Books: Decline & Fall

DISTURBER OF THE PEACE (336 pp.)—William Manchester—Harper ($3.75).

On a fine May evening in 1912, two testy young U.S. critics strolled along the Champs Elysees in Paris. “Isn’t it magnificent?” asked George Jean Nathan. Replied H. L. Mencken: “You can have it. I want a good American drugstore, where I can get a first-class toothbrush.”

It was not the last time that Mencken spoke well of his native land. Years later he admitted that “I wouldn’t swap an American bathroom for the Acropolis.” But these were passing sentimentalities from the man whose avowed program was “to combat, chiefly by ridicule, American piety, stupidity, tin-pot morality, cheap chauvinism in all their forms.”

Tory & Bohemian. William Manchester’s Disturber of the Peace is as good a record as any of how Mencken went about goading his victims. But the surprising fact is that no really first-rate book has yet been written about the juiciest subject imaginable for a U.S. literary biography. The raw materials for the job are massive and easily available. Among them: Mencken’s 88 scrapbooks of clippings; the Princeton University Library’s microfilm record of more than 10,000 letters written by Mencken; the Congressional Library’s long-playing recordings on which Mencken, under questioning, ranges over his whole life. Young (28) ex-Marine Manchester enjoyed a further advantage: until a stroke laid Mencken low in the fall of 1948, he cooperated generously with his admiring biographer, even got him a job on Mencken’s old paper, the Baltimore Sun, so he could be closer to his man.

From that close-up point of vantage, Biographer Manchester tries manfully to understand the contradictions that few understood when the beer-guzzling bad boy from Baltimore was an editor of the Smart Set and the American Mercury. Mencken wrote like a reckless revolutionary, but he was Tory to the core. His home life was as innocent as the average minister’s, but he flayed the ministers, and the Bohemians claimed him as their own. In the 1920s, a word of praise from Mencken became a priceless treasure. When, as a joke, he suggested various politicians for the presidency, minor booms resulted. When he said some kind words about Henry Ford, they were quoted in the full-page ads that blared the arrival of the model A.

Aviation to Xylophones. By the middle ’30s, Mencken’s influence had begun to fade. Mencken was as much the victim of the depression as the shivering vagrant to whom he once gave his overcoat on Times Square. He refused to take the depression seriously: “What goes up must come down. [That’s] all the economic theory worth knowing.” But a frightened and hungry U.S. public had no stomach for ridicule, and ridicule had always been the popular basis for the Mencken boom. By the late ’30s, many bright young people barely knew who Mencken was. To the old campus hero that was a mortal hurt, but he never changed. Wrote he: “On all known subjects, from aviation to xylophone-playing, I have fixed and invariable ideas. They have not changed since I was four or five years old.”

In spite of his obvious hero worship, Biographer Manchester makes an honest if superficial effort to explain Mencken’s decline as a critic of manners, morals and letters. But he still leaves undone the harder job of explaining just what made Mencken tick. Like every other book on Mencken to date, Disturber of the Peace is at its best and most informative when it quotes from its subject’s own machete-swinging prose.