You Tell ‘Em : H.L. MENCKEN CONTINUES TO DISTURB THE PEACE : MENCKEN: A Life, <i> By Fred Hobson (Random House: $35; 672 pp.)</i>

Even Henry Louis Mencken can’t get away with being a curmudgeon anymore. In recent years his prejudices have been inspected for serious political “incorrectitude,” his mental health pored over by prescribers of prophylactic doses of anti-depressants and his decline into mumpishness decried as though he hadn’t been entitled to become an old crank.

Ah, Mencken, where is thy sting now that we really need it?

The curmudgeon shortage in this country is critical--sitting around grousing that the world is going to hell on a sled doesn’t cut it. “Curmudgeonry” requires style and a talent for invective that only a few masters (e.g., Robert Sherrill) can provide anymore.

As literary biographer Fred Hobson shows in this lucid and respectful work, Mencken, who began his career in curmudgeonry before he was 21, made it into an art form. Born into a Baltimore German family in 1880, Mencken went to university in the city room of the Baltimore Morning Herald. All his life he retained the raucous and ribald glee with which good national reporters attack bunkum (or at least as so many of them used to before moving within the Beltway and developing terminal cases of self-importance).

By 1914 Mencken was already a noted literary critic and author of an admiring work on Nietzsche. As Fred Hobson demonstrates, all the planks of Mencken’s intellectual platform were already in place, but they seem to have been cemented by the bitter experience of being pro-German during World War I. Mencken’s “Germanophilia” was not so much political as cultural--he was an intellectual snob and proud of it. He sought in his own German family roots an identity with what he considered the intellectual aristocracy. Those who were opposed to the war in Vietnam may remember a famous headline in Ramparts from that era: “What Do You Do When Your Country Is at War And You Think the Other Side Should Win?” Many of the ‘60s radicals wound up, improbably, like the arch-conservative Mencken in the ‘20s--hypercritical of their own country.

Not that we ever lack a rich and inviting array of big, fat juicy targets in this great nation, but the ‘20s were almost made for Mencken’s pen. The decade’s splendid run of general silliness included fatuous academics and pinheaded fundamentalists, as well as the usual dweebs, dorks and crooks of public office.

Hobson, nevertheless, persuasively makes the case that Mencken’s importance as a social critic is dwarfed by his role in American literature. Indeed, the list of authors he published first in “The Smart Set” and later in “The American Mercury” reads like the Modern American Library. There was nothing conservative about Mencken’s literary judgment--it was as close to infallible as one human being can get in the course of a lifetime. His early devotion to Mark Twain was followed by a passion for Theodore Dreiser’s realism and then the nurturing of such an astonishing range of talent that it’s far easier to list whom he missed than whom he noticed. (He never thought that much of Hemingway and published only a bit of T. S. Eliot.)

As Hobson writes, Mencken “published fiction by Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Cabell, Sherwood Anderson and Dorothy Parker and poetry by Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters and Louis Untermeyer . . . nonfiction contributors for the two years (of The American Mercury) include Clarence Darrow, Charles Beard, Upton Sinclair, Carl Van Vechten, Waldo Frank, Margaret Sanger, Max Eastman, Emma Goldman, Joseph Wood Krutch, Carl Van Doren, Ernest Boyd, Arthur Krock, Josephine Herbst, Bernard De Voto and Sinclair Lewis.”

The recent controversy over Mencken has centered on his alleged racism and anti-Semitism, since the prejudiced old grouch does not measure up to the genteel verbal standards of our day. But as Hobson demonstrates, Mencken “was receptive to black writers, without question more helpful than any other editor of his time.” Among his friends he counted W. E. B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes and George Schuyler. But Mencken also was capable of calling blacks “coons” and sadly, he once went so far as to write, “The vast majority of their race are but one of two inches removed from gorillas.”

“Such a record would seem to condemn Mencken outright,” Hudson argues, “and yet, if his utterances at times suggested severe racial prejudice, at other times his words--and more particularly, his actions--seem, given his time and place, a virtual testimony to racial enlightenment.” Hobson contends that Mencken, in regards to both blacks and Jews, was not prejudiced but “verbally insensitive.”

This, however, is a big stretch, for while it’s true that Mencken was never given to understatement (“lowerbole” was not his game), he was, after all, the author of “The American Language,” still considered by many the best work ever printed on the subject. It’s not easy to think of America’s Samuel Johnson as “verbally insensitive.”

Hobson comes closer to the truth, I think, with this observation: “(Mencken) was alternately blessed and cursed, by nature he would say, both by a penchant for colorful and explosive language--hyperbole, slang and epithets--and by a need to categorize and to abstract everything, including nations, regions, religions and ethnic groups. Thus, rhetorically at least, he lived life more dramatically than most other mortals, attempted more, risked more, said more and said it more colorfully on a wider range of subjects than perhaps any other writer of his generation. The result, depending on what he came out with at any given time, was that he appeared to be both the best friend and the worst enemy of Jews, blacks and numerous other segments of the population.”

As I know to my sorrow, the risks of constantly cranking out opinions into short newspaper columns are glib generalization, superficial analysis and self-contradiction.

When Mencken’s diaries were posthumously published in 1981 and 1989, they touched off a fine brouhaha, as did the 1991 publication of Mencken’s unflattering memoir, “My Life as Author and Editor.” On top of being called racist, anti-Semitic and misogynist, Mencken now stood accused of being a disloyal friend and all-round misanthrope. Hobson’s book helps us understand why Mencken’s world had become so dark even before his crippling stroke in 1948. That Mencken lived another eight years after he was deprived of the ability to read and write was an agonizing tragedy.

While Mencken’s judgments on many of the writers he knew are harsh, it is a fact that a remarkable number of them were raging alcoholics with the unpleasant habit of borrowing money and not returning it. Also remarkable is Mencken’s generosity: He often helped pay all or part of other people’s medical bills, for example, including those of the dying American progressive Emma Goldman.

Hobson’s book leaves me liking Mencken neither more nor less than I ever did: I always both adored his work and disagreed with him, especially about democracy. Hobson does, however, give me a great deal more respect for Mencken.

Working hard is not a fashionable virtue, except among those who like to dwell on the manifold moral failings of poor folks. But the sheer amount of work Mencken turned out is as impressive as its caliber. I even like the strait-laced side and the old-fashion decency of this famous attacker of Puritanism.

Above all, however, one knows that in Mencken, there stood a man you’d want to have a beer with.