THE LETTER OF ALEXANDER WOLLCOTT

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1 07 336

OF THE FIRST EDITION OF

THE LETTERS OF

ALEXANDER W'OOLLCOTT

TWO HUNDRED AND

SIXTY-T-WO i^ TJ JVCBEREI> COPIES

HAVE BEEN SOPEOIALLY
BOtJN'I^ IN TWO VOLUMES

FOR THE EDITORS
THIS SET IS NU3VXBER

betters of ^Alexander 'Woolkott

JUso by JCkxander 'Woollcott

LONG, LONG AGO

t

WMJULB ROIME BtJRJSTS

Anthologies

AS YOU \VHRB * WOOLIXXyrT*S SECOND READER
TUB WOOUX30TT READER

Alexander W'oollcott

THIS EDITION IS PRODUCED IN HILL COMPLIANCE WITH
ALL WAR PRODUCTION BOARD CONSERVATION ORDERS

COPYRIGHT 1944 B7 THE VIKING PRESS, INC.

PUBLISHED BT THE VIKING PRESS IN JULY 1944

PUBLISHED ON THE SAME DAY IN THE DOMINION OB CANADA BY
THE MACMTLLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED

PRINTED IN U. S. A, BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN, INC., SCRANTON, PA.

Contents

A portrait of Alexander Woolkott and
reproductions of three letters precede page 1

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION vii

A NOTE ON THE LETTERS xxiii

THE LETTERS

I

CHILDHOOD TO 1910

1

n

WORLD WAR AND
POSTWAR, 1917-1919

21

in

THE 1920's

75

IV

1930-1932

85

V

1933-1935

117

vi

1936-1937

157

VII

1938-1939

199

vin

1940

225

IX

1941

268

X

1942

289

XI

1943

388

INDEX 403

^Biographical Introduction

Alexander Woollcott's letters, even on business matters,
were always personal, and in a personal correspondence a great
deal of knowledge before the fact is taken for granted. We will
not attempt to give a detailed biography of Woollcott, or any
appraisal of him, but only to supply the reader with a factual
backdrop for the letters. Through them, the man speaks for
himself.

Alexander Woollcott, the youngest of the five children, of
Walter and Frances Bucklin Woollcott, was born on January 19,
1887, in Phalanx, New Jersey. The settlement itself, known
as "the Phalanx," was the seat of a co-operative society deriva-
tive, together with the better known Brook Farm, of the eight-
eenth-century social philosophy of Charles Fourier. It was an
experiment in communal living combining agriculture and in-
dustry, and, like all these early experiments, it failed to provide
a living for its members. Within a few years of its inception,
the Phalanx was taken over by Woollcott's maternal grand-
father, and from then on became the Bucklin family seat.

The house was a large, rambling, eighty-five-room struc-
ture which was continually swarming with near and distant
relatives of all ages who came and went continually. In the
years to follow, the Woollcott branch often found it a valuable
refuge in times of financial stress.

[vii]

Woollcott's first two years were lived at the Phalanx. But
Walter Woollcott had an errant nature; he seems to have spent
a great deal of his life migrating from one side of the country
to the other, often accompanied by his family, and in 1889 he
took his brood to Kansas City. There Woollcott first went to
school. (Half a century later his first teacher, Miss Sophie Rosen-
berger, sent him one of his compositions she had carefully saved.)
His friendship with Lucy Christie (Drage) began there, and his
first interest in the theatre was aroused when Roswell Field
(Eugene s brother) took him to see Sinbcd the Sailor. There,
also, he made his first public appearance when he took the part
of Puck in a Shakespearean pageant at the age of four and
was made ineffably happy forty years later by the discovery of a
photograph of himself in the role.

In 1896 the family moved to Germantown, Pennsylvania,
and their summers were again spent at the Phalanx. Woollcott
went to public school, and it was to his teacher, Miss Sorber,
that he wrote the first letter which we have been able to obtain.
At this time his friendship with his schoolmate and neighbor,
George Smyser Agnew, began a friendship which went on
until his death.

Although the Woollcotts were on the poor side, financially
speaking, they were intellectually affluent During the summers
at the Phalanx, music and art were part of the daily life, and
Dickens and Thackeray were read aloud to the family by Mr.
Woollcott. Woollcotts mother and his sister Julie were defin-
itely of bookish tastes; an evening's diversion often consisted of
the reading of Shakespeare, with each member of the family
assigned roles. Julie and he spent long hours together, despite
the fact that she was considerably his senior, the bond between
them was always exceptionally strong, and she had a great in-
fluence in directing his early literary tastes. Amateur theatricals
were his favorite diversion.

By the time Woollcott was ready for high school the family
[viii]

had installed themselves more or less permanently at the Phalanx,
leaving him to board out during the four years he attended Cen-
tral High School in Philadelphia. He helped support himself
during this period by writing book reviews which his cousin,
Miss. Helen Sears, helped him to place in the Evening Tele-
graph and the Record. Whenever he had any extra money he
betook himself to the gallery of a Philadelphia theatre, where
for the first time he saw such stars as Otis Skinner and Minnie
Maddern Fiske, who later became friends to whom he was
devoted.

Autumn of 1905 found Woollcott climbing the hill to the
Hamilton campus overlooking the Mohawk Valley. Edwin
Root, a distant relative and an alumnus of Hamilton, was respon-
sible for this choice of college, a choice which had an enormous
influence on his whole life.

He was a good student. He won his Phi Beta Kappa key
during his junior year; he took an immediate interest in the col-
lege paper, and was editor of the Lit in his junior and senior
years; he founded the first dramatic dub, Charlatans. Woollcott
was a poor boy who went to a college which, at that time, was
also poor. His love for Hamilton was the love of a son who felt
the need of caring for his mother, like him in need. When the
news that the Carnegie Fund had made the college a gift of a
hundred thousand dollars was announced, Woollcott wrote an
ecstatic editorial for the Lit called "Surely Our Cup Runneth
Over."

He became the ideal alumnus; Hamilton always occupied a
large place in his heart and he planned for it with love and care.
Besides helping innumerable boys pay their tuition at his Alma
Mater, he worked assiduously for the Hamilton Choir, which he
transported to New York for yearly concerts to fill their coffers;
he also founded and contributed to a yearly literary prize; he sent
hundreds of books to fill the library shelves. He made substantial
contributions to the college itself and served on the board of

[ix]

trustees for several years. His ashes are buried in the coll
cemetery next to the campus he loved so well.

In 1909 Woollcott came to New York with his diploma in
his hand and got a $15 a week job as a cleric in the Chemical
National Bank, but this was quickly terminated by a particularly
virulent attack of the mumps. Upon his recovery he armed him-
self with a letter from Samuel Hopkins Adams, another Hamil-
ton alumnus, and went to see Carr Van Anda, managing editor
of the New York Times, who put him to work as a reporter. He
seems to have been only a fair reporter; although he loved news-
paper work, the limitations imposed by cold, impersonal facts
were not well suited to a style of writing which was already
showing the earmarks later to become so characteristic. He was
therefore delighted when, in 1914, at the resignation of Adolph
Klauber, he was appointed the Times dramatic critic.

In those days the New York Times obviously considered the
theatre of minor importance. Dramatic criticism was relegated
to a small and inconspicuously placed space in the daily paper,
and Woollcott's pay was $60 a week. It served, however, to allow
him greater latitude in which to develop his own particular style,
and Woollcott the phrase-maker began to emerge. By the time
of the war he had become a well-known figure on Broadway and
an influential critic.

When America entered the World War in 1917, Woollcott
was unable to get into combatant service because of his bad eye-
sight. He enlisted in the New York Post-Graduate Hospital
Unit, afterwards officially known as Base Hospital No. 8, and
went with them to France, where he was promoted to Sergeant
In the hospital he performed the usual duties of an orderly, and
he did his unpleasant job well. In 1918 he was transferred to
the Stars and Strifes, the weekly newspaper of the AEF. His
job as its star reporter took him often to the front. On the Stars
and Stripes were many men who afterwards made conspicuous
places for themselves: Harold Ross, founder and editor of The

[x]

New Yorker, Franklin P. Adams (F. P. A.); John T. Winterich
(now Colonel); Stephen Early, Mark Watson, A. A. Wallgren.
Woollcott stayed in France until six months after the armistice,
still working on the paper.

In the summer of 1919 he returned to this country. He
resumed his job as dramatic critic of the New York Times, and
his first book was published, The Command Is Forward, a col-
lection of stories, most of which had appeared in the Stars and
Stripes.

His vitality at this time was enormous, as was his love for
the theatre, and he bellowed his praise and condemnation so
violently that he became the most influential critic of his day.
Now his reviews were signed, and his eccentric appearance made
biTn a conspicuous first-night figure. He affected a flowing cape,
an opera hat, and a cane, and he was definitely the cynosure as
he swept down the aisle into his front seat in a theatre. The
poses which he adopted at this time were gradually assimilated
into the picture of him which remained in the minds of the
public, a picture which he deliberately encouraged and which
afforded him amused satisfaction.

The next nine years of Wooflcott's life were spent primarily
in the theatre; he left the Times in 1922 for a brief sojourn as
critic of the Sun, but he was not happy on an evening paper, as
he felt that his potency in that position was diminished. When
Munsey sold the Sun he was switched to the Herald, another
Munsey paper. In 1925 he went to the World, then under the
aegis of Herbert Bayard Swope. Here, along with Walter Lipp-
mann, F. P. A., Heywood Broun, Deems Taylor, Frank Sullivan,
and others, he helped to make that paper the most exciting of its

day.

Woollcott's personality made it inevitable that he should
develop both great loves and great hates in the people who made
up the world of the theatre. His enthusiasms ran away with him,
and his praise often was enough to start a long line at the box

[xi]

office. His condemnation, sometimes considered injudiciously
bestowed, was often a death knell. Woollcott's extraordinary skill
in using words obviously gave him power to inflict great pain;
people of the theatre were chagrined and resentful at some of the
phrases relating to their performances. Many of his warmest
friendships, however, were begun because of his praise of
hitherto unrecognized talents. In 1924 the Marx brothers, who
had played in vaudeville for years, came to New York in a
musical comedy (I'll Say She Is) which, because its opening was
during a particularly busy week, was comparatively unnoticed
by the critics. By chance Woollcott attended a matinee, and was
so captivated by the antics of Harpo Marx that he re-reviewed
the play (a brief notice had already been written by a second-
string critic), and his enthusiasm dragooned all the other first-
line critics into seeing the show. This made the play an instant
success and established the Marxes. Woollcott not only recog-
nized the rare comedy spirit of the four brothers, but discovered
in Harpo a quality and charm which made them the closest of
friends during the rest of his life.

Woollcott was now living in a reconditioned house on West
Forty-Seventh Street, where he approximated, perhaps uncon-
sciously, his earlier communal life at the Phalanx. The other
apartments were occupied by Harold Ross and his wife, Jane
Grant, Hawley Truax, Kate Oglebay, an old friend originally
from Kansas City, and another friend, William Powell. There
was a dining-room shared by all and a great deal of informal
entertaining. His days were a happy combination of work and
people. He lunched daily at the Algonquin Round Table with
a group of men and women, still young, who were to become
extraordinarily successful in various creative fields. The Round
Table in its day was the informal meeting place for F. P. A.,
Heywood Broun, Brock and Murdock Pemberton, John Peter
Toohey, Peggy Wood, Margaret Leech, George Kaufman, Marc
Connelly, Deems Taylor, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker,

[xii]

Donald Ogden Stewart, Jane Grant and Harold Ross, to mention
some of them. This group knew each other intimately; their
humor was frequently barbed, and Woollcott took great advan-
tage of his skill in riposte. When his remarks were particularly
sharp, it was not unusual for angry words to pass back and forth,
with Woollcott likely to be the victor. Many people thought him
rude; but it was a rudeness of manner rather than intent The
comedy of insult was quite the order of the day. This did not,
however, excuse him in the eyes of many whose feelings were
hurt

The other great social event which occurred with regularity
was the weekly meeting of the Thanatopsis Inside Straight and
Literary Club, a poker game played each week at the home of a
member. Its personnel was drawn from the Algonquin Round
Table, and was entirely masculine, with an occasional woman
permitted as both dinner companion and kibitzer.

Woollcott's life was full now the theatre was flourishing
and there were often as many as ten new plays to be reviewed in
a week when the season was at its height In addition to his
newspaper work, he had become a frequent contributor to maga-
zines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Vanity Fair, Cos-
mopolitan, Collier's, and he had begun his weekly column,
"Shouts and Murmurs," for The New Yorker. This informal
column concerned itself with a criticisni of a current play, a note
about an interesting murder (a subject which fascinated him all
his life), caustic or favorable comment on contemporary fiction,
or just a recounting of an amusing story about one of his favor-
ites. He also found .time during these years to do more sustained
pieces of writing: The Story of Irving Berlin was published;
a book about Mrs. Fiske; Mr. Dickens Goes to the Play; En-
chanted, Aisles. None of these earlier books had wide circulation.

Woollcott's life had assumed a pattern, adapted to the hours
of a newspaper man. His day began at noon at the Algonquin;
the afternoons he spent at the newspaper; an early dinner, the

[xiiil

theatre, and then to write his review. Later he would take up
again with his guest of the evening; he had supper or joined a
group of friends, where there might be a game of bridge, hearts,
cribbage, backgammon, or anagrams, any one of which he would
play passionately -till early in die morning. He loved to gamble;
but he played all games with a competitive zest that had no rela-
tion to the size of the stakes. Obviously such a schedule left him
little time for letter writing and accounts for the dearth of letters
from this period.

About this time Woollcott began to feel that dramatic
criticism was no longer a satisfactory medium. He had to write
too quickly; his style was at its best when it had time to be sea-
soned; both his truculences and his enthusiasms needed temper-
ing, and he was aware of it. In 1928 he resigned from the World
with no very definite idea of what he wanted to do.

In the next few years he wandered both here and abroad;
twice he took houses in the south of France with friends; he
made many trips to England and went to both Japan and China.

On his return he moved from the house on West Forty-
Seventh Street and took an apartment next to Alice Duer Miller,
on Fifty-Second Street at the East River. Here he thought he
would have greater privacy- That this turned out not to be so was,
of course, no accident; by this time the pattern of his social life
was firmly fixed, and he allotted people small parcels of minutes
with the exquisite timing of a busy doctor. A large calendar hung
on the wall right above his desk; he could see at a glance what
he would be doing every hour of the day for months ahead.

In the summer of 1929 he wrote his first play, in collabora-
tion with George S. Kaufman. The Channel Road, an adaptation
of the Maupassant story, "Boule de Suif," had a run of exactly
fifty performances. Woollcott was not discouraged, but turned
to still another field-^-radio. His first appearance on the air was
on an isolated fifteen-minute sustaining program which he called
'The Town Crier/' It got a sponsor quickly and went on twice

[xivl

a week; from there it was just a brief time until lie appeared on
a national network on a program known as 'The Early Book-
worm/' and his voice saying 'This is Woollcott speaking" soon
became familiar to millions of people. He loved the radio; it
opened up a wide and responsive audience, and one with which
he felt he was in immediate contact Fan mail delighted him; his
pockets were continually bulging with comments from his listen-
ers, which, like a schoolboy, he read to all who would listen.

Throughout his life Woollcott had a reluctance to see him-
self tied up too far ahead, and he never allowed even his radio
life to interfere with his summers. In 1923, with some friends,
he founded a little dub on Neshobe Island, Lake Bonioseen,
Vermont. In the beginning the clubhouse itself was a summer
camp of the simplest kind, with kerosene lamps and life reduced
to the essentials. The wooded island covered seven acres and
guaranteed complete privacy; the lake water had a balmy quality
which made swimming delightful. The club membership, which
did not change much during the years, was composed of such
friends as Neysa McMein, Alice Duer Miller, Harpo Marx, the
Raymond Iveses, Beatrice Kaufman, Raoul Heischmann, Grace
Eustis, Harold Guinzburg, and Howard Dietz. Its pastimes were
swimming, sailing, badminton* croquet, and in the evening all
sorts of games from anagrams to bridge. Woollcott considered
Lake Bomoseen the most beautiful spot in the world at all sea-
sons of the year. He never tired of it and never felt restless; grad-
ually he came to spend more time there each summer, until
soon he was living there six months of the year.

But the theatre bug was still in his system. In 1931 his
friend S. N. Behrman, author of such comedies as The Second
Man and Rain from Heaven, offered him a part in his play,
Brief Moment. Woollcott was delighted from every point of
view; the character was a mild caricature of himself who lay
supine on a couch throughout the play, occasionally exploding
into typical Woollcottian invective, and he was continually on

[xv]

the stage from the beginning to the final curtain. He loved every
moment of it

After the play closed, in 1932, he went to Russia, where his
old friend Walter Duranty, then Russian correspondent for the
New York Times, served as guide. He saw everything there was
to see in the Russian theatre, to the detriment, perhaps, of more
attention he might have paid the Communist experiment; but
he met all the leaders in the contemporary political picture and
returned to the United States full of admiration and respect for
things Russian.

In 1933 Woollcott again collaborated with George Kauf-
man, this time in a mystery play entitled The Dark Tower,
which was also doomed to fail. This was his last attempt at play-
writing and he again turned his attention to radio, in which he
functioned continually and successfully until his death. By this
time his services were in great demand, and he was one of the
highly paid stars of -the air. His subject matter varied greatly;
sometimes he reviewed a pky or a book (his enthusiastic praise
of James Hilton's Goo&bye, Mr. Chips, for example, made it a
national best-seller overnight); sometimes he gave a surprise
serenade to some well-known figure (such as Jerome Kern or
Walt Disney) with a large orchestra and such guest stars as Noel
Coward, Ethel Barrymore, or the Lunts; or he talked of some
organization like the Seeing Eye, which was close to his heart.
It was part of a self-imposed mission to try to stimulate the pub-
lic into reading a book or seeing a pky he thought worthwhile.

He was also popular as a lecturer, but was never willing
to commit himself to a natipnal tour. He chose instead to speak
occasionally at universities, where he might, perhaps, influence
the minds of the young. In 1933 he gave a series of lectures on
journalism at Columbia University, and a little kter another
series at the New School for Social Research. In 1934 his first
best-seller was published, While Rome Burns, a potpourri of his
magazine writing.

[xvi]

Woollcott's life had by now changed completely from that of
his newspaper days. He arose at eight, read his mail, which had
become voluminous by this time, while he drank cup after cup of
black coffee. If he did not have to dictate a radio broadcast or a
magazine article to his secretary, the first visitor would be shown
in promptly by nine o'clock. The procession of guests was steady
until he went to dine. He was extraordinarily gregarious. A Sun-
day morning breakfast went on steadily from nine o'clock in the
morning until four in the afternoon. When Woollcott's apart-
ment became overcrowded, the guests often spread out over
Alice Duer Miller's more spacious quarters adjoining. They
shared so many mutual friends that it became a habit for him
and Mrs. Miller to entertain together, formally as well as in-
formally. In the evenings he wandered among his friends, and
went occasionally to the theatre. It still held its interests for him
and, now that he was no longer a dramatic critic, he was able to
pick his fare more discriminatingly. He loved it now mostly for
the friendships he had made in it, and he often went to out-of-
town openings to see such friends as Ruth Gordon, the Lunts,
Katharine Cornell, Helen Hayes, or the first performance of a
play by Thornton Wilder, whom he admired above all American
dramatists.

In 1936, after eight or nine years of a frantically busy life
in New York, Woollcott decided that his Vermont island offered
"him a much more restful and agreeable routine. He wanted a
house for all-year-round use, and Joe Hennessey, who had been
running the club for several years, undertook to build it for him.
A site was chosen on a ridge overlooking the lake on all sides,
and a low, rambling, stone house was built which became his
permanent home until his death.

With Woollcott established in his own home in 1937, he
became the dominant force on the island to an even greater
extent than he had been before. Even here his innate gregarious-
ness, however, forced him to approximate his New York routine

[xvii]

as closely as possible. He ran the island as a benevolent mon-
archy, and he summoned both club members and other friends
to appear at all seasons of the year; he turned the island into a
crowded vacation ground where reservations must be made
weeks in advance; the routine of life was completely remade to
suit his wishes. He decided which guests were to sleep where;
late risers were assigned rooms in his own house where the early
morning activities of the clubhouse would not awaken them.
Others were summarily called -for a seven o'clock pre-breakfast
dip regardless of temperature.

Breakfast went on all morning, with Woollcott presiding
at the table in a dressing gown. Around eleven o'clock there was
a croquet game if possible; it was always his favorite form of
exercise both physically and in terms of the peculiar competitive
quality which this game, above all others* is able to arouse in its
players. The Woollcott version of croquet is played with long-
handled, heavy English mallets and composition balls which
barely pass through the narrow wickets, and to play it well re-
quires skill at a complicated strategy. The course on the island
is a tiny plot of rough ground surrounded by woods dipping
sharply to the lake, so that balls sent into the woods often re-
quired three strokes to get them back into the dear. It was
nothing for one game of croquet to last three hours. Passions ran
high, including Woollcott's, even when the game was played for
nothing.

A secretary was in constant residence, and Woollcott gen-
erally worked a few hours each day. In 1935 he had edited an
anthology called The Woollcott Reader which quickly reached
a very large audience. Now he followed this with Woollcott's
Second Reader. These were, in reality, an evangelistic enter-
prise designed to make people read his favorites. He did an
occasional series of broadcasts, was a frequent contributor to
magazines, and he lectured here and there at his pleasure. In
the Fall of 1938 he again returned to the theatre as an actor,

[xviii]

this time in another play by S. N. Behrman called Wine of
Choice, and in a part not too dissimilar to the one he played
in Brief Moment. The play stayed on the road for three months
and had a brief run in New York. It then quietly folded in time
for Woollcott to return to the island for the summer.

By now, however, his appetite for acting had been consider-
ably whetted by his two experiences, and when Moss Hart
visited the island in 1939 Woollcott suggested that he and George
Kaufman write a part for him in their next play. The two play-
wrights were delighted with this idea, but in the course of their
planning The Man Who Came to Dinner, it turned out to be
not only a play for Woollcott but one about him. He was
ecstatic, but cool afterthought made him feel that it was in
questionable taste for him to appear in a play in which he him-
self was the protagonist In the eyes of most of its audience, the
portrait of the self-centered prima donna riding roughshod over
ordinary people's feelings was far from flattering. The fact that
he, himself, liked it and longed to pky it is evidence that he
was not unaware of his faults as others saw them. Subsequently,
after the play had become a New York success, the temptation
became too great and he happily volunteered to appear in the
Pacific Coast company. He used the early Fall months for a
lecture tour which took him from New York to Seattle and left
him in Hollywood in January 1940, in time for rehearsals. He
learned the enormous part of Sheridan Whiteside with great
ease. He now had his wish so far as his career in the theatre was
concerned; he was not only playing a leading part, but the play
itself was a big success. And he was in Los Angeles, the home
of many of his friends. Harpo Marx was there, Walt' Disney,
Frank Graven, Charlie Chaplin.

He took a bungalow at a hotel; he had his valet and his secre-
tary with him, and Joe Hennessey was there also. In near-by
bungalows were George Kaufman and Moss Hart, Charles
Laughton, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and her husband,

[xix]

Alan Campbell; between them all and the demanding role he
was acting every night, his life would have been a taxing one
even for a man with more vitality than his. When the play
finally settled for a run in San Francisco in March, the same
life continued, with, of course, the list of friends changed. The
average actor spends his mornings in bed, but Woollcott con-
tinued with outside activities at the same tempo as though he
had not the extra strain of his nightly role on his shoulders. He
still arose at eight in the morning to read his mail and his
papers, he still dictated letters and articles till noon, and his
late afternoons and late nights were taken up by his friends.

Late in April Woollcott had a severe heart attack, his first
serious illness since the mumps in 1909. It necessitated his
immediate withdrawal from The Man Who Came to Dinner,
and the show was forced to dose. After several weeks in bed
he was able to return to Lake Bomoseen for a long period of
complete inactivity. From this time on his health was a matter
of great concern to everyone who cared for him; he never com-
pletely recovered from the serious damage done to his heart. The
attacks were recurrent; the curtain had begun its final descent
and he knew it Each convalescence found him attempting to
return to at least a modified form of his old routine; in the Fall
of 1940 he went on the air electioneering for Roosevelt and
early in 1941 he was back on the road again in The Man Who
Came to Dinner. By this time he had been forced to realize
that there were definite limitations to what his body could stand,
but the curtailment of his activities was a constant sorrow to
him. The hot breath of war could already be felt and he longed
to contribute something for the causes in which he believed so
strongly.

In the Fall of 1941, against all medical advice, he went to
England, and did a spirited series of broadcasts which the Eng-
lish seemed to find heartening. On his return he gave some lec-
tures in the Middle West in the form of a report on English

[xx]

morale in a section of our country which he thought needed it.
This activity brought on another series of heart attacks which
were followed by an operation and a long convalescence, but the
Fall of 1942 found him feeling greatly bettered and functioning
with all his zest of ten years ago.

He came to New York for the winter and established himself
at the Hotel Gotham. He broadcast several times for commercial
programs, he was on "Information Pleace" a couple of times,
he wrote a monthly article for the Reader's Digest, and he also
edited a pocket anthology called As You Were, selected to please
the men in the armed forces, from which he turned over all
earnings to the United Seamen's Fund.

On January 23, 1943, he had a fatal heart attack while
broadcasting on a program called 'The People's Forum." He died
that same night.

