Summa Contra Mencken

THE BITTER SPRING (730 pp.)--Charles Angoff--Thomas Yoseloff ($5.95).

Hell hath no fury like an ex-disciple. Novelist and Editor Charles Angoff was sole editorial assistant to H. L. Mencken from 1925 to 1933. In recent years Russian-born, Harvard-educated Angoff has emerged as Mencken's chief literary assassin. Having fanged his ex-idol non-fictionally in H. L. Mencken: A Portrait from Memory, Angoff releases some fictional venom in The Bitter Spring. Mencken is portrayed as a loud-mouthed vulgarian and an intellectual fraud with but a single saving grace, his love of music.

The novel's liveliest scenes take place in the office of "the literary dictator of America," cigar-chomping Harry P. Brandt, editor of the American World. In an early scene Brandt speaks to the music critic, Paul Jennings (patterned on George Jean Nathan), "a gourmet and a snob" who wears monogrammed shorts:

"By the way, Paul, did you ever drink French whiskey?"

"I didn't know they made whiskey."

"They do, the damn frogs, and I had the misfortune of drinking it once. It took me four years to get over that slop. It was made from the wax in the ears of Clemenceau."

Listening with every pore open to the gibes and chaffer of the two sophisticates is a green, young editorial hand, David Polonsky (obviously Angoff), a breathless and bewildered Boswell already a trifle disillusioned in his Johnson. Polonsky's trouble seems to be that he has come to the American World seeking a 20th century messiah and found only a man with a man's common frailties. Nonetheless, Mencken, as the villainous Brandt, commandeers The Bitter Spring and breathes into it the only life it has. While much of Brandt's talk is unfit for print, it alone bears repeating. The slashing Mencken tone is nostalgically familiar in such comments as: "All the Spaniards have contributed to the world is hemophilia"; ''Thoreau was a Gandhi in a second-hand suit"; "It is downright unfair to take money from the rich to try to educate the poor, who don't want any education, are puzzled by it, and once they get it, such as they can absorb, use it only to read confession and detective magazines. So I say, teach the boobs nothing, except to obey their superiors."

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