Books: Mencken at 61

NEWSPAPER DAYS—H. L Mencken—Knopf ($3).

Like its immediate predecessor, Happy Days (about his boisterous Baltimore childhood), this is a book of reminiscences —a rollicking account of Henry Mencken’s start and rapid rise in journalism from 1899 to 1906. Interspersed are hilarious portraits of tavernkeepers, politicians, cops and other period fauna.

Mencken was city editor of the Baltimore Morning Herald at 23, managing editor of the Evening Herald at 25. His greatest feat was to write, after close study of maps and ship names, an imaginary account of the Russo-Japanese naval battle at Tsushimi, which coincided so closely with the actual news trickling in two weeks later that he scored a fortnight’s beat on the world.

His biggest story was the Baltimore fire in 1904, which lasted ten days and gutted the heart of the city. During that “electric week” Mencken worked one stretch of 64½ hours while the Herald, its plant burned down, was printed in three different cities. When it was over Mencken felt older than he does now.

At 61, the author of Prejudices, Notes on Democracy, In Defense of Women, The American Language, etc., is aware that he has entered what he calls his “autumnal-years.” He is not the riproaring Mencken of the 1920s, when his name was on the lips of every undergraduate literatus, when newspapermen were supposed to carry copies of the Mercury in their hip pockets along with their liquor flasks, and when he himself was scorching Fundamentalists at the Scopes trial, sitting up all night with characters like Rudolph Valentino, and lalloping around Manhattan with Ernest Boyd and Jim Huneker.

But Mencken is still a newspaperman. He stopped writing regularly for the Baltimore Sunpapers early this year, but he still covers an occasional story as a reporter. He is also a director of the Sunpapers, and is now conducting the management’s negotiations with the Newspaper Guild. Most afternoons Mencken drops in at the Sun office, chats with cronies—President Paul Patterson, Editor-in-Chief John Owens, and a character called “The Bentztown Bard,” who gets out a column of Biblical quotations, homely recipes and small-town chitchat.

Next January he plans to publish a monumental dictionary of quotations running to a million words. He is also working on more autobiography, including a history of his own ideas. Actually they have not changed very much; but the things about which he had ideas have changed. The happily and giddily clowning U.S. of the 1920s was Mencken’s raw meat. He could not believe in the Depression, pointing derisively to jampacked cinema houses and highways full of colliding cars, until —so one story goes—friends showed him a bread line; then he was visibly moved. What would the Mencken who made such scathing fun of “Dr. Coolidge” and “Dr. Hoover” have thought of the Mencken of 1936, who traipsed along in a Landon parade? “Dr. Roosevelt” had simply replaced Drs. Coolidge and Hoover, and Mencken was agin him.