Unregenerate Iconoclast

A MENCKEN CHRESTOMATHY (627 pp.) --H. L. Mencken--Knopf ($5).

For nearly half a century many a U.S. citizen has devoutly wished that Henry Louis Mencken would shut up. In all that time, he has been hushed only twice. From 1917 to 1919, the blocky bad man of U.S. letters refused to write under wartime censorship. Then, last November, a severe stroke (cerebral hemorrhage) left the 68-year-old gadfly partially paralyzed and stilled his buzzing. But not entirely. Even as he was brought to a halt, his latest book was in the printer's hands. It will remind old readers and explain to many a new one why the cigar-chomping, beer-guzzling Sage of Baltimore has been the most effective irritant in U.S. writing history.

A Mencken Chrestomathy is Mencken's own selection from his out-of-print writings. He has arranged them to deal broadly, and of course irreverently, with morals, women, statesmen, the South, literature and more than a score of other subjects. Worthier books have been published this year, but few that offer even a sizable fraction of the plain reading pleasure to be found in the chrestomathy (i.e., selection of passages--chrestos, useful; mathein, to learn). Even now, when many of the earlier heresies of the Sage of Baltimore have faded to archaic jeerings, he still has the power to annoy and sometimes to infuriate. With it he also has the talent to make a reader admire the technique of the Mencken flaying process even as his sympathy goes out to the victim.

Mencken, with practiced cynicism, once tried to figure himself out. In a piece called Sabbath Meditation he said: "My essential trouble, I sometimes suspect, is that I am quite devoid of what are called spiritual gifts. That is to say, I am incapable of religious experience, in any true sense ... I dislike any man who is pious, and all such men that I know dislike me." The Chrestomathy is liberally sprinkled with his truculent gibes at all faiths, but none feel his unsparing rod more often than the Methodists and Baptists ("As for the Methodists, the Baptists and other such mudsills of the Lord . . ."). As for his own soul: "I go on believing dismally that when the bells ring and the cannon are fired, and people go rushing about frantic with grief, and my mortal clay is stuffed for the National Museum at Washington, it will be the veritable end of the noble and lovely creature once answering to the name of Henry."

Having waved aside the prospect of immortality, Writer Mencken laid about him with such relish that it finally settled into a kind of smugness. His iconoclasm became a trademark and an act; the Paris-green-covered American Mercury that he edited became an undergraduate bible for the bright boys of the '20s and early '30s. He scorned marriage ("Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn't they'd be married, too"). But he shook the faith of many an admirer when he married at 50 and said: "I have often imagined that I would be as perfect a husband as a woman could find." Otherwise, as his Chrestomathy proves, he has been consistent in his peeves and gripes through several decades. But Mencken seldom descended to personal brawls in print. Like many a man with a terrible pen, he preferred the assault on the group. Says he: "I have never found it difficult to be on good terms, personally, with my enemies. I always try to choose decent ones. When I encounter a mucker, I simply avoid him."

Mencken poured his scorn on U.S. life, its culture and its government. Presidents consorted with "rogues and ignoramuses"; the Senate was "perhaps the windiest and most tedious group of men in Christendom." He decided that "democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage," that a pastor is "one employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay." His targets ranged from the ancient Greeks ("Greek tragedy, that unparalleled bore, is confined almost wholly to actresses who have grown too fat for Ibsen") to chiropractors ("heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover"). Since he was "a skeptic as to all ideas, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed."

They usually did. Although Mencken tore great holes in the fabric of U.S. manners & morals, he almost always let in more air than light. His job, at a time when the job needed doing, was to cudgel Comstockery and hack at hypocrisy, and he did both with a zest that makes his pages effervesce 30 years after their subjects were topical. Mencken, whatever the college boys may have thought a quarter-century ago, was no great thinker; he was a man of stout prejudices, with a gift and vocabulary for iconoclastic expression even richer than Mark Twain's. In the word's true sense he was, like Thoreau, a radical. But he was also a political conservative, to the dismay of the assorted pinks and reds who once thrilled to his lambastings of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, but were forced to turn on him when he struck out at the New Deal, socialism and communism.

Mencken has been a prodigious workman with a fine regard for the craft of writing. Even the "professors" he loved to pummel had to cheer his massive, scholarly and readable American Language as the best thing of its kind. At another extreme, his autobiographical books (Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days) are among the most engaging of any in U.S. writing. During the past decade his writings and utterances have tended toward peevish and irresponsible flailings of men and politics. But he has seldom hit below the belt and has never used the stab in the back. Whatever his justifications, he struck, as Critic Gerald Johnson once said, right between the eyes.

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