He steered his own course, regardless of what the morons who supported him believed

NOVEMBER 29, 1939.

Reading what is printed about myself, I am made to realize constantly how little a man makes himself understood by his writings. People are always assuming that I am moved by motives that are completely foreign to me. In the first days of the American Mercury, for example, it was generally assumed that I had some aspiration to lead the so-called opinion of college students. Nothing could have been further from my thoughts. I have, in fact, almost no interest in the ideas of college students. They seem to me to be simply immature men. They are always following fresh messiahs. That I served for a short while as one of those messiahs was not only surprising to me, but extremely offensive. I received hundreds of invitations to address college audiences, but refused all of them until it came to be generally understood that the boys were following other leaders; then I accepted a few.
It has also been assumed on frequent occasions that I have some deep-lying reformatory purpose in me. That is completely nonsensical. It always distresses me to hear of a man changing his opinions, so I never seek conversions. My belief is that every really rational man preserves his major opinions unchanged from his youth onward. When he vacillates it is simply a sign that he is stupid. My one purpose in writing I have explained over and over again: it is simply to provide a kind of katharsis for my own thoughts. They worry me until they are set forth in words. This may be a kind of insanity, but at all events it is free of moral purpose. I am never much interested in the effects of what I write. It may seem incredible in an old book reviewer, but it is a fact that I seldom read with any attention the reviews of my own books. Two times out of three I know something about the reviewer, and in very few cases have I any respect for his judgments. Thus his praise, if he praises me, is subtly embarrassing, and his denunciation, if he denounces, leaves me unmoved. I can’t recall any review that ever influenced me in the slightest. I live in a sort of vacuum, and I suspect that most other writers do, too. It is hard to imagine one of the great ones paying any serious attention to contemporary opinion. Certainly there is no sign that Shakespeare did. He may have heeded now and then the practical needs of the London stage of his day, but in the realm of ideas he steered his own course, regardless of what the morons who supported him believed or thought they believed.

uit: The diary of H.L. Mencken - H.L. Mencken


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