To the average man a life devoid of the family relation-
ships which make up the usual human experience would neces-
sarily be an unhappy one; Woollcott found work and friendship,
which he inextricably combined, a satisfactory substitute.

His letters show how much his work meant to him. Wooll-
cott loved to work; he sat down to the actual job of transferring
his thoughts to paper with infinite pleasure, and if the finished
article satisfied him, he rose exhilarated. He was a meticulous
worker who painstakingly searched for the perfect phrase. His
work did not always measure up to his hopes; he knew it was
uneven, but when it was good he was like a small boy who has
just found a full jar of cookies. He entered on each job with
anticipation, as he always felt that his best' work was still ahead
of him. He received both critical praise and condemnation. This,
we feel, is not the place for either.

His letters also show how much people meant to him. He
was unusually sociable and had many more close friends of all
ages than the average person: a boy at college, a neighbor in
Vermont, a young girl who wanted to write, an agreeable com-

panion on a train, as well as important figures of the theatrical
and literary worlds in which he moved. He entered eagerly and
with infinite curiosity into the lives of each and every one of
them; each was an unfinished serial and he looked forward to
every meeting for the next installment. His incredible memory
enabled him to follow these lives intimately and with unflagging
interest Retold and embellished with the Woollcottian touch,
their stories often acquired romance and adventure to such a
degree that the protagonists would hardly recognize themselves.

Friendship with Woollcott was precarious, but this
seemed never to serve as a deterrent. He was capricious, wilful,
spoiled, and at times moody. He was impatient with the obvious
and the trite. These characteristics inevitably brought quarrels.
He wrote angry, cutting, and sometimes cruel letters; none of
them is included in this collection for the reason that the editors
did not receive any. Certainly they exist, but they were with-
held by their recipients either because the fundamental relation-
ship with Woollcott was good enough to blot out whatever emo-
tion the letters had originally aroused, or because the attack was
so vitriolic that they were unwilling to see it published. Most
of Woollcott's quarrels, however, were quickly reconciled. He
accepted criticism cheerfully and was never reluctant to admit
it when he was in the wrong. He was essentially a sentimental
person. He was warm, affectionate, and generous to those he
loved. He liked his friends to like each other, just as he wanted
them to share his enthusiasm for a favorite play or book.

Woollcott's friends found him gay, tender, stimulating, and
steadfastly loyal. These letters are the token of his great gift for
friendship.

Beatrice Kaufman
Joseph Hennessey

[xxii]

A CNote on the Letters

This took is only a small representation of the thousands
of letters which Alexander Woollcott wrote. His correspondence
was enormously far-flung; he wrote with no idea that his letters
would ever be published; and he kept no copies. To prepare
this book, we wrote to his known friends and published notes in
the literary journals, asking that his letters be sent to us. It is,
therefore, quite possible that some whole groups of letters have
escaped us. Some we know are war casualties close friends
such as Walter Duranty and Eleanora von Mendelssohn had left
them tucked away in various parts of Europe. Still other friends,
Ethel Barrymore and Dr. Logan Clendening, for example,
did not save their letters. And correspondence with the friends
he saw most frequently consisted largely of notes arranging
meetings. Yet we received a generous collection perhaps one
thousand to select from, and of these we have chosen those
which seemed of the greatest general interest

Letters from the period of the Twenties are scarcest; then he
was seeing most of his close friends daily around New York and
consequently not writing many letters. The preponderance of his
correspondence came from the last few years of his life, when his
illness precluded his usual activity and enforced a greater leisure.
Still, it has been a satisfaction to us that we have been able to
represent in considerable detail the interests, activities, and asso-
ciates of the most important periods in Woollcott's life. We are

[xxiii]

grateful to all the friends who sent us letters, whether we could
use them here or not

We have done as little editing as possible. Deletions were
largely of material that was repetitious or too personal for inclu-
sion. We have briefly identified people and explained the cir-
cumstances of a letter only when we felt that the point might
otherwise be lost. In deciding when to supply these notes, we had
to remember that what will seem obvious to Woollcott's friends
may be unfamiliar to his larger audience. As notes could not be
repeated, the reference is usually given only on the first appear-
ance of the name. Readers who do not go through the book con-
secutively can refer to the index, where the pages on which notes
appear are indicated with an asterisk. Similarly, first names or last
names used alone in the letters have usually been completed by
us only on their first appearance or when they might be confus-
ing. Material in [bracketsl has been supplied by us; (parentheses)
are Woollcott's.

Woollcott wrote occasionally in longhand, but most of his
letters were dictated. We have retained his salutations and signa-
tures, which often followed a personal whim. Sometimes he did
not like a friend's given name and arbitrarily assigned him another
which pleased him more; other times the names were literary
allusions or were used as part of some private game. We have
followed chronological order; the groupings by years is arbitrary,
for the convenience of the reader.

B.K.
J.R

[xxiv]

THE CREAM OF WHEAT

March 1, 1935

Bear David;

These are the facts:

1: Departing for- Chicago on the night of March 3rd*
2: Address until March 20th Hotel Blacks tone .
3: Lecture at the Convocation at the university

of Minnesota, Minneapolis, on the morning of

March 7th*
4: Broadcast from Chicago Sunday evening, Mai*ch 10th.

Later the same evening, Thornton Wilder,

{Jertrode Stein and I will be the guests of

some undergraduate honor society for several

hours of continuous high. discourse.
5: March 12th, lecture northwestern University.
: larch 14th, lecture Toledo.
7: Jiarch 15th, lecture Detroit*
8: March 17th, broadcast from Chicago,
9: March 18th, lecture Indianapolis.
lOt March 19th, visiting with the Sarkingtons

and inspecting Foster Hall,
11* larch 20th, lecture Chicago diversity.
12 : Harth 23rd, Signet Clufo dinner, Harvard.
13; larch 24th, broadcast from Sew Yorfe City,
I4i larch 26th, visit to Laura. B* Richarda,

Sfcrdiaer* Maine*
16: larch 27th, lecture Bowdels ^College, Bnmswick,

ferch 31t t broadest frow Ikwr Yoa?k City.

1st, death of Xt. leollcott, aa thotw-
cheer.

, danciug id tte streets; hsdf-

all tUj6 schools; baak gioratorium,
I'aea April 3rd.

I

Childhood to 1910

To MISS K. R. SORBER

[WooIIcott was tea years old when he wrote these letters to his public

school teacher.]

Phalanx, Red Bank, N. J.
August, 1897

My dear Miss Sorber,

The Phalanx is just as beautiful as it
always was and everything is so very free here.

I just got here last night and then I was so happy.

You know I spent the night in Jersy City. That is a very
beautiful place. Parts of course are very busy and like any other
city but then of course it has its' pretty spots. A great many in
fact

The catalpa tree's are blooming and makes the front of the
house very beautiful.

It has been to hot to go on the hill this afternoon but I
expect to spend tomorrow morning there.

I will take the spy glass and then I can see what changes
have taken pkce around the country.

My Aunt Annie has a beautiful dog called Don. He is
very intelligent.

I hope you are having a pleasant time, I am.

Your sincere pupil,

Aleck WooIIcott

[11

To MISS K. R. SORBER

Red Bank, N. J.
August, 1897
Dear Miss Sorber,

Please don't detest me for not answering your
lovely letter. Well I flatter myself I did answer it but I lost it and
somehow I let the days slip by.

Do you remember, on the last day of school you read us
about the Indian chief, Pontiac and you spoke of Evangeline.
Well the other day I got it out and read it and I entirely agree,
with you as to it's being fine.

I have just finished the fourth of seven pincushions I am
emboidering (dont consider spelling.

I have just had an old tooth out. When I had gone through
with the terrible ordeal I laughed.

I have hauled out a basket of St. Nicholass and have been
reading them.

We have a lot of company now so I want to go out.

Yours truly
.A. H. WooUcott

To GEORGE SMYSER AGNEW

[The correspondence with his boyhood best friend began when
Wooflcott was twelve. Their friendship continued all his life.]

Red Bank, N. J.
August 21, 1899
Dear Smyser:

I got your litde note from York and I answer it
promptly.

My brother Phil and cousin Tod have started to print old
plates of people and landscape of the Phalanx. They are very

[2]

dear to all of us and so the boys have sold quantities. I have
bought several so you will be glad to see them.

The other day three boys, of which I am the oldest, went
on our wheels to Highland Beach, fifteen miles. We went the
ocean and the river.

I am coming home on September the seventh, I think. I
am very anxious to hear what you are going to say to me when
I come home. I have a presentiment that it is something about
Harriet Pauline. Is it?

I have nothing to say.

Aleck Woollcott

To GEORGE SMYSER AGNEW

Philadelphia, Pa.
June 25, 1900
Dear Smyser,

I rode up to Courdand's house today and he says
he is coming tomorrow and says he will go to the Gymnasium
with you. He received your note. Of course I would not have
mentioned the subject to him had I not known beforehand
that you had asked him yourself.

My dear Mrs. Aleshine are you going in the pool tomorrow.
If you dont it will be exceedidingly malocious and i should not
admire it in the extreme.

My dear mrs. Aleshine the following is a sample of the
ALESHINE and LEGKS UNPRONOUNCEABLE and unheard of vocab-
ulary dictionary.

malocious unmusical and noisy

delupititude . weariness and utyritoyjgheirua745n ness

galavonishaw cartimighetreskellness

Mrs. leeks and Mrs. Aleshine are not responsible for the mean-

[3]

ing or the spelling of their vocabulary but the above is the most
authorized edition of the words and their soul perspirin mean-
ings.

Farewell Farewell

Mrs. Leeks
P.S. It is sweet to be remembered

[The boys had been reading Frank S. Stockton's The Casting Away of
Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine.]

To GEORGE SMYSER AGNEW

Red Bank, N. J.
July 18, 1900
Dear Smyser:

It was very wicked of you not to write to me before.
It was a snipy short letter when it did come but still it is sweet
to be remembered. You spoke of a Bert in your letters. Was it
H.P.D. From the tune of your letter you seem to be having a
good time. I know I am. I have pkyed over three hundred
games of croquet since I have been here. I am in a high temper
just now having been robbed of my swimming.

When we went there today there were two bulls and about
twenty cows bathing. I tried to chase them off but the bulls
looked so feeeiocious I decided not to.

I am going off crabbing tomorrow with five other boys
about my age. We will be gone from about 8 A.M. till 8 P.M.

When I woke up this morning I was hopping mad to find
she had skipped off to Philadelphia for a few days.

I have only been to the ocean once so fer but I will pretty
soon. I have malaria pretty often so I shall proceed to take a pill.

We take the pill, We take the pill etc.

Oh Matilda this place is simply littered up with a huge
painting which I know would make your mouth water.

[4]

The thermometer has been singing the tune of 100 and
I have been so cooked, boiled, broiled, baked, fryed and poached
since the weather that I know all the microbes must be dead.

Have you been to the Y.M.C.A. since I have been away.

I know you must weep so much from pure lonliness and
the pool overflows.

Farewell, Farewell,

Alicia

To GEORGE SMYSER AGNEW

Red Bank, N. J.
July 8, 1901
Dear Smyser,

I have been playing croquet all day and am simply
tired out The set is a new one, down at the cottage (Aunt Joe's
house, just a little way down the road

This far from scientific map may if you are very brilliant give
you a faint suggestion of the situation of the houses.

My dear child, July 22nd is pretty far off but if nothing

15]

unexpected happens, its entirely convenient.

Come to the Phalanx prepared for;

1 Quiet with nothing special to do.

2 Queer people, all very dear to me, but being out in the
country and surrounded only by friends they are apt to be
much freer than they would in the city.

3 Sleeping almost like camping out but with a bed, room-
mosquito canopy & light I fear that after a lively week at the
shore, the Place will seem dull. We can take walks, play (tennis?)
& croquet, go swimming or paddling (according to our several
abilities and the depth of Hop Brook) sit in the hammocks,
explore the please, play with the baby, visit the Richdales, read,
gabble, or do what I do but what will probably be uninteresting
to you, listen to the gabble of my assembled relatives. If that
doesn't settle you, I'm at the end of my rope.

All I ask is to have you go away, pleased with the Phalanx
and not gossip about any peculearities you may notice to Justus.

Yours as ever
A. H. Woollcott

P.S. I omitted in my list eating the fruit which is ripe at the time
& exploring the factory.

To GEORGE SMYSER AGNEW

Red Bank, N. /.
July 30, 1901
My dear Smyser,

Your charming letter received. Sunday there
were sixteen people at the table. Ivy and Ned [Mr. and
Mrs. Root] arrived 'Sunday about 12 M. Ivy had a little gift to
every one on the place from the elder "Mr. Swigger" down to

[6]

Eleanor. She brought me a little purse from Paris, with a coin
from each country through which she traveled. Olive, Julie [A.
W.'s sister], and Mr. Sumner (young Mr. Swigger's brother-in-
law) departed on Monday, bag and baggage, mid weeping,
and lamentations. (N.B. Mr. Stunner's bag and baggage con-
sisted of a valise 1 inch by 3 inches.) We enjoyed our straw-
ride very much. I ate a bag of candy, a bag of peanuts, 2 bars of
popcorn, a glass of Huyler's ice-cream soda, a chocolate Milk-
Shake, and a hot Frankfurter. We had a lovely ride and the
moon was glorious. We sang all the way. We reached home at
half past one Sunday morning. I slept all Sunday morning.

Frank Swigger and Mr. Barker went Saturday. We had a
frightful thunder storm yesterday. It struck just across the road.
I have written to Berry, Waldie, Mamma, and Justus but
have had no answers. I don't know what would happen to Phil
S. if we had a serious battle because I have to blow out his light
and tie his, tie. Yesterday evening he went to bed before me
but staid in his mother's room because he was afraid to go into
his house alone. Have just had some lovely huckle-berry-roly-
poly. It certainly is handsome.

Very truly yours
Aleck. H. Woollcott

To GEORGE SMYSER AGNEW

Philadelphia, Pa.
May 3, 1903

DearS

We will appear tomorrow night (Monday). I am
writing as you told me to warn you when the evil was to fall
upon you.

I have discovered a new way to discover 6*5. Give this
sum in mental arith. to a person whose B you want. For instance

17]

Lyde. Tell her to think of the number of the month in which
she was born, to double it, add 5, multiply by 50, add the day
of the month on which she was born, subtract 365, add 115,
and then ask her the result, which in her case would be 720,
that is seventh month, twentieth day, July 20th, and thus you
can find a persons B without their knowing it.

As in case of Mrs, Murphy this would be convenient.

Adieu

A. H. W.
What gorgeous writing.

To GEORGE SMYSER AGNEW

Theta Delta Chi House, Hamilton College,

Clinton, N. Y.
October 2, 1905
Dear Smyser,

I hope you will pardon the use of the machine but
it belongs to my room-mate and as it is a new kind to me I
practice on it all I can in order to get the hang of it. Arthur
[Richdale] tells me that you were surprised to hear that I had
come up here and I realize that I still owe you a letter. But
things have gone so swif tly since I have been here that I have

only scribbled off a line here and there when I had something

.
special to communicate. Here it is after midnight and I am

starting in on a letter to you.

Arthur perhaps told you that I had been chosen as one of
the four freshmen to enter Theta Delta Chi this year and I am
still trying to realize my good fortune. Until you have actually
entered college you can have no conception of what the word
fraternity means and I myself am just beginning to understand.
Prior to the invitation to join there were box parties, dinner
parties and card parties to give the fellows and me time to look

[8]

each other over and once I accepted the pledge I moved down
the hill and started in my life at the feat house. There are six-
teen of us who live here together, four from each class. These
live the most intimate kind of lives month in and month out,
always together in each other's rooms and partaking in the same
amusements. The house is a large one with fine porches and
grounds and it is half way up the hill on which the campus
stands.

Two ladies act as housekeepers and we all eat together a
senior presiding and he always says grace. It is one of the
principles of the frat to make it as much of a home life as pos-
sible and the 'house is furnished throughout as a large and fine
residence would be. I hope you don't get tired of hearing about
these details as I am very enthusiastic and think of nothing else.

We all go to chapel every morning at 8:30 and have a
short, opening service. Then every Sunday we have a regular
service that is supposed to be non-denominational but the lean-
ings are decidedly Presbyterian. One of the seniors plays the
organ, a big beauty that covers the entire front wall of the
chapel. For voluntaries he always gives some good music instead
of hymns. For instance last Sunday we had the War-march of
the Priests before the service and the third movement of the
Tannhauser overture afterwards. There is a choir of the
eight best voices in the college and we all open by singing a
chant. Then there is the responsive reading which is followed
by singing the "Doxology" and then the "Lord's Prayer'* is given
and then the sermon. I don't think much of Dr. Stryker as a
teacher but he certainly is the most eloquent preacher I ever
heard and he gets his ten thousand a year for that very reason.

We have gymnasium twice a week and do all the stunts
to music which makes it partake something of the joys of danc-
ing school.

Here is a coincidence for you. My chief friend here in the
senior class is Selden Talcott Kinney of Easton, Pa. and it was

[9]

at his father's sanitarium that your very dear friend John Bentley
was staying when he was taking the cure that summer they -were
all at the Phalanx.

I hope you liked the picture of the Victor party. We had
them very frequently and Mr. W, always distinguished himself
by referring to the nocturne as "Choppins Nocterine."

I will close by telling you about the Roots' house
where I stayed the first week I was on the hill. It was built in
1790 for an inn and is altogether the quaintest house I was
ever in. Every room is on a different level and there are little
alcoves and short flights of stairs everywhere you happen to
step. But the thing that would appeal to you is the furniture
which is almost entirely colonial from the pictures to the china.
Room after room without a single stick of modem furniture
in it and I never ceased raving over it.

Tell me all the news and the health reports of the family.

Aleck Woollcott

[The Root family, induding Oren and his brother Elflm, was intimately
connected with Hamilton affairs.]

To GEORGE S'MYSER AGNEW

Clinton, N. Y.
Nwember 24, 1905
Dear Smyser,

Excuse the letter on a typewriter, but I have
fallen into the habit of using one, and I manipulate it with
speed and ease.

I enjoyed your letter very much indeed: it was the first
account I had of your meeting with Helen and Maymie though
since then each of the dames has written me a long and detailed
account of the whole teekish affair. Maymie is in Georgia much
the same as usual, and Helen is still wandering around the
old town.

[10]

It is beginning to settle down to a good old-fashioned winter
as they have it here with 20 below as a common thing and three
months of sleighing as a regular occurrence. Our house is about
three quarters of a mile from the chapel and is supplied with a
set of sleds each marked with the Greek letters of the fraternity.
These are taken up in the morning and the boys come down
to the house in about one minute. You can slide for a mile and
a half without stopping to the bottom of the hill and so far only
two broken bones have resulted this year, which is a much
better record than usual.

I continue to love it here with all my heart and everything
is just ideal. I have several very dose friends in my own and
the upper classes, and there is always so much to do. We gave
a small informal dance here to about fifty people and I was so
tired when I crept into bed at five in the morning that I slept
until three the next day. The boys invite their, damsels from all
over the state and girls pack up and come all the way from
New York just to attend the Theta Delta opening dance. In
February is dance week when the whole week is used in gayety,
and our crowd gives a house party, each boy bringing a girl for
the week and sleeping in the dormitory to leave the house dear
for the girls and their chaperones. There are dances every night
and sleighing parties in die daytime and it costs all the boys
who entertain damsels just about fifty dollars. So yours truly
will go stag.

This sounds as if we never did any work but the course is
a stiff one and no shirks ever get past the first term.

Your mother will expire when she learns that I am still
sporting my entire summer outfit of summer garb with no idea
of donning anything heavier for some time to come. I shall have
to buy some winter underwear, tell her, as I thoughtlessly
neglected to save the remnants of my last year's stock and the
safety pins.

I have made great friends with the old man who owns a

[11]

great estate opposite us and has ten dogs and eight cats. I am
invited there for dinner Sunday, which is provoking as he is
a vegetarian, though happy thought he may have buns and
apple sauce.

I have no particular Phalanx news: Mrs. Root is to have a
pky go on before Christmas. I have neglected to answer Celia's
three impassioned postals that arrived all in one mail. But I really
cannot undertake another correspondent when I have so many
unanswered letters on hand.

Write me all the news

Aleck

To GEORGE SMYSJEH AGNEW

Utica, N. Y.
June 22, 1907
Dear Smyser:

I suppose you received my postal and now Fve
found an opportunity to write sooner than I had expected. My
friend Hawley Truax, who, if you remember, I said was exactly
like you, has a motor here at college and it has broken down
leaving me in Utica, stranded on a hot June afternoon. So I
am writing to you.

Mother forwarded your letter and I was much interested
in all the news, and also much conscience stricken at my long
neglect of my correspondence. I don't see why I don't take a
brace. I certainly can't afford to seemingly ignore all my friends,
yet there isn't half enough time to do aU I want to do, and so it's
only natural dozens of letters go unwritten.

First of all I've had the play to distract my attention. Since
Easter we have been at work on the Sophomore pky in which
I took the leading girl's part. It was a howling success and we
took in a mint of money. I'll send you the special supplement

[121

to "Life" the college newspaper, which was issued in honor
of the play with pictures of the cast in it. Since the play I have
had four large dances and three teas, heastly hot, hut Utica
society just wakes up in June when the men and girls are
back from college. Yesterday I went to a tea and sweated like a
June bride for a half hour and solemnly swore 111 never go to
another. Yesterday noon there was a dear little wedding in
Clinton into which I butted and besides all this exam week is
in full blast. It is hard to shine both in your studies and in gay
society.

It's stupid for me to ramble on in this aimless fashion about
my gadding here which can hardly interest you. Yet you would
love it here, I'm sure. The work takes a lot of time but generally
I do my studying on the grounds of the Root House, lying on
the grass, two of us, smoking and looking out across the valley,
where you can see the tips of the Adirondacks, forty miles away.

I have formed a number of close friends here. I am the
only poor guy in the crowd so they take me motoring, to dinners
and theatres and I roll around as if my pockets were bulging.
My best girl friend is the daughter of the big Grace Church
in Utica, and I dine at the Rectory quite often tho I'm sure the
rector loathes me as a rank heathen, tho he is nice to me and
tells most unrectorish stories when the ladies are not around.
But woe is me the fair Katherine sails for Iceland on Wednes-
day to be in Europe indefinitely, so no more dinners for me at
the Rectory for some time to come.

Commencement week begins Monday and will leave me
dead as a rag. The larks go on day and night till Friday morn-
ing. Monday night there are three dances, Tuesday night there
are three dances, Wednesday the Alumni Banquet and Thurs-
day commencement day, Thursday night the Ball which lasts
till six in the morning, and then they scatter. I shall cut the
ball because of the expense and because I start work at Chau-
tauqua for the summer on Friday.

[13]

Do you know Chautauqua, the big summer school on
Chautauqua Lake about ten miles from Erie? Well I have some
sort of a job there for the summer and haven't the vaguest
notion what I am to do. Still the place is beautiful, the lake
great and the chances for hearing fine music and big speakers
is continuous.

I wish I could have joined the Jamestown [Va.] party which
starts from here on the first of July. About a dozen Hamilton
Freshmen are going down there to roll chairs on the midway;
they get a quarter of what they take in, which will cover most
of their expenses. Still the carfare down there will be consider-
able, and I fancy the chair rolling will be hot work.

I suppose Mother wrote to you and told you what news
there is, that Ella Richdale and John Bucklin each have children,
only Ella's is born and I don't think John's is yet, that the Wooll-
cotts have done nothing in this line at all yet, that Mrs. Oliver
is dead, that Nancy Root is still at the Phalanx growing big and
pretty, and always under the firm conviction that there is no one
in the world like Bam [the family's pet name for A. W.'s mother],
who, as she confided to Aunt Ann, is a fine old girl.

Guy Richdale and June are both in the Standard Oil Com-
pany now and both doing well. They'll probably marry in no
time.

Tomorrow night the Dramatic Club have a box party at
the theatre in Utica to celebrate our success. The play is "Big
Hearted Jim" which sounds pretty rotten and I guess it will be.

If you will write me I'll try to answer more promptly.

Aleck Woollcott

[14]

To GEORGE SMYSEH AGNEW

Chautcntqua, N. Y.
July 21, 1907
Dear Smyser:

Your letter was so duly appreciated that here I am
answering within a reasonable time which is quite remarkable.
I don't know where Mamma got the idea that I was coining to
Phalanx in September. It would be entirely too expensive a trip
and so, between the week that College opens and the time my
work ends here I shall visit my room-mate Len Watson in his
home in Westfield, about ten miles from here on Lake Erie^
From there we shall probably go to Hamilton together. At any
rate I shall take in Niagara on the way which is near here.

So I guess I don't see the Phalanx before Xmas at the earliest
and unless I have some unexpected expenses this year, maybe
I can save up enough to go down to Philadelphia Xmas week if
you people would put me up for a day or two. I hate to think of
not seeing the pkce again for another year so I shall make a
desperate effort to come then.

You needn't sniff at my occupation for the summer. Almost
all the waiters at Chautauqua are college men and we get board
and room for our pains. All we have to do is to come at meal
times, serve our table and clear it away. Then we all select a table
and eat our own meal generally a table in the tents which
surround the St. Elmo. There are four boys and three girls and we
have a very good time.

My other job, as janitor, requires about a half hour's sweep-
ing every day and I have to take tickets for the occasional lectures
and concerts given in the hall so you see I have most of my time
to myself. I have read a whole library since I've been here,
wrote twenty-two letters the first week, and go swimming and
rowing when it's warm enough.

