THE DIARY OF H.L. MENCKEN
Edited by Charles A. Fecher
New York: Alfred a. Knopf, 1989
476 pp., $30
H.L. Mencken, during his lifetime, was the target for abuse as vituperative and exaggerated as the attacks he levied against his own targets. Mencken, who boasted that nothing gave him more pleasure than "stirring up the animals," would be amused and gratified at the new round of controversy publication of selections from his diary has sparked. He made the first entry on November 5, 1930, three months after his marriage to Sara Powell Haardt, and virtually ceased keeping the diary for two years after her death on May 31, 1935. Thereafter, he resumed entries on a more or less regular (although not daily) basis until a stroke on November 23, 1948, left him without the ability to read or write.
Mencken willed the diary with the bulk of his personal papers and memorabilia to Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library, with the proviso that the diary be sealed for twenty-five years after his death to protect the feelings of living persons. Even after the twenty-five years were up on January 29, 1981, the library kept access narrowly restricted. One difficulty was that a number of those referred to, and not always flatteringly, were still alive. Most troublesome, however, were the doubts as to whether Mencken had intended the diary to be published. The labels on the wooden boxes containing the diary stipulated that the work should be open "only to students engaged in critical or historical investigation."
In 1985, the library obtained from the then Maryland state attorney general a hair-splitting opinion that there was no legal bar to publishing the diary. The following year, the Pratt board of trustees voted formally to do so. Charles A. Fecher, a Baltimore journalist who is editor of a quarterly journal of Mencken studies, Menckeniana, and author of the favorably regarded Mencken: A Study of His Thought (1978), was named editor. In rough form, the diary consists of twenty one hundred pages of (mostly) double spaced typescript, or between five and six hundred thousand words. "The happiest alternative," Fecher explains euphemistically, "seemed to be a selection that would be representative of the whole and - just as important - of interest to today's reader."
Fecher spells out the sensible criteria followed in winnowing the published text down to one-third of the total. He has more difficulty, however, in justifying the decision to publish. He argues, rather lamely, that because Mencken was "one of the most important and influential figures in twentieth-century American literature," leaving the diary "locked away in a vault, available only to a handful of scholarly researchers…simply made no sense." He takes pains to rebut the stories that the diary reveals the dark side of Mencken by painting him as an embittered, isolated, narrow-minded, and bigoted old man soured at a world that had passed him by. On the contrary, Fecher emphasizes, "The Mencken of the diary is perfectly consistent with all the other Menckens of fact and legend. It tells us things about him that we had not hitherto known, but it does not tell us anything different."
There is at least one major surprise. For all that Mencken's reputation during his lifetime rested, and his historical significance continues to
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