Mencken Redivivus

H. L MENCKEN: A PORTRAIT FROM MEMORY (240 pp.)--Charles Angoff--Thomas Yoseloff ($3.95).

During Prohibition, the red-letter days at the American Mercury were the ones on which the bootlegger's man in the Brooks Brothers suit delivered the booze. Editor Mencken "stopped whatever work he was doing, carefully unwrapped each bottle, put it to his cheek, and smacked his lips . . . Mencken's eyes bulged and glistened, his cheeks flushed, and he would gabble and gabble, spitting tobacco juice all the while into the large brass spittoon at the side of his desk.

" 'Angoff, do you mean to tell me that they didn't teach you the fine points of wines and whiskeys at Harvard?' " 'No, I'm afraid they didn't,' I would say, prepared for what was to come, for we went through this ritual numberless times.

" 'Then, Professor Angoff, you have something to learn. By the time you get around to getting your second upper plate of teeth, the way I am now, you will learn that people who don't like to drink can't write . . . Never trust a man who doesn't feel better when he's tanked up . . . But,' he spat in the spittoon, and his face became serious ... 'I have no use for anybody who neglects his work for drink ing or for women. Work comes first. All the time. Drinking, like lovemaking, is for the evening hours and the short hours of the morning. Only bankers, utility moguls, insurance-company presidents, Methodist bishops, Catholic monsignori, managing editors of newspapers, and other such swine drink during the day.' "

Hickest of the Hick. During the day, as Author Charles Angoff makes clear in a book that is really a nonstop conversation piece, Mencken's vice was word-intoxication. Profane, scatological and childishly bigoted, Mencken uttered a good many words that probably belonged in the spit toon, but they lodged vividly in the memory of Russian-born, Harvard-educated Charles Angoff. Critic, Novelist and Edi tor Angoff has a legitimate claim to know Mencken well--from 1925 to 1933 he was Mencken's sole editorial associate on the Mercury. But this will only partly help the reader to know Mencken better. Angoff's strip-poker method of characterization rarely gets under the man's skin; it merely shows he had one. "Say any damn thing you please," Mencken once told Angoff, "only never say I was a Christian." Angoff has kept the promise by making him a kind of village atheist. In the process, he cuts Mencken down to Mencken--and that's not Voltaire.

Beyond sauerkraut and Blutwurst and good German beer, Angoff suggests, Mencken thrived on prejudices. His private league of nations included the American "boobeoisie," the "bloody English," the "stinking frogs," the "dirty wops" and the "Irish monkeys." New Hampshire and Vermont were "the varicose veins of New England," and New York was "a sewer, a cesspool, a garbage can . . . the hickest of all hick towns." Of U.S. Presidents, there was "no viler oaf" than Woodrow Wilson. "You know what I think of Hoover. Turn him upside down, and he looks the same." As for the Roosevelts, Teddy "had the manners of a saloon bouncer and the soul of a stuck pig, and FDR is the synthesis of all the liars, scoundrels, and cheapskates of mankind."

The Co-Ed & the 'Cello. Magazine circles were little better. The New Republic was run by "kept idealists," and the Nation was staffed "by men and women who were suffering the change of life." Mencken's high jinks masked low insight, according to Angoff, and Mencken never fully understood even the writers he championed, e.g., Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis. He thought Henry James "was an idiot, and a Boston idiot to boot, than which there is nothing lower in the world, eh?" F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was "poor stuff." Said Mencken of Hemingway: "The man can't write. Just a bad boy, who's probably afraid of the dark." As for Faulkner, "there is no more sense in him than in the wop boob, Dante . . . the man hasn't the slightest idea of sentence structure or paragraphing." Angoff drops an amusing footnote to the famed "Hatrack" episode in which Mencken got himself arrested in Boston for peddling an issue of the Mercury, banned for its story, by Herbert Asbury, of a southeast Missouri prostitute. Mencken was so afraid of losing the magazine's mailing privilege that he yanked the next issue's lead article, "Sex and the Co-Ed," and substituted "On Learning to Play the 'Cello."

Music could mellow the caustic Mencken strain. He once moved Angoff by saying, "Schubert knew God, he knew that God, too, was afraid, that God, too, trembled and was in doubt and got angry and regretted and yearned in vain, like you and me and all of us." Though he spouted misogynisms, Mencken was deeply in love with his wife, Sara Haardt, who lived only five years after their 1930 marriage. When she was dying he told a friend, "Women are always waiting . . . women are always waiting for--birth, for kisses, for love, for growing-up, for smiles, for death."

Exit Babbitt. Mencken brought no such intuitive wisdom to economics or international affairs. He tried to laugh off the Depression as an invention of "charity racketeers," and he ignored Hitler as passing nonsense. Soon he and the Mercury were on the skids, and from 1933 until his 1948 stroke, he busied himself mainly with reminiscence (Newspaper Days) and scholarship (supplements to The American Language). Author Angoff skirts his lasting impact. Mencken, who detested democracy, ironically democratized U.S. life and art. He made Babbitt-land so culture-conscious that Babbitt disappeared. He lampooned frauds in high places so lustily that no public figure has been sacrosanct since. Partly because of his blasts at the prissy genteel tradition, much of American fiction became as unblinkingly honest as fact. His vitality seems to have been reasserted with his death early this year. Angoff's "portrait from memory," for which the author must have started scratching notes on his first day of work in the Mercury office, follows Mencken's own Minority Report (TIME, May 21). And promised in time for this fall's political "show," as Mencken delighted to call it, is a collection of his Baltimore Sun pieces on political campaigns, A Carnival of Buncombe.

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