I suppose that last sounds queer for I've read how rotten
hot it's been in Philadelphia at the time of the Elk's parade,

[15]

But it's cool'enough here for Chautauqua sits some 1300 ft. above
sea-level. It's a great old place with six or eight entertainments
every day all free. They have the finest music in Chautauqua of
any resort in the country. This is music week and all the big
authorities are to lecture on different subjects. There is to be a
course on the life of the great composers, and every night they
give an oratorio. This being Sunday they give Haydn's "Creation"
in the amphitheatre a choir of four hundred the quartet and
orchestra. You would enjoy it no end.

Last week they had the Prize Spelling Match. New York
against the rest of the world. I went in for New Jersey and
covered her with glory by missing the first word they gave me.

Write again when you have time and give my love to all
your people.

Aleck H. Woollcott

To GEORGE SMYSER AGNEW

Clinton, N. Y.
November 4, 1908
My dear Smyser,

I have probably lost your good opinion per-
manently by my erratic ideas about correspondence, but it is
really very hard for me to find much to write about, when Mother
tells you all the Phalanx news and the accounts of my own doings
would be filled with names that are utterly unfamiliar to you.
Howsumever I think of every one I know there in Philadelphia,
probably far oftener than they think of me, and unless some-
thing unforseen comes up to interfere, I shall most certainly
accept your invitation for the holidays, coming down sometime
between Christmas and New Year's.

We are to have eighteen days vacation and that will leave
me time to gad about New York a bit, and some time for the

[16]

Phalanx and Philadelphia. Marian [Stoll] as you probably know
is in Germany, which is too bad as I should like very much to
see her. I came very near to going over myself last spring and
indeed I threaten to go every once in a while but it doesn't seem
very likely just now. Phil Welch wants me to go in January
with him, but it would certainly be foolish to have gone this
far with college and then throw it up just for a chance to see
Europe.

I was in Utica Election night, taking dinner with the
mother of the girl whom I hope to marry some day, and she
played "Hearts and Flowers" for me. It started me thinking of
your mother, and thfe horror you used to express when she tried
that old favorite of yours. Out of this started a train of thought
that led to this letter.

I have been doing very little of interest this Fall. Senior
year is one of few studies and beyond the editorship of the college
magazine I have very little on my mind. Phil Welch and I
are very apt to spend the large part of every day together, and
that means Utica and the theatres when his pockets are full and
my room in the dormitory when they are empty.

I have a great fireplace in my room, with woodboxes which
the Freshmen are supposed to keep full, only they don't. Last
night the snow was so thick and the wind so noisy that we dark-
ened the room, and ky all evening in two Morris chairs in front
of the fire. It is a harmless way to spend a few ihours. About ten
we sent a Freshman over to Commons for some eggs on toast,
candy and cigarettes, with the result that I have a rather sour
stomach this morning. It is still snowing and the sleds are out in
full force, which will give you a hint as to the climate here.

I don't know what started me thinking of it, but there
came into my mind the other day the recollection of Courdand
Baker playing priest on the third floor of our house on Walnut
Lane. I can see him now, and smell that ghastly odor of incense
that he managed to stir up somehow. That house wasn't half bad

[171

and we used to have some pretty good times there. Ask your
mother if she remembers how she s used to prophesy that it
wouldn't be long before we were back in it again, which is rather
pathetic now that you come to think of it As far as I am con-
cerned everything has gone beautifully. I never have had four
such wonderful years and I never expect to have again.

I think it is high time that I came back, however, and
refreshed my mind a little. I picked up my old birthday book a
few weeks ago and for the life of me I couldn't remember more
than half of the names in it. I hope I shall have a chance to run
out to Germantown and see Miss Wilcox and Miss Montgomery.
But it will be vacation time and they are always queer and out of
their element when you visit them in their homes.

I don't think there is any recent Phalanx news that would
interest you particularly. I am pretty rusty on it for I'm there
only once a year at Christmas, and for the life of me I can't
remember where all the people are.

You must tell me when the time comes what part of the vaca-
tion would be most convenient for you to have me, so that I can
make my plans accordingly.

Excuse the typewriter but I use it almost all the time.

Yours as ever

Aleck

To GEORGE SMYSER AGNEW

Red Bank, N. /.
7^x29,1909
Dear Smyser:

You would have heard from me before this but I
have been sick and unable to write. Two weeks ago I was at
Lillian's and woke to find a swelling behind my ears. That
suggested mumps. It took me about two minutes to fly into my

[181

clothes and start for the Phalanx, Frances was here for the week
and Julie.

I was pretty sick and got worse. By Saturday I couldn't
move and had to he lifted from the bed and then that beastly
complication set in and I am still here tho better. Sunday was the
worst. Julie in one room undergoing a slight operation and I in
my room where three injections and several doses of morphine
brought small relief. Mother was flying around in a fine state.

Julie has gone back to New York and I expect to go by
Monday.

Your letter reached me all right but my address is 34 W.
12th St. where Phil Welch and Julie and I are all rooming. I'd
be glad to see an occasional Record.

Affairs here are by no means settled but I think Aunt Julie
and Mother will descend into their graves from this pkce and
no other.

Aleck

To GEORGE SMYSER AGNEW

THE NEW YOBK TIMES
September 24, 1909
Dear Smyser,

It is too bad that most of my plans for coining to
Philadelphia never amount to anything. As you see by the above
heading, I am located here as a young and hopeful reporter,
instead of being on the Philadelphia Record, but I nonetheless
appreciate your sending me the paper.

I am sorry that you avoided me so carefully when you were
in the city. Julie must have seemed a little dopy, though I
doubt if you realized that she was so sick that she could hardly
stagger. She collapsed that night with a horrible attack of indiges-
tion. I am glad to be here on her account, not that she isn't far
better able to take care of me than I of her. She gads around some-

[19]

thing fierce, as your friend Bert would say* I did four theatres
myself last week: a number of the fellows were in town on their
way back to college and I took my last fling before starting work.
Miss Atherton was here too on her way to Vassar. She stopped
at the Martha Washington and I got passes to go up on the roof
where we had several barn dances before we were stopped by the
authorities.

It is great up here in the Times: we are in the tower of the
Times Building and can see all over the city on all four sides. It's
great at night and will be fine as an observation ground during
the coming week.

I can't tell you how much I enjoy my newspaper work. It
will never bring me any money but I love it and that's enough.
There have been some gay times this winter. I see very little of
Julie who has her friends, interests and work while I have mine*
We do meet at breakfast.

There is no news from the Phalanx. Julie, Frances, Uncle
Will, and I went down for Labor Day and saw the Monmouth
County fair. My first and last Mrs. Giles had resurrected an
antique quilt of hers which won a live dollar prize, to her great
delight The plans of the family as a whole will take more
definite shape after the first of October and I will let you know
the news whenever there is any.

I don't expect to get away for Xmas: it will be the first spent
away from the Phalanx since that memorable one in 1907, when
I gave a few readings at the Mennonite after the comic opera was
given up.

Give my best to the family and let me know how Mrs.
Deaney fares. I think she is a greater favorite with Mother than
anyone she met in Philadelphia. Oh by the way, Helen Sears
[A. W.'s cousin] is to be in New York hereaf ter. I tell you that
you'd better come over. The rats are leaving the old ship.

Yours sincerely,

Aleck W.
[20]

II

World "War and Postwar
1917-1919

To MRS. ALICE HAWLEY TRUAX

[During his early days in New York, Woollcott made the' Truax house
his home. Hawley Truax had been one of his best friends at college.
Mrs. Truax was Hawley's mother; his sister Katharine married Lloyd
Stryker, another college friend; and his brother was Chauncey Truax.]

New York City
June 9, 1917
Dear Mrs. Truax,

I have not written because I had nothing to
add to the news Katharine [Truax Stryker] was able to carry
with her to Blue Hill. I do not yet know when or where we are
going; the entire unit is a pawn in the war department's game.
We think we are going to France and we think we will be there
before the first of July. But we don't know and one of us doesn't
care. I haven't any idea what I will do different work at dif-
ferent times, I imagine. As a tentative preparation, I am brush-
ing up my French, arranging to have it spoken to me several
hours a day. Roche, whom you met, and Alphonse of the Metro-
politan Opera, are helping and I have put an ad in the Courier
for the services of "un Frangais bavard ou une Frangaise s&ieuse.
C'est amusant, n'est-ce pas?"

I feel like a pig to go away leaving my things strewn all
over your apartment I think much of my raiment, shoes, shirts,

[21]

etc. might well be bestowed on the City Mission or Salvation
Army. Of the books, only those on the lowest shelf are greatly
treasured. The rest can go to Malkans if there is not room for
them in the celebrated Chest. When the time comes for you to
move or whenever they are in the way, will you consult with
Julie about their storage, either in a warehouse or at the Phalanx?
As for our financial entanglements, I will turn over a lump sum
to Hawley on the eve of departure.

If we do not sail next week, I shall try to go to Commence-
ment and to take Hawley with me.

I have bought a rubber life-preserving suit, quite a structure.
It fits over me like a baby's crawling-suit, very rubbery and very
bulky, so that I somewhat resemble the gods in The Gods of
the Mountain. It keeps one warm, upright and afloat for days,
with a whistle to summon help and a pouch for food, stimulants
and light reading matter The Atlantic Monthly, I presume. I
tested mine in the Howard plunge and it worked like a charm.
Heywood Broun wanted me to stay in the tank for four days as a
true test but I declined. He was interested because he was to
sail today and I suppose he has. He ordered two suits, one for
himself and one for Ruth Hale now, and since Wednesday,
Mrs. Heywood Broun. He goes as correspondent for the Tribune.

I will complain to the Times about the subscription.

Aleck

To LAWRENCE OILMAN

Governor's Island
June, 1917
My dear Brother Gilman,

The only cloud on the memory of a

most delightful evening is the fact that I found no trace of my
watch next morning. I remember looking at it in Delmonico's
and it occurs to me as possible it may have slipped to the floor

[22]

instead of into one of the many new pockets with which I am not
yet on intimate terms. It is open-face an old watch with a back-
case of beaten gold. Will you inquire after it in Delmonico's
and if, by any wild chance, it is in the pound there, send it to
me here and forever oblige

Yr obt. servant
George Washington

[Before Wooflcott sailed for France, the New York critics gave him a
farewell dinner. As music critic of the North American Review, Mr.
Gilman was one of the party.]

To MRS. ALICE HAWXEY TRUAX

Governor's Island
1917
Dear Mrs.Truax,

When you get this, you will know that my days
on the land in this land are numbered. Thereafter my address
will be as follows:

PRIVATE ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY FORCE

AMERICAN EMBASSY

PARIS
FRANCE

U. S. BASE HOSPITAL #8
FRANCE

It sounds rather formidable, doesn't it?

Everything here on the island has been outrageously agree-
ablethe men, the food, the equipment, even the drill, strangely
enough. I have just come in from an hour of marching and feel
as fresh as a daisy.

I shall never cease to be grateful to you for my home of the
last two years. I wish I could say it in some way to make it sound
more than a mere formal acknowledgment If it had not been

[23]

there, ready and hospitable and sympathetic, when I came back
from Baltimore last Christmas, I do not know what would have
become of me. You and Hawley will be always in my thoughts
and of course I shall write whenever I can. Love to Katharine.
Au revoir,

Aleck

To JULIE WOOLLCOTT TABER

[Woollcott's dose relationship with his older sister, Mrs. Charles Taber,
is brought out in the letter to Lucy Drage, on page 79.]

On Board an American Transport
[Received September 11, 1917]
Dear Julie,

On what ought to be the last day of our voyage, I
have dug my writing case out of the bowels of my barrack bag
and brought it up on the f orecastle deck in the hope of writing a
few letters to be mailed after we reached the land that should
come over the horizon before sundown. There is really not much
I can say except that I am feeling serene and uncommonly well.
I am assuming you will have received official word of our arrival
long before this letter reaches you.

I acquired a new typewriter just before we set sail and
when if ever we are finally settled, I know I shall feel more
like writing you. If ever a letter arrives that is full of odds and
ends of our doings over here, please pass it on to Mrs. Truax for
there isn't going to be an awful lot of time for writing.

We were all so displeased by the unsavory old transport
that originally bore us from shore, that everyone grinned from
ear to ear when we were rammed and had to be taken off. Our
present craft is an immeasurable improvement, and though the
huddled sleeping quarters and the unimaginative meals have
staggered those who have never roughed it at all, I have emerged
quite unruffled after a curious voyage that has really been

[24]

mighty enjoyable. You know I haven't a decent minimum of
fastidiousness and I have enjoyed every day.

I don't know where we are going or how soon we are to be
at work and as far as I personally am concerned do not know
for sure what that work will be. But I do know that whatever the
work, the co-workers will be congenial and everything thus far
has been much, much pleasanter than I had any right to expect.

I got the typewriter in the hope that from time to time
I might be able to write pieces for publication. It will be some
time before 111 know how much if any time I will have for writing
and how much if any of what I write will get through. By way
of an experiment I wrote a piece for the Times yesterday and if,
after a while, you should encounter a little sketch on life aboard
a transport, you will know more of our trip than I have written
here.

Our officers are an agreeable lot with no disposition what-
ever to lord it over us. Among the enlisted men, there is every
variety a nice miscellany. I have made new friends and encoun-
tered old ones. When we were on the old Saratoga, I slept my
one night on deck and about four in the morning, a captain of
artillery went along waking everyone up and sending them below
because the ship was about to move out. I came to in time to hear
him say 'What the hell are you doing here?" and found it was
Fritz Burrows who was in college with me. Again, when we
came aboard this transport, the first person I met was Bob Hull
who was a Theta Delt of my time at Hamilton. He is crossing
with another hospital unit.

The crossing has been as calm as Hop Brook and we have
been able to spend practically all our time on deck. We have
eaten on deck, bathed on deck and slept on deck or some of us
have. It's rather fun to roll up in army blankets arid poncho and
go to sleep on the forecastle deck under the stars and it's not
half bad to come shivering up at four and stand in front of a hose
to get your bath.

[25]

This morning I sang in the choir at morning services to the
great amusement of the ungodly and now we are all polishing
our boots and side-arms and mending up generally to look neat
and pretty for the French. This letter will be mailed from France.

With love

Aleck

Next day

P.S. Just a line to say that after as wildly exciting a morning as I
can recall, we are all smiling at the land which seems not more
than a stone's throw from die bow. I wanted to add too, as a
message to Aunt Julie, that Nelson Sackett * is an exceptionally
fine fellow, much liked and already designated a corporal. We
are the best of friends.

A.W.

* Nelson Sackett is Anna Benson's boy a Princeton under-
graduate.

To MBS. ALICE HAWLEY TRUAX

With the American Expeditionary Farce
September 2, 1917
My dear Mrs. Truax,

I am sitting as I write in the garden be-
hind a house taken over by the YMCA, seizing a free hour for a
letter to you. The chief burden of the letter is that I am well and
busy and cheeful. If I do not write much more than that, it is
not because I have anything painful or sensational to conceal
but because a long list of censorship rules makes me falter and
I do want this note to get through with my greetings. I think
the very fact of a censorship cramps one's style, no matter how
innocent one's prattle, so I have attempted nothing but postal

[26]

cards. Besides, I keep my mind off America and all the folks as
much as I can. There is no use being riven by homesickness all
the time. But you mustn't forget me.

Some day, when it's all over, 111 take an evening off to tell
you of our unforgettable crossing: that should have a chapter
all to itself. It seemed pretty good at last to get the first sight
of the red sails of the fishing crafts, to see people waving to us
from the fields and catch a glimpse of an American flag flying
from some housetop. We were an old story to the gamins of the
quai when we finally reached our moorings but they were all
ready with fruit to throw on board and our first greeting and
tribute was a well-meant pear which hit one of our men in the
eye.

We were pretty glad, too, to reach what appears to be our
quarters for some time to come a quainter and more picturesque
town than ever I saw when I was in Europe before, unbelievably
remote in spirit from this war and this century. When we had
leave, we would clatter over the cobble-stones to some seamy little
buvette for dinner. I remember one dinner that consisted of bread
and butter, fried eggs innumerable, salad, plenty of red wine and
milk, cheese, preserved cherries and coffee, and the check for the
four of us was only six francs. I remember, too, the evening when
I disrupted the whole town buying some stuff tr&s pratique
and engaging an old woman to make it into laundry bags for a
procession that formed as soon as my enterprise was discovered.
And I remember the excitement in a tiny, old imprimerie when I
discovered a story in French by O. Henry, author of "Le Chou
et le Roi." I was so agitated at this souvenir d'enfance that the
shopkeeper was much affected and kept exclaiming, "Comme
vous &es sensibles!"

Everything was so serene and agreeable there and our hikes
along the blackberry lined roads were such picnicky jaunts that
I've no doubt it was good for our immortal souls that some of us
were transferred to another post for some hard though temporary

[27]

duty. This detached band (of which I am one) knows not the
day nor the hour where (if ever) it will rejoin its unit and we are
too busy to think much about it one way or the other. We had
all become such good friends that the splitting up, even if only
for a short time, was quite gloomy.

My French has served me well and I can even negotiate
messages over the telephone. One of my first assignments was
to find, borrow and bear off a frightful old harmonium for the
Chaplain, and the French that was shattered on that occasion was
shocking to contemplate. I find it flows easily enough and that
I can understand even the most voluble.

I have seen few people I knew though just as I sat down to
write this letter, a young YMCA secretary blew up and intro-
duced himself as Whitcombe, Hamilton '17. He tells me he saw
Tom Orr two months ago in Paris and that Tom was as fat as
butter and fully determined to go to the French school for artillery
after he had served his time in the ambulance.

I am afraid all this is pretty idle chatter but I'm not moved
or encouraged to send you any searching revelations. Ill just add
that I'm glad I came and am already satisfied I did the best and
most I could. Will you ship this note on to Julie instead of tear-
ing it up. My best to Hawley and Lloyd [Stryker Katharine's
husband] and Katharine. Think of me once in a while and when
the war is over, watch out for my knock at the door.

Alexander Woollcott

To JULIE WOOLLCOTT TABER

Base Hospital #8, AEF, France
September 23, 1917
Dear Julie:

I have had several letters and enclosures from you, and
a letter from Aunt Julie the last dated August 27th and,

F281

since then, no word at all from the other side of the Atlantic.
Our mail comes in bunches, and I am getting hungry for another
bunch. I have it in mind to drop you a postal every week, so
that you can keep track of me even when I have no chance or
mood to write.

I have always hated to write letters until all was tranquil
and settled and completed for an indefinite period, but, if I wait
for such intervals here, you will not hear from me until the end
of the war. If I were to try to tell you what a day is like, I might
with discreet omissions get away with it, but, by the time
the letters reached you, as like as not I would be doing some-
thing else, and living a totally different existence. It cramps
my style.

I can say that, so far, everything has been varied, interest-
ing and satisfying, and I cannot imagine anything happening
which would make me regret for one moment that I had come
across. Most of the time, I am busy at the desk of the receiving
office in the hospital to which a group of us were sent some
weeks ago for temporary duty. But I also go out on the ambu-
lances a lot, and have all manner of miscellaneous work all the
way from carrying a coffin for an officer's funeral, to bringing
milk and chickens from, the farms for miles around, and trying
vainly to persuade the old Frenchwomen to gather the wild
raspberries that are so thick along the roadside, but which they
have scorned for so many years that they don't propose to pick
them at this kte date.

In the evenings, if we are free, we gambol downtown, to pick
up the latest gossip from the front; to talk with men who have
been to Paris; to buy chocolate and other less innocent beverages,
and to pick up all the rumors concerning the arrival of new-
comers from home. The air is full of rumors. Soldiers in transit
sit around the little terrace cafe tables, and tell stories of the
death of kings. Paris editions of the Chicago Tribune, the New
York Herald and the London Daily Mail are to be had, but

[29]

there is nothing in them, and the New York Times, by which we
all swear, is, at least, two weeks late. You all know much -more
about the war than we do, and I'm sure you talk about it much
more.

Once in a while, we meet old friends as the stream passes our
way. The other day, for example, one of the ambulance drivers
from a near-by camp dropped in on me with an invitation to a
small, but select, Hamilton dinner of five. It was great fun as one
of the crowd was a Theta Delt. We sent a post card to Dr.
Stryker, and signed our names somewhat unsteadily upon it.

I think I have relished nothing more than my excursion with
the mess-sergeant into the country to teach the natives how to
clean the chickens we buy from them twice a week. We needed
a chicken and some boiling water. The chicken was obtained
after we had convinced little Frangois that we would not take the
gray one which he was fattening for his father, due back from the
front the next Sunday. Then we went into the kitchen of the
old house a very old house that had been a fine chateau before
the Revolution. We sat around the smoky hearth, waiting for
the water to boil in the kettle swinging over the twigs, while
the old woman brought out her red wine, and the old man poured
it out I wanted to explore upstairs, but I was given to understand
that it was scarcely clean enough for inspection, and I guess
that was true.

These little excursions break in pleasantly enough on our
days, which run from 5.15 ("daylight saving" schedule) to 6.
We all work hard enough. If you are driving an ambulance or
running the operating room, you are happy, and if you are work-
ing in the kitchen, or holding raving spinal meningitis patients
in bed all night, you are not so happy, but, in the long run, I guess
it doesn't matter much.

I am afraid this is all very disjointed, but I write a paragraph
every once in a while between ambulance calls and other
interruptions and the result is confusion. I see by the mail bags

[30]

that pass our way that there is some method of addressing old
magazines vaguely to the soldiers and sailors in France for general
distribution. Any magazines and books especially books you
may address to me, will reach far and wide. I yearn for The New
Republic, but I am scarcely settled enough now to subscribe for
it. Do mail me a copy now and then.

We hear the Red Cross notice of our safe arrival reached
our folks after a week and more of delay. I shall be curious to
know when and how the news reached you.

I am very well. I haven't had an hour's sickness since I saw
you. The day we landed, I fell on the deck and wrenched my
ankle badly enough to tear a ligament, so I rode in state over the
ground covered by our first hike, and then got on well enough
with the aid of a Sayre bandage.

Goodbye.

Aleck

To JULIE WOOLLCOTT TABER

Base Hospital #8, AEF, France
October 2, 1917
Dear Julie:

Not your first letter, but your first answer, reached
me yesterday, and I promptly acknowledged it with a serial post
card. I have now laid hold upon this simple but tasteful station-
ery to write you a letter^ which I shall begin today and finish
when I can.

I do not remember whether I wrote and told you that
Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale tracked me to my lair, and
demanded that I either report at once for a week-end in Paris,
or clear the decks for their descent upon me at the hospital; I
have fended them off until I can see a little way ahead. A week-
end in Paris! That, of course, is impossible. I know how Mrs.

[31]

Fiske feels when her friends urge her that it is too rainy for her
to bother going down to the theatre. Ruth is toiling on the Paris
Army Edition of the Chicago Tribune, and they are happily
domiciled on the Boulevard Raspail, and she still insists on being
known as Ruth Hale. I found her note tremendously heart-
warming.

The other day, while we were in the throes of receiving
ambulance-loads of patients, I discovered that Lieutenant Lin-
coln a much-admired man hereabouts, and, I imagine, an
exceedingly competent physician was from Worcester, and
knew the Tabers well.

We are all the time running across traces of home that way.
I found one of the ex-members of the Times staff, the other
evening, embracing the buxom proprietress of a little chocolate
shop in town, and learned from him between embraces that
Phil Hoyt is a captain in the National Army. Think of that!

You must tip me off as to whether my letters come to you
in a mutilated condition. So far, none of mine have been scorn-
fully returned by the censor and no wonder, for I have been
insipidly discreet, and evaded trouble by saying nothing at all.
You must tell me, too, whether, on receiving the letters which I
confide to the post without postage, you have to pay anything.
As Bam used to say, "Don't forget to answer that question." Also
this one: Was there a postcript about the last day of our voyage
on the letter sent you from the ship? [The next line of writing
was deleted by the Censor.]

I am afraid that by this time you are quite bewildered by
the myriad addresses I have given you. The latest official address
is at the head of this letter, and my intuition tells me it will be a
fixed address for some little time to come. You must not imagine
that I have skipped about France for every change of address.
Usually, I have remained stubbornly stationary, while the address
changed over my head. As a matter of fact, our crowd is just now
scattered to the four comers of the earth, various groups on

[32]

detached service doing every conceivable kind of work. I do not
know when all will come together again, but I am under the
impression that those of us who have been working here at one
of the emergency points will be replaced before the week is gone,
and so be free to journey back to our own headquarters.

This is really an eventful week. We are ingenuously expect-
ing to be paid off tomorrow. They have a little song here which
(to the tune of "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah") runs something

like this: r> i t n

Every day we sign the yayroll,

Every day we sign the payroll,
Every day we sign the payroll,
But we never get a G D cent!

This is spirited but untruthful: We do get paid in sufficient
abundance, but we know neither the day nor the hour.

Also, this week, we recover the stolen hour. We rise every
day, except Sunday, at 4.15. The clocks say 5.15, but they don't
deceive us. Next Saturday, this hour will be formally returned to
us while we sleep, and (as we always have an extra thirty minutes
sleep by way of keeping Sunday holy) we shall luxuriate in an
hour and a half extra sleep that night. These little blessings
are much appreciated.

