The Impossible H.L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories.

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The Impossible H. L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories, edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers  (Doubleday/Anchor, 707 pp., $15 paper)

LITERARY historians usually think of H. L. Mencken first in connection with The Smart Set and The American Mercury. In fact, Mencken spent his entire professional career as a newspaperman. All else, including the founding of the Mercury, was secondary. From 1904 to 1948, with time out for two world wars, Mencken labored for the Baltimore Sun papers in various capacities, doing everything from writing unsigned editorials to negotiating labor contracts. He wrote a daily editorial-page column from 1911 to 1915 and a weekly editorial-page column from 1920 to 1938. Most of Mencken's best-known essays began life as newspaper stories of one kind or another. But most of the three thousand pieces Mencken wrote for the Evening Sun and other papers have remained uncollected to this day. "In the columns of the Evening Sun," Mencken wrote, "I can say anything I please. I tackle subjects there that are never mentioned in other newspapers ... and yet most of it is buried in their files. To be sure, I occasionally dredged out extracts from it for my Prejudices books, but they were few in number and of relatively little importance."

Now Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, editor of Mencken and Sara, an invaluable edition of Mencken's correspondence with his wife, has put together a fat and sassy anthology of Mencken's newspaper work. The Impossible H. L. Mencken is organized thematically, and the themes, as usual with Mencken, are familiar to the point of banality: the defects of democracy, the joys of life in Baltimore, the idiocies of journalists, the dangers of trusting any politician farther than he can be thrown. But if Mencken's themes are-as Count Basie used to say of his band's repertory-"the same old beef stew," his variations are almost always as fresh as a farm breakfast.

Take, for example, a 1925 Evening Sun column with the unpromising title "Traffic": "There was a time when the American citizen was an idealist himself. Now he is only idealism's raw material, as a cow is the raw material of butter, ice cream, and custard pie-a stuff milked, tickled, clubbed, and pulverized into beauty by ordained virtuosi." Or this tart postmortem on the 1948 elections, written only two weeks before Mencken's career was cut short by a crippling stroke:

  Truman . . . assumed as a matter of
  course that the American people were
  just folks like himself He thus wasted no
  high-falutin rhetoric upon them, but appealed
  directly to their self-interest.
  Every one of them, he figured, was itching
  for something, and he made his campaign
  by the sempiternal device of engaging
  to give it to them.... If he did not
  come out for spiritualism, chiropractic,
  psychotherapy, and extrasensory perception
  it was only because no one demanded
  that he do so. If there had been
  any formidable body of cannibals in the
  country he would have promised to provide
  them with free missionaries fattened
  at the taxpayers' expense.

The Impossible H. L. Mencken is not perfect. It is to begin with, a bit redundant. "Most of the classics," Miss Rodgers says, "have been repeated, as no collection of Mencken would be complete without them." That means the original versions of such widely anthologized essays as "Valentino," "The Sahara of the Bozart," and "Bryan"; it also means several less well-known pieces that have already appeared in books edited by Mencken himself and by subsequent hands. This deliberate repetition is a mistake, since most potential readers of The Impossible H. L. Mencken will already own A Mencken Chrestomathy, The Vintage Mencken, and various other Mencken collections that have appeared in the last four decades. Miss Rodgers also has devoted far too much space to Mencken's presidential-convention coverage 172 pages, slightly less than a quarter of the book) and not quite enough to his volcanic editorial-page thumbsucking of the Thirties, the decade of the despised "Roosevelt II."

As for the uncollected material here, none of it is boring, but none ranks with Mencken's finest work. Not that this is Miss Rodgers's fault. H. L. Mencken was a compulsive reviser, and he rarely let any of his newspaper work get into his own collections without reworking it extensively. While Mencken enjoyed working under pressure ("I am at my best," he said, "in articles written in heat and printed at once"), it was through careful editing that he put the clinching gloss on his best essays.

Taken as a whole, The Impossible H. L. Mencken has a slightly miscellaneous air that might have been avoided had Miss Rodgers stuck solely to, say, Mencken's editorial-page columns for the Sun papers, arranged chronologically. Alternatively, she could have attempted to carry out Mencken's own plan for a sequel to A Mencken Chrestomathy. Mencken accumulated, by his own reckoning, about twice as much material for the 1949 Chrestomathy as went into the finished product. This material now reposes on a shelf in the closet of the Mencken Room of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, dusty and forgotten. Somebody should do something with it.

But enough quibbling. The collection (save for a boorish introduction by Gore Vidal) is sure to give pleasure. Even at his second-best, H. L. Mencken was a not-so-minor miracle. How tonic it is to quaff this stiff dose of hundred-proof irreverence in an age when insensitivity, real or alleged, has become the last hanging offense. Mr. Teachout, formerly on the New York Daily News editorial board, is at work on a biography of H. L. Mencken. His latest book is City Limits.