The Diary of H.L. Mencken.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

The Dairy of H. L. Mencken

The main impression that arises from H. L. Mencken's diaries is of the unlikelihood of their author as the leading American writer of his day. He was a man with no sympathy whatever for the national enterprise; in one typically dolorous entry, he says, "My grandfather, I believe, made a mistake when he came to this country... I have spent all of my 62 years here, but I still find it impossible to fit myself into the accepted patterns of American life and thought. After all these years, I remain a foreigner." He was not a creature of the literary or journalistic demimonde either. His closest friends were solid, prosperous burghers: professors at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, executives of the Baltimore Sunpapers, and, in New York, the publishers Alfred and Blanche Knopf rather than his fellow writers. His idea of a good time is conveyed by a passage written after the death of his friend Max Brodel, a medical illustrator and a fellow member of the Saturday Night Club, which was the locus of Mencken's weekend entertainment for many years:

It has been the custom of the club since the beginning to end every evening of music with a waltz, and usually it has been one of Strauss's, though the library also contains many by Waldteufel, Gungl, Komzak and Niehrer. Max always welcomed this postlude. "I begin to feel beerish," he would say - and the moment the piano lid banged down we'd be off to the beer table. No members of the club ate and drank more heartily. He was, in fact, a really gargantuan eater....

Maryland is for crabs

Although Mencken was, unlike anyone who's around today, enormously influential as both a political commentator and a literary critic, he conveys in the diary no sense of real engagement with either field. For all of his adult life he disapproved of the basic condition of American politics, and the figure he disapproved of most of all was Franklin Roosevelt ("a fraud from snout to tail"); to the extent that he found any politicians tolerable, they were conservative Republicans like Robert Taft and Joseph Ritchie, the governor of Maryland, whose following among intellectuals was probably limited to Mencken.

In the final phase of his career, the only political cause that truly interested him - opposition to American involvement in World War II - was one he felt (probably rightly) that he couldn't get away with writing about, so the particulars of his views about it remain a mystery. Anyway, it's hard to imagine that if he had set down his case against the war, it would seem anything but embarrassingly wrongheaded today. There is not a hint in the diary that Mencken perceived Adolf Hitler as either dangerous or evil. In general, very oddly for a journalist, Mencken had no interest in the idea of the nobility of a writer's participation in public life. In one entry he says proudly about his writing, "It is free of moral purpose"; in another, "The one obligation I recognize in this world is my duty to my immediate family."

Burgher king

During the years before 1930, when the diary begins, Mencken championed the work of many of the great writers of his day, such as Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, and Scott Fitzgerald. By the time of the diary, though, Mencken had stopped writing literary criticism, and almost all of the literary commentary in the diary has to do with how pathetic his writer-friends (including all of the above and, especially, the now long-forgotten Joseph Hergesheimer) had become, thanks to alcoholism, financial imprudence, and physical infirmity. He doesn't seem to be reading new books; there is only one entry in which he praises other writers' work, and even in that case he is quick to denigrate the authors of the two books he admires: Will Durant (Caesar and Christ) for being "only a popularizer, and full of unwarranted pretensions," and John Gunther (Inside Asia) for being "in general... a third-rater." A typical willfully nonliterary passage on another writer is this...