However, you would not think our life very vigorous, I
am afraid, if you could share one of the chicken-and-sweet-potato
dinners they serve to our detachment (however differently
others may fare), or if you could see the dozen Roger & Gallet
tubes of shaving cream at present under my bunk, or if you
could go to Victorine's with us for chocolate and cr&me-au-
beurres of a pleasant October evening when the work is done.

I got this far with my letter on the 2nd, and here it is the
night of the 6th. That impression of mine was fulfilled. I am back
at headquarters after an absence of five long, toilsome weeks.
The return was accomplished after as fitful a series of starts as
that which ushered us from the States. You may remember we

[33]

were forever starting. Well, the last two days on detached
service were spent in the same way. We were all packed up,
even unto our soap and tooth-brushes, for forty-eight hours
before the relief arrived, and, in the dark of the moon, we set
forth in a train of ambulances for our own post. There is no
describing the serenity of this ancient spot with the unbelievable
sunsets, and the music of the angelus coming through the twi-
light I am mighty glad to be back.

I had a fearful shock, however. An American mail had
arrived just before we reached here sack after sack of it, and
not so much as a card for me. I think some letters must be delayed
not gone astray for good, but delayed. One of the boys who is
betrothed to a dazzling vision of a girl, has heard from every one
else in the world, but never a word from her! I have had letters
from many people in France newspaper guys and other men
on service at various stations but, from America, no one has
been true to me but you. I suggest that you number your letters
so I shall know if they are all reaching me. Here it is the 6th of
October, just two months since we sailed, and not a letter have I
had save yours and those you have forwarded to me.

Every man here has, apparently, come from a family which
reads the Tinzes, for they have all had clippings from that excel-
lent journal for the llth.

Au revoir tout va bien.

Aleck

[34]

To JULIE WOOLLCOTT TAPER

Base Hospital #8, AEF, France
Late October, 1917

Dear Julie:

I find the. only way to get a letter written in these
parts is to start valiantly forth upon it and take it up from time to
time until you think the hour has come for it to he signed and
entrusted to the Censor. I have started such a letter to you
several times of late, but whenever I have come back to it it would
seem so dull and peevish. Peevish, because it is difficult to take
one's pen in hand without mentioning the uncertainty of our
mails, and that it is a subject for sulks. The mail that blew in
here last Sunday after a three weeks silence, brought me your
letter of October 2nd, a request from the Fanners Loan and
Trust that I subscribe to the second Liberty Loan, and a note from
Myra Holmes, wanting to know who this John Corbin was. I
was afflicted because I had signed, have been in olive drab for
three months been away from America for almost three months,
with never a word from the old crowd in town, from Mrs. Fiske
and the stage folks, from the Truaxes and the Hamilton bunch.
I was enraged because the Fanners Loan and Trust, after cheer-
fully professing ignorance of the enormous sum I transf ened to
the Paris Bank, had the nerve to circularize me for a loan to
which I had already subscribed over here as handsomely as I
could under the circumstances* However I realized that I need
not think myself quite forgotten, for I can never feel sure all
these far-away friends have not written me again and again. Per-
haps some of the letters will show up some day. Those who keep
tab on such things by having their letters numbered serially, will
get the first, second and then the seventh, in the most discon-
certing way. Some who know that many a letter must have been
written, will get none at all, or perhaps just a note asking why
they have not written, when, as a matter of fact, they have written
often and laboriously ever since their arrival. I know one boy

[35]

who is frantic because his mother has not heard a word from
him or had not on October 6th. I know a young father who is
pretty worried because the last letter said the baby was sick, and
there hasn't been another letter for six weeks. Then, on the other
hand, some are lucky and emerge from the mail distributing with
a dozen or so of letters and as many packages. I found one
embarrassed young man with enough sweaters to keep the entire
AEF comfortably warm all winter. So it goes all very puzzling
and depressing. I would wash my hands of the whole matter, and
bend my attention entirely on the absorbing work and the lik-
able crowd around me, if it were not for you and a few others
I really cannot banish from my thoughts. All this I started to
say yesterday, but it sounded so ungracious to roar with rage
about a mail that had, after all, brought me a welcome letter from
you. However, you understand.

Anyway, I feel amiable today. I have just received word from
the Fanners Loan and Trust that, after all, they did have author-
ity to cash my checks, from the Paris branch, or from another
branch in a certain town just an hour's drive from where I now
sit. At first they had disowned me utterly, and this gave me a
forlorn feeling of being without any outside resources at all
nothing to fall back on in case I should have the bad luck to
break my glasses often, or something like that. It was the more
of a blow because I am not yet rid of all my "chip-of-the-old
block/' spendthrift habits of civil life. For instance, I casually
order a rather costly edition of Les Mis&rables to be sent from
Paris to the funny little book shop in the town here, and then
too, I sent to Paris for the score of Pierrot the Prodigal which a
young chap who is an exceptional musician plays for me once
in a while those dear melodies which produce an exquisite
nostalgia, as you can imagine. I can pay for all these little flights,
never worry but it reduces me to scant funds, so it is a com-
fort to know that money is within reach, if an emergency should
arise. Then too, I am feeling especially amiable because this

[36]

morning's .post brought me another expansive, warm-hearted
letter from Ruth Hale, together with the news that she and
Heywood are meditating a descent upon me here this coming
Sunday. I will put them up at one of the comic old hotels in this
dear old town, and I shall get old Madame Lefeuvre to prepare
one of her extraordinary dinners with omelette au kirsch (blaz-
ing), with veal, perhaps, cooked with mushrooms and chestnuts,
most appetizing. "Ti&s, tr&s bon, M'sieur" as die always roars
from the doorway while we eat her dinners.

They are making great plans for a Christmas Eve in Paris.
I get plans of the apartment on the Rue Raspail with my room all
marked with a cross to show where the body will fall in a stupor
from overeating; and they swear they have the seats to the opera
already reserved. I kugh ironically at such didoes, but, whereas
I can't say it will be Christmas week, I can say I hope and expect
to spend five days in Paris before the winter is over. Our party
is akeady made up, and we shall go to my little old Cornille in the
Latin Quarter, and I shall see Wythe Williams and Walter
Duranty, and Ruth and Heywood and it will be a real reunion.

I must rush away now, for the mess hall has been cleared
for the dress-rehearsal of a vaudeville bill to be given there
tomorrow night in honor of Hallowe'en, and for die general
amusement of the patients, the personnel, and stray neighbors
and other AEF folk who happen to be. with us for the moment.
I have a one act pky in it which I wrote one night last week,
and which we have been rehearsing in the x-ray laboratory
whenever we had a chance. Schuyler Ladd is playing the leading
part. It is called "And Ye Took Me In" tell Hawley, who will
understand and be ever so scornful.

Two days kter.

Well, the show is over and was a real success. We encoun-
tered our troubles when we brought the scenery into the mess

[37]

hall, intending to make a stage out of the mess tables and plant
the set on top of it. There wasn't room and we hated to cut
down the scenery because it was a remarkably workmanlike set
made by an engineer corporal who is serving in France as a
carpenter, and who had been a stagehand for twenty-five years.
We were in -a quandary when the engineers came gallantly to
the rescue, offered us their new barracks as a theatre, knocked
out the end of it, built a stage in a few minutes, roofed it over,
put in the scenery, knocked out a stage entrance, ran up head-
lights and footlights, strung a curtain, and really gave us as
perfect a theatre as you could ask, with perfect acoustics. The
Unit is large enough to provide all sorts of talent. One of the
men is a costumer in civil life, and the ravishing creation he
made out of nothing was unforgettable. Another is an organist
of repute and he led the orchestra, recruited generally, and expert
enough to step into the breach without rehearsal. The play
my play that is employed two of the boys and three nurses, and
was devised so that the men could appropriately appear in their
own uniforms, and was so loaded with local humor that it could
not very well help going over. Schuyler was splendid and
patiently developed all the others. He is a marvel of good humor,
consideration and dignity one in a thousand, and the least
actory actor I have ever known bar none. Our audience was in
high good humor, with the Colonel and the Major in the seats
of the Mighty, with a mass of minor officers, with the nurses and
secretaries and non-coms filling a good portion of the hall, to say
nothing of all the patients who could be trundled down from the
wards, and a few favorites from the village, including a hero of
the Marne, who was wounded three years ago, and lives now in
our town. *

I am afraid this letter conveys the impression that we have
come over here on a spree, but you should see me unloading
freight cars in the pouring rain, or presiding at night as ward-
master in a syphilis ward, or measuring dead darkies for their

[38]

coffins. I put these in because they sound impressive but I must
admit I had the time of my life in the syphilis ward. Then of
course the grim work really lies ahead of us, except for those
who or rather some of those who have gone forward on
detached service, much as we did a few weeks back, to be gone
we know not how long.

Five days later.

It is just as well I didn't sign this letter, and consign it to the
Censor, for in the interval since I wrote the last paragraphs, we
have had a flood of letters one from you, and one from Aunt
Julie (very melancholy) and one from Mrs. Truax, and one
from Mrs. Fiske a great rush of letters, entirely restoring our
good humor. Then too Sunday morning before the first mess,
and while I was racing in extremely fatigue uniform across the
courtyard of the Hospital, Nelson Sackett, who was corporal on
guard at the moment, came with the news that a lady and gentle-
man were inquiring for me and in the faint light of dawn, I
discovered Ruth and Heywood waiting for me at the gate. They
spent Sunday with me and are staying over until tonight They
went to mess with me at noon, went out with us on an ambulance
call during the afternoon, dined with me en ville in the evening,
and altogether made it a full rich day. It demoralizes me to
mix my old self with the new this way, but I enjoyed it just
the same. I enjoyed it hugely, and I look forward to seeing
them at Christmas time, which is now fairly certain.

All the letters speak of Brother Corbin, but I never read his
stuff, not from spleen, but because I would rather not read the
Times at all. I have no news from the old set around Times
Square, except the tidbits Ruth passes on from Paris. There
has been a terrific row between Arnold Daly and John Williams,
in the course of which, I hear, Daly sent John five closely type-
written pages of insults. He then sent carbon copies of the

[39]

letter around among the managers, and one of them is on its
way to Ruth in Paris. It is to be passed around here and we are
all to initial it and forward it solemnly on its way in the most
military manner possible.

Heywood is sending back a story about our play. Keep your
eye out for it Read the Tribune.

Much love always.

Aleck

[John Corbin took Wooflcott's place as dramatic critic of the
New York Times.]

To MRS. ALICE HAWLEY TRUAX

Base Hospital #8, AEF, France
December 4, 1917
Dear Mrs. Truax,

Your letter which you began to write me on
the 4th of last month and wound up several days later found me
here yesterday. It came along with many other letters a real
treasure of a mail which I carry around with me inside my
blouse and re-devour every time I get a chance. Our letters come
all at once after days and weeks of silence. We hang on to them
for days, snatching odd moments to read and reread them. I take
mine to bed with me and go through them in the last half hour
before taps.

Here was this letter from you and a letter from Hawley
sent on from the camp at Allentown. There was a letter from
Tom Smith, the agent who handled my stuff for the Century and
who writes to tell me he is now managing editor of that moribund
publication so that he can just slam in any of my stuff he wants
without having to ballyhoo for it. A convenient arrangement.
Then a brisk little note from Walter Duranty my old pal of the
Paris Times office hailing my advent there at Christinas time.

[40]

Then a dear letter from Prof. [William P.] Shepard, two long
letters from Julie, two very comforting letters from the Farmers
Loan and Trust who had previously agitated me by mislaying
my money letters from the Times office and bit of a Christmas
card from Greta and her mother.

This letter of mine to you must serve as a Christmas greet-
ing not, I hope, the only one to reach you through me for, if
fortune is kind, you will receive a modest Christmas gift, an old
card case, of no conceivable use in this day and generation but
something to leave lying around to prod an occasional memory of
one who thinks of you often with the greatest affection and
gratitude.

It is true that my letters must necessarily be an uneventful
chronicle but, whereas there are hundreds and hundreds of things
I might say but would not be allowed to say, still none of those
is really of vital importance. I know nothing big and significant
about the war that you yourself do not know. The censorship is
vexing but it is not really choking back anything worth mention-
ing from me. Indeed, I am not sure you have not a far clearer
view of things from the vantage point of West Fifty-Seventh
Street. I think we in our corner see the war less clearly, talk of
it less often and think of it far, far less. You have no idea how
isolated is each little bit of the Allied armies how entirely con-
cerned with its own community tasks, pleasures, hardships and
intrigues. I remember, when I was back home, that I was
amused at the comfort the British correspondents drew from the
woe and discouragement of the prisoners they took at Messines
Ridge. Naturally enough the prisoners at Messines Ridge felt
that the end of the war was at hand. They didn't know any-
thing about it, but from their point of view, it seemed as if the
thing couldn't continue another twenty-four hours. And I
imagine that a great hospital, splendidly run far back of the Riga
front, would feel as if everything were going wonderfully well,
even in the midst of a complete Russian rout So if I were running

[41]

some small office in some small hospital on the Western front,
all would seem well if that office went well and we would seem
pretty badly off if that office ran badly. I can imagine that Haw-
ley's notion of the war will, at any given time, depend on how
well his car runs. It really is that way.

I am well and busy fairly busy with the ordinary coming
and going of the hospital and especially busy during the past
month with our preparations for die Thanksgiving show which
fell to me this time each of us at all inclined that way must
take charge of one of them. The unit is full of talent so that if
it were ever possible to count on a rehearsal, the thing would
be easy enough. As the major number of the bill, I did a hasty
dramatization of Leacock's "Behind the Beyond" with Mr.
and Mrs. Audience and a dramatic critic sitting in a box and
keeping up a chorus of remarks on the play. It went fairly well
and would be fun to do really some time.

We gave the show Thanksgiving Eve in the new convales-
cent barracks across the road, before a miscellaneous audience of
patients (some crazy), visiting colonels and majors, engineers,
marines, our own men, our own nurses, French guests of honor
and the washwomen from the village. I made an opening address
in French that would have agonized Hawley and then stage-
managed the rest of the evening, with Schuyler Ladd you
remember the Daffodil in The Yellow Jacket as one of my
stars and Bobby Burlen, a side-partner of Walter Wanger's at
Dartmouth, as the other. The show made enough of a hit for us
to have to give a command performance at the big camp eight-
een miles away. That was pulled off last evening. Late in the
afternoon I assembled my troupe and we trundled off in ambu-
lances to the next town, where we were dined in state at the
Officers Club there and then went out to camp to pky in the
YMCA before an audience of a thousand men mostly enlisted
men, very keen, very cordial and simply starved for something
to laugh at. They gave us a royal reception and things really

[42]

went with a bang. I shall always remember the departure of the
pkyers by moonlight, when, after gulping down some hot
chocolate and gathering our props and costumes together, we
piled into the ambulances and drove singing home along the
country lanes, arriving long after taps. I enclose an all but invis-
ible snapshot of the dress-rehearsal where I can be f aintly seen
standing in the box. I write all this with the slight uneasiness that
it will seem to you we are all frivoling over here, but you needn't
worry about that. Not that there have been any hardships. I
haven't experienced anything that could possibly be called a
hardship since I landed in France. I have at times had to work
very hard and have had tribulations of the spirit mostly self-
made of which I would rather not speak or write till I can see
them in some sort of perspective. But life has been far more
comfortable than any of us expected and it may continue so for
a long time to come. The food has, for the most part, been good
quite good enough. Now and then sugar is lacking or butter but
we have plenty to eat and the spreads we can buy for very little
in town are simply luxurious. Dinners of partridge and rabbit,
beef-steaks and perfect omelettes, patisserie worth going miles
to eat and plenty of hot chocolate. At least so it has been with us
in our out-of-the-way corner of France and that is all I know
about

I may see more at Christmas time for I am planning to go to
Paris to spend my five days leave with Heywood Broun and Ruth
Hale. I am dashed by the news that they plan to leave .for
America shortly after the holidays as his job is done here. He
came over to cover the arrival of our troops and that story has
pretty well written itself out by this time.

Very likely Ruth will be back in New York before the end
of January. I shall ask her to call you up or write to you with an
eye to seeing you. She will be able to describe our life here more
vividly than I can do by mail. She and Heywood came in upon
me one Sunday morning just as I was racing across the courtyard

[43]

to mess and they stayed for two days, exploring everything and
making friends on all sides. I want Ruth to call on you and
on Julie and to tell you anything you want to know. She herself
has been far nearer the front than I and can tell you many things
I have never seen and may never see. We never know.

Will you give my love to Katharine. Give my best to
Hawley and to Lloyd. And to Alethea [Rudd]. I shall try to
write each of them before another week is past. Remember me to
Mary, if , as I hope, she is still with you. I often think of her and
her heavenly puddings. I often think of her with contrition when
I make my bed and tidy up my barracks box. Tell her I lie so
still in bed that I never take the covers off more than once a
week and tell her that I never throw anything down anywhere.
If ever I come back, you will find that, whatever else it has done,
the army has produced a house-broken Alexander.

This letter has run long enough. I am sending it out pretty
dose to the anniversary of a very desolate time. I shall never for-
get how kind and comforting you were this time a year ago and
I look forward always to a time when I may come back to you
and Hawley.

Alexander Woollcott

To JULIE WOOLLCOTT TABER

Base Hospital #8, AEF, France
December 10, 1917
Dear Julie,

I have postponed writing this for so many days
that now I am pretty sure it will not reach you in time for
Christinas. I will be luclqy if it arrives in time for your birthday.
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, many happy returns of the

Even if this letter is late for Christmas, I hope at least one

[44]

of the two Christmas gifts I have planned for you will arrive
before that day. One of them is a useless sort of bag, made from
an ancient altar-piece and dispatched to you long since, via
Paris. The other will come to you from New York thanks to the
machinations of that Carolyn Talcott

I have a miscellany of small things to say to you. First I
must answer your question about Nelson Sackett, who tells me,
by the way, that his mother is sending me a book. I don't know
what book nor why. Of course I see him daily. The day your
letter arrived, I remembered having seen him that morning
with painful clearness for he conducted morning exercise in the
bright moonlight a little way down the road from the hospital
and quite upset me by his solemnity on that occasion. He is
in great fettle today for he has gone on the pleasant detail of
visiting one of the several debarkation ports and camping there
on the lookout for Christmas packages due this unit. I trust some
of mine will arrive, for several people have written me from
back home telling of things dispatched in my direction and I am
hopefully on the lookout. Nelson is an uncommonly nice fel-
low and very devoted to his mother of whom he speaks in the most
homesick accents I ever heard. For a long time he had no luck
in getting letters from her and he was terribly low about it but
they started to arrive at last and I take it from his manner that
they have been coming steadily ever since.

I must send you this extract from a letter from Walter
Wanger. You remember Walter was the Dartmouth prodigy who
managed Nazimova and was a great pal of mine. He has turned
up somewhere in Italy and I have a note from him which says:

"I was sitting in my room today after our first American mail
came in one of my fellow birdmen asked me if I knew by any
chance a wayward cousin- of his that lived in NY and lately had
departed for France. When he said 'Alexander Woollcott' I
sneered and admitted that I once had a press agent by that name
and no sooner had I said those words of confession than, opening

[45]

a letter from my sister, I found the pleasant surprise your
note. In short, what John Corbin would call a coincidence; some-
one with the original spirit of Roi Cooper Megrue capped the
climax by remarking, What a small world it is after all/

(Curtain)
Next morning

Trite, theatrical but effective.

Alexander Woollcott, NY Times

Note. The realism of the story is that your cousin Walter
Woollcott's son of Raleigh, N. C., is bunked in the room here
a delightful and nice boy with no weak tendencies toward that
evil thing the theatre!"

I thought this would interest you.

Long discouraging interruption at this point. Letter resumed
two hours later.

I was delighted to get Lucy's [Drage] letter which came
trailing along some time after the first announcements of it I
fell to thinking of how wonderful she is and what a gift she has
for holding on to people no matter how many years and how many
miles and how many new interests come between. She puts so
much of herself into a letter and herself is so extraordinarily
vital that I feel all warmed and thrilled even by a letter months
old which reaches me second-hand. She is one of the wonder-
people of our life, isn't she? What do time and space matter
to such spirits as hers? Send her my love.

I am still hoping to get to Paris Christmas though all manner
of things, such as quarantine or a sudden inundation of patients
or whatnot might abruptly put an end to our giddy series of
Paris leaves. If I go I shall stay with Ruth and Heywood in
'their apartment while the others of our party go on to the
University Union. Ruth has planned all manner of festivities.
She has a tree and Christmas gifts waiting for me, she has a
room prepared, she has guests invited for a series of dinners,

[46]

Walter Duranty, of course, and Wythe Williams and Viola
[Williams] and others who are in Paris now. I am desolated
by the probability that they will sail for America in January
and leave me alone. However, if that befalls as I think it will,
I shall ask Ruth to get into touch with you and with Mrs. Truax
and tell each of you all it is proper for her to tell of my adven-
tures in the past four months. She can tell you it in an interest-
ing way because she is a gorgeous lady with a heart as big as the
AEF* I imagine, by the way, from something she said, that she
has written you of her visit to my peaceful haunts.

The other day I snatched a twenty-four hour leave and, in
company with a boy I like enormously, I visited the cathedral
town near here I have been there before. In the afternoon,
after lunch with Schuyler Ladd and one or two others, I went
a-shopping to buy gifts for some of the men to send to their
folks and searching all the antique shops for a present for Ruth.
I found a most extraordinary Louis XVI fan of ivory and point
d'Alengon but it cost 300 francs and I am not as rich as once
I was so I left it in the shop. I found some old seventeenth
century chessmen of ivory but they seemed purposeless and in
the end I went to dinner empty-handed. That night we went
to hear Offenbach's Barloe-'Bleue sung by the local opera com-
pany very passably by the principals with the aid of a chorus
of women who resembled nothing so much as the old crones
in the illustrations of a W. W. Jacobs story. After a luxurious
hot bath we went to our luxurious and virtuous beds and came
home next day in the rain. I blush to admit that we caught the
train by the skin of our teeth without time to buy tickets and
that the ticket-taker accepted our pass as some mysterious author-
ity for traveling free on his road. I imagine the French, in
their polite and silent way, are secretly disgusted with the
extravagance of the American soldier. It must be hard for them
to understand his luxurious way. He may be the merest of
buck privates like myself but he has a way of taking the best

[47]

room in the best hotel and of preempting the best seats at the
opera. We ought not to do it but there you are. *

I never finish a letter like this without an uneasy feeling
that you will gain the impression we are all here on a spree. You
little know if that is what you think. I tell you the incidents of
my hours of ease, but even now I have to work darn hard had
to work sometimes to the point of absolute exhaustion and we are
only just beginning. The program at our particular point in
the line is a staggering one and the imagination reels before the
work that lies ahead of us just a little way ahead.

I have written giddily to avoid getting on the subject of
Bam and the anniversary which tomorrow will bring. But I do
want to say that as I think of how enormously sympathetic and
hospitable her heart was and when I. think of how she shared
everyone's sorrow, that it is well she left the world last winter,
well she has been spared a time so full of heartache for so
many people and sure to be full of woe before the business is
through. I find life indescribably poorer because she is not
living but I am glad she is out of a troubled world which would
have saddened her last years beyond even your great power to
comfort and cheer.

And now no more for a time. Don't mind being forty-five
and never doubt I will come back to you and spend the rest of
my days close to you.

Aleck

To RUTH HALE

Base Hospital #8, AEF, France
January 12, 1918
Dear Ruth:

This is an arrow shot into the dark for I know not
whether you two have set sail for home. I came back from Paris
only to be engulfed in such a quadrupling of our work as makes
me think the days of comparative leisure are over for good and

[48]

all. It left me not a minute for writing even to you and then,
when I planned to make amends by telegram, I got caught up
myself for a few days as a patient in the hospital and never had
the chance to send my farewell message to you.

I think after all, I won't try to thank you for your amazing
creation of a Christmas, Til just send my love and my blessings.
I think a special providence watched over our party: it would
not listen to any of the things that tried to interfere. And let me
tell you this last shining evidence. On the very morning I left
you and started back to work, word went forth that the pleasant
custom of Paris leaves was thereby suspended throughout the
AEF for all and sundry I was only just in time.

I came back to find my bunk buried completely under a stack
of accumulated Christmas boxes, and still they come. I came back
to find that the ever astonishing David Belasco had started send-
ing me magazines in such droves that I can supply the whole
hospital. "I came back to find our work piling up to staggering
heights (for us) and no end in sight. Heywood's simply execrable
story on our little hospital dramatics has begun to arrive from
various sources and when I saw to what rank he had magnificently
appointed me, I understood in a flash why he had looked so
enormously guilty and contrite throughout those halcyon days
in Paris long ago. Tell him I don't mind at all.

This doesn't pretend to be a letter and I don't promise ever
to write a real one again to anyone till this business is over. But
I wanted to report present and I'll do that every once in a while.
I shan't pretend to be full of jollity and glee when I'm not nor to
be bursting with health if I have spinal meningitis. As a matter
of fact my present brief hospitalization is traceable to eye-strain
and Dr. Devol is in charge of a moody, fractious patient who
has nothing much amiss with him and who has not earned the
extra sleep and egg-nogs he is getting. You will be thrilled to
learn that I have not smoked for two days the first recess in ten
years and that I'm not finding it particularly hard. Above all,

[49]

dear Ruth, I shan't dissect myself again and again to show you
the progressive corruption I know is under way in my soul in this
ignobling enterprise. Maybe it'll be because I am realizing a
little late that it really doesn't matter so very much what hap-
pens to my dirty little soul.

