H.L. Mencken - Heathen Days

MARCH 30 1942

Copyright 1941, 1942, 1943 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper. Published simultaneously in Canada by The Ryerson Press.

Published March 1, 1943

eISBN: 978-0-307-83088-3

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W HEN I finished Happy Days in August, 1939, anchored to an Underwood Noiseless Portable in the lovely Summer home of Dr. and Mrs. Frederic M. Hanes, high up in the North Carolina mountains, it would have astonished me unfeignedly if one of the native necromancers had dropped in from a neighboring Alp and told me that two similar volumes would follow it. I had had a grand time doing the book, but it seemed to me that one dose of my curriculum vitae was enough for posterity, and with the troubles of the teens peeping round the corner in my memory, I was rather glad to be shet of the subject. It soon appeared, however, that I was in the hands of higher powers, some of them supernatural but most of them merely human. The latter were customers who began writing in suggesting that I do a companion volume on my early newspaper adventures, and in a little while I had so far succumbed to their blarney that a couple of chapters thereof were sketched out. This was in 1940. The project occupied me off and on during the year, but in the main I worked on my New Dictionary of Quotations, and when 1941 dawned Newspaper Days was still only a fragment. I thereupon decided, heroically but idiotically, to jam through both books together, and the result was that I landed in hospital in April, with the dictionary finished but Newspaper Days yet very far short of it. After I got out of their animal-house the resurrection men ordered me to take a holiday, and I went to Cuba by sea probably my last ocean trip on this earth. I spent a couple of lazy weeks in Havana and its environs, hearing some excellent music, watching (and getting converted to) the cavortings of a Russian ballet company, and putting away large quantities of the nourishing Cuban victuals. When I got back to Baltimore I had so far recovered that I had a sudden burst of energy, and was soon knocking off what remained of Newspaper Days at the rate of 3,000 words a day my all-time high for sustained writing. The MS. was in the hands of the Knopfs by June 18, and on June 24 I was writing to Blanche: I note your acceptance of Newspaper Days. It is naturally gratifying to a young author.

The present volume is a kind of by-product of the burst of energy just mentioned. When I came to the end of the period marked off for Newspaper Days, I simply could not stop, but kept on going until I had accumulated four or five redundant chapters. When wind of these reached Harold W. Ross, the alert editor of the New Yorker, he collared them for his instructive weekly, and urged me to go on to more. When Newspaper Days came out in the Autumn of 1941 there was further heat from customers, and even a few whiffs from reviewers, so the present volume gradually and inevitably took form. It covers a wider range of time than either of its predecessors, for in it I have included a couple of chapters that belong to my Erinnerungen aus dem frhlichen Bubenleben but somehow failed to fit into Happy Days, and on the other end I bring it down to 1936. But there is no continuity in it, and none was attempted. It is simply a series of random reminiscences, not always photographically precise, of a life that, on the whole, has been very busy and excessively pleasant. Like any other man I have had my disasters and my miseries, and like any other author I have suffered from recurrent depressions and despairs, but taking one year with another I have had a fine time of it in this vale of sorrow, and no call to envy any man. Indeed, I seem to have been born without any capacity for envy, and to the fact, no doubt, is due a large part of my habitual tranquility, not to say complacency. But in part that contentment of spirit is due also to a kind of caginess that has dissuaded me, at all stages of my life, from attempting enterprises clearly beyond my power. Sticking always to what I could do with reasonable comfort, I have escaped the pains of complete bafflement, and thus have no motive, whether Freudian or other, for begrudging the other fellow his competence. Indeed, I simply cant imagine competence as anything save admirable, for it is very rare in this world, and especially in this great Republic, and those who have it in some measure, in any art or craft from adultery to zology, are the only human beings I can think of who will be worth the oil it will take to fry them in Hell.

Despite my two previous miscalculations, this third volume of my more or less accurate memories will probably be my last, for I begin to be impressed, at sixty-two, with the cogency of the Chinese warning that it is later than you think; and if I actually do any more dredging out of the past it will undoubtedly be in a more chastened and scientific mood. The hereditary pedant in me has made me a diligent conservator of records, and in the files in my cellar are enough of them to entertain a whole herd of nascent Ph.D.s records of forty-three years on newspapers, of forty as a writer of books, of twenty-five as a reviewer, of twenty as a magazine editor. These vocations have overlapped, but they have also intermingled, and some of my chronicles are thus rather complicated. When I was engaged a little while back in trying to get some order into them, I was struck by the thought that every man given over professionally to hearing and seeing things ought to be allowed two lives one to hear and see and the other to set down what he has heard and seen. But inasmuch as no such thought seems to have occurred to the Creator of the species, I am doomed to an inevitable but sorry compromise. Having now done three volumes of my recollections, I shall turn away from the past for a while and devote myself to hearing and seeing some more. I can only say of the present volume, as I said of its two predecessors, that it is not sober history but yarning, and is thus devoid of any purpose save to entertain. If it fails there it is a flop indeed. The title, alas, comes a good deal short of satisfying me. In its provisional or studio form I thought of the book as Miscellaneous Days, for it covers a long period and shows me at ages ranging from the agonies of nonage to the beginnings of senility. But there were objections to Miscellaneous Days that need not be gone into here, so I began concocting various other titles, all of them bad Busy Days, Gaudy Days, Red-Letter Days, Assiduous Days, and so on. Finally, I hit on Heathen Days, which is probably worse than any of them. The precisely right title would be Happy Days III, just as the precisely right title for Newspaper Days was Happy Days II, but it is now too late to undo the mistake I made in 1941.