H. L. Mencken A Second Mencken Chrestomathy.
Selected, revised, and annotated by the author.
Edited, and with an introduction, by Terry Teachout.
Knopf, 491 pages, $30
H. L. Mencken’s admirers will eagerly welcome this new collection of his writings, compiled by Mencken himself as a complement to his 1949 anthology, A Mencken Chrestomathy, and only recently discovered in manuscript by his assiduous biographer, Terry Teachout. For those of us who remain skeptical, however, the publication of a second comprehensive “chrestomathy”—which Mencken defines as “a collection of choice passages from an author or authors”—offers an occasion to reconsider Mencken’s work on its own terms, quite apart from any recent questions about his personal prejudices.
Since Montaigne’s Essays, one of the great attractions of reading an essayist has been the opportunity to follow the introspective motion of a richly furnished mind. The particular pleasure of reading A Second Mencken Chrestomathycomes from the balance between Mencken’s satirical laughter at the spectacle of America and his lucid pessimism, reflected in this anthology in his appreciations of such writers as Conrad, Dreiser, Zola, Thomas Huxley, and Nietzsche. Yet all too often even the sympathetic reader finds that the impersonality and generality of Mencken’s observations, the famously rapid cadence of his prose, and his assertion of authority without argument or evidence have together produced a hollow if still quite comical effect. Mencken lacks the more fully persuasive, supple quality of those essayists who, like Montaigne, stress introspection and observation, hesitation