My Life as Author and Editor

Would Mencken have finished this account had he not been cajoled into covering the 1948 political conventions? Maybe his stroke, which occurred before he started recording his American Mercury years, would have happened at the same time regardless, but his convention work that year seemed to exacerbate his ill health, and could have hastened the apoplexy that prevented him from writing (and reading) for the rest of his life. Furthermore, he could have used those weeks to advance the narrative at least through the Coolidge era, and maybe to its end. As it is, we're left with Mencken's only incomplete book. The title would be accurate if "Half Of" preceded it: many topics and people are traced to date, but, aside from a short first chapter, all of them are introduced during his Smart Set years, which ended in 1923. Also, Mencken's work as an author uses far less ink than his work as an editor. This is Mencken's most gossipy memoir, and at times his dirt-dishing is irritating; several digressions discuss Broadway and Hollywood types. However, this liability is often an asset. I'd not heard of Lilith Benda until reading Mencken's passage about her; now, I want to read what she wrote. The memories of other authors, books, publishers and magazines are kept alive. Various peripheral characters add color to the story. While many of the authors Mencken discussed receive a paragraph or so, he gave Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis their own miniature biographies. When they met, Lewis was drunk and obnoxiously proclaiming his latest book, "Main Street", but Mencken afterwards confided to his Smart Set co-editor George Nathan that he couldn't imagine such a lush writing anything worthwhile. He changed his mind after reading the "Main Street" proofs the next morning on his return trip to Baltimore; he reported that he immediately and enthusiastically wired to Nathan, "That idiot has written a masterpiece." Some examples of Mencken's outlook are here, including, "I never had any belief in religion, and even as a youth I never went through the Socialist green sickness that was then almost universal. I was against Bryan the moment I heard of him, and my interest in Roosevelt I was always born of delight in the Mountebank, not of belief in the prophet. As I have recorded in "Newspaper Days", my first adventures as a reporter convinced me that the uplift in all its branches was only buncombe. I was not, of course, a partisan of the economic royalists who then ran the Republic - on the contrary, I believed that most of them were thieves and that all of them were frauds - but it seemed to me that, at their worst, they were appreciably better than the Chaldeans and soothsayers who proposed to drive them out of power, if only because they were at least more or less competent at their nefarious business. Competence, indeed, was my chief admiration, then as now, and next to competence I put what is calle

Even after all this time, we still feel the impact of H. L. Mencken's arrival on the literary scene in the opening years of the 20th century. He wrote millions of words, and has been the subject of many biographies. Despite all the ink spilled by and about him, the fragmentary nature of his autobiographical works still strikes one as a tragedy. He began keeping a diary from the mid-Thirties, when he was over fifty, and his career-ending stroke cut this autobiography off just before he started writing about his glory years of the Twenties.It's a pity, certainly, but editor Jonathan Yardley has done a splendid job editing the manuscript down to this book. Yardley succeeded in accomplishing his goal, to "let Mencken be Mencken" and to keep himself in the background. One approvingly contrasts this style of editing with David Cairns well-researched but fussily-footnoted _Memoirs of Hector Berlioz_.So, we have Mencken's own account of the beginnings of his career, and his encounters with publishers, editors, poets, writers, and other notables of the 1910s. The only person who gets treated as an equal is his partner at _The Smart Set_ magazine, George Jean Nathan. Most everyone else has their weaknesses and strengths--if they have any strengths in his eyes--baldly and succinctly described. We meet the then up-and-coming Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, and Ezra Pound, to mention a few. Mencken gives us some flash-forwards every now and then--we see Pound as a raving brownshirt in the Thirties, demanding to be published in Mencken's magazine. Mencken prints the text of the withering reply he sent back.Mencken's tone can be off-putting for a neutral reader. He frequently comes across as suaver-than-thou, unconned and unconnable. But most likely only people who already love Mencken will read this anyway, so they will enjoy themselves nonetheless. And he is very funny in some vignettes. Read the one where he and Nathan pretend to be interested in a tramp poet's tour of Greenwich Village. There are two paragraphs early on in the book which may serve as the thesis statement for his whole life and career. In them, he describes how he was never attracted to religion or its secular imitations, nor ever considered himself a tool of the plutocracy. And indeed, a review of his output does show that he fell into his distinctively cynical style very early in his career, and never seemed to find cause to depart from it. In this biography he relates his activities and his reasons for them with very few emotional asides. Like a speakeasy gin-and-tonic, this is astringent stuff--but it hits the spot.