Second Mencken Chrestomathy (2 page)

“I
HAVE
discovered something,” Alfred Knopf said to H. L. Mencken one day in 1920. “It is that H. L. Mencken has become a good property.” Knopf was talking about the unexpected popular success of
Prejudices: First Series
, the first of six collections of Mencken’s essays, articles and reviews to appear under the Borzoi imprint between 1919 and 1927. In 1919 Mencken was still known outside Baltimore—his lifelong home and base of operations—mainly as coeditor of and book reviewer for the
Smart Set
, a shabby-looking magazine of modest circulation and raffish reputation.
Prejudices: First Series
was intended to bring his writing, and his personality, to the notice of a wider audience: “I made a deliberate effort to lay as many quacks as possible, and chose my targets, not only from the great names of the past, but also from the current company of favorites.” The effort, like most of Mencken’s exercises in self-promotion, paid off.
Prejudices: First Series
and its successors were all reviewed widely and, to the initial surprise of author and publisher alike, even sold well. It was through these neat little crown octavo volumes as much as through the
Smart Set
(and, later, the
American Mercury
) that American readers of the ’20s came to know the man whom Walter Lippmann, writing in 1926, called “the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people.”

In the ’30s, Mencken fell from grace with Depression-era intellectuals, who found his literary tastes bourgeois and his politics neanderthal. (“Nearly all poverty is caused by idealism. The normal poor man is simply a semi-idiot whose dreams have run away with his capacities.”)
Prejudices: First Series
sold only three-hundred-odd copies between 1931, when the plates were melted down, and 1942, when the last printing was exhausted. But he became a good property again with the publication in 1940 of
Happy
Days
, his best-selling childhood memoir, and it was doubtless no coincidence that around this time he began thinking of putting together a comprehensive anthology of his own writings. As early as 1943, Mencken discussed with Knopf the possibility of bringing out “a sort of Mencken Encyclopedia, made up of extracts from my writings over many years, arranged by subject and probably with additions.” According to his diary, he went to work in earnest four years later: “Unable to do any writing, I have put in my time selecting and editing material for the ‘Mencken Omnibus’ that Knopf proposes to get out.… I am not reading all my old stuff, but I am trying to look through it.”

The book that emerged from this lengthy period of gestation was a kind of super-
Prejudices
, a jumbo volume containing Mencken’s thoughts on everything from the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (good) to the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (bad). Like the six
Prejudices
, it was assembled with loving care:

By mid-September of 1948, Mencken had blue-penciled this mountain of typescript down to a 265,000-word draft. Knopf hated the proposed title,
A Mencken Chrestomathy
(according to Mencken, the word means “a collection of choice passages from an author or authors”), but Mencken insisted on it, going so far as to discreetly twit his old friend in the preface: “Nor do I see why
I should be deterred by the fact that, when this book was announced, a few newspaper smarties protested that the word would be unfamiliar to many readers, as it was to them. Thousands of excellent nouns, verbs and adjectives that have stood in every decent dictionary for years are still unfamiliar to such ignoramuses, and I do not solicit their patronage. Let them continue to recreate themselves with whodunits, and leave my vocabulary and me to my own customers, who have all been to school.” Not surprisingly, the ever-practical Mencken was more responsive to Knopf’s concerns about the length of the first draft: “I myself feel that there are things in the present text that had better come out, so we should be able to reach an agreement without difficulty. There is an excess of copied material about equal in bulk to the matter now in the book. Thus, if the ‘Chrestomathy’ has an encouraging sale I’ll be ready to produce a second volume.”

Mencken delivered a 185,000-word revised draft on September 24, 1948, and approved the copyedited manuscript on November 8. Fifteen days later, a massive stroke left him unable to read or write for the rest of his life.
A Mencken Chrestomathy
was published the following July, two months before Mencken’s sixty-ninth birthday. It turned up on the
New York Times
best-seller list almost immediately, appearing alongside
Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Seven Storey Mountain, The Fountainhead, Cheaper by the Dozen
, John P. Marquand’s
Point of No Return
and Nancy Mitford’s
Love in a Cold Climate
. (They don’t make best-seller lists like
that
anymore.) The
Chrestomathy
has sold slowly but steadily ever since: 27,000 copies in hardcover, 22,000 in paperback. Moreover, the book’s influence has been completely out of proportion to its sales. With the exception of Malcolm Cowley’s
Portable Faulkner
, no anthology of a modern American writer’s work has done more to shape the reputation of its subject.

What makes this first
Mencken Chrestomathy
so compelling? To begin with, it is not a conventional anthology. Most single-author anthologies, including some very artful ones, are purely functional: they are meant to introduce the reader to an
oeuvre
, not to serve as ends in themselves. The
Chrestomathy
is different. Mencken claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that his purpose in editing the
Chrestomathy
was “simply to present a selection from my out-of-print
writings, many of them now almost unobtainable.” In fact, the text was the climax of a process of serial revision that in some cases lasted as long as three decades. Typically, Mencken took a Monday Article written for the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, recycled it into a
Smart Set
essay or an
American Mercury
editorial, polished that version for inclusion in one of the
Prejudices
and, finally, created a “definitive” version for the
Chrestomathy
.
*
This editorial process is of particular relevance because Mencken’s output consisted mainly of essays; comparatively few of his books were, to coin a Menckenism,
durchkomponiert
. By selecting the best of these essays, revising them extensively and collecting them in one carefully arranged volume, he produced a book that is at once an anthology and a deliberate act of literary and intellectual self-definition.
A Mencken Chrestomathy
is not quite as comprehensive as it looks: much of Mencken’s work was still in print in 1948 and is therefore not included. But despite the absence of any material from
A Book of Prefaces, Treatise on the Gods, Treatise on Right and Wrong
or the three
Days
books, it nonetheless contains a broadly representative cross section of his writings, one from which subsequent generations of readers have acquired a total sense of H. L. Mencken as man and artist.

