Fun Among the Philistines

MENCKEN by Carl Bode. 452 pages. Southern Illinois University. $10.

It takes an effort of mind to recall the time, not so very long ago, when America was still something like a collection of small towns, and a provincial newspaperman named Henry Louis Mencken was its national cracker-barrel atheist. It is, moreover, a matter for wonder that Mencken, who dressed like the gallused boors he despised, chewed cigars like a Tammany clubhouse character and had tastes that ran to beer and bawdy jokes, was ever regarded as the epitome of metropolitan sophistication. The term smart set, which was the title of his first magazine, seems sadly unsmart today. The word sophisticated now applies mainly to weaponry and (in Italy) to synthetic wine. Those whom Mencken called "sinhounds," "bluenoses" and "wowsers" are virtually extinct, and Mencken lies amid their megatherian bones.

Although Mencken shared the fate of the successful satirist--to perish with his enemies--he had fun, while he could, slaying philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Mencken added to the gaiety of nations; he was a great man with a custard pie. Puritanism, the genteel tradition in fiction, Prohibition and even that "Bible of the booboisie and boost-erism"--the Saturday Evening Post --all became his targets.

Fit for Fortune Cookies. Mencken's denudation of America's Sunday-go-to-meeting image was carried out with wit and a once admired prose style. Harold Ross of The New Yorker said that he was "the most enlightened man writing today." That praise now seems a shade inconsequential--as if a potentially great pianist had squandered his digital gifts as a pinball virtuoso. In truth, Mencken worked hard at his prose but had the autodidact's fatal fondness for the fancy word. As for the flowers of wit culled by Carl Bode, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, they have wilted badly. Intended to shock rather than illuminate, the once celebrated epigrams shock no more. The examples quoted, such as, "Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another," yearn for the merciful embrace of a fortune cookie.

Some solid achievements remain, of course. The American Language (and its supplements) has justly become a classic. Mencken's lively journalistic talents invigorated a generation of practitioners. The American Mercury waged brisk verbal war against Bostonian cultural fuddy-duddyism. The green cover of the Mercury, in fact, was once the badge of the campus intellectual. The views expressed seem far from revolutionary today, but they are more trenchant and readable than Marcuse or Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

Rococo Invective. For a practicing iconoclast, however, Mencken chose surprisingly feeble icons of his own. As a young man, he fell for Nietzsche and his doctrinal fantasy of the Ubermensch. As misread by Mencken, Nietzsche provided license to despise the human race and delight in all things German--as epitomized by beer and Brahms. Politicians were rogues. The church was only a racket. People in general were boobs. Such were the underpinnings of Mencken's rococo invective. But when serious matters were involved, his philosophical resources were meager and his thinking often callow and jejune.

If Mencken's work often seems to be wit without truth, his biographer punishes him by writing about him truthfully without wit. He is, moreover, partisan. A chrestomathy of cliches could be compiled from the book. However, Professor Bode does manage to convey something of the pathos of Mencken's later years--and especially of his marriage. At 43, the Baltimore sport married. Despite his Nietzschean warnings against wives ("Take your whip," etc.), he chose as his bride a Southern belle. She led the atheist sage to the altar (Episcopal) and, although she gave him nights off to go to the old club, enclosed him firmly in the sort of wallpapered bourgeois cage against which he had always railed. He loved it. His only protest was to paste cutout figures of Mutt and Jeff on the repetitive pattern of the wallpaper. It summed up his commentary on the American life-style--and his own.

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