"Come In, Gents"

HEATHEN DAYS 1890-1936 -- H. L Mencken--Knopf ($3).

Henry Louis Mencken admits that "the resurrection men" have had him in their "animal house"--his way of saying that he has been in the hospital. Illness has not prevented the Baltimore sage, who believes that beer is very close to the meaning of life, from drawing off a third foaming, savory volume of reminiscences.* As much as he loves beer Mencken loves "competence ... in any art or craft from adultery to zoology." This book is further testimony to his own competence as the nation's comical, warm-spirited, outstanding village atheist. He still stands ready to convulse, while he instructs, those fellow citizens who are willing to loaf a little on the village green.

As a small boy he adored "an uncouth youth" named Hoggie Unglebower, a juvenile gang leader in West Baltimore. Hoggie was no Lothario, "he was actually almost a Trappist in his glandular life," but he was a master at killing rats and murdering cats. Hoggie fell from his pedestal the awful day his glands began to function, and Mencken transferred his loyalty to an instructive Shetland pony called Frank.

Frank taught Mencken how to bite enemies in what Mencken calls the "caboose." Then Frank nearly blew up after trying to eat ten bushels of oats, and young Mencken joined the Y.M.C.A. There he learned to distrust "Christian endeavor in all its forms" and moved hastily on to Baltimore Polytechnic. The Polytechnic taught him 1) that philanthropy was "a purely imaginary quantity, like demi-virginity or one glass of beer," and 2) that the eager curiosity of growing boys was not to be satisfied by anatomy classes in which "all the abdomen south of the umbilicus was represented by a smooth and quite uneventful surface."

There are many other scenes from Mencken's long journalistic career, including a Cuban revolutionary bit which is a thumbnail classic on Latin American politics. Mencken has heard all the great U.S. exhorters, from William Jennings Bryan on, and it is his considered opinion that none was "worthy of being put in the same species, or even in the same genus, as Gerald L. K. Smith ... a boob-bumper worth going miles to see and hear." Mencken heard Smith speak on the same platform with Father Coughlin and win hands down, despite his opponent's "habit of enforcing his points by revolving his backside."

Trips to the Mediterranean served only to reinforce Mencken's native temper. At the Vatican he inserted himself among the pilgrims and impudently kissed the apostolic ring of Pius X. Jerusalem he deplored for its "crude pottery of the thunder-mug species." The Holy Sepulcher he found obviously "bogus ... for unless Joseph of Arimathea was a reincarnation of Samson no one could imagine him rolling a stone large enough to close it." Mencken was full of sympathy for the British soldier who "spoke in favorable terms of the destruction of [Jerusalem] by the Romans in the year 70 A.D. . . . A man of speculative mind, he tried to figure out how long it would take a smart battery of artillery posted on the Mount of Olives to knock the whole bloody settlement to pieces, and his guess was that it could be bloody well done in half an hour. He was, he said, bloody hot for trying it and he hoped that it would be done in some bloody future war."

But it was Prohibition that brought Mencken perhaps his richest experiences and inspired perhaps his most uplifting prose. One day he went with Publisher Alfred Knopf to hear the Bach Choir at Bethlehem, Pa., and "our tonsils became so parched that we could barely join in the final Amen." Rushing frenziedly to a strange speakeasy, they found themselves without a card of introduction. Mencken did not hesitate. Before the eye at the peephole he held his music score. The eye read:

J. S. Bach Mass in B Minor

Concludes Mencken: "The eye flicked for an instant or two, and then the mouth spoke. 'Come in, gents,' it said."

* The first two: Happy Days (TIME, Jan. 29, 1940); Newspaper Days (TIME, Oct. 20, 1941)-

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