Books: Short Notices: Aug. 16, 1968

DO BUTLERS BURGLE BANKS? by P. G. Wodehouse. 191 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.50.

Which came first, P. G. Wodehouse or the English butler? Wodehouse's publishers confess they are not even certain whether he is 87 years old and has written a million books, or a million years old and has written 87 books. Anyhow the figures strain the imagination—but not more so than this potty tale about a bogus butler who sets out to burgle a Worcestershire bank. Connoisseurs of the old master's brand of daffy brouhaha will savor it to the last page. For those who don't trust any writer over 80—well, maybe they should sample a little vintage Wodehouse first, like a whiff of Carry On, Jeeves! (1925), or the tiniest dollop of Love Among the Chickens (1906).

THE CONSTANT CIRCLE: H. L. Mencken and His Friends by Sara Mayfield. 307 pages. Delacorfe Press. $6.50.

Sara Mayfield's chatty account of "the Sage of Baltimore" is another link in the seemingly endless sausage of Menckeniana. Miss Mayfield, an Alabamian who was a close friend of Mencken, is most revealing on Mencken the professional bachelor who finally gave in at the age of 49 and endorsed monogamy as "comfortable, laudable, and sanitary."

Her admiring view of Mencken overlooks much in his work that was malicious. That is not hard to do, considering the Gargantuan proportions of his sense of fun. It is difficult to quibble about a man who, as an agnostic, prepared himself for the possibility of Judgment Day with the statement, "Gentlemen, I was wrong."