A Second Mencken Chrestomathy.

THERE'S a curious fact about recipes, which cookery writers conveniently ignore. It is that there are enough recipes already, and enough good ones, to keep any competent cook happy for the rest of his life. There is no need for any more. The recipe writers can simply pack it in and do something else.

The same is true of novels and poetry. After three centuries we now have enough excellent novels to keep the most voracious reader occupied till the end of his days. Every hour we waste reading Margaret Drabble is an hour not reading Jane Austen or P. G. Wodehouse. Most contemporary writers clearly should pack it in. They are not needed.

There are exceptions to this fact; and it is a fact, not an opinion. Journalism, especially humorous journalism, is one of them. Several enterprising writers of this century have done journalism rather than novels not only because it pays better but because they have thought it the genre of the time, the place where their talents would shine best. Certainly they are needed. Not only are essay- and review-writers of the caliber of Florence King and H. L. Mencken very rare but, unlike novelists, journalists do not have to compete with (usually much better) dead rivals, since they write on contemporary topic - among others, Mencken on Prohibition or the war, Miss King on Seventies feminism or contemporary pornographic styles. They do not say anything new, of course. Conservative readers do not want new things said. Old things are better. But they do apply old wisdoms to new topics.

Of these two volumes of collected writings, Mencken's is the less satisfactory. His writing is very uneven. At one extreme are the inventiveness and sustained argument for "barbaric" punishments ("Jack Ketch as Eugenist" and others) with the magnificent proposal for a return to outlawry: "a man who chooses the career of an outlaw is made one officially. From that moment he has no rights whatever. Any citizen may beat him, wound him, and even kill him without challenge." At the other is the essay on "The Fat Man." It's a topic with enormous controversial and humorous potential, which Mencken totally fails to exploit. And Mencken does not read well when he is collected. One begins to see the weakness of that supposedly hard and realistic world view he was so proud of. Beneath the admirable cynicism is a tedious and shallow nineteenth-century rationalism. Look, for instance, on page 480, at the essay that starts "I believe unreservedly only in what may be demonstrated scientifically." Moreover, the more one explores Mencken's wit, the more it turns out to be epigrammatic rather than argumentative. It's a skill at one-liners, not at essays. The best essay in the collection is the shortest, all of 11 words on "Liberalism": "A liberal is one who is willing to believe anything twice."

Miss King is an essayist and a brilliant one. Her collection includes essays, reviews, "anthropological" studies such as "Southern Ladies and Gentlemen," and her novel, When Sisterhood Was in Flower. But whatever the apparent literary form, her skill and joy are in a huge number of quite short, shall we call them, sketches. No one would claim her novel was wonderfully structured as a novel, but what writing is to be found in it! In the very best sense of the word, Miss King is a journalist.

Sisterhood contains, for instance, sharp and hilarious observations on how to write a pornographic novel, or rather how to fill the pages with as few words as possible. First there are an inordinate number of end pages, front and back; then you have every chapter ending with a blank page, the headings of chapters dropped to a few lines from the bottom of the page, and lots of very short chapters to maximize the advantages gained from such ruses. Then

pepper your story with newspaper headlines, ads, movie marquees, and signs so that you can center them and double space around them. Like this:

BEAVER SHOTS

After you get the sign painted, have your character stare at it for a while, unable to believe what he sees because he's doped up. . . . Then have him close one eye and reread it so that you can repeat the sign:

[This is why] porn characters, who no caution in life's larger moments, always read labels with meticulous scrutiny:

K-Y JELLY 

. . . The more they repeat themselves, pause, think, and start over, the more paragraphs you can indent:

She's a natural blonde, he thought. A real natural blonde. Was she ever! "Wow," he breathed . . . There was no mistaking it. No way! "Honey," he said, "you're a real natural blonde."

. . . Then there are the groans, moans, screams, and grunts: . . . "YESSSSSSSS -SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!" You can do a lot with "yes." Handled properly, it takes up a whole line.

And the reviews - of Sylvia Plath, Erica Jong, and many others - are glorious. Here she is starting in on one:

Now that "self-esteem" is the bee in every bonnet and the fork in every tongue, it was only to be expected that Gloria Steinem, the divine afflatus of feminism who has made a career of leading the herd to trendy saltlicks, would take a crack at it.

She took two cracks. Her first draft was read by a friend who told her it was too impersonal. "I think you have a self-esteem problem," said the friend. "You forgot to put yourself in."

Of course she forgot. She's been thinking of everyone but herself for years. Hopping on planes the moment radical groups needed her, soothing fevered caucuses, tucking in fretful task forces, living in an apartment with no furniture because she gives all her money away to worthy causes. Her friends call her a "co-dependent with the world," but we of coarser fiber recognize Dickens's Mrs. Jellaby, who let her own children go hungry in order to contribute to the African Children's Milk Fund.

As Miss King's popularity has grown so have demands that past pieces be made available to new readers. Thus the inevitable collection. It is a jolly good collection, too, in the sense that many of her best pieces are in it. It is a pity, though, that someone has decided it needed the usual collection decorations. Miss King has otherwise been well served by her editor, Calvert Morgan, but his Introduction is a mistake. Indeed any introduction is going to look drab beside these pieces. Even Miss King's own introductions to the individual sections add little and read rather limply. I suspect she could parody both his and her own introductions. But one comment by Mr. Morgan should be denounced immediately. He says, "I don't think you'll be able to lay down The Florence King Reader without finishing it, either."

I understand why these pieces had to be collected as a book, another blasted book. The reader, however, does not have to cooperate and read them all together. He should do the exact opposite of what Mr. Morgan says. For the pieces deserve to be read and savored one at a time, each separated from the next by a bottle of claret, five courses, and a sleep.