Mencken and Sara: a life in letters.

Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters, edited

by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (McGraw-Hill, 551 pp., $22.95)

H. L. MENCKEN wrote love letters? The same H. L. Mencken who proposed a $1-a-day tax on all bachelors because, he claimed, it was worth that much to be free? Eighteen years Mencken's junior, Sara Haardt was a Goucher College graduate and a fledgling writer when the two met in 1923 during one of Mencken's periodic visits to the Baltimore women's college. Thus began a correspondence which survived their marriage in 1930 and continued to her early death (from tuberculosis) in 1935. Marion Elizabeth Rodgers retrieved these letters from the Haardt collection, which Mencken had donated to Goucher in the fall of 1935. Only now are they being published. Would Mencken have approved? Probably not. He was a private man who preferred to keep his "comic mask' (Edmund Wilson's phrase) firmly in place. In the course of these letters the mask does slip. What is revealed, however, is not a hard-faced curmudgeon, but a fuzzy-cheeked fifty-year-old, give or take a few years, who was very much in love for perhaps the first time. In her introduction to this thoroughly annotated correspondence (which includes many more letters from Mencken than from Sara, owing to her greater care in preserving his missives), Marion Rodgers concludes that the two were united in their love of Baltimore, their love-hate attitude toward the South, their penchant for looking on life as a human comedy, their mutual respect, and their "dim view' of marriage. To Mencken, however, marriage was always a possibility --so long as both parties subscribed to his version of a pre-nuptial agreement: "I hereby promise to do my damnedest. And you are hereby notified that I expect you to be polite.' If their letters are any indication, this contract was in force well before their marriage, a marriage made in the only heaven the agnostic Mr. Mencken ever claimed to know.