My Life as Author and Editor.

The passage of time continues to play havoc with the reputation of H.L. Mencken. The writer who in the 1920s was so extravagantly admired by advanced opinion for his bold and hilarious Prejudices--as he called six volumes of his popular essays--is once again being consigned to the realm of fallen idols. Prejudices of the kind that Mencken made an important part of his comedy routines in the Twenties are no longer smiled upon in a society governed by solemnly enforced liberal pieties, and the even more objectionable prejudices that he voiced in private, which have lately been coming to light, have quickly become almost the only thing a younger generation knows about the man who was once a folk hero of the American intelhgentsia.

It may therefore be worth recalling that the first time Mencken fell from grace, in the 1930s, it was largely his obtuseness about what was happening in Hitler's Germany that caused his reputation to suffer a precipitous decline. Had he confined himself to expressing his distaste for the juggernaut of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and the Stalinist culture of the Depression era, he would have been bitterly attacked by the Left, to be sure, but that in itself would not have been enough to bring about his downfall.

What ruined Mencken's standing as a public sage--the figure who, a decade earlier, had been described by Walter Lippmann as "the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people"was his defense of Germany at a moment when the Nazis loomed as a lethal threat to the very civilization that Mencken himself professed to represent. It was never again possible to think of Mencken as a man who could speak with authority on public affairs.

His extinction was far from complete, however. From the ashes of his renown as a critic and commentator there emerged a new reputation of a very different sort. Responding to age and circumstance--he turned sixty in 1940, and was soon obliged to resign his position on the Baltimore Sun papers because of his opposition to the war with Germany--Mencken devoted his talents to a vein of cheerful recollection that was new for him. "Bits and pieces of reminiscence that he had originally published in Harold Ross's New Yorker had been put into a book called Happy Days in 1940 and had been a great success," writes Jonathan Yardley in his introduction to My Life as Author and Editor; "readers who remembered Mencken only vaguely as a disagreeable controversialist, or had forgotten him altogether, were surprised and delighted by these sunny, uproarious tales of life in old Baltimore."

Happy Days was quickly followed by Newspaper Days in 1941 and Heathen Days in 1943. Mencken was once again a popular writer--but this time not as a scourge of American life but as its benign comic laureate. The title Happy Days said it all. He captured a new generation of readers with his portraits and vignettes of an America far more picturesque and painless than the one they knew during the war, or indeed the one he had so successfully pilloried in the Twenties, and no one ever taxed him for changing his tune. Before the war was over, Mencken had accomplished one of the most remarkable comebacks in American literature.

It is unlikely that the publication of My Life as Author and Editor will stir any comparable revival of his literary fortunes. Mencken worked on these reminiscences intermittently between 1942 and 1948, when he was disabled by the stroke that ended his literary career, but they do not constitute a proper sequel to the Days books. He could not sustain the same high-spirited momentum in composing them.

The book was never finished, of course, and Mr. Yardley has had to cut a good deal of what, from his description, sounds like a shapeless and unwieldy manuscript. But its patchwork form is not the main problem with My Life as Author and Editor. The real failure of the book lies deeper. Mencken's gifts were those of a humorist and, within a very small compass, a critic, and when these gifts deserted him, as they largely had when he came to write these literary memoirs, what remained was mostly shallow bluster only occasionally relieved by observations already familiar to us from other writings.

Had the book been published fifty years ago, its principal interest would have been in Mencken's account of his relations with Dreiser, the most important of the American novelists whose work he took up as a cause. But this is a subject now more amply illuminated by the publication of the Mencken-Dreiser correspondence and several biographies of Dreiser. The little that Mencken adds to the story in this book is scarcely worth having, and it is in any case vitiated by the preening sarcasm and unremitting condescension that Dreiser's wayward personality and uneven talents often elicited from Mencken. You have to go back and read the essay on Dreiser in A Book of Prefaces (1917) to understand what it was in this writer that Mencken admired when he first read him. The same goes for Mencken's accounts of Joseph Conrad and the American critic James Huneker.

The truth is that most of what Mencken had to say about the literary life of his time is no longer very interesting. He knew very few of its major writers, and his opinions of their work, if he chanced to notice it at all, are often indistinguishable from the kind of philistine blather that on other subjects he deplored. It may amuse some readers to find Thomas Mann referred to in this book as "a jackass" and Ulysses described as "mainly puerile" "I have never been able to get over a suspicion that Joyce concocted it as a kind of vengeful hoax"--but it sounds pretty stupid to me. The remark about Thomas Mann, to be sure, had to do with politics, but there is no evidence here that Mencken ever acquainted himself with Mann's novels which is amazing when you think of the fuss Mencken made of the superiority of German culture.

Then, too, his insurmountable Anglophobia seems to have closed the door on British fiction after Conrad (who was, of course, Polish), and about the great poetry of the period Mencken was simply hopeless. Even about The Great Gatsby, which he liked and praised, Mencken could nonetheless write that "I certainly don't think much of The Great Gatsby as a story. It is in part too well-made [a charge he could never bring against Dreiser!] and in part incredible." Hemingway he disliked, Faulkner seems to have escaped him, and Henry James he dismissed in 1920 as "a sort of super-Howells, with a long row of laborious but essentially hollow books behind him." He was anything but a critic for all seasons.

Mencken's literary taste was often hostage to a single overriding interest-his hatred of the Puritan tradition in American life. It was his determined campaign to extirpate the influence of that tradition from American life and letters that won Mencken the loyalty of the emancipated younger generation in the Teens and Twenties. But this anti-Puritan animus did not always prove to be a reliable guide to literary merit.