My love to Heywood and Arthur Hopkins and my best in
the world to you. Here's to our next meeting.

Alexander Woollcott

[Note on letter, from Dr. Devol to Miss Hale.]
Dear dear Miss Hale I want very much to see you. I wish you
might be here at "Alex's" bedside in Ward 3 of course you
would have to wait your turn as there is a constant line. He is
much better you will be happy to know. With much love.

Faithfully

Edmunjl Devol

To JULIE WOOLLCOTT TABER

Base Hospital #8, AEF, France
January 26, 1918
Dear Julie:

This is another scrappy note written as a stop-gap
between my last long letter to you and the next. It will be a few
pages. full of nothing, for I have no eventful things to relate,
and no typewriter within reach, and without one it is so hard
for me to be garrulous.

Yesterday came your letter of January 3rd, and Aunt Julie's
as well, and many others one from Arthur Hopkins telling me
he had sent me the script of Madame Sand which I would most
tremendously like to see, and one (a very charming one) from
Mr. Van Anda telling me the [Times] office had sent me a Christ-
mas box. It is one of two Christmas boxes that have failed to

[50]

reach me yet the other sent by the [Brock] Pembertons and
that set. The first Christmas of the AEF was bountiful beyond
anyone's imaginings such heaps and mounds of packages, truck-
loads of packages, something for everybody, boxes from mothers
and fathers, boxes from schools and clubs and offices, and boxes
for no one in particular. My two boxes from the Phalanx
were among the first to appear. They were held, as most of
the Christmas mail, at the nearest port, and delivered here
on Christmas Eve, so that I got my hands on them only after
my return from Paris. It reminded me of that first Christmas at
the Phalanx I remember the one in '95, when we were all very
poor and Bam warned me not to expect much, and then was
quite overcome because everyone on the place literally every-
one contributed something to the Christmas of the youngest.
You must thank everyone for me. You see Charles' paper before
you, and of course you spotted your envelopes.

I am so thankful it was neither of the Phalanx boxes which
went astray, and if any of mine are lost to me for good, I hope
some other soldier has them rather than the fishes of the deep.
There has been a good deal of that I imagine, although each
organization had its man stationed for a fortnight in advance at
each of the big ports. That was what Nelson Sackett was doing,
by the way. Mrs. Sackett sent me a book of essays by Crothers,
of whom I heard Brother Burton [Dr. Richard Burton] sing the
praises more than ten years ago. Very charming stuff, but I know
now what book I would want if I were cast away on the prover-
bial desert island with the just one book for company. It would
be The Golden Age, by Kenneth Grahame. I sent to Paris for it
shortly after my arrival, and have read and reread it since, and it
is the only thing I have been able to read with any pleasure or
with any attention for several months past. It is one of the
perfect things in our imperfect world.

On my birthday very timely came a sumptuous box from
Professor Shepard with so much in it that it was evidently

[51]

intended for distribution a dozen pentii-sfiarpeners, a dozen
trench mirrors, etc., etc. I made the acute medical ward and the
mastoid ward perfectly happy the night of its arrival.

I think I told you I had been in hospital myself for several
days. I escaped as soon as possible, but as I was forbidden any
close use of my eyes for several weeks, I elected night ward
work as a substitute for my regular job, and have been enjoying
it immensely enjoying the night hours, the escape from the
crowd, the sleeping in a squadroom of eight instead of a squad-
room of fifty, and, above all, the chance to slip downtown every
afternoon for a walk and a dinner. The night men go on duty
at 6.30 P.M. and work till 7.30 A.M. the rest of the day is gen-
erously bestowed on them by a grateful government.

Those dinners in the village are unforgettable. I particularly
like M&re Cocaud's, an inconspicuous little buvette I stumbled
on our first night here back in August. Since then, it has been
almost too popular, particularly with some of the draft boys who
are doing their dirty, noisy best to make it uninhabitable. But the
night workers, dropping in at 4.30 of a winter's afternoon, can
get the sole table in the kitchen, right beside the open hearth
where, with a single frying-pan held over the crackling twigs,
M&re Cocaud can make the most extraordinary dinners of
sausage, omelettes, French pancakes and honey, coffee, etc., etc.
No matter how many come in of an evening for dinner, they
must wait their turn, for M&re Cocaud will not add a stove or
even another frying-pan to her stock. Nor can she be induced to
make a profit out of us, but keeps her prices way, way down, as in
the days before the war. She was a very sad little woman when
we first came, talking all day long of her brilliant young son
who was killed in the second autumn of the war. There were
always a few furtive tears when we tried to talk with her, but
the boys have become her great solace, and she is all smiles these
days, and never so happy as when every table is full, and she is
flip-flopping the crapes in the frying-pan. A dinner there of

[52]

sausages and strawberry jam, crfepes and honey, bread and butter,
coffee and milk, will cost anywhere from 3 to 4 francs, and be
worth going miles to eat.

Tell Aunt Julie I should enjoy an occasional glance at The
Bookman, and tell Charles I have no photograph in uniform for
his collection, and would violently decline to appear in such a
gallery. I have not seen much of the war, but I have seen a good
deal of the AEF, and if I could describe it faithfully, if I could
give you a cross-section of the men's thoughts, if I could show
you the motives that control, if I could suggest the Sammy's real
feelings about France and the French, and the French emotion
on the subject of the AEF why, it would be hard to prevent
any previously cherished sentiment about our expedition from
dying, or languishing at least, for lack of nourishment. In all
events, let's don't celebrate it until it has done something.

(I don't know why this sour outburst at this point.)

I am gkd the things came through safely from Paris to you.
With Ruth as adviser and purchasing agent, I got some little
offerings for you and Mrs. Truax and Mrs. Fiske and Alethea.
It was back in November we did it and my memory is a little
vague, but I am under the impression that the enamel box was
added by Ruth on her own hook to the altar-piece I got for you.
Maybe by this time, or rather by the time you get this, you will
have seen Ruth. She and Heywood sailed on the 19th. She will
have so much to tell you. I wish she and Heywood could come
down and visit you for a few days. I wish you could get to know
her. She is a most tremendously fine person, and he, of course,
is a dear.

I am hating to think of the hard winter you are having and
of the hard winters to come. I'm glad I'm over here. I may have
my glooms from time to time, but I'm always gkd I'm here.

Aleck

[53]

To JULIE WOOLLCOTT TABER

Base Hospital #8, AEF, France
February 14, 1918

Dear Julie:

I imagine it must be a relief to receive another letter
from me written on a typewriter, for I have been out of touch of
one these last few weeks, and my hand-writing has been abomi-
nable for several years past. I have used a pen so seldom.

Of course I am fierce homesick. I think anyone 'who goes
around the AEF with a long face ought to be shot at sunrise,
but on the other hand, anyone who is here in this year of grace,
and does not feel sad and homesick, must be an insensible clod.
There is none such that I have found. Of late, and almost for the
first time, I have taken to dreaming myself back in America, but
I am no Gogo Pasquier, and I cannot dream dreams worth while,
not see the people and the places to which I would rush the first
chance I had. The other night I dreamed I was making an
uninteresting call at the Agnews. Again I was back in Kitten-
house Street trying on two costly but horrible-looking sack coats
that Father had bought in days of greater prosperity, and which
Bam was sneaking to me on the q.t The climax came when I
spent one whole dream driving along Grand Street on the surface
car, and going to Broadway Rouse's wholesale store (which I
never entered in my life) and there purchasing a bolt of foulard
silk to be cut up into waist lengths for Christmas presents for my
friends. What a dreary business what a waste of dream power.

You must tell Mrs. Holt that I was amused to see our friend
Miss Sergeant in the court of the hospital the other day. She was
visiting here with Mrs. J. Borden Harriman who bounced
through our otherwise peaceful midst for several days. I don't
mind her coming to look us over, but I do mind her preempting
the kitchen of Madame Cocaud's so that one night it was impos-
sible to get anything to eat there. Miss Sergeant is the writer
who lunched with Mrs. Holt one day at the Cosmopolitan Club

[54]

when I was there. The other man at the luncheon was named
Stork Younf or Stock Young, or something like that an Am-
herst man, who, by-the-way, has dashed me off several business
notes under the delusion that I am still at the Times. Every now
and again, I get a note or letter from someone singularly oblivious
of my present state, asking me to review a book or speak this good
word for so-and-so I can-do nowadays.

So Miss Sergeant can tell Mrs. Holt many things about our
world but not so much as Ruth Hale can tell you. Mrs. Truax, in
her last letter, intimates that she can tell pretty exactly where I
am, but she never gleaned it, I imagine, from any letter of mine.
I have never tried to intimate anything contraband in my letters,
partly because I am naturally a law-abider, and partly because I
think it is rather sinister practice. However, the hews must be
pretty well disseminated by this time. I imagine they know in
America, and I am sure they know in Germany. One of our
village women, whose son is a prisoner in Germany, and has been
there these two years past, writes her to advise her to make a lot
of money out of the Americans at the hospital, and how he found
out we were here the good lady is at a loss to explain.

There is one thing that all our family must keep in mind,
and that is that we are a very mobile force, and that a man who
enlisted in Base Hospital #8 back in the States may be far, far
from it now. The changes have already begun, and I think they
will continue soon and rapidly. I doubt if our little group of
serious enlisters will hold together long, and both Mrs. Truax
and Eva McAdoo will be interested to know (if they have not
heard it long since} that even Dr. Lloyd, who established the
original Post-Graduate Unit, and came over as its Director, that
even Dr. Lloyd and Base Hospital #8 have parted company.
Several other men have been transferred to other fields. Three
have been commissioned. Others have gone and will go on
detached service of various kinds. Many, I think, will get dose
to the front, and I think most of them are itching to do that

[551

I am. I would never have believed when I left that I would
have been so eager to get up and mix with it. I wish to heaven
I were as well equipped for field work as Hawley will be when
he gets here. As far as that goes, I don't know a single bit more
than when we last met.

I hope to see Hawley when he passes this way, as he is
more than likely to do. It will be a great meeting. There are
many such some of them unforgettable. Do you remember my
telling you, or rather did I tell you, of seeing Tommy Lee, a
Hamilton Theta Delt, 1914, last September, and dining with
him in company with several other Hamilton men?

It gave me quite a pang and quite a thrill yesterday to
stand down in the hold of a ship bound for home. I had toiled
down the companionway to the second hold (oh, memories
of our own trip) to help down an awfully nice young Brooklyn
boy who is going back minus an arm he had when he came
over.

I wonder if you ever saw that paltry account Heywood
Broun wrote of our Hallowe'en Show. I got the clipping some
time ago, and was much irritated to see he liad called me a
sergeant. It was this way: He was here back in early Novem-
ber at a time when Colonel Siler named a number of sergeants
in our midst, which was nice of him, only the promotions were
none of them approved from Paris. Not a personal disapproval,
you understand, but a sweeping disapproval of promotions in
general at that time. I had been much too canny to mention it
myself until it was sealed and approved from on high, but
Heywood was not so canny, and he spilled, the beans, with the
result that Jane Grant addressed me letters with the rank to
which I was not entitled. It doesn't matter now, as I was made
a sergeant late in January, and still hold that rank at this writ-
ing. This is a pleasant distinction, and it has its advantages, but
it has its drawbacks as well.

The length of the war might be almost anything you can

[56]

name, and we can tell better in the summer. Personally, I feel
as if the next few months will see great upheavals, as if every-
thing anyone said or thought or planned or hoped in February
would have to be revised and redeckred in June, as if the day of
change was at hand, and the world we know on the edge of a
maelstrom. 'This is not from evidence I see, but from things I
hear, and, more particularly, things I read, things written back
home, for heaven knows we get litde or nothing from the appall-
ing journals they publish in English for us in Paris.

I suppose there is enough general information here for this
letter to go on to Mrs. Truax of whom I think often and wist-
fully these days. She writes me letters packed to the brim with the
things I want to know, and I am in pretty close touch with all
our litde set in Fifty-Seventh Street. I feel as if, in order to
ensure my getting another such letter one of these days, I
would best write her t great length, but when I write such a
letter as this to you, my time and writing mood are spent, and
if she will realize that I am writing to you both perhaps she will
let me off and still write from time to time.

Good night and my love to all of you.

Aleck

To MRS. ALICE HAWLEY TRUAX

THE STARS AND STRIPES
Paris, Spring 1918
Dear Mrs. Truax,

I am afraid it is a long, -leag- time since I
last wrote you and I am afraid this won't be a very interesting
letter for it can be nothing but the chatter of one who, for the
time being, is leading as unsoldierly existence as you could
imagine. I am working these days on the army newspaper and

[57]

eking out a pleasant but impecunious existence under the sky-
line of an old hotel in the Rue d'Antin, just south of the boule-
vards.

The Stars and Strifes suddenly burst into print in February,
and from time to time a newspaper man here and a newspaper
man there is detached from his command and shipped up to its
staff. I had heard there was such a sheet but had never seen a
copy when I was requisitioned for the job. As far as I can make
out, everyone I ever knew suggested my name but I rather
think I owe the somewhat doubtful service done me to an
exceedingly decent and energetic officer in the intelligence section
whom I met at the Brouns at Christmas time. I say doubtful,
for no one can work far behind the lines without feeling restless
and dissatisfied and if, as seems tremendously probable to me,
we drop back eventually into our organizations, I shall find myself
just as inexpert and unequipped as % when J first staggered Gover-
nor's Island with my unmilitary appearance.

Shortly after I arrived, the door of the restaurant where I
was gorging myself swung open, and thinly camouflaged in an
officer's uniform, in walked F.P.A. [Franklin P. Adams], I
saluted and fell on his neck and we have had a good many parties
since then, one at the Grand Guignol when the few seats
occupied were largely occupied by Broadwayites so that it seemed
like a first night once more. Oil sont les neiges? F.P.A. has his
colyum on the paper, of course.

The staff has some pretty good men on it, those first rate
men whom the provincial papers produce and who remain little
known and underpaid simply because they are not in New York.
There is an engineer from the Frisco Park Row, a first rate poet
and copy-reader from the Springfield Republican, a professional
humorist from the Sun and Hartford Times, etc., etc. One was
laying rails, the other keeping the books of an aero detachment
and a third wriggling along the ground as machine-gun messen-
ger when uprooted for this detail.

[58]

As each number of the Stars and Stripes carries our names
up in the corner as comprising the editorial staff, I am occasion-
ally run to earth by an old friend and so the weeks have their little
reunions. Don Stone and I ran into each other and had a quite
unforgettable evening together. I mean I won't forget it. Then
today, in blew Baba Engs. You know. Russell's lovely sister. She
is a Red Cross woman. I believe orphans are her specialty. She
has a party all planned for tonight and perhaps I can go. I have
seen and played about with Jack Calder, who is in fine fettle these
days and fairly thriving on army life and I hear quite often from
Walter Wanger who is an aviation cadet and who will be a first
lieutenant in a day or so. Walter is impending on-Paris- and I
shall be glad to see him.

We have occasional days off and spend them frugally. One
day we wandered through P&re-Lachaise and I think you would
have smiled at the sight of a bare-headed marine standing with
downcast eyes and placing an onion on the tomb of Oscar Wilde.
Last Saturday, the chill was out of the air for the first time this
spring and we ate on a little restaurant terrace across the way
from St Germain des Pr&s. I love St. Germain and have my best
times on that side of the river. That afternoon, we loafed inter-
minably in the Luxembourg gardens and acquired great merit
by treating all the refugee children to a ride on the most ricketty
carousel extant

I would live on that side of the river if the air raids did not
make it impossible. If you are caught out in one there is simply
no getting back. That shrieking siren and the sound of the dis-
tant barrage has no sooner started than every light in the city
goes out as if a single hand had turned a single switch. You hear
and half feel the panicky scamper around you on the streets as
people make for die abris and there's simply no groping your
way all the distance to the Od&>n. The night of my arrival was
the occasion of the worst air raid the most thunderous and
the most spectacular, a great sight if you will stay out of the cellar

[59]

and keep your eye on the heavens. There have been fewer of
them of late and they have been mild and inconsequential. All
Paris goes underground when they begin and it's a nuisance if the
warning sounds just after you have climbed into bed but no one
thinks much about them and the boys are quite taken aback when
they get letters from home and find the folks are worrying about
them.

Then came the gun but that, too, seems to have lost some-
of its first fine enthusiasm. The steady blasts from it are no
more. We hear it only occasionally and no one even stops what
he is doing. "Ah, there, Bertha/' or some such greeting is enough
of a response. Of course it was Very much in everyone's mind
at first, particularly after its extraordinary shot on Good Friday.
The memory of that overhung Paris on Easter Day and I shall
never forget the morning services 'at Notre Dame with the
thought of that skughter in every bowed head.

We eat in abundance. As far as I can see, everyone in France
has all he wants to eat. Butter is rare, bread is rationed and they
talk of meatless days, but I am terribly fat. We have to use the
bread tickets but that doesn't mean there is any lack of it or any
serious inconvenience. The allowance provides a good deal more
bread than you want and there you are. Once a month, 'you
must step in at the nearest mairie and get your supply of tickets
and that is all there is to it

If I am due for a long stretch of service on this detail, I
trust devoutly that I can work up front. I have applied to be
attached to a mobile, field hospital and comfene the functions
of medical sergeant and Stars and Stripes correspondent. Good-
bye and much, much love. I cannot tell you how often I think
myself back to the apartment in West Fifty Seventh Street. I
am always looking up toward the Great Northern, always hear-
ing you stepping about in your room, and hearing Mary's step
in the dining-room. (Please note F.P.A/S censoring throughout
this letter.)

[60]

Oh, yes, and now and then a letter thanking Mrs. Fiske for
a box. Her Christmas box, which was a screaming mixture of
Huneker, soap, dice, cigarettes, BiHesj etc., arrived in perfect con-
dition on April 4. Once she wrote and insisted on knowing what
I lacked. I replied, truthfully enough, that I had all the heart
could desire except America and tooth-paste. She sent me the
tooth-pasteenough to polish a regiment for five years. I hope
some of us will get home before that

Much love

Aleck
(Passed as censored*)

Franklin P. Adams, Capt., N. A.

CAFfc.

[Cartoon was drawn on the letter by A. A. Wallgren
Stars and Stripes.]

[61]

To MRS. ALICE HAWLEY TRUAX

Paris

July 6, 1918
Dear Mrs. Tmax,

I have had two days off in the last two months
and this is one of them, so you may know I am busy, preoccupied,
and therefore for the moment not actively discontented, in
the sense that we used -to say actively ill.

I am becoming, week by week, a passionate enthusiast on the
subject of America, something I never was before. I was ever so
much more interested in the total cause, and not so very deep in
my heart, there were doubts about the record America would
make. I used to listen to the boys on the boat and in camp
prattling away their easy optimism to the effect that the American
would make the best soldier in the world, that an American
could beat the life out of any German, that there was something
essentially strong and brave about an American, etc. etc. And I
used to shudder because it seemed provincial, because I thought
there was nothing in history to justify it, because I thought it
would sound offensive in the ears of the French and the English,
etc. Well, I have been living at the front with the infantry, getting
to know the American under fire, getting to know whole rafts of
men from all corners of America as I never knew them before,
and I do believe with all my heart, there never were braver,
gentler, finer, more chivalrous soldiers since the world began, I
think I first came to know mine own people in the woods near
CMteau-Thierry.

Of course, it is impossible not to feel all this in the air. I
cannot .tell you how important, how fine, and how telling was the
work done by the men who raced across France and jumped
into that batde just north of the Marne literally did that,
leaping from the big camions as they slowed up and fairly
running into the fray without stopping to stretch their legs. I
can think of nothing I would rather be just now than a private

[62]

in the Marines. Not that they were all Marines and not that the
most remote and untested of us are not sharing in the exhilarating
American popularity which is in the very air these days, so that
you felt the tingle of it as you hiked through French villages and
caught an expression of it in every wave of the hand from a
French window and every smile from an old French soldier.

I drove in from a town beyond the Marne to be in Paris
for the Fourth and I shall always be gkd to remember I was here
for the Fourth. I shall never forget it. You must think of me
standing weeping on a chair in the Champs Elyses, too choked
to cheer as the bunch went by, some of whom I knew in camp,
with the sun on their helmets and a grin on their faces. They
marched through a very rain of rose petals. When the poilus came
next, with the hortensias showering all about them and a little
American flag fluttering from every bayonet, there was no con-
taining us. And all the while, a band either ahead or behind
was playing "Swords and Lances' 1 that inarch we have heard
pilot so many parades around the corner from Fifth Avenue into
Fifty-Seventh Street And all the while overhead, circled and
swooped the aviators, dropping roses as they flew, now looping
the loop til) we were dizzy .from watching them, now dropping
so low they grazed the tree-tops.

Of late since May some time, I have been going every
week to some part of the front, sometimes dropping off with my
pack and living with a company in the ravine, now sticking to a
car and covering a great deal of ground. It is fairly easy to get
along. France is small, a country of short distances. If you are at
the front and must gravitate slowly toward Paris it is no great
undertaking. You sleep with the Infantry, hook a ride with an
ambulance, mess with some field hospitals, hike a while, make
the railhead by nightfall and come on in that way. More often,
the staff has a car of its own and scoots all over the country in it.

Recently three of us found ourselves late at night at a
French village which is headquarters of one division. We had

[63]

not had any sleep worth mentioning and had driven a hundred
miles. Besides, the artist who was with me [C. Leroy] Baldridge
and a Lamb of God if ever there was one was running a fever
which worried me a little. The driver who is French volun-
teered some real beds. He went to the town mayor and declared
we must have a house to ourselves. The town was, of course,
evacuated. He produced a bunch of keys, large enough to open
the Louvre, I should have thought, but they merely gave us
entry to a morsel of a French cottage on the edge of the town. We
each picked a bed throwing dice for choice and settled down
rather like the three bears. I pried open the shutters of my ground-
floor room, and pushed them wide so I could go to sleep watch-
ing the roses in the little garden and watching the moon come
up over the edge of the woods just beyond. And so I dozed off,
only to be awakened by the painful discovery that on the edge
of that woods was a French 145, an enormous gun every flash of
which lighted up my room and every shot shook me in my bed
like corn in a popper. It was a comic sequel to a wild day. I have
got used to sleeping through the droning boom boom of a barrage
and I can sleep under the steady bang of the Soixante-Quinzes,
but this monstrous thing was more than I could bear.

The next day was full of things to remember, including a
chance encounter with the Commander-in-Chief who had come
unheralded to decorate some njen with the Distinguished Service
Crosses seven of them. It was the first ceremony of American
Field Decoration and we just strayed into it. The rehearsal of
the battalion parade in the green meadow, with an airplane
duel going on overhead that ended in a German machine com-
ing down in flames, the music of the regimental band from the
edge of the woods and the boom, boom, boom of the cannons,
then the arrival of the general and the fine pomp and circum-
stance of the decoration I was fairly uplifted and would have
been quite happy, except for the misadventure of having eaten
some bad meat at the cavalry mess down the road, so that I

[64]

maintained military bearing with some difficulty and vomited
at every hedge between Montdidier and Paris.

Usually when my friends blow into France, they get hold
of a copy of this unprecedented newspaper, see my connec-
tion with it and write me or drop in and go out to dinner
with me. I have not heard from Lloyd [Stryker] but the other day
Max Foster came in and then in blew Phil Hoyt and Roy Dur-
stine, so we have had some parties on the tip top of Montmartre,
the part of Paris I love best. I took Baba Engs up there for supper
last night and was somewhat embarrassed to have the patronne
of the little restaurant where we eat confide to me that one of my
friends had been in the other day to breakfast with a girl.

Give my love to Katharine and Eva and tell Mary to save
some bread pudding for me.

Alexander Woollcott

(Censored \>y) Charles P. Gushing

To RUTH HALE

Paris
September 5, 1918

Dear Ruth,

This is a rainy day in Paris and nothing could be
nicer than that.

I have been luxuriating in it through a week's permission,
which I was much too discerning to spend at any official leave
area. So I am soaked in it just now. This afternoon, on my way
from dejeuner, I have been playing with my friend, the sacristan
of St. Germain TAuxerrois, who, as a great treat, took me up the
old Norman Tower and showed me his twelfth century psalters,
his sixth no, seventh century chests, his old altar carvings. He
told me how once an American had gone off in disgust because

[65]

lie didn't believe such tales. The sacristan thinks it must be hard
for people from so young a country to realize how old things can
be. I guess it is. While we were climbing down, we heard the
innocent old bell in the clocher that had given the signal for the
massacre of St. Bartholomew's eve.

I must say, we fare pretty well in Paris. You can get any-
thing in the world you want to eat except pudding. Sugar, but-
ter, cream, all the little forbidden things are easy enough to get
if you know where to go. If you know enough to go to Mont-
martre the very tip so high up that the rules and regulations
never reach there. Or to M. Jacques, who has a discreet back
room. Or to my petit dejeuner place behind St. Germain 1'Auxer-
rois (a stone's throw from the hotel of the musketeers) where all
these contraband things and others (such as cafe cognac) may
be had boldly on the sidewalk. I never knew why this was so
brazen till I discovered that the police station was across the way
and the place itself the police restaurant.

