American Notes MARYLAND

H.L. Mencken, the iconoclastic journalist who delighted in debunking the "booboisie," is being debunked himself. An abridged version of his diaries will arrive in bookstores this month. In journal entries written between 1930 and 1948, Mencken emerges as a hypochondriac with an anti-Semitic streak. In one passage he noted that a house on his street had been bought by "some Jews . . . with various ratty tenants." In a segment that the editor omitted, Mencken referred to two Baltimore businessmen as "dreadful kikes."

Mencken ordered that the diaries be sealed for 25 years after his death, which occurred in 1956, and thereafter be made available to students only. But in 1985 the Maryland Attorney General ruled the restriction not legally binding. Mencken would probably have put down controversy over the diaries to what he called "the virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation." But admirers of Mencken's wit may now find it harder to laugh with him.