On the subject of what Mencken actually knew about the emancipation of the younger generation that made him a cult figure, My Life as Author and Editor does have something interesting to tell us. He recalls a shocking discovery that he made on a visit to James Branch Cabell in Richmond in the company of Joseph Hergesheimer in 1921. On that occasion Mencken was obliged to attend a coming-out party that Cabell and his wife were giving for one of their daughters. "On the morning after the Cabell coming-out party," he writes, "Joe [Hergesheimer] tiptoed into my room at the hotel and beckoned to me to follow him. He led me to his bathroom, and there motioned to me to apply my ear to a door connecting with the bathroom of the adjoining bedroom. I could hear the voices of four or five young girls and it became immediately apparent from their talk that they had been guests at the party the night before. The conversation was really astonishing, for though I had read This Side of Paradise and had been hearing a lot about Flaming Youth, I was innocently unaware of the extent to which its revolt against all the ancient decorums had gone. The gabble of these fair flowers of Virginia almost made my hair stand on end. They seemed to know all the dirty words, and they used them with the freedom of Kipling's single men in barracks."

What immediately came to mind when I read this passage was Max Beerbohm's famous cartoon of Henry James on bended knee collecting his information about life--meaning, of course, sex by looking through the keyhole of a locked bedroom door. Yet here is Mencken at the age of 41, the great arbiter of manners and morals for the new generation, self-portrayed in what amounts to the same posture. And this episode occurred a year after the publication of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, in which Mencken is invoked as a deity of personal emancipation. You have to wonder what it was that Mencken supposed would supplant the Puritan restraints his mockery did so much to dismantle. My guess is that he never gave it a thought. His forte was provocation, not moral philosophy. On all moral and social questions Mencken was what we now call a libertarian, which may be why in a later period he has proved to be attractive to certain conservatives. Yet the notion that Mencken himself was some kind of conservative is simply not supportable-unless your criteria for a conservative are solely a hatred of Franklin Roosevelt, a style of comic bluster, and a fondness for Pilsner.

Not that he was any sort of liberal, either. Few writers of his time were as immune to the liberal pieties as Mencken, who never pretended to love democracy or equality and was not much of a believer in the perfectibility of the human species. And about members of that species whose racial and ethnic origins were different from his own, he did not hesitate to express his unlovely prejudices.

I have to confess that I am not as bothered by those prejudices as a lot of other people appear to be. Ugly these prejudices sometimes were, but were they ever serious? I doubt it. Mencken does seem to have had a bee in his bonnet about the Jews, and his animadversions on the subject of "prehensile kikes," etc., are on florid display in a good many pages of My Life as Author and Editor. Yet before we hasten to inscribe Mencken's name in the crowded roster of this century's most notorious anti-Semites, it needs to be remembered that in his published writings he usually reserved his most categorical anathemas for what he liked to characterize as the "so-called Anglo-Saxon" race.

Attempting to explain his German loyalties in My Life as Author and Editor, Mencken wrote that "It suddenly dawned on me, somewhat to my surprise, that the whole body of doctrine that I had been preaching was fundamentally anti-Anglo-Saxon," and his other writings bear him out. Thus in his essay on "The American Tradition," he goes on at length about the "inferiority" of this breed, which he held to be largely responsible for the deficiencies of American society.

"In the fine arts, in the sciences and even in the more complex sorts of business," he wrote, "the children of the later immigrants are running away from the descendants of the early settlers. To call the roll of Americans eminent in almost any field of human endeavor beyond that of mere dull money-grubbing is to call a list of strange and often outlandish names; even the panel of Congress presents a startling example. Of the Americans who have come into notice during the past fifty years as poets, as novelists, as critics, as painters, as sculptors, and in the minor arts, less than half bear Anglo-Saxon names, and in this minority there are few of pure Anglo-Saxon blood. So in the sciences. So in the higher reaches of engineering and technology. So in philosophy and its branches. So even in industry and agriculture." Etc.

Whether any of this was ever strictly true is not the point. No one ever relished such writing for its scientific accuracy. Mencken was acutely conscious of living in what he liked to call a "mongrel" nation, and he did not scruple to disguise his amused distaste for many of its constituent groups. These he openly ridiculed--it was part of his comic style--and in so doing he was part of the mainstream of American life. As a child growing up in an immigrant household in the 1930s, I learned very quickly that in the privacy of the family every immigrant group ridiculed every other immigrant (and non-immigrant) group, even those that were most envied. This did not prevent their offspring from forming close bonds with contemporaries from other groups, for that, too, was part of the mainstream of American life. These prejudices, moreover, were widely reflected in the political and popular culture of the time, and Mencken was a part of that culture.

It may not have been a perfect way to live, but looking back on it today I find that I prefer it to the smarmy hypocrisy that now attempts to disguise the realities of American life with the enforced cant of "diversity" and "multiculturalism." You have only to read the liberal tripe that now fills American journalism with boilerplate sentiments about our "rainbow" society to understand why an earlier generation admired Mencken's irreverent candor.

Still, even Mencken's prejudices, which were once so liberating for so many people, are now as dated as many of his literary opinions. The personal emancipation from conventional bourgeois standards that he advocated has been achieved with a vengeance, and we are left to deal with its shattering consequences. In a society in which school kids are instructed in the niceties of sodomy and daily television features endless talk about perversions of every variety, the demolition of the Puritan tradition has lost its charm. If Mencken survives a while longer as a writer, it will not be because of the Prejudices or a book like My Life as Author and Editor. Mencken will owe his survival to the Days books, which, though now fading into the literature of nostalgia, are still fun to read; and even more to his works on The American Language, which contain his most original and enduring writing about American life. The rest, alas, is history--interesting to read about, perhaps, but no longer to be read as living literature.

Mr. Kramer is editor of The New Criterion and art critic for the New York Observer.