M. Jacques, who used to run the big hotel in Rouen before
the war, is devoted to his clients fiddles from the Stars and Stripes
and when, in early June, it looked as though all Paris would
have to or might have to move out, he wanted to go along
with us and reopen wherever we set up our presses again. Re-
cently, he has been a bit flustered due to his wife, in Switzerland,
having presented him with twin boys and very triste for three
weeks because the closing of the frontier shut off all news from
them. I was there the other evening when, at last, the postman
brought a letter. Such excitement! Of course, the old postman
had to be treated to a drink then and there. The news was good.
I was interested because the elder twin is formally and officially
my godson. I have sent him a spoon of gold and silver from
his parrain. His name is Marcel Benolt Dick le petit lapin. And
then Montmartre Do you know la butte? Gimalac's, or Nini's
or Freddie's? better far any of them than the Coucou where
the approval of Julian Street is announced in English by a sign

[66]

out front. Such good things to eat and such leisurely service as
if there were all the time in the world! Such absurd dogs as
gather about your table and ogle you for scraps! At Nini's, if you
will keep quiet, you can stay till midnight, playing poker. At
Freddie's, there are apt to be songs and recitations. Quite as
though the quaint notion had just occurred to him, Freddie will
ask the old, long-haired poet to sing Musette's song or a slat-
ternly female, much impaired by opium, to recite something im-
passioned from Baudelaire. As they have come for the purpose
they are not hard to persuade. Afterwards, Freddie, with equal
spontaneity, passes the hat for them. Once the place was full of
American officers who all fled after the Baudelaire. Freddie con-
sulted me about it. Didn't Americans like Baudelaire? Not
American officers, I told him. A great light dawned. "Ah," he
exclaimed, "then it is with you as it is with us. All your officers
were drawn from the grocer class." Once Freddie announced,
with great empressement, that a young American was present
who would sing in American and French. We all appkuded and
shouted "Bravo" and in the midst of this uproar, I discovered that
the young American in question was I. I tell you, cryptically,
that I rose to the occasion.

We sing a good deal, I'm afraid. The favorite song with all
our French friends is

Qu'est-ce-qu' arrive lundi? Lundi Bolles

Oh vous salle Boches, je vous souhaite de m&me,

a free translation of "Oh you dirty Germans," the soldiers' song
which Elsie [Janis] has been singing hereabouts. Then there is
the new song the poilus have of which the refrain is

Two testaments
The old and the new
But there's only one hair
On the head of Matthew.
[671

The verses are all outrageous puns on the numerals. Par example:

On dit qu-y-en-a dice
Distance au front
Neuf & la coque
Huitres-d'Ostend
Cest epatant
System metrique
Saint Sebastian
Katherme de Medicis
Tioyes-en-Champagne
Deux testaments
L'ancien et le nouveau
Mais il ny-a qu'un Cheveux
Sur la t&te de Mathieu.

Elsie loved Montmartre. I have guided so many footsteps there.
F.P.A., Grantland Rice, Lee Dodd, etc., etc I was led there
by Wythe Williams. Paul West usually haunts the Pkce du
Tertre, you know the place staged in Louise. Did I tell you
that after looking at my picture, caught by the camera in full
war paint with mask and helmet, he said, "Ah, the daughter of
the regiment!" I was on Montmartre not long ago with my dear
Walter Duranty, than whom no one can have a warmer spot in
my foolish heart. As we were skating home in midnight darkness,
a polite young lady (who was out shopping, I suppose) linked
arms with us and walked bantering all the way to the opera.
Walter urged her on me as one passionate as a lion. I whispered
to her that he was passionate as a rabbit, which is much more to
the point. On leaving, she confided to the stars her private
opinion that we were both as passionate as two plates of noodles.
I haven't had much chance at the theatre. Brieux's Rofce
Rouge wasn't bad at the Od^on and The Cricket on the Hearth
with exquisite oboe music by Massenet. There's an English stock
company that has been packing the Th64tre Albert Premier with

[68]

Aussies and Canadians on leave a mighty good stock company
with Smith, The Mollusc, The Tyranny of Tears, Billeted and
Wanted a Husband the last was much mauled about and
spoiled to make a play for Marie Tempest as A Lady's Name.
Nous avons chang6 tous cela. We were very hilarious during
the first performance of Billeted when the lovely ingenue dropped
her lighted cigarette down the bosom of her gowri. It was an
agonizing moment and no time for false delicacy. You should
have seen her go after it.

The theatres are packed now. So is Paris. There never was
any repining all through the anxious spring. No bells were rung
when the tide turned, even when the boches were no longer at
Noyon. But everyone smiles, everyone walks with a gayer step
and all's well.

It seems to me there are twice as many people on the boule-
vards as there were in June, twice as many people sipping ap6ci-
tifs at the green hour, twice as many puttering over the book-
stalls on the quais. It takes me an hour to walk a block along the
quai that starts here below my window. I revel in fearful trans-
lations. "M. Ending commence voir dair." Do you recognize
that? I found a French Trilby, with delightful French illustra-
tions which, unlike the author's own, were of the period. Also a
French Alice in Wonderland would you detect "a bright idea
popped into Alice's head" under the disguise of "Une ide
lumineuse traversait 1'esprit d'Alice"? Dear, dear.

There are some darned good books on Paris which you'd
enjoy if you haven't found them long since. The one in the
Mediaeval Towns series is the best. E. V. Lucas's A Wanderer in
Paris is for beginners but it has nice chapters and enchanting
pictures. I enjoyed Belloc's Paris.

Poor Rufie is to be laden this Fall with business for me.
If I have any luck, I'll get a Liberty Bond sent you to dispose
of and buy Christmas things for me. Also, before long, I'll send
you money to pay my civilian insurance for 1919. Also, I might

[69]

send you something to sell for me, all with an eye to raising
Christinas funds.

I must copy out for you a Tommy's will, of which I have
seen a transcript. It read:

"In the event of my death (cheers!) I leave all my estate
(loud cheers!) to my older brother Charles (loud and prolonged
cheers!)." '

It was probated of course.

I never intended to write you such another long letter and
never set out to fill it to the brim with Paris. But I have been
spending a week's leave in the place. I have been working in and
out of it for six months and I love it above all places in the
world. The river that flows past my window now is gleaming in
the sunset that has followed the rain, and the bridges fade away
mysterious in the distance and no German foot shall ever cross
them.

Alexander Woollcott

P.S. I forgot to tell you that on the night I sang at Freddie's
his place looks like a Belasco gesture indicating Bohemianism
I noticed on my way out that the long-haired poet and the
opium queen were busy dividing the gate. I burst in indignantly
and demanded my third and while they were still uncertain as
to whether or not I was facetious, I let them buy me off with
a glass of something.

P.P.S. Notre Dame is having a bath. They are scrubbing the
old lady from base to gargoyles. Her ancient stone emerges un-
expectedly white and embarrassed like Heywood found nude
on Fifth Avenue.

A.W.
(Censored "by) Charles P. Gushing

[70]

To DR. EDMUND DEVOL

Ear-le-Duc
le 12 Novembre, 1918

My dear Major,

I was glad to hear from Dr. Trexler and have
confirmation of Capt. Pease's report that you had heen made a
major and I want you to feel sure I will not let it make any
difference between us.

I wish everyone at the hospital could have shared some of
my recent experiences. I was at the front isn't it a wonderful
place? till the last shot was fired but I do not mean that.

For instance, not long ago, being out at elbow and thinly
clad, with winter coining on, I drove to the commissary at St.
Dizier and appealed to the old corporal in charge there for a
little raiment. Instead of demanding this and that of me and
tossing a salvaged coat out to cover my nakedness, he assigned
two darkies to me as fitters and held up the whole line for an
hour while he fussed about, getting me oilskin capes, his best
quality of leggings, his finest whipcord breeches, etc., etc. I
dared hardly question this benevolence lest it would break some
spell but finally he grinned and said, "I guess you don't re-
member me/' I admitted I didn't. 'Why," he said, "don't you
remember old Cherry, who threw the chocolate pot at the orderly
down at Savenay? I was one of your patients down there and
you were mighty nice to me."

Now the point of this story, Major, is this that, as you
well know, I was never remarkably nice to anyone and I gather
from this and other cases that the least kindness, the least little
human touch, warms the heart of these soldiers when they are
as the service records say "Sk in hosp." I wish, when I was
there, I had realized this as I realize it now. But I did not get
religion till that great morning in June when I saw the Marines
tearing up the road on the way to Chdteau-Thierry.

I have met our old patients again and again. They hail me

[71]'

from passing trucks. I run into them on the edge of Sedan.
Once, I remember, when a kitchen capsized on the first day of
the St-Mihiel attack, it could serve only cold coffee and this
was almost gone when I came toiling up the road. The cook
stood guard over the last cup. "I am saving it for that fat medical
sergeant with the specs/* he said, "he took care of me at Base
last Fall."

I shall always remember Ward 3 very vividly and the sight
of a fashionable New York doctor giving old sickly fretful darkies
just as much care as if each and every one were Gertrude Ather-
ton. By the way, do you remember that wretched fellow, Miss
Ward's pet patient, with the loud voice and the mitral insuffi-
ciency? It seems he called at the Times office and regaled my old
confreres there with the most startling stories about me and cer-
tain very lovely nurses, leaving them with the impression that
France had transformed me into something of a blade.

Well, I hope and expect to visit Savenay before the winter
is gone and I hope and expect to dine with you in New York
before I set forth on the journey around the world that I am now
planning.

I have time to write you this long letter because I am wait-
ing at Bar-le-Duc for the arrival from Paris tonight of my new
automobile. In it, I am going to. the Rhine.

My love to Dr. Trexler, Schuyler Ladd, Red Moore and
yourself these four and no one else.

Alexander Woollcott

P. S. Don't you think the Stars and Stripes has been darned
good? We have slaved to make it so.

A.W.

[72]

To JULIE WOOLLCOTT TABER

Paris
December, 1918

From: Alexander Woollcott
To: Mrs. Charles Taber
Subject: Alexander Woollcott

I clip a Me editorial I wrote for

the Stars and Stripes for the issue of December 6th wrote it just
about the same time you -were expressing exactly the same
thought in a letter to me.

Last Saturday I decided the time had come to go to Paris
so off I set, driving as far as Nancy. We had to put up at a little
town in Akace-Lonaine for the night and were most royally
served at the inn there by one who spoke pretty good English
considering he had been a waiter in New York for eighteen
years. We trailed through Metz in the dismal morning rain and
made Paris at midnight.

I had come in, expecting to straighten out a lot of little
things and start back immediately for my beloved Rhineland
and for my still more beloved Army of Occupation. But I find
they want me here for no end of things so there will be the
old round of editorial conferences and this and that Still I don't
pretend it will not be pleasant to be in Paris especially to be
here through the Christmas holidays just as I was last year.

Immediately, the business of life accumulates. There are
reams of letters, there are cablegrams. Old friends are in town-
Telephone messages and this person and that popping up in
the mob. Here are two boys from my old tent squad on Gover-
nor's Island, up from Savenay to buy glass eyes for the hospital
a pleasant errand. I hear my dear Major Devol (my doctor when
I was sick at Savenay) is in town and has been in to see me.
Then a most embarrassing letter from Mrs. Truax, congratulat-
ing me on the acceptance of my play which, malheureusement,
has not even been written. It was all a joke or partly so. One

[73]

night at Bar-le-Duc when an air raid on the town shut out all
but candlelight and precluded more sustained literary effort, I
whiled away the time by dashing off some post cards. One was
to Arthur Hopkins, the producer in New York, with whom both
Ruth Hale and Brock Pemberton are associated and who, I be-
lieve, is the best producer in America. I idly told him that after
the war I was minded to set forth oft a tramp-steamer for a long
year at sea that when I got off I would have a play for him
called "World without End" and that then he would be ruined.
I was highly amused at Coblenz to receive a cable from him
saying "Accept play and ruination/' which I thought was a
pleasant though expensive jest. You can imagine I was startled
to receive a clipping announcing that Mr. Hopkins had accepted
the play without reading it, but I rather imagine Ruth started
that story going just to be facetious. I think I will have to spoil
the joke by writing the play after all. It is all in my mind.

Tomorrow night, nine of the staff will go to Nini's little
restaurant on Montmartre and dine there en f amille, with some-
thing witful for each as a gift from each of the others. [John T.]
Winterich, I know, has already bought a YMCA pin for a foul-
mouthed little varlet and he has purchased a second-lieutenant's
bars for the most aggressively private private on the staff.

Next day, M. Jacques proprietor of the restaurant where
we usually eat will give us a dinner.

I am mailing you today, a copy of the current issue which
has a letter to America from me in it and also my story of the
Rhine crossing. There is one paragraph in that story at which,
I am pained to say, .Mr. Wilson is said to have laughed uproari-
ously.

You can imagine how content I am to have Mr. Wilson
here and how relieved to feel the undercurrents of intrigue and
unrest subside at his coming. I believe he will blow away all
the obstructions in the path of a decent peace.

Aleck
[74]

ra

The 1920s

To A. A. WALLGREN

New York City
Nwember 15, 1920
Dear Wally,

I am passing the hat for Marie Louise Patriarche
I hope for the last time, certainly for the next few years. I want
to catch her by Christmas time with the news that her bank
account will see her through indefinitely. Please send me a check
for any amount between one and one hundred dollars.

I hear youVe been married several times since we last met
Why don't you ever write me or draw me or call me up? You
remember Chesterton's slogan "My mother, drunk or sober!"
Well, them's my sentiments toward you, old thing.

The other day a girl blew in with a letter of introduction
from F.P.A. which puzzled me a little until I discovered that
he had given it to her when we were still in Paris two years
gone by. It bade me introduce the girl to "everyone in the office,
including the Scandinavian." Yet she was a very nice girl.

A.W.

P.S. Saw Father Brady the other night He asked after you.
I told him you were married. He fainted.

A.W.

[Marie Louise was a little French orphan adopted by the Stars and
Stripes staff, on which Mr. Waflgren was a cartoonist.]

[75]

To EDNA FERBER

Paris

July 21, 1922
Dear Berber,

I never got your telegrams and probably you never
got my letter written to Frankfort. However, I cannot remember
that it was important. It described my huge 19-cent room at the
Hotel Traube and my unbelievable breakfasts of fruit, eggs,
toast, echt coffee und cream for 12 cents all served on a table
overlooking the Rhine. It told how I would probably stay in
Coblenz until I had caught up with my work which I did.

I enclose several items for your entertainment. The letter
from Deems Taylor (isn't 'living like Swopes" a perfect phrase?)
will amuse you. The squanderous $15 referred to is a check
I sent Mary in the hope that she could get one of those bags
for me or two.

Speaking of Swopes, I eventually called on them. It was
high noon at the Ritz. Margaret was in bed, garbed in pink and
altogether too beautiful. Herb was receiving correspondents,
being shaved by an imported coiffeur and describing London
hotel prices. There were silk stockings and fragments of toast
and huge bunches of roses in pleasant profusion, but nothing
much to do, so Margaret and I shot craps while Herb talked.
Your note from Carlsbad awaited me at the Hotel when I
returned from Carcassonne. When you suggest that anything
that befell in Berlin "puzzled" me, you don't know your good
old "she-ancient/ 1 as the low [Marc] Connelly once called

Your affectionate

A, Woollcott

[Herbert Bayard Swope and Woollcott were both young reporters
on the New York scene before the war. Later, when Mr. Swope was
managing editor of the World, Woollcott became its dramatic critic.]

[76]

To JEROME KERN

Bomoseen, Vt.
July, 1924
Dear Kern,

Confidentially, I am puttering about at present with
a biography of Irving Berlin whose story has a strong appeal to
my foolish and romantic heart. I need hardly say that I have no
notion of trying to turn learned in the midst of it nor do I think
that grave musical criticism has any place in the project. But I
would, when the thing reaches book form, like to see one chap-
ter that says something intelligible about him as a composer, his
place in the history of ragtime, his melodic gift, his place as a
maker of folk song, etc. not gushy, not untrue, not a floral
wreath. I think the thing for me to do is to call a witness and I
am wondering if you would care to be the witness. If it could
take the form of a letter from you to me, the trick would be done.
This is just a tentative inquiry which I will follow up, if
encouraged, by coming out to see you when I am back in town
late this month.

Yours
A.W.

To EDNA FERBER

Bard S.S. France
le 10th June, 1926
Dear Ferber,

I am debarking tomorrow at Plymouth, reinforced
by a wireless from Irving [Berlin], confirming my reservations
at the Carlton and inviting me to dine with him on the night of
arrival carefully ascertaining first, I suppose, that I could not
possibly land in London before midnight.

But what I really wrote to tell you was about the shocking
revelations into the character of Nancy Woollcott

[77]

She is the twelve-year-old eldest of that Baltimore bevy
the exquisite flower of the flock, the perfect one. I suppose her
sisters and cousins have always rather resented her. Now they
are getting out a magazine and thus far all of Nancy's contribu-
tions in prose and verse have been returned to her without com-
ment. Finally, in desperation, she asked bitterly if she might be
permitted to insert an advertisement, and was assured (probably
after a hasty investigation of her assets) that she might take a
page on payment of 6 cents. Her dignified announcement read
as follows:

Miss NANCY B. WOOLLCOTT

The Most Charming

Woman in the

World
Call between 2:30 and 3

Well, that's that, and I have no news beyond the fact that
[Charles] MacArthur who is with me says he can't get over the
notion that he's on a boat and that [Robert] Benchley, wishing
to get us something we couldn't get in Europe, brought us a
plate of wheatcakes and left it in the cabin.

I don't know when I will reach Paris but I hope to find
there a letter telling me when you are to arrive from die South.
My elegant motor trip to St. Jean was crushed by the Fleisch-
mann mishap. The kid came out of the operation (double msCs-
toid) all right but their European trip had to be called off.

I have no plans beyond a few vague dates at Antibes for
the end of June.

I am going to Scotland in July.

Woollcott

[78]

To HUDSON HAWLEY

New York City
May 15, 1928
Dear Hawley,

I am sailing on May 19 aboard the Roma, bound
for Naples where I will be lodged for a day or so, at least, at the
Hotel de Vesuve. My party, which consists of Alice Duer Miller,
Harpo Marx and Mrs. George S. Kaufman [Beatrice Kaufman],
will then motor up through Rome, Perugia, Siena, Florence and
probably Milan and Maggiore, settling eventually at Antibes for
the summer.

I am writing to warn you that you may get a telephone
message of greeting as I dash through Rome, and to tell you that
if you were half a man (admittedly a matter for nice and anxious
calculation), you would persuade the Commendatore Oro, or
whoever is in charge of the Department of Tours, to put a hand-
some automobile at the service of so influential a cluster of
American journalists for the trip from Naples to the Lakes.

A.W.

To LUCY CHRISTIE DRAGE

[Lucy Christie Drage and Julie Woollcott Taber became dose friend^
when the Woollcotts lived in Kansas City. After the death of Julie,
Lucy's memories of her served as an unbroken bond with Woollcott. 1

Antibes
June, 1928
Dear Lucy,

When Julie died, I had a strong impulse to jump on
a train and go to you as the only person left in the world to whom
I could really talk about her. There seemed to be too much to do.
The day she died, Billy [A. W/s brother] himself was taken to a
hospital in Baltimore and hung between life and death for
weeks of anxiety. Then I think I invented things to preoccupy

[79]

me, made a great pother about work to be done, ran round and
round in busy little circles, anything rather than sit down and face
the fact that there was no Julie any more and never would be
again.

I wired you that day that I would write you a letter and
here I am at last, in this corner of the Riviera where I have
bestowed myself for the next few weeks, sitting down before the
portable I have toted across the world, batting out a letter that
should be full of the things I would have told you had I really
hopped on that train and gone out to see you, I wish now I had
done it

I am glad you did not see her in those agonizing summer
months when her sickness first took hold of her, when we were
dragging experts to see her and she was trying to walk but
couldn't, unable to speak clearly but trying to all the time, shak-
ing so that she could hardly guide a cigarette to her lips. It was
cruel business. The experts had some elaborate explanation of
the inexplicable phenomenon a progressive degeneration of the
nerve tissue which defeats medicine and eludes surgery. But the
ways of the spirit are mysterious and I know that she had just
invented a way of getting out of a world that was too intolerably
lonely for her without Charles. You could tell that from the peace
and satisfaction which settled on her when the invention
worked at last, for in the final six weeks at die hospital, there was
no pain or distress or trouble. She just lay there at rest in a room
that somehow began to look like her, with the yellow roses on the
table and the blue silk shawl thrown across the foot of her bed.
Day by day the years seemed to fall away from her, cast off like'
garments she no longer needed. She did not know even me, but
she was pleased when it was Paul Robeson's voice on the phono-
graph and pleased when the nurse would put a gardenia on the
pillow beside her. If you bent close, you could hear her say
"Sweet, sweet" The lines went out of her face, the gray out of
her hair, the pain out of her eyes. Her hair, braided and tied with

[80]

little blue ribbons, ky tossed upon the pillow and framed so
prettily a face that was the one you saw when she first came out
to Kansas City nearly forty years ago.

Toward the end, while she was still talking, all her thoughts
ran back to those years and the ones between were forgotten.
She talked of the day I was born and of the trip west and of
Aldine Pkce, with Rose Field calling up to your window and
making all manner of fun of her because she was so excited over
the fact that Frank and Mailie [Sauerwen] were coming. One
of the last things she said was that she must find out where Rose
Field was living and go to him and offer to keep house for him.
One of her last commissions to me was to write you the birthday
letter, for which she could no longer hold a pen.

She told me all about the day in January when I was born
how, after breakfast, Mother told her not to bother to clear
away the things but to go up to the old house and ask Grandma
to send one of the teamsters to fetch the doctor. It was snowing
and old Dr. Kimball came the seven miles in his cutter. The other
youngsters on the place were not told what was up and went to
their lessons in Mailie's room as usual. While they were bent
over their books, Mailie slipped out and found her father taking
a surreptitious drink in honor of so agitating an occasion. She
came back with the news and imparted it cryptically by scribbling
a line on a piece of paper and smuggling it unseen into Julie's
hand. It was a line from Bleak House which they were all read-
ing then. It ran something like this: "A young gentleman has
arrived whose name is Mr. Guppy." So they always called me
Mr. Guppy. I made a stab at it myself but got no nearer than
Guffy. Mailie called me Guffy .always. The advent of the new-
comer was regarded as a family calamity. Aunt Julie told me once
that she spent that day crying in her room as the least she could

do.

It was of those days Julie talked toward the last. It is
then I wish you could have come. I wish you could have seen her

[81]

when the sentries we all post to warn us that the world is look-
ing could no longer do their duty. I am sick at the thought of
what swinishness and poltroonery and malice the spectators
would find if ever my guards were dismissed and I could no
longer edit myself for my neighbors' inspection. But the Julie
that was turned toward you and toward me was the same all the
way through a gentle and gracious and gallant person in the
very core of her. There was nothing hase in her.

There are just a few of us left to whom it matters. In
September Dr. Humphreys died. You remember I was named
after him. He was a person of circumstance and Trinity was so
crowded for his funeral that I had to. stand in the back of the
church. In the shadow of the pillar there I watched the proces-
sion following the coffin out into the afternoon sunlight Aunt
Eva, bent and old but able to make the journey, and behind her
young Eva and her husband and a swarm of grandchildren.
And I knew that there were great-grandchildren stowed away in
sundry nurseries. And I knew, too, that I could stand in the
shadow of that pillar for a hundred years without seeing the end
of the procession, without seeing the end of the chapter written
by that full and fruitful life. It is so different when a childless
woman dies. Julie's chapter is ended. She was perfume, scat-
tered now on the ground. And there is just a small company of us
you, dear Lucy, and a few others, for whom the fragrance of
her lingers in the air.

The Phalanx is ghostly now. There are strangers in the
little cottage, so that what Aunt Anne used to call the Julie light
can once more be seen through the trees. But -the big house is
mostly dark. When I used to come home at Christmas time from
school, I could see it from a great way off through the bare
branches of the trees, warm lamplight shining from each of the
twelve French windows that looked out across the lawn. Now
only two or three windows are lighted.

The last to go was Uncle Will. He had been born there and

[82]

did his first toddling in that pretty ravine of which he painted
the beech trees all his days. Even when he had to go into exile
as an old man and was supposed to he painting landscapes in
Florida and California, it was the heech trees he saw with the eyes
of his heart and the beech trees that kept showing up in those
pictures of his. Aunt Anne took his ashes down into the ravine
and buried them at the roots of one of those trees. Then she just
carved his initials in the bark of the trunk. That was only a month
ago.

So one by one the lights go out. I have had to write you
about them. It is because Julie loved you with a surpassing loyalty
and tenderness. The miles and the years between made no dif-
ference to her at all- none at all. I think you knew that there
wasalways that lamp in her window for you, always that loving
TSncbiess mherTffiarC " ~"

Something stops me from trying to say anything of the
impoverishment I feel. What a world this would be what a
morning light would shine across it if all people were like her.
I think of that and of many things and I send you her love and
mine. I wish I could stand beside you at some window today
and look out into the twilight and say nothing.

^~ Aleck

To EDNA FERBER

Antibes
June2,192S
Dear Ferber,

I am here leading the life of a rosy, middle-aged dol-
phin here alone, though this coast swarms with people I know.
Why don't you motor here en route to Grenoble? I think you'd
love it.

Love to Julia A. W.

[83]

PS. I attended the strike debate in the House disguised as a
Liberal Expert and I had tea with Philip GuedaUa who looks
a little like Changing Pollock. And I won a pound playing
croquet with the English at the Duke of Manchester's.

A.W.

To PETER HACKETT

New York City
July 15, 1929
My dear young man:

Some decayed old gentlemen whose poker
games in happier days used to be enlivened by the occasional
presence of your sainted mother before she found something
better to do, have, out of an institution known as the kitty, pur-
chased you the enclosed present being under the impression that
when you got around to it, you would find it more pleasing than
a bassinet or even a gold safety pin.

