The Impossible H. L. Mencken
Rodgers, Marion Elizabeth
THE IMPOSSIBLE H. L. MENCKEN: A SELECTION OF HIS BEST NEWSPAPER STORIES Edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers/Doubleday/707 pp. $27.50 Joe Mysak H e died thirty-five years ago, but Henry Mencken...
...This new collection, says editor Rodgers, "attempts to provide one of the most comprehensive editions of Mencken's articles, showing the full range of his talents and interests, which made him so famous during five decades of American history...
...And again: "The stuff I wrote for the Evening Sun included some of my best, and yet it is buried in their files...
...Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, author of the 1987 Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters and an unreconstructed fan, quotes this magazine's patron saint: "I am at my best in articles, written in heat and printed at once...
...Here Mencken comments upon several news items of the day about stingy husbands and how much they give their wives for provisioning: A Duluth man sought a divorce from his wife on the grounds that she fried and consumed a peck of Bermuda onions daily, and so made his house uninhabitable, his bank account a theoretical abstraction and his dream of happiness a mere hallucination...
...The classics are here, of course: "The Sahara of the Bozart," "Imperial Purple," "Valentino," "Bryan...
...Consider his 1918 observations on Americans and their quest for status, later so well catalogued by Tom Wolfe: The character that actually marks off the American is not money-hunger at all...
...27.50 Joe Mysak H e died thirty-five years ago, but Henry Mencken is always with us...
...next year or the year after, two recently opened manuscripts on his life as an editor, author, and newspaperman—more than a million words' worth...
...The world, perhaps, contemplates these men THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 41...
...So much newspaper work concerns frauds long dead and forgotten, and old newspaper controversies of a dark and expired age, as Mencken would have put it, that collections of them seem unthinkable...
...Last year a "Quotable Mencken" and the Diary, this year a fine, fat collection of his previously uncollected newspaper work...
...they must be wooed to a sort of Jerichoan fall...
...They have not been seen, but they are familiar...
...The walls are not to be stormed...
...At least three-quarters of the essays have not been seen since their first appearance in the newspaper where they were praised or damned over sixty years ago...
...an antique from 1908...
...Or take "How Much Should a Woman Eat...
...Attacks on our liberties, and theenthronement of all kinds of frauds—these never go out of style...
...He was known as much for his style as for his "irritating and irresistible" Joe Mysak, The American Spectator's chief saloon correspondent, is the managing editor of the daily Bond Buyet And they all still make very good, very stimulating reading, which is why Mencken is still with us...
...it is what might be called, at the risk of misunderstanding, social aspiration...
...The fruit of all this appetite to get on, this desire to cut a better figure, is not the truculence that might be imagined, but rather timorousness...
...S o said, La Rodgers has put together an impressive collection of almost 200 pieces...
...A lucky few know his Prejudices essays...
...Although Mencken was a career newsman, surprisingly few of his daily stories have been preserved, and most of those in books known chiefly to buffs...
...The desire itself is bold and insatiable, but its satisfaction demands discretion, prudence, a polite and ingratiating habit...
...But the riches of The Impossible H. L. Mencken are as multifarious as the man, and one can just let the book fall open and come upon some treasure...
...The regular reader, if he knows Mencken at all—beyond the Diary uproar, that is—knows him for his aphorisms, the three autobiographical Days books, or The American Language...
...And that is why today Mencken can be read on Prohibition, or the Scopes trial, or censorship, or politics, without lengthy glosses and still with a great deal of pleasure...
...His own work, on the other hand, comprises two main ideas: "I am strongly in favor of liberty and I hate fraud...
...Mencken was a great saver, reworking most of the topics and themes of his newspaper work into books later on...
...and perhaps his own Collected Mencken, the Chrestomathy...
Vol. 24 • December 1991 • No. 12
