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With Apologies Toward None
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10093 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
3,154 Words |
| Author
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Charles A. Fecher
Charles A. Fecher is the author of Mencken: A Study of His
Thought and editor of The Diary of H.L. Mencken. He was editor
of the Enoch Pratt Free Library's quarterly journal
Menckeniana from 1985 to 1998. |
MY LIFE AS AUTHOR AND EDITOR
H. l. Mencken, edited by Jonathan Yardley
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1993
421 pp., $27.50
In the early 1940s, H.L. Mencken produced, in rapid succession, three volumes of memories: Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days. In the preface to the first of these, he made clear that it was not offered as "coldly objective history," and the same was, of course, true of its successors. On the contrary, they were really a series of delightful and sometimes hilarious anecdotes, told with a gently nostalgic humor not at all like the savage wit of his earlier books and recreating an era of American life that even then had faded from the memories of most people.
The "Days" books, as they came to be called, speedily established themselves as the best known and best loved of his works, and the ones by which he would most likely be remembered. Over the years, critics, Mencken scholars, and the public alike accepted them as his autobiography.
But he himself apparently did not.
In an entry in his diary dated July 11, 1941, commenting on the fact that Newspaper Days had run to exactly the same number of pages as its predecessor, he said that "making it run precisely the same length as Happy Days was really an extraordinary feat of copy-reading. I shall boast of it when my real autobiography comes to be written [italics mine]."
He must have started very soon afterward to think about writing it, for, in an entry on December 29 of the same year, he said:
Since I finished "Newspaper Days" and the quotation book I have been devoting myself mainly to a detailed record of my days on the Sun. It already runs to nearly 200,000 words, and I have got no further than the year 1935. Moreover, there are considerable gaps in what is already on paper. I'd like to finish it, and then do a similar record of my adventures on and with magazines. There are great numbers of documents in my files, but if I don't reduce them to order myself no one else will ever be able to do it.
What he proceeded to do the next few years was really to write two autobiographies, for the simple reason that he had always lived two
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