriage as many men are today, as was Sara. She couldn`t decide between a career and marriage, which is still a quandary for me and many other women in their 20s.
Yet she was very Victorian in her way. So was Mencken. In spite of his cynicism and his very modern outlook on life, he was very old-fashioned, and I think he appreciated a woman who had that mystique and those old-fashioned values.
Sara`s story is, in a sense, kind of like mine. She was from the South, and yet she moved to the North. She always felt the pull of the Southern heritage that she came out of and also the Northern progess that she liked very much.
It`s sort of like my own life. I grew up in South America, and much of my family is in Chile. My mother`s from Chile, I was born in Chile, and my father`s from New York. I always feel a conflict between the old-fashioned roles that women play in South America, yet here I am in the United States.
I think one has to achieve that balance. I don`t think Sara was uncomfortable. I think what she had the most trouble with was telling her Southern friends back home what she was doing. They must have wondered what she was doing in the North, why she was killing herself living in a small apartment and writing short stories.
She even wrote short stories for some of the women`s magazines about how her Southern friends would come and visit her, and they already had three children and a huge house and a doting husband. Often she must have stopped herself and wondered whether she oughtn`t to give it up and go home and get married and live a very tranquil and fulfilling life in the South.
There were many things about the South she loved. She loved the landscape and she loved the people. But she also loved Baltimore and the North and the excitement of the intellectual community. And Mencken was in Baltimore.
On the superficial level, Mencken was very much the gentleman. He was very polite. He was one of the most courtly and well-mannered of men. I think that she found that very liberating and very appealing. Also, she was that way herself. People who knew her said she used to say these terribly brilliant and witty things. But she had that soft Southern accent and voice, so it always came out a little softer and very charming. So she wasn`t a wimp, she wasn`t afraid of saying these things out loud.
I think the letters gave me a new idea of what marriage could be. Mencken used to like to say, ”We don`t fight with any other persons, so why should we fight with each other?” I think that what they had for each other is mutual respect. He was very thoughtful of her. He would bring her little gifts, to fill the house with what he called ”her merry and easy laughter.” She was also very thoughtful of him.
Also, he was very supportive of her. I think it`s very hard for men to be totally supportive of their wives. Let`s say she has to finish a particular story or a paragraph and she doesn`t want to get up because she feels inspired. If you have someone who understands that your creative juices are flowing on a particular evening, that`s very nice.
I don`t think there was any downside. She said these were the happiest years for her. She got to know that literary circle of the 1920s and Mencken`s friends from Baltimore, a very interesting crowd. I think Mencken was very influential in helping her stories get noticed. I think Sara let herself be very influenced by Mencken in her novel, ”The Making of a Lady,” and in her stories. On the other hand, it was thanks to him that she had some of her most polished pieces published.
Again, she benefited a lot from him but also he from her. He saw the South differently because of her. He began to see how Southerners thought and felt. He began to take a kinder look at the South under Sara`s influence. And after he married her, he realized that marriage wasn`t so bad after all.
When Mencken met Sara, I think he thought he was too old to get married. And two, he had been very much in love with someone else. When that woman, Marion Bloom, suddenly decided that he was taking too long to propose and went off and married another man, he was terribly hurt. Here was a man who has been hurt once and doesn`t want to get hurt again.
Also, Sara had so many illnesses. In 1928 she was in a hospital, and they discovered that her left kidney was tubercular. Mencken was outside her hospital room, and the doctors came out and told him that she had only three years to live. At that moment, he realized that he was going to lose her forever. Here was a woman who was his companion and confidante, and he was on the verge of losing her.
That realization spurred him to action, and he asked her to marry him. Then she lived five years, which he called ”two more years of happiness than I had any right to expect.”
You know, after writing this and interviewing so many people who knew the Menckens, both Sara and Henry, I have felt such a longing, because I wish I had been able to meet them. I`m vain enough to think that maybe he would have liked me. He had many female friends, and I`d like to think that maybe I would have been one of them.
It`s weird–I don`t want to sound like Shirley MacLaine or anything–but sometimes I feel almost as if I`m being led by Mencken. When I first started on this project, I was 23. I was looking at letters Mencken had written to his former girlfriend, Marion Bloom, Marion spelled the same way as my name. I was in the Mencken Room at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. It`s very quiet and it`s lined with books and some of Mencken`s personal letters and materials. I was looking through some of his letters to Marion when I came across this one that said: ”Dear Marion: At age 23, you talk about giving up. But life is more enjoyable after you`ve reached your 30s and have accomplished something. You`re not going to be satisfied getting married and living a cow- like existence.” So it gave me a jolt. I had been thinking to myself about all the things that he mentioned in his letter. I had thought about giving up a career and getting married. So I really felt at that instant that I was being spoken to.
