The Diary of H.L. Mencken.

The Diary of H. L. Mencken

THERE IS NOTHING surprising in the Mencken diary--not to those who know the man and his work. As Charles a. Fecher, author of H. L. Mencken: A Study of His Thought and editor of the diary, writes in his introduction, "The Menken of the diary is perfectly consistent with all the other Menckens of fact and legend. It tells us things about him that we had not hitherto known, but it does not tell us anything different."

Not everyone agrees with this assessment. "Dimming of a Legend," said Mencken's own Baltimore Sun: "Mencken diary reveals racism, anti-Semitism, spite for friends." A United Pres story went out with the headline, "Mencken Diaries Show Another Side of Baltimore 'Sage.'" Meanwhile, the daws at the National Press Club threaten to rename the club's H. L. Mencken Library.

Such is the merest sampling of the early fallout from the publication of the diary Mencken kept from 1930 until his career-ending stroke in 1948. The diary is one of three known unpublished works; the others being My Life as Author and Editor and Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work, which are slated to be unsealed in January 1991, although probably not to the same protestations of shocked sensibility we've seen here.

Columnist Russell baker, who takes a Menckenian delight in today's absurdities, had the quickest and most commonsense defense of the Mecken diarty and its so-called revelations: "I am profoundly unshocked to learn that the night thoughts H. L. Mencken confided to his diary were sometimes tainted with racism and anti-Semitism. to have been utterly free of such stuff in Mencken's time and place would have been astonishing. I speak with authority here, for I was growing up just a block away from Mencken while he was keeping his diary. We all spoke meanly of each other back there . . ."

In fact, anyone who is offended just does not know Mencken. He made his career asa curmudgeon and iconoclast, and heartily took his own advice: people like to read abuse. Through much of the diary, Mencken assaults Franklin D. Roosevelt, patronizes blacks, and does betray a certain anti-Semitism. In truth, any group looking to take offense can probably find grounds for it in the diary. Mencken casts his baleful eye upon fundamentalists, most believers in an afterlife, various uplifters and propagandists, nearly all Americans, the U.S. Government, Generals Eisenhower and Patton, Communists, socialists, Democrats, Republicans, the British, American Anglophiles, alcoholics, nearly all authors, teachers, homosexuals, many of his colleagues at the Sun, public nuisances (including bobby-soxers and neighbors with barking dogs), morons, imbeciles, and those who "manage themselves badly." Consider this line, the sole entry for one day in 1946: "Nine-tenths of the people who call me by telephone I don't want to talk to, and three-fourths of the people I have to take to lunch I don't wnat to see."

As Fecher notes, "The story goes that he once read his own obituary in the Sun files, approved it, and directed that a single sentence be added at the end: 'As he got older, he got worse.' This was undoubtedly true."

The only people who pleased Mencken were those he judged "superior men," who knewtheir business and stuck to it. "The only sort of man who is really worth hell room [is] the man who practices some useful trade in a competent manner, makes a decent living at it, pays his own way, and asks only to be let alone."

He believed firmly, and this is evidenced in the diary, in an aristocracy of talent, without regard for race or creed, and his own actions seem to cap the argument. There is no indication whatsoever that in his daily dealings he was racists--his American Mercury published more black writers during the 1920s than any other major magazine--or that he behaved other than amiably with Jews. The diary is not, as has een alleged, an endless diatribe written by a bitter man seeking escape during his years of eclipse. Indeed, the diary is faily charming, often humorous, and at times quite revealing. As editor Fecher notes, although Mencken was out of the spotlight during the 1930s, they were some of his most productive and successful years.

The diary offers rather familiar glimpses of such lights as James M. Cain and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mencken's friends George Jean Nathan, Joseph Hergesheimer, and Theodore Dreiser, and his publisher Alfred A. Knopf. But if generally unsurprising, the diary can be nonetheless unsettling, as in this entry from 1942: "I believe, in truth, that immigration is always unwise--that is, when it is not enforced. I believe my chances in Germany would have been at least as good as they have been in America, and maybe a great deal better. I was born here and so were my father and mother, and I have spent all of may 62 years here, but I still find it impossible to fit myself into the accepted patterns of American life and thought. After all these years, I remain a foreigner.c

Because of his extreme isolationist views, Mencken suspended the writing of his Sun column during both world wars. At the end of World War II, he told Sun management, "The course of the United States . . . was dishonest, dishonorable and ignominious, and the Sun papers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace." Elsewhere in the diary, he writes, "The government I live under has been my enemy all my active life. When it has not been engaged in silencing me, it has been engaged in robbing me. So far as I can recall I have never had any contact with it that was not an outrage on my dignity and an attack upon my security." Such is the diary. It is a fascinating work, although we have only about one-third of it here, such was Mencken's almost compulsive self-documentation, and the repetition involved in any diary. "There is, indeed," Mencken wrote, "probably no trace in history of a writer who left more careful accounts of himself and his contemporaries. I have tried hard to tell the truth. At bottom, this is probably subjectively impossible, but I have at least made the effort."

Fans still have a lot to look forward to: besides the newspaper and magazine memoirs, there is talk of a quotable Mencken in the works. And here a word on sympathetic editors may be in order. Having finished this diary, and a book of Churchill's speeches, I think it isn't too much to ask that publishers employ editors with fewer reservations about their subjects. Such books appeal to a few thousand fans capable of finding on their own all the criticism they want--especially with Mencken and Churchill.

Mr. Mysak is managing editor of the daily Bond Buyer.