Monologue on a Bugle

HAPPY DAYS (1880-1892)-- H. L Mencken--Knopf ($2.75).

Probably no man alive more guilelessly enjoys hearing himself talk on paper, or is better able to infect others with the pleasure, than Henry Louis Mencken. Happy Days, his account of his childhood, is a set of 20 essays. They are as rosily extrovert a record of a human being's first twelve years as ever transcended fatuousness. They are also (with occasional slackenings) museum pieces in the good old Mencken bravura at its brassiest. For all its mannerisms and unsubtleties, the Mencken vernacular is extraordinarily vigorous and fine U. S. prose.

Little Harry Mencken, "a larva of the comfortable and complacent bourgeoisie," was the eldest son of August of Aug. Mencken & Bro., cigar makers. August's brother Henry, called Hen, lived next door, and in summers they all took a double house in the country. Little Harry went to F. Knapp's Institute, whose headmaster still wore "the classical uniform of a German schoolmaster--a long-tailed coat of black alpaca, a boiled shirt with somewhat fringy cuffs, and a white lawn necktie."

Mencken was eight when he discovered Huckleberry Finn: the discovery, "probably the most stupendous event of my whole life," set him reading Life Among the Mormons, One Thousand Proofs That the Earth Is Not a Globe, everything available in English. No less important to his future was his father's gift for Christmas 1888: a printing press.

Of his mother, Mencken tells little. Of Baltimore food (hardshell crabs with "snow-white meat almost as firm as soap"), of Baltimore sewage (in summer it masked the city with the odor of "a billion polecats"), of his own petty larcenies and light vices, of the alley Negroes (he calls them coons, Aframericans, blackamoors), of policemen, of livery stables, of trips to Washington with his father, he tells a great deal, most of it as solid as it is entertaining. He writes a beautiful chapter on his father as a businessman, drinker and practical joker, makes him, quietly, a great comic character. Chief cause of the comedy: he "was probably the most incompetent man with his hands ever seen on earth."

The one serious regret of Mencken's life is that he was not well taught in music. "Lady music teachers . . . wrecked my technic and debauched my taste." He still likes to pound the piano but, "born with an intense distaste for vocal music ... to this day think of even the most gifted Wagnerian soprano as no more than a blimp fitted with a calliope." As for Karl Czerny, standard nightmare of every child's piano lessons: "So late as 1930, being in Vienna, I visited and desecrated his grave."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.