H.L. Mencken, America’s greatest journalist, has been a boon to biographers. It would be possible, in fact, to teach a course titled “Mencken Biography,” beginning with Carl Bode’s scholarly “Mencken” (1969) – still a source for Marion Elizabeth Rodgers’s effort, “Mencken: The American Iconoclast” (Oxford University Press, 672 pages,$35) – and continuing with “Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H.L. Mencken” (1986), William Manchester’s “masterful” (to use Ms. Rodgers’s word) work, which benefited from interviews with the subject himself.

Mencken ensured that he would bemuse new generations of biographers by withholding access to certain papers (including his outspoken diaries).Thus Fred Hobson’s mammoth “Mencken: A Life” (1994) drew on new archival sources and surpassed Bode in the scholarly biography category. Then along came Terry Teachout, “The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken” (2002), an engaging work that exploited yet more new archival treasures while stripping the sage of Baltimore to his essentials: “This is a life of Mencken,” wrote Mr. Teachout, “not the life. I have made no attempt to be exhaustive, so as to avoid being exhausting.” Weighing in at a good 150 pages fewer than Mr. Hobson or Ms. Rodgers, Mr. Teachout’s biography – in a larger typeface – is without doubt the winner in the reader-friendly competition. Is his refusal to compete for the definitive ribbon the reason Ms. Rodgers did not even include him in her bibliography?

Selling biographies is all about positioning, and there is a politics of biography that biographers rarely acknowledge. Mr. Teachout presents himself as a standout – not a professional biographer, not a scholar, but rather a Menckenite: “I am, like Mencken, a working journalist, and have spent most of my adult life working for and editing American magazines and newspapers.” In other words, Mr. Teachout has ink on his hands and knows the way Mencken did business.

He does get rather carried away, though, claiming: “Unlike Mencken’s previous biographers, I write, very broadly speaking, from his point of view, and I hope this has helped me understand him more completely than either frankly hostile critics or those admirers who find his philosophy sympathetic but shrink (often quite properly) from its implications in the real world of actions and ideas.” To write from Mencken’s point of view is autobiography, isn’t it? Or is Mr. Teachout merely repeating that he is a journalist writing about a journalist? Mr. Teachout adds that he will put such matters as Mencken’s “alleged anti-Semitism” in an “appropriate historical context.” Well, that is not, broadly speaking, Mencken’s point of view at all, and how could it be?

Ms. Rodgers’s goal is to stake out the high ground, and she believes herself to be nearer to Olympus than her predecessors: “The majority of this biography is based on primary sources, from personal interviews and manuscripts housed in private family collections as well as in libraries in the United States and Germany.” That Ms. Rodgers has been thorough is beyond question. In terms of sheer quantity, Ms. Rodgers has collected the largest mass of Menckeniana. She lists something like 60 archives and interviews dating back to the 1980s. She recounts meetings with Mencken friends like Alistair Cooke, who handed over Mencken letters. “I’ve got the goods,” Ms. Rodgers’s source notes and acknowledgments announce.

It is not so easy to tell, however, how much weight to give those interviews. An interviewee will often be cited at the head of a note that is otherwise referring to sources, primary and secondary that have been available to other biographers for years. This is not to deny that Ms.Rodgers has new and exclusive material, but rather to point out that there is a symbiosis between new and old, between one Mencken biography and another, which her statements about relying on “primary sources” obfuscate.She is too quick to proclaim the divinity of her definitiveness.

Mr. Teachout would have done himself a service by pointing out the futility of the quest for the definitive. One biography is always liable to be answered (checked or corrected) by another, and in their earnestness, definitive biographies overreach. (They are like those great Victorian worthies Lytton Strachey could not resist deflating.) The biographer becomes so grandly involved in the subject that insupportable statements issue from the pen, apparently without any sense of how preposterous they sound to others. Here, for example, is Ms. Rodgers’s Mencken discovering the joy of reading:

No one, especially not those who grew up with and cherish books, can ever forget the electric epiphany of the event, that moment when mysterious black shapes, so small they appear like ants on a page, suddenly and miraculously are transformed into words with meaning.

Did Mencken really experience anything like this? If so, I cannot make it out from the footnote that accompanies the paragraph I’m quoting from.

The redundancy of “electric epiphany” reminds me that Mr. Teachout is a better writer than Ms. Rodgers, and his biography is the one I would recommend, especially if your time is limited to reading only one Mencken life.

Yet there are certain topics unavoidable in any Mencken biography, and on the topic of Mencken’s anti-Jewish remarks, for instance, it can be valuable to read more than one voice. Mr. Teachout is frank and fair, but he could have been more censorious: On the one hand, Mencken’s belief that Jews made trouble for themselves and made it easy for Hitler to attack them was “not rare in the United States in 1933”; on the other, Mencken never brought himself to acknowledge the Holocaust in his writing or to see what a momentous event it was in human history – a “more disturbing matter.” In some ways Ms. Rodgers’s handling of the issue is more compelling thanks to her lengthy discussion of how Mencken’s obtuseness on the subject of Nazi Germany estranged him from his Jewish friend, Philip Goodman. Fred Hobson also provided a searching analysis of Mencken’s pro-German and rather callous views of Jews.

In the end, though, all Mencken biographers – no matter how much or little material they have to work with – present similar pictures of “the American iconoclast” (Rodgers), “the skeptic” (Teachout), and the “elusive Mencken” (Hobson). Mencken attacked reactionary thinking and religiosity (he coined the term “Bible belt”),and he railed against big government and the Roosevelt administration’s welfare programs and bogus “brains trust.” If Mencken remains the greatest American journalist, it is not because of his uncategorizable politics but because of his language. Like Mark Twain, Mencken loved words, turns of phrase, and epigrams aimed at sizing up the world in a sentence:

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people.
Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

He was born in Baltimore, the son of a cigar manufacturer in middle-class bliss, pampered with the notion that his German family had a distinguished heritage and was definitely a cut above most Americans. He never lost a sort of sneering regard for American democracy: “The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.”

Mencken actually voted for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, believing he had to be an improvement on the dismal Hoover. But Mencken quickly soured on a man who cynically pandered to the people. “Democracy,” Mencken quipped, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” If Mencken had been a character in an English novel, he would have dismissed a certain class of people as “common.” He was a great reader of Nietzsche and promoted the novels of Theodore Dreiser, a German-American who was more than a little attracted to the will to power.

But Ms. Rodgers is quite right to extol Mencken the iconoclast. Democracy thrives on criticism and can still be energized by Mencken’s pen. He fought against censorship and convinced Clarence Darrow to take on William Jennings Bryan at the famous Scopes “monkey” trial in Tennessee. If Mencken remains vital, it is because he remains, like Huckleberry Finn, such an engaging critic of American institutions.

Mencken was too middle-class to light out for the territory. Indeed, he never left Baltimore for very long. In old age – even after a stroke – he enjoyed reading about murders in the local papers and about the foibles of royalty. He was a true democrat in the sense that all journalists are – looking always for the story and not caring who was offended. Mencken’s own books on the American language suggest there never could be a last word – let alone a definitive biography. How happy he would be to know that as a subject for biography he has endured as a subject for debate.

crollyson@nysun.com