In behalf of the Thanatopsis Inside Straight and Literary
Club, I beg to remain your obedient servant,

Alexander Woollcott

[The gift that was presented to Peter Hackett a few days after his
birth, and a few months before the market crashed, was one share
of U. S. Steel.]

[84]

IV
1930-1932

To BEATRICE KAUFMAN

London
April 26, 1930

My blossom:

Noel [Coward] is the only gamester I ever knew with
my own whole-heartedness. We played backgammon or Russian
Bank all the way over. I had never before crossed the Atlantic
without once laying eyes on the darned thing. The other
passengers were mysteriously angered by this singleness of
purpose. They would stop by and say: "Don't you two ever tire
of that game" or "Still at it?" or, in die case of the German pas-
sengers they would merely say "Immer!" to each other in passing.
We finally devised an effective rejoinder, merely singing in duet:

We hope you fry in hell
We hope you fry in hell

Heigho

The-merry-o

We hope you fry in hell.

I did not have much luck. Paid for my passage but not
much over.

Cavalcade last night. Noel's party in the royal box. A con-
venient arrangement, with a salon behind it for coffee and

[85]

liqueurs and an adjacent room for the occasional relief of the

royal kidney.

Adele Astaire and Lord Cavendish in the next box and the
Duke of Bedford in his. In fact, everyone on hand with the
possible exception of Frances Wellman. The audience gala, much
cheering at Noel's entrance, a speech afterwards from die stage.
The show very moving. Also a good play. No one had ever told
me it was that.

I am lunching today with Jeffrey Amherst, dining tonight
with the incomparable Rebecca [West], lunching tomorrow with
Mrs. Belloc Lowndes. Tomorrow afternoon, Lilly [Bonner]
arrives by plane from France. Program from then on a blank, but
probably a week-end at Noel's, which is near Dover and might
be taken in en route to Paris.

I must make dear a curious illusion of which I am con-
scious. If I write a note to either you or George Backer, I feel as
if I were writing it to both of you. This note, for instance, will
leave me with a feeling of having just communicated with him.
I am dimly aware that any message for him I have in mind might
reach him more immediately if I were to send it care of Kuhn,
Loeb but I cannot be bothered with his endless fluctuations of
address and I prefer looking upon you as the nearest thing to a
permanent address he will ever have.

As a matter of fact, I have a message for him. Tell him to
read Van Wyck Brooks' Life of Emerson. I don't think it's a
very good book watery and general. But Backer should read it
and when he does he will see why I think so just as clearly as if
I wese to mark the significant passage for him.

Joyce [Barbour] and Dickie [Bird] are immensely bucked
up. He is rehearsing the leading part in the new Priestley play
and she is rehearsing for the new Joe Cook show and after ten
weeks in that she will go into the new Coward revue. This
hasn't a tide yet. I suggested calling it "Here's to Mr. Woollcott"
or "Here's to Mr. Woollcott, God bless him" but Noel is curi-

[86]-

ously inhospitable to suggestions from others and he does mate
the good point that in England it would not mean so much as in
the States.

Both Dickie and Joyce look uncommonly well. Joyce has a
figure like Lilly's. It makes me wonder if a year of complete
destitution would not be good for baby.

A.W.

[The friendship which began when George Backer was in his early
twenties continued througn the period when Mr. Backer was pub-
lisher and editor of the New York Post.]

To BEATRICE KAUFMAN

Kyoto

April 22, 1931
Light of my Life:

I cannot tell you how often I have rejoiced
that you were not with me on this curious expedition. I could
not have gone through with the necessary ceremonies dropping
repeatedly to my knees, scraping the floor with this old fore-
head, eh-eh, with your unamiable eye upon me. It is difficult
enough, God knows, for me to eat with chopsticks. Inevitably
a few bamboo-shoots fall off ont6 my long-suffering lapels. But
with your eye on me, they would have all fallen off. Then you
would have been so disagreeable about my arrival at the Imperial
Hotel me getting at once into pajamas and receiving deputa-
tions in the Campanile manner, with no conspicuous difference
except that I take tea now instead of coffee and the Gideon Bible
in the room was in Japanese. When Mr. Hyashi came and bowed
low and said he trusted I would find equally enchanted aisles in
Japan, I just thanked my stars that none of you crude people was
within earshot. When finally I went into dinner and the orchestra

[871

struck up the "Dance of the Hours" (on my word of honor) I
had a dreadful moment of feeling that you at least had a spy on
the job.

I have had such a swell time since I started and, in this one
week in Japan, gone through such eye-filling and beguiling
hours that I keep thinking it can't last Today I've been trundling
around Kyoto in a rickshaw, fairly beaming with contentment.
Perhaps the misadventures and misgivings will set in when I go
down to Kobe on Saturday and embark in a noxious and unsea-
worthy little Japanese boat for a four days' sail across the Yellow
Sea to Tientsin where Yuan will meet me. Something will have
to go wrong soon or I will get apprehensive. My luck has been
holding so long.

I sat down here tonight with the notion that I would recount
my various adventures, some charming, some hilarious. I had it
in mind to describe the entrancing supper that Kikugoro, the
great Tokyo actor, gave me at his house the night I left Toyko
(the Lunts will redly have to do better by me from now on)
and the speech I made to two hundred girls at a school and the
arrival here in Kyoto in time for the cherry-blossom festival. But
instead 111 save it all up until I get back and then find everyone
walking out on me after the first five minutes. Fm already a little
sore when I think how nobody's going to listen quietly to my
relentless travelogue.

Your parting gift, which must have involved the denuding
of several orchards, was gratefully received at Seattle. And that
about clears matters up except for an impulse to report how
fond of you I am. From time to time my heart dwells on that
fact. Occasionally it will occur to me when I am dropping off to
sleep on the other side of the world. Then it smites me with
such intensity that I should think it might easily light a lamp
in your room thereby, I am afraid, etching you at all manner
of mischief.

Fm off to Osaka now to see the marionettes and a few

[88]

good temples. Yesterday I saw a fervent Japanese gentleman
standing, in the frosty twilight, under a sacred waterfall. He
wore a suit of tasteful underwear and prayed aloud with chatter-
ing teeth for the good of his immortal soul.

Hoping you will soon take similar measures I remain

Yours respectfully

A. Woollcott

[Henry Yuan. is the son of Yuan Shih-kai, the first President of China.
He was sent to the United States to be educated, and went to
Hamilton College, where he and Woollcott became acquainted.]

To HERBERT BAYARD SWOPE, JR.

[Herbert Bayard Swope, Jr., was a schoolboy of sixteen when Woollcott
wrote this letter to him .]

Kyoto
April 22, 1931

Son of Heaven:

I would address this to the school at Riverdale
but I suppose you are seldom there. It is intended as a line of
thanks for those expensive groceries with which you so agreeably
showered me on the eve of my departure. They sustained me all
the way to Seattle where the business of speeding me on rny way
was taken over by your aunt Phyllis's father [Mr. Blake]. He
is a tall and imposing creature of whom I could catch only
glimpses in the flurry of my final arrangements, which included
everything from buying some garters to a brief dash to the local
chiropodist He (the chiropodist, not Mr. Blake) was from
Oneonta, N. Y., and makes shoes for Babe Ruth, whose bunions,
I was credibly informed, are just like spurs.

Well after that, there were a dozen days on the boat, devoted
to much reading, some writing and the minimum of typhoid
injections. I enjoyed the voyage so much that I felt outraged when

[891

we lost a day en route. I am aware that this was no special bit
of fraud. Indeed, it's quite the usual thing. I had merely for-
gotten about it.

We had a rather interesting murder on board. An Indian
traveler in the steerage dropped dead fifteen minutes after buying
some soda pop. As he weighed 300 pounds, it was a little difficult
getting him up the companionway in order to drop him over-
boardfeet weighted into the deep. His bride was inconsolable
for as much as half an hour but thereafter perked up and flirted
around hopefully. Her charm for me was somewhat impaired by
the circumstance that, in her front teeth, a gold spade and a
gold heart had been skillfully inlaid. Of course no one breathed
an official suspicion of murder, as it would have meant inquests
for the next ten years.

I have never enjoyed traveling in a country so much as in
Japan. The meals in the Japanese homes and restaurants, rather
than in the foreign hotels, delight me continuously. I am afraid
they would revolt one who has been brought up to look at
every edible twice and then spit it out. I have particularly relished
two dinners I have had here in Kyoto, sitting up at a little counter
of spotless, new unpolished wood and taking my food direct from
the hands of the chef, an expert who is tastefully attired in a
suit of durable underwear and who works with an immense
gravity, occasionally interspersed with sudden shrieks of falsetto
laughter, usually inspired by my maladroitness with the chop-
sticks. And even your sainted mother would relish the custom of
starting the meal with a face-wipe with a soft, moist, perfumed,
hot face-cloth, brought by a pretty girl who kneels beside you
while you tidy up for dinner. And certainly she would approve
*lie gargle which was supplied pitcher, cup, spittoon and all
as the final course of my dinner last night at Osaka, where I had
gone to see the famous puppet theatre.

As for your sainted grandmother, I don't like to say any-
thing or to inquire what Oriental colony there may have been in

[90]

Far Rockaway, but it is extraordinary that about one out of
every three young Japs I meet are the living image of your
uncle Bruce.

I bid you au revoir.

A. Woollcott

To LILLY BONNER

[The Bonner family consists of Lolly Stehli Bonner, her husband Paul,
and their four sons; Woollcott's long friendship with them was unusual
for him because it embraced the whole family. He spent much time
at their home in Locust Valley, Long Island, and later visited them
during their long sojourns in Europe..]

Nora, Japan
April 24, 1931
My dear Lilly

You have had your sweet revenge. Never had I
thought to see the day when I would long for those splendid,
capacious, substantial two-tined forks of yours. But it has come
to pass. When I am crouched on a silken cushion beside a lac-
quered tabouret, trying (while the little waitress kneeling beside
me titters with ecstasy at my efforts) to convey to my lips a morsel
of bamboo-shoot dipped in gravy and mashed radishes and have
only chopsticks to do the trick with, then I eat my words the
bamboo-shoots having fallen by the wayside. And there can be
other difficulties. For instance, the little waitress will lift the
sake bottle with a pretty inquiring gesture and I bow and say
thank you at which, with a regretful sigh, she puts the bottle
away. It's like the equivocal French merci and I must get the
intonation wrong. But the real hardship is these damned chop-
sticks. I have abandoned my diet as a work of supererogation. I
can lose weight just by the process of elimination which my lack
of dexterity forces upon me.

But IVe never seen so enthralling a country. Every waking

[911

minute entertains the eye. For sheer delight, I offer you this
ancient and quiet town so quiet that I hear all the bird-calls in
the countryside and the rattle of a distant cart somewhere and the
occasional boom of the gong at the Temple where some pilgrim
must have paid 5 sen for the luxury of calling Buddha's atten-
tion to his prayers. I practically spent the day feeding rice-cakes
to the sacred deer who drift by thousands through Nara and
whose attentions, when they suspect you of concealing rice-
cakes on your person, are even moister than Paddy's. It was a
benign spring day and it seemed as if all the school children in
Japan were out on the highways on a picnic. Sometimes I saw
them trudging along through a very snowstorm of cherry-
blossoms. I invaded one Temple at a time when about two
hundred girls were at prayer. Their shoes were ranged outside
and how they ever get back into the right ones, is beyond me. Per-
haps they don't. Tliey were all about six years old each. Henry
Bonner would, I am sure, have risen to the occasion and asked
for more.

Tomorrow I am going over to Kobe for a four-day sail across
the Yellow Sea to Tientsin in what will probably be a horrid
little boat. But Yuan and [John] Thomason have been wiring
greetings and I look forward to Peking where I should be well
established a week from now.

I found it hard to believe it was only four weeks ago last
night that I heard Toscanini conduct the Ravel music, I listening
from a vantage point which gave me a superb view of your back
in that black dress. If memory serves, you were wearing what I
hope (in case we ever have to hock them) were emeralds. I
trust you do not mind if I drift around the Far East with a
pleasant memory of the nape of your neck etched on my heart

Tell Paul that getting only one drink of sake is rather a hard-
ship because it is served in a cup so tiny that compared with it the
offerings of eye-dropper Bonner seemed like the gigantesque liba-
tions of a medieval baron.

[92]

Au revoir. Ill see you around the end of June if the fates
are kind to me, that is.

A.W.

To LILLY BONNER

Ne7 York City
July 2, .1931
My dear Lilly:

Here I am, safe home and feeling singularly
bereft I know now exactly how Stefansson must have felt when
he came out of the Arctic regions at the end of 1915 and heard
for the first time that the world had been at war for more than
a year. The news that you have departed these shores greeted me
at San Francisco and in Hollywood I caught up with George
Backer who told me it was all true. I do not think until then I
had stopped to realize how inextricably the Bonners root and
branch had grown into the fabric of my life. I had been looking
forward all the way back across the Pacific to the moment when
I would reappear on your horizon and had been getting down to
brass tacks on my old and then still unrelinquished idea of taking
a house in Locust Valley. Well that's that Or, at least, for the
present, that is that

As to coming over to Saint-Cloud, I have every intention
of doing so between now and the end of the year. The exact time
would be determined by the schedule of my work. After three
fallow months, I am due just now for some weeks of steady writ-
ing. By the middle of August I should know what if any radio
work I must do in the Fall and whether I would have time,
before starting in, to take a quiet trip across the Atlantic. I
would really like to do none at all for then I could come over in
October which would be perfect

From everyone I hear only regret at your absence ana

[981

admiration for the way you managed the exit. It seems to me
among the probabilities that you will live to look back on that
departure as the beginning of a better existence but the whole
chapter is one too involved and too abundant for me to dabble in
it. I move we postpone the subject until I have a free afternoon
and can settle down to it.

My adventures in China were soul-satisfying and one of
the rare treats you cannot escape by trans-Atlantic flights is the
evening when I sit down and tell you 'all about it. Also the ele-
gant keepsake I brought you from Peking must wait a while,
although I might find someone going your way to deliver it for
me. I know that the Fatios are leaving this evening but they will
land in Naples, go to Switzerland and Sweden and not reach Paris

until September.

Aleck

Next Day.

P.S. F.P.A. has been muttering over the telephone about a letter
from Paul I was to read, and I held this open on the chance that
I would find it in this morning's mail. It hasn't come yet, so I
will wind this up without having read it. Tell him I know how
unsettling it is to give up any job which has become a habit,
and which had, through many years, absolved one from the
anxious burden of choice. But tell him that the task of picking
up each day and making it with his own hands is a good job, too,
though more exacting. I know very few people equipped with
the rare talents needed for leisure, but Paul does happen, I think,
to be one of them. I include some snapshots taken of an oblivious
backgammon game, which was staged at the [Kathleen and
Charles] Norrises beautiful ranch, to which I transported Harpo
[Marx] and [Harold] Ross when they met me at the boat in San
Francisco*

Miss Ryan tells me that I owe Paul $5.50 on silk sheets
maae up to complete an order, but as he owes me $25 for reck-

[94]

lessly betting against me in the matter of the sex of an impending
baby, I will thank him to send me his check for the balance at
once. All of which sounds very light-hearted and jolly, and it
ought to, for that is exactly the way I feel. I have no sense of
separation, but rather a strong belief that somehow, somewhere,
I will see much of you in the next forty years. If you were j}ot
practically illiterate, I could rely on you to know that the last
paragraph of Great Expectations runs as follows:

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined
place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first
left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all
the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, 1 saw no
shadow of another parting from her.

A.W.

To LILLY BONNER

New York City
July 22, 1931
Dear Lilly:

As I suppose you already know, it's a girl at the
F.PA's. Esther came into the hospital Monday and attended
to the matter within two hours. The whole thing makes a sucker
out of me, but there were no bets. Incidentally, Paul is a menteur
and pouilleux b&tard when he says he didn't bet me that little
Miss Stehli would be a boy. Frank was here till all hours last
night watching [Harold] Guinzburg and me play backgammon,
and trying to screw up his courage to the point of calling his
daughter Persephone. I pointed out that she would be known
as Phony, and am myself recommending Rachel.

Broun's revue was staged last night, but it so smefled of
failure in advance that I couldn't make up my mind to attend

[95]

it The reviews this morning are written with a kind of crush-
ing kindliness.

I am having Holliday send you Wells's The Science of
Life. This impulse has been forming ever since I vanished for
five days in tie Yellow Sea into the enchantment of its fifteen
hundred pages. I thought then how simple, everyday biology had
been left out of not only my own education, but that of pretty
much everyone I know. I think that's because we are brought
up by schoolmasters, and schoolmasters are classicists. I doubt,
for instance, if either Reache or Manfred knew any biology
worth imparting. I then progressed to the point of thinking it
would be a grand idea to present your spawn with a first-rate
microscope, and that you could get some biology teacher in one
of the Long Island schools to come for two hours once a week
and start the kids off on a little laboratory work for which the
material abounded all over the place. I wish to God someone
had done something like this for me. Then I would have gone
into high school and college with the ground to some extent
prepared for the very meagre amount of planting such institu-
tions usually give. What I had in mind was the liberal applica-
tion of a corrective to the still strong monkish influence in our
schools and tutorial systems, something to give a boy the rounded
mental equipment that a man like Wells has. Well, I don't
know whether the great migration has shot this plan all to hell,
but anyway, I tlrmlr you will get a good deal of pleasure out
of The Science of Life. Everything except the section on genetics
I found easy enough reading, and my only fear is that you
already have the damned booL In that case, I shall be too irri-
tated!

Life at Sands Point seems to be much as usual I find it
pleasant, distracting, and singularly unnourishing. It is no way
to live.

On the way back, the boat put in at Honolulu for twelve
hours. I thought a good deal of Sibyl [Lady Colefax], noted

[96]

that the beach at Waikiki was not any larger than the Stehli
riparian rights (or wrongs) on Oyster Bay, and bought a copy
of Time, in which I read with mixed emotions the story of
Ralph Barton's suicide.

Well, I was gone only three months, but in that time you
had migrated, and Belasco had died, and Ralph had killed him-
self, and everyone had taken up Culbertson.

A.W.

To LILLY BONNER

August 26, 1931
Dear Lilly:

I am trusting this to the mails with what I can
remember of your address, for I am writing from Hawley Truax's
pkce in the Berkshires and I left my address book behind me in
New York. I am on my way by motor to the Tarkingtons in
Maine.

There is to be one final expedition before I settle down at
the Campanile a house party at the island, consisting of Bea-
trice, Backer, Harpo, the Guinzburgs, and, I hope, the Dietzes. I
plan to herd them there on September llth, and stay three or
four days, it being part of an old notion. to see what a Vermont
September was really like. A pretty successful island party was
wound up without casualties a week ago the Ives, the Fleisch-
manns, Neysa [McMein], George Abbott (we now call Neysa's
place in Port Washington the Abbottoir), Alice [Duer Miller],
Harpo, and myself. It was a part-time arrangement for the
Fleischmanns, who kept making disastrous trips to Saratoga, but
as Charlie Brackett would rush over from Saratoga, this evened
matters up. Ruth [Fleischmann] stayed on the island only long
enough to complain a good deal about the beds.

As for my plans, I shall have to confess a secret shame. I

[97]

am resuming the Shouts and Murmurs in The New Yorker
with some September issue, but with radio people and the like I
have been arch and hard to please because it now seems likely
that I will go on the stage just once and get it over with. It
seems that Katharine Cornell has leased the Beksco Theatre for
three years, and will inaugurate her management by producing
there, in October, a comedy by S. N. Behrman called Brief
Moment, in which Francine Larrimore will star, and in which
there is a part Behrman wrote with me in mind. This character is
a stout, indolent and unamiable creature who spends a large
part of the pky lying on a chaise-longue and making an occa-
sional insulting remark. After a good deal of palaver, it looks now
as if I would surely go into rehearsal with this, and even get as
far as the week's tryout in Washington on October 12th with-
out being fired. I suppose that if I were still in the cast when
the play opened in New York, I would have to play it for at
least four weeks. Perhaps it would work out so that I could come
over and spend Christmas with you. All this is so uncertain, even
now, that I have not spoken of it to anyone around here, but
having sworn to announce my plans to you, I can at least con-
fide to you what's afoot

The new Marx picture is to open next week, and Harpo has
taken a penthouse in East Fifty-First Street for six months. The
brothers (or rather, three of diem at least) jumped into Hey-
wood's show for two nights, ensuring a profitable week for that
somewhat anxious venture. They did it for nothing, and were
solemnly presented with three of Heywood's paintings in full
view of the audience. Groucho said it was bad enough playing
for nothing.

Alexander W.

RS. Speaking of beds at the island, they have found a new
name for the big double-bed in the front room on the ground

[98]

floor. It is comfortable but noisy, and lets out a tell-tale groan if
you move in it We how call it the informative double,

A.W.

To A. A. WALLGREN

Washington, D. C.
November 6, 1931
Dear Wally,

Your amiable letter soothed and assuaged the tedium
of my recent exile in Detroit. It makes me proud to think that you
sit in your little suburban home reading from my works. I can
almost picture you in your arm-chair with your feet up and your
lips moving. What embarrasses me is a secret conviction that
you then turn to the other communicants of Old Swedes' and say:
'There's a man who has a lovely prose style and once in Paris,
during an air raid, he got drunk and took off my shoes for me."

A. Woollcott

To LILLY BONNER

New York City
November 20, 1931

Dear Lilly:

Well, I'm just a fooL Here I am sold down the river
in so many different directions that I practically have no private
life. If you could see me dictating breathless* prose while brush-
ing my teeth in the morning, and correcting proof while apply-
ing grease-paint in the dressing-room, you would have some rough
idea of my present demented state. After the opening at the
Belasco ten days ago, I had reason to believe that you were
getting reports from Neysa, Miss Ryan, et al. I don't know how I
can supplement these, except by letting you know that we seem

[99]

to be something in the nature of a hit. At least we are doing a
lively business uncommonly good business in a season wben
most of the plays are dying like flies. Next, it has occurred to
me that it might amuse you to see the script, accompanied by a
complete set of the photographs of the production. These will
go forward to you within a day or so. I had thought by this time
to know what I, myself, would be doing. But I think it will need
another two weeks before we can make an estimate on how long
the play is likely to run, and when I know that, I can come to
some conclusion about how necessary I am to it, if at all, and
whether I want to go on playing it for months. My sense of
freedom in the matter is somewhat tinged by the circumstance
that I own a small but tender fraction of the production, and
would a little prefer that it should not lose money. Of course,
I'm having a robustly amusing time, and am really quite good in
the play, thanks to the fact that it is an actor-proof part which fits
me better than any suit I ever had did.

One advantage of my present visible preoccupation is that
I don't have to go to any parties at all. The only exception in the
past two months was that annual birthday party of the Krock-
Kaufman-Fleischmann aggregation which brings together, by
the arbitrary accident of birth, people who would not normally
go within ten miles of one another. I moved from the demi-tasse
right into a car and drove back to town, but the occasion did have
its compensations.

It is barely possible that before the winter is out, you will
get an invitation to dine with Elsie DeWolfe (Lady Mendl to
you). I am very fond of her, and enjoy her company enormously.
She is a really fabulous creature. She fed me before the play on
Wednesday night with Lanson 1914 thrown (or rather poured)
in for good measure. But she is leaving for Paris in another fort-
night, and I have filled her head with the importance of getting
you and Paul to come and see her. You will probably hear from
her. Paul can play around with Sir Charles.

[100]

Well, dear, the call boy (who happens to be a girl, by the
way) is announcing the overture, and I must go down and con-
ceal my breaking heart under the eternal mask of the clown. In
another two weeks I will be full of information about this busi-
ness of my visiting Vaucresson. I hear rumors of the suggestion
that I accompany the Duer-McMeins on their projected explora-
tion of the Nile. I must impart to your private ear a resolution
made several years ago never to travel anywhere with anybody
except my dear George Backer, who is incapable of minding my
acerbities because, in his vagueness, he doesn't even know I'm
present. He is, incidentally, so ill as to alarm me. They wanted to
operate on him for appendicitis, and found that a six-weeks
course of treatments to reduce an enlarged liver, etc., would be
necessary first. I suppose he will be operated on early in Decem-
ber. Much love.

A.W.

* I dictated "deathless," by the way.

To LILLY BONNER

New York City
December 4, 1931

Dear Lilly:

Elsie Mendl is sailing back home to Versailles this
Saturday, and she carries with her (unless she has forgotten) a
small gift from me to you. I cannot make up my mind whether
it is a Christmas present or just something in between times.
Perhaps if you really get it, and I don't happen to come to life
in time to send something else, you would better call it a
Christmas present You can tell Paul that I felt fairly bitter
when I examined his catalogue at Dutton's the other day and
saw that he was offering for sale the first edition of The Whilom-
ville Stories which I had given him for Christmas two or three

[101]

years ago. As I had paid two dollars and he is asking thirty-five,
I feel that its sale at this price will involve an unearned incre-
ment in which I ought to share. The whole episode gave me a
good idea. I am having that rug you gave me for Christmas kst
year exhibited in Sloane's window as part of the Alexander
Woollcott Collection of objets d'art. I am asking a thousand
for it and will give you half of what I get.

I have been busy as hell, and have had time for nothing
except one hurried trip to Newark to see Maude Adams play
Portia, and to become involved in a local squabble which has,
I think, left none of the Swopes except Ottie speaking to me.

