H. L. MENCKEN ON AMERICAN LITERATURE

H. L. MENCKEN ON AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Edited by S. T. Joshi. Ohio Univ. Press. 298 pp. $44.95

Nowadays most people think of H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) as the scourge of the middle-class philistines he dubbed the "booboisie," but in his own day he was at least as well known as a literary critic. Over the noisy course of a 15-year run as book reviewer for The Smart Set, the magazine he coedited with George Jean Nathan, Mencken reviewed, by his own reckoning, some 2,000 novels, most of them, also by his own reckoning, the work of "100 percent dunderheads." Few things date faster than a cruel review of a bad book, but Mencken was no mere hit man: He was largely responsible for bringing Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis to the attention of American readers, and he helped put F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Ring Lardner, and Sherwood Anderson on the map of letters. As if that weren’t enough, he was one of the first critics anywhere to recognize Huckleberry Finn as a major novel—and to say so, loudly and repeatedly, until his colleagues got the message.

All these achievements and more can be sampled in H. L. Mencken on American Literature, the first new anthology of Mencken’s literary criticism published in decades. Joshi, the editor, is a Mencken buff who knows his way around his hero’s monstrous output (Mencken plausibly claimed to have published well in excess of five million words), and though his selection overlaps rather more than it should with William H. Nolte’s indispensable H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set Criticism (1968), still in print, it also includes a number of previously uncollected pieces, not a few of which are both significant and readable.

Among them is a wickedly funny review of Death in the Afternoon in which Mencken contrives simultaneously to praise Ernest Hemingway and skewer his all-time favorite target, the American South: "Not many current books unearth so much unfamiliar stuff, or present it so effectively. I emerge cherishing a hope that bullfighting will be introduced at Harvard and Yale, or, if not at Harvard and Yale, then at least in the Lynching Belt of the South, where it would offer stiff and perhaps ruinous competition to the frying of poor blackamoors. Imagine the moral stimulation in rural Georgia if an evangelist came to town offering to fight the local bulls by day and baptize the local damned by night!"

Joshi also supplies extensive and useful annotations that clarify a good many otherwise impenetrable period references, as well as an enthusiastic introduction in which he claims that Mencken "could almost be said to have invented a new genre, that of the satirical review." That is coming it a bit high, as Mencken buffs are wont to do, but Joshi is squarely on the mark when he says that Mencken "played his part—and it was a significant part—in establishing the American literary canon." Best of all, he did it with a smile.

—Terry Teachout