Hazlitt for Mencken

For a reading public which he has made it his business to astonish for the last 20 years. Editor Henry Louis Mencken of The American Mercury had one more surprise last week. He announced that, with its December issue, his ten-year connection with the Mercury would end. Next day the Mercury's Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced the successor whom Editor Mencken had nominated for the job: Critic Henry Hazlitt, currently co-editor and book reviewer for The Nation. To Manhattan reporters, Editor Mencken revealed reasons and plans:

"As a matter of fact, my retirement from the Mercury was pretty well agreed upon some time ago, about the time the depression came along. But I didn't want to leave then. We were having tough going. . . . Now we seem to be on fairly firm ground. . . . The Mercury will go on, of course. I may write for it ... but I'm breaking clean, without any strings to it.

"Frankly, my reason for retiring is that I feel I've been editor of the Mercury long enough. It is my confidential opinion that all magazines ought to change editors every ten years. Besides I want to have more time for my writing. . . .

"I have a book three-quarters through. It's a book on morals. When I get that finished, I may go to Europe. When I come back, I want to go to work on another book--'Advice to Young Men.' Then I've got to rewrite The American Language. ... It will have to be two volumes I guess--I don't see how it can be less. . . ."

To readers of the Mercury, imagining the magazine without Editor Mencken was a good deal like imagining a highball without whiskey. Publisher Knopf started the Mercury on January i, 1924. mainly as a vehicle for the opinions of Mencken and Critic George Jean Nathan, who had been Mencken's associate on the defunct Smart Set and who was his co-editor of the Mercury until 1925. Editor Mencken's cruelly funny "Americana," his violently anti-philistine literary criticism, his extraordinarily acute editorial judgment and "clinical" literary style with its German impediment, gave the magazine its character and its importance. Wrote Book-Critic Harry Hansen last week: "As for Mr. Mencken, he not only found new authors, he gave them a new language. As one of his contributors told me: T saw my articles appear in print colored with such words as privatdozent, geheimrat, bierbruder, and hasenpfeffer which mystified my friends because I don't know German.' "

Under Mencken, the Mercury helped to popularize a quality usually mis-defined as "sophistication" in U. S. journalism. Its angry crusadings against provincialism, the Bible Belt, Rotarians, evangelists, puritanism, Prohibition and Babbittry in general became sufficiently successful to seem a little antiquated and unnecessary. To his admirers, Editor Mencken's retirement last week seemed unmistakable if regrettable evidence of his skill and judgment. His battles were won, his job done.

What the Mercury will be like under its new editor not even Publisher Knopf-- who said only that the magazine would be conducted along "the same general lines" --knew last week. Grave, workmanlike, austere where Mencken was clownish, inspired, blatant. Editor Hazlitt started his career on the Wall Street Journal, was a financial writer for the New York Evening Post and then the Mail before he became literary editor of the Sun in 1925. He resigned in 1929 to join The Nation. Last month he published The Anatomy of Criticism. Essayist William Hazlitt was his great-great-great uncle.

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