A.W.

To ALFRED LUNT

New York City
December 14, 1931
Dear Alfred:

There was such a mob backstage last night, and I
was so trampled under foot by the Mourning Becomes Electra
company, that I had no time for the civilities beyond telling
Henry Travers what I have been telling him for years that
he's just about my favorite actor, who never fails me whatever
betide. In the confusion I found myself out on the street again
without attending to one matter that was on my mind. I wanted
to hunt up this man [Eduardo] Ciannelli, whom I do not know,
and tell him how beautiful I thought his performance was
especially in the last act

When your grandchildren (on whom you have not yet
made a really effective start) gather at your rheumatic knees and
ask you what you did during the great depression, you can tell
them that you played Reunion in Vienna to crowded houses,
and enjoyed the whole depression enormously.

A. Woollcott
[102]

To PAUL BONNER

New York City
December 30, 1931
Dear Paul:

I was delighted beyond measure with my Christmas
present. I think that, after all, I must own up to something I
have always thought myself free of the lust of possession. I
know that when you had this book it created a mild flicker of
interest in me, but certainly nothing comparable to the one I
began to feel as soon as it was lodged here under my own roof.
By the way, without any intention on my part to accumulate
a library that is anything except a work-shop, mine is growing
insensibly in value. This Fall Constance Collier gave me the
first English edition of Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant inscribed
by the author "to Ellen Ellen Ellen Ellen Ellen Terry/* The
copy has a certain evidential value just now when Gordon Craig
is setting up a tiny clamor to the effect that Shaw had not, as
a matter of fact, made much impression on Ellen. I would have
to testify she thought so little of this brain-child of his that she
casually bestowed it, inscription and all, upon a boy friend. And
as Constance Collier carried the boy friend off from under her
nose, the book, in the whirligig of time, came into my possession.
Life hereabouts seems very congested. I myself cannot get
to see the few plays that are worth seeing, and would not have
seen the one big hit in town, Reunion in Vienna,, if they had
not given a Sunday night benefit for the unemployed. It is a
good comedy made enchanting by its performance, particularly,
I think, by Lynn [Fontanne], who plays with a kind of exquisite
delicacy that can't even be described. I don't know whether
you've heard anything about the play, but it is a reunion of an
exiled Hapsburg who returns from driving his taxi in Nice, and
after an interval of ten years sees once again the safely ensconced
matron who had once been his mistress. The meeting is electric.
He sees her in a mirror, turns slowly around, scorches her from

[103]

head to foot with his eyes, circles silently around her, comes
close, lets his hand play over her hosom and buttocks, then slaps
her in the face and gives her one long, exhausting kiss. All that
time she never speaks, never moves a muscle, but when he
straightens up again, you can see that she is swooning inside.
Everything about her has wilted in the heat. The lady sitting
in the seat behind me kept up a helpful causerie for the
enlightenment of her companion. At this point she said, 'Tfou
see, she ain't responsive."

There's another scene I think you might like to know about.
It's the one where the returning Hapsburg has his first encounter
with the old beldame (played, of course, by Helen Westley)
who runs the restaurant where the reunion is effected. He can be
heard speculating idly as to whether she still wears her old red
flannel drawers, and at an opportune moment lifts the skirt
to see. The glimpse of Helen's behind incarnadined in flannel
is a nighdy joy to the Guild subscribers. The other evening,
unfortunately, even Helen knew by the gasp of the minor actors
on the stage that she had forgotten to put them on. One saw the
thing itself hung with shreds of old Jaeger like some Dor6
conception of the Inferno. Alfred came out of his cat-
alepsy at last unable not to speak the line which was then due.
It was, "Well, thank God there is one thing in Vienna that
hasn't changed."

I have had it in the back of my mind all along that I
would be able to crawl out from under the debris of my life
along about the middle of March. If it should turn out that by
then I would be well and solvent, I want to take ship for Europe,
roughly dividing the next ten weeks between London, France
and Spain, not necessarily in the order named. I'd like to motor
in some part of France I've never seen the Aveyron or the
Dordogne. I'd like to have a look at Spain, which I have never
seen, and I'd like to spend a week in London with Rebecca
West, and Jeffrey Amherst, and Noel [Coward], if he is back

[104]

by then, and Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, and Siegfried Sassoon, if
I can break through his door. Recently Henry [Stehli] wrecked
my peace of mind by suggesting that Lilly would bounce over
to America after the flight from Egypt. I do hope that you or
she will write me before she departs, telling me just what her
plans are. It would be too sickening if we were to cross on the
Atlantic. Also, tell Lilly that I am doing up a bundle of choice
reading matter in a shawl-strap, and Alice [Duer Miller] has
promised to transport it in return for the privilege of sampling
it en route. I think you are; all going to have an enchanting trip,
but I am too involved in this venture at the Belasco to be able
to get out in time to join you. Besides, the damn thing has so
gutted my calendar that unfinished work is piled high around
me in crushing quantities.

A. Woollcott

To LAURA E. RICHARDS

[Mrs. Richards, the daughter of Julia Ward Howe and Samuel Gridley
Howe, was in her eighties when Woollcott began to correspond with
her. He had recently read and reviewed her memoirs, Stepping West-
ward, and this was a reminder of the pleasure her early stories,
including Captain January, had given him. This friendship continued
until her death, at the age of ninety-three.]

New York City
February 9, 1932
My dear Mrs. Richards:

I do not aspire to enrapture posterity

with another Shaw-Terry correspondence, but I must write
you once more if only to withdraw "paw/' I am now quite
sure that you do not paw, though perhaps you pounce occasion-
ally.

Then if you don't mind, I should like to say something
about the word "rubbish." I must tell you that it is an old

[105]

trick of mine to snatch, when venting some great enthusiasm,
at any chance of disparagement in order to lend credibility to
the bouquets I am tossing. It is a kind of back-pedaling, I sup-
pose. As a matter of fact, the other books are all vague to me.
I suppose I avoided most of them because they were written
for girls. They came along in that time of my life when I read
ravenously. We lived in Germantown, outside Philadelphia,
and in order to get enough reading matter to last me over Sun-
day, I had everyone in our household (including the cook)
become a subscriber to the Germantown Library, which was the
lovely eighteenth century Wister Mansion set in a park. This
gave me jurisdiction over four cards. I used to set forth with
a small hand-cart (actually) and come home heavy-laden except
on the several occasions when, coming of absent-minded stock,
I appeared at the library with the letters which my mother had
given me to mail, and only then discovered that, in passing the
box at the corner of our street, I had posted the library cards.
This misfortune used to infuriate me to tears. I have no idea
which of your books I gobbled in that period but after nearly
thirty-five years, I seem to recall an impassioned young woman
who was dedicated to the slogan, "Cuba Libre," and also a
family group named Basil, Merton and Susan D.

I can report one thing to you. No. & Bond Street is still
standing, but No. 23 is gone. However, it must have gone
recently, for the passerby can see the traces of old rooms and
stairways left like scars on the wall of the building still standing
next door.

One thing I looked vainly for in Stepping Westward and
that was some allusion to Kate Douglas Wiggin. I thought your
paths would have crossed somewhere in Maine. She was a
great and a l dear lady, and we were neighbors for many years,
and I think of her often. The first letter I got in response to
the Stepping Westward review was from her sister, Nora Smith.

And you yourself tell me there is something else you left
[106]

out of the book. So you wish now that you had "put in another
story" and then add: "No matter/' No matter? I am livid.

Yours sincerely,

Alexander Woollcott

To LAC7RA E. RICHARDS

New York City
March 15, 1932
My dear Mrs. Richards:

I seem to have accumulated a number

of things to tell you. As soon as I have reported my delight
in your letters and my immense gratification at the valentine,
I can settle down to the business of the day. To begin with,
I take it that I need not spend too much time disposing of that
somewhat blurred stencil comprised in the word "sophisticate."
It is used as a classification stamp on the work of all of us who,
through inertia, continue to function in New York. A fair analogy
would be the comic-journal notion of yesteryear that all little
boys in Boston had enormous, dome-like foreheads and wore
spectacles. I am under the impression that it was Gertrude
Atherton who first printed this label for wide distribution. Well,
the tales I could tell you about Gertrude Atherton! She didn't
live in a tree with an affinity. That would have struck her as
too humdrum.

You see, I am not a book reviewer at all. For too many years
I was a dramatic critic, a post nicely calculated to rot the mind.
After my flight from Times Square, I invented this page in
The New Yorker where, as a kind of town crier, I can say any-
thing that is on my mind. The trouble is that there isn't often
much on it But every once in a while I have the satisfaction,
which is the breath of the journalist's nostril, of hearing bells ring
all over the country. Then I know that I have had the good for-

[107]

tune to say something which a lot of people had wanted to have
said. Said for them, that is. This happens just often enough to
keep me going. It happened in the case of the piece I wrote about
Stepping Westward. At the risk of seeming vainglorious, I must
(because, after all, they are your affair, not mine) report some of
these reactions to you. I do not think there has been a day in the
past two months when someone has not written me about that
piece. More often than not the note takes the form of someone
thanking me for reminding him or her of Captain January. I get
descriptions of angry hunts through the bookcase until the miskid
copy is run to earth in the spareroom closet Then follows a fond
reunion with a few tears for the story's sake, and for the sake of
days gone by. I have received several stern letters from followers
of Hfldegarde. The lovely Anne Parrish tells me that she still
reads them for the peace they bring her. I never knew Hilde-
garde, but at least her wallpaper seems to have made a vivid
impression on her contemporaries.

As for that small express wagon in which I used to trundle a
five-foot shelf home from the Germantown Library, I have been
trying to reconstruct its contents. I make out a list for myself
and it sounds implausible. I suppose it is because it underwent
such violent fluctuations in the years from nine to fourteen.
But I think if I could go back and stop it on any one expedition,
I would find incredible variations in a single wagonload. There
would be candid juvenilia written for the slower-witted boys,
sandwiched between books that I could and do read now for
pleasure. But I think that even at the time, I knew there were
those among my favorites which were good in a sense that the
others were not. I think I knew, when first I read them, that I
would always like Huckleberry Finn, and Little Women, and
Kenneth Grahame's The Golden Age, and Howard Pyle's Robin
Hood, and Captain ]cmuary. Mixed in with such treasures, and
pretty much at the same time, was a good deal of addiction to
Harrison Ainsworth and to Charles Reade. But above all, and

[108]

through all, and to this day, my dear Charles Dickens. My
father started me when I was ten by reading Great Expectations
to me. I still think it is the best of the lot I had read all except
Bleak House by the time I was twelve. Later I took on Jane
Austen, and one of the reasons why I am not particularly well
read today is because I have spent so large a part of the last
twenty years rereading Dickens and Jane Austen. I remember
Shaw admitting once to me that a concordance of his own writ-
ings would reveal the Dickens allusions as running four to one
against any other writer. He told me it was a kind of shorthand,
and I realized that that was what it had always been with us.
If I had not known the people in Dickens as well as I knew the
neighbors, I wouldn't have understood what the family were
talking about half the time. My grandfather lived to be eighty-
eight. Toward the end he relinquished all jurisdiction of his
acres, but kept his eye on the hollyhocks, and we would know
the chickens were at them by the sight of him hobbling down the
steps, brandishing his cane and shouting, "J anet > donkeys!" I
understand that I, myself, arrived on this scene when all the
boys and girls in the family were at lessons. The tidings were
clandestinely conveyed to my sister on a slip of paper which con-
tained a sentence from Bleak House, the book in which they
all happened to be immersed at the time. The sentence was: "A
young gentleman has arrived whose name is Mr. Guppy/' For
some years thereafter, I was referred to in the family as Mr.
Guppy.

Well, I must run now.

Alexander Woollcott

P.S. Since we're talking of favorites and the- vice of rereading, I
might add that the best of all biographies, to my notion, is
Trevelyan's The Early History of Charles James Fox. I always
keep a few copies on hand for distribution among the benighted.
I have just been reading an advanced copy of the excellent memoir

[1091

which the present Trevelyan has written about his father. In one
of the letters printed in it I notice the old man referring to the
time when he, too, "commenced author/* I suppose I ought to
know where that phrase came from, but I don't.

A.W.

To .ROBERT BARNES RUDD

New York City
March 24, 1932
Dear Bob:

Your word reached me too late. I had already
indignantly returned the drawings to him. Total strangers all
over the country dump scripts of plays, novels, short stories,
poems and the like on me all the time. The accompanying letter
always asks if I would mind telling them whether it would be
a good idea sending them to The New Yorker. I should think
it would be so simple to send them direct and find out that way,
When I sold 'The Precipice" to Youngs Magazine (or, per-
haps, The Black Cat), I do not recall that I first mailed it to
the editor's laundress to find out if she thought the editor would
open the envelope when I sent it to him.

I can find no record that Guy Domville was ever published,
but I have a notion that Thomas Beer would know if a manu-
script copy were anywhere available, and I am writing to ask
him. I remember reading in something of his an account of the
disastrous first performance.

Speaking of John Aubrey, I have just been rereading the
lovely Strachey piece about him in Portraits in Miniature. The
realization that I will never have another book by Strachey to
read -gives me such a sense of impoverishment as I have never
known before in reading the death notice of some writing fellow.
There is a fine preface on Aubrey by his new editor, John Collier,

[110]

the young man who wrote His Monkey Wife. Aubrey, was new
to me, but that is only because Bib was my last attempt at a
teacher of English literature. I have been trying to find a diag-
nosis of the peculiar twinge of pleasure that I get from such a
first-hand witness as Aubrey. Take this passage, for instance, in
the profile of Ben Jonson:

In his later time he lived in Westminster, in the house
under which you passe as you goe out of the churchyard into
the old palace; where he dyed.

He lies luryed in the north aisle in the path of square stone
(the rest is lozenge) opposite to the Scutcheon of Robertus de
Ros, with this inscription only on him, in a pavment square of
blew -marble, about 14 inches square,

O RARE BEN JONSON

which was donne at the charge of Jack Young, afterwards
knighted, who, waiting there when the grave was covering,
gave the Fellow eighteen pence to cutt it.

I suppose the twinge is a response to the evidence that any-
thing so casual and unpretentious could have become, by the
mellowing of time, so momentous. I know that kind of twinge
keeps me in a constant state of pleasurable agitation when I
read those somewhat kindred favorites, The Fugger News-Let-
ters, and Private Letters, Pagan and Christian, edited by Lady
Brook (or Brooke). There, if you like, are two absolute essentials
for the browsing room. If they are not there, something must
be done about it at once. If you do not know them, I cannot
bear it. The best letters of the latter collection are the Christian
ones, particularly those of the Bishop of Clermont, who was a
seventh century fellow. You must read his account of a week-end
at Aries, and of his dinner with Theodoric.

I was amused that you listed Salvation Nell only as an
afterthought. I always associate it with you, and I am not sure
we didn't see it together that Christmas vacation when I was

[111]

lodged for the night at your house on my way home from college.
I probably made you buy the tickets, but perhaps we both made
Hawley buy them. However, the association derives from that
action of the impressionable Alicia who, as you will recall, was
so affected by the play that, between the acts, she tore the corsage
of violets from her bosom and thrust it into the tambourine of
the Salvation Army lassie in the lobby. Sheldon roared with
delight when I told him about that years ago.

I last saw Mrs. Fiske in San Francisco in June just for a
few moments in her dressing-room. I found her playing there
when my boat put in from Japan. Then we were both in Cleve-
land in October. It was the week Brief Moment opened, and I
was a great local success due to the fact that, in the fearful
acoustics of the Hanna Theatre, the critics could hear only me
and the prompter. Arriving in town on that Saturday to resume
her interrupted tour in some dreadful play, she sent a note
around to the stage door saying: "Dear child, many, many
congratulations/' Then, at Christmas time, her maid sent a note
to the Belasco Theatre saying that Mrs. Fiske was too ill to
pick out a book for me this Christmas, and adding: "But she
bids me tell you there will be another Christmas/' But there
will be no other. I feel inexpressibly poorer.

Of course I loathe Gordon Craig with intensity, I have
never known anyone so overweeningly pretentious with so little
to show for it His book goaded me into two pieces in The New
Yorker some months ago. One of them was reproduced in The
Era, a London newspaper, under the simple heading: "New
York Critic's Bad Lapse in Taste/'

P.S. Good God. What a long letter.

To CHARLES MACOMB FLANDRAU
[Flandrau's Viva Mexico and Diary of a Freshman were among Woofl-
cott's favorite books, which he constantly urged others to read.]

New York City
March 31, 1932
My dear Mr. Flandrau:

By sending you the accompanying

pamphlet (the printing house in the Middle West which pub-
lished it without leave shut my mouth by giving me fifty copies),
I have a chance to thank you for your letter and to report that
Copey [Professor Charles Townsend Copeland] and I talked
about you a few days ago when I made a pilgrimage to 1 5 Hollis.
When I tried to find out from him why you wrote so infre-
quently, I discovered I was treading on difficult ground. You see,
he hasn't written much either, and he would prefer that the
subject should not be brought up.

I had a copy of Viva Meodco with me when I went to Japan
a year ago this time. A young Japanese scholar named Osamu
Yamada borrowed it from me with a promise to send it on to a
young Swiss friend of mine in Basle. It has since been raptur-
ously acknowledged. You will say I am like one of those women
who come up to a lecturing author thinking to please the poor
wretch by saying: "I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed your
book. I have lent my copy to everyone I know/' Poor Kate
Douglas Wiggin used to lament with genuine emotion that she
was the most "borrowed author in the world.

However, this leads me at an ambling gait to the report that
when I set sail from Kobe to Tientsin, I could not resist sending
you a note. As the address had to be sketchy, it seemed doubt-
ful, at the time, that you would ever get it. I merely felt obliged,
for old times' sake, to exclaim at my first encounter with the
Japanese: "What a wonderful little people they are!"

Then I could describe Harpo Marx's delight in the story .of
your old horse from Loquacities. But perhaps you know not
Joseph and would not care that you had pleased him.

Alexander Woollcott

To BEATRICE KAUFMAN

London
December 8, 1932

Beloved friend: (that is the way my hurried notes from Mrs.
Belloc Lowndes begin)

It is all so confusing. I mosey over from Berlin
and find the Bonners the bankrupt Bonners most exquisitely
ensconced. A lovely house with a hair-raising butler and five
maids and a Rolls Royce. And I dine there the first night and
not far down the table sits your own personal George, immacu-
late in a white tie and wasting gems of small talk on a Mrs. Leslie.
And I come back to my hotel and learn from my mail that you
think there's a chance just a bare chance that George may
come to London next week.

George, whom I encountered the next evening chez the
[Raymond] Masseys and the evening after that at the Savoy
grill, is in a mood so benign that I think you should be alarmed. I
hear he not only took all Paul's plays to read but that he volun-
teered to. At this writing (11 A.M.) he is toying with the idea
of casting Paul as the doctor [in Dinner at Eight]. This would
please Lilly and annoy Dickie [Bird] a good deal. But George
just beams in a saint-like manner.

I even hear that he has offered to buy into the American
rights of the new Maugham play which Rebecca [West] and I
went to see the night before last and which we considered (to
put it conservatively) Godawful. Seeing Rebecca again is my
great delight. She is now extraordinarily beautiful, having gone
over to some doctor near Vienna or Dresden and lost eleven and
a half pounds the first twenty-four hours. Address furnished on
request

My immediate calendar runs something like this:
. Today: Lunch with Mrs. Belloc Lowndes.

Tonight: Dinner with Lilly, then Words and Music with
Lilly, then all to supper afterwards at the Savoy with Jeffrey.

[114]

Tomorrow: Lunch at the House of Commons with Cazalet
and a dinner party with Rebecca at the Bonners.

Day after: Lunch with Robert (Brief Moment) Douglas
and dinner at Rebecca's with Clive Bell.

Next evening: Dinner at Lady Colefax's with George and,
I suppose, Edna [Ferber].

Following evening: New play with Dickie (I mean I am to
be with Dickie, not the play).

Following day: Lunch at the Jardin des Gourmets (dear,
dear) with that Mr. Bailey who writes the Reginald Fortune
stories and dinner later at the Bonners.

Etc. Etc.: Lunch with Lady Ravensdale Thursday, dinner
that night with Mrs. Lowndes and the Charles Morgans, dinner
on the 20th with Lady Iddesleigh.

So you see. The same old jig. And this is the odd thing about
it. I allotted myself a month of the fleshpots in London as a kind
of reward for all I would have to endure in Russia. The trouble
is that I had a delightful and continuously satisfactory time in
Russia, so that by rights I ought now to be undergoing some-
thing pretty grim in the penitential way. I don't quite know what
to do about this. Maybe God will do something about it.

As for Russia, I don't think I 'want to chatter about it in this
fashion. I will save it up and tell you all I know, which is a good
deal.

When I come back, you can climb on my lap and go through
my pockets to see what Nunkie has brought you. Some comfit or
trinket, 111 be bound.

I love you, my dear.

A. W.

[See note about Lady Colefax on page 161.]

[115]

To CHARLES LEDERER

[Mr. Lederer, then a young prot6g of Woollcott's, has since become a
successful Hollywood writer.]

London

December 31, 1932
Son of Heaven:

I am sailing home aboard the Bremen on the
15th. This will compel me to observe my own birthday alone on
the high seas. I will be forty-six. Getting to be a big boy now.

I think you might grace the occasion by writing me a letter
of such date that I would find it waiting for me in New York
a letter telling me the news of your health, present plans and the
state of your immortal soul, which last I consider, without much
warrant, my peculiar care. Also news of Harpo. I do not even
know what continent he is now adorning. Also news of Charlie
MacArthur and family.

I have seen so many earls and countesses lately that a glimpse
of one so ignobly born as yourself would be refreshing. Have seen
nothing of dear, dear Lady Cavendish, who once sat on this old
knee. But that was when she was Adele Astaire. I understand
she gets along famously with her motherin-law, the Duchess of
Devonshire. Has the Duchess saying "Oke" already* Then I
suppose I should tell you about Lord Redding's recent marriage
to a woman some forty years younger than himself. The London
Times account of the wedding ended, unfortunately, with this
sentence: "The bridegroom's gift to the bride was an antique
pendant/'

A. Woollcott

[116]

V
1933-1935

To JEROME KERN

Washington, D. C.
February 22, 1933
Dear Jerry:

On New Year's Night I was finishing up a week-end
in a superb old place in Kent, since closed by its defeated family
for lack of cash to keep it open. The younger son of the house
is an incredibly charming young country squire, who was mar-
ried the other day to that lovely stepdaughter of Wodehouse a
marriage made in heaven, I should say, and likely to be blessed
in Kent, for the young folks were moving into one of the farm-
houses to go right on with the horses, tie vegetables, and the
orchids.

However, we were fiddling with the radio when we tuned
in on the Holland station, and what should we hear but music
pouring from the finest instrument fashioned by nature in our
time. And what should he be singing but the lovely song you
wrote with the notion that he should sing it!

But I am writing to assure you no jury would convict if
you wanted to join me in murdering Eddy Duchin. At least,
until further details are available, we might begin by murdering
him. It is his orchestra that plays the Brunswick record of "Egern
on the Tegernsee," and the idiot who sings that melting and
lovely song never took time, even with the hint the rhyme gave

[1171

him, to learn how to pronounce Tegernsee; and then, just to make
things harder, he gets another line of the song wrong. "One more
light," he sings, instead of "One light more/' As soon as I find
out who this singer is, I am going to drag him out on a cement
sidewalk, take him hy the throat, kneel on his stomach, and
pound his head on the hard surface until it cracks like a melon.
Then it will be your turn.

My God, Jerry, what a time of years it seems since Julia
Sanderson was singing "They Wouldn't Believe Me," and Marion
Davies was just a nobody in Oh Boy! Things move so fast in
this age that when they revived Show Boat last spring, and every-
one spoke of it as such a dear old classic, I began to have you con-
fused with Elgar. It was reassuring to have you bounce right
back with a score I like even better. Or at least a show I like much
better, because it is all of it good [Kern's Music in the Air].
Indeed, I never have seen a musical pky so well acted. Never in
my life. The casting and direction are miraculous. Irving [Berlin]
tells me that should be your credit Is he right? [Walter] Slezak's
performance is Godgiven, but so is that of the old girl who sings
"Egern on the Tegernsee." And the one who plays the prima
donna's maid, and the young woman with the sweet voice who
look like Mrs. Gilbert Miller and plays the publisher's secretary.
And [Harry] Mestayer is superb. Generations of the very blue
blood of the theatre entitle him to make that magnificent speech,
which he does to my heart's content I do not even mind that
he mispronounces Ids key word. Or, at least, I do not mind
much. Do take him aside and tell him he is a magnificent actor
but that it is not pronounced "ameeteurs."

And Al Shean, Jerry. Do you know about him? He and his
sister were children of an old German musician named Lafey
Schoenberg, who played the small towns of Hanover for fifty
years, traveling from one to the other in a cart, and who died in
Chicago at the age of one hundred and one. When they came to

[118]

this country Al went to work as a pants-presser, and the sister
made lace in a tenement Al was known as die fastest presser south
of Rivington Street, but he had a passion for singing swipes. He
was always organizing quartets and being fired for practicing in
the can during working hours. Once, when a whole quartet was
fired it went right into vaudeville as the Manhattan Comedy
Four. This success inflamed the sister. It was too kte for her to go
on the stage, what with her five children and all, so she decided
they must, and then pushed them into the theatre, although they
and the theatre both resisted strenuously. Of course you know
they are