That no sequel to
A Mencken Chrestomathy
has previously been attempted makes perfect sense. “Anthologies are, ideally, an essential species of criticism,” Randall Jarrell has said. “Nothing expresses and exposes your taste so completely.” This is especially true of self-anthologies like the
Chrestomathy
. No other editor, however skilled or sympathetic, could possibly assemble a collection of Mencken’s writings equal in interest. The book you hold in your hands, however, is not a secondhand imitation of its celebrated predecessor but the real thing:
a Second Chrestomathy
based on manuscript material selected and edited by Mencken himself.

Mencken hinted at the existence of this material in a poststroke interview in which he spoke of his frustration at not being able to publish a sequel to the
Chrestomathy
: “I never got to read it in
book form. I had enough material for maybe two more volumes like the
Chrestomathy
.” His remark was more significant than anyone knew at the time, or for long afterward. By the time of his death in 1956, Mencken had transferred most of his private papers to the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. Among them were five boxes of unsorted manuscript material intended for use in a second
Chrestomathy
. Much of it consisted of typescript passages edited by Mencken; some appear to have been part of the first draft of the original
Chrestomathy
, while the rest were presumably intended from the outset as a sequel. Mencken’s diary entries imply that he revised the
Chrestomathy
passages as he selected them. This made it possible for him to assemble the first draft from edited typescript, at least some of which was re-edited before being cut from the final draft in September of 1948. (The introductory note to the reminiscence of the Baltimore
Sunpapers
included in this volume contains interlinear changes in Mencken’s handwriting that could not have been made prior to the summer of 1948.) This explains why he had expected to be able to produce a second volume so easily: the hard work was already done.

In 1963 Betty Adler, then in charge of the Mencken Collection, proposed to Alfred Knopf that he publish a new anthology based partly on Mencken’s notebooks and partly on the
Second Chrestomathy
material. It is not clear whether Knopf already knew that Mencken had culled enough material for a second full-length
Chrestomathy
. Whatever the case, he rejected Adler’s proposal, and the five boxes of typescripts, carbons and newspaper clippings eventually found their way to the top shelf of the closet in the Pratt’s Mencken Room, where they gathered dust for twenty-nine years. No one other than Betty Adler appears to have examined this material closely until the spring of 1992, when I looked through it in the course of my research for a forthcoming biography of Mencken and realized that he had done far more work on a sequel to the
Chrestomathy
than had previously been thought. Even though Mencken did not prepare a chapter outline or organize his material in any way, it was clear that it would be possible to shape the surviving manuscript material into
a Second Chrestomathy
that did justice to his intentions. This book is the result.

A Second Mencken Chrestomathy
, like its companion volume,
is more than just a selection from Mencken’s best-known work. Some 147 of the 238 passages reprinted here are, to the best of my knowledge, appearing in book form for the first time. Of the remaining passages, sixty-two come from books that are no longer in print. Another twenty-nine are currently in print in various Mencken anthologies; of these, twenty-one appear in previously unpublished versions prepared by Mencken specifically for the
Second Chrestomathy
. A case in point is “The Commonwealth of Morons,” an abridged version of the essay “On Being an American,” first published in
Prejudices: Third Series
and reprinted in two of the standard Mencken anthologies, James Farrell’s
Prejudices: A Selection
(1958) and Huntingdon Cairns’s
The American Scene
(1965). The
Second Chrestomathy
version comprises about one-third of the original essay, with a freshly written closing paragraph and dozens of other textual changes.

The uncollected material reprinted in this book says much about the breadth of Mencken’s interests, as well as the essential unity of the philosophy underlying them. It includes excerpts from his vivid 1920 translation of Nietzsche’s
Der Antichrist
, and from the “New Constitution for Maryland” he drew up in 1937 for the amusement and edification of readers of the Baltimore
Sun
: “No person shall be eligible [to serve in the state legislature] who is or has ever been a minister of the gospel, or who has ever been under guardianship as a lunatic.” (It isn’t hard to imagine the look on Mencken’s face as he rapped out that sentence on his Underwood noiseless typewriter.) His formidable skills as a journeyman book reviewer are also on display, along with a witty apologia for the tastes of an omnivorous reader who chose to write—and did it well—not only about the novels of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis but about such unlikely-sounding books as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s
My Musical Life
and Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s
The Worst Journey in the World
: “I do not review upon any systematic, symmetrical plan, with its roots in logic and the
jus gentium
, but haphazard and without a conscience, and so it may occur that a fourth-rate novel gets a page, or even two pages, while a work of high merit goes inequitably to my ash-barrel and is hauled away in the night, unwept, unhonored and unsung, along with my archaic lingerie and my vacant beer bottles.” One might easily put together an extremely readable anthology out of Mencken’s book reviews
alone, which take up 105 pages of small print in Betty Adler’s bibliography and of which the two
Chrestomathys
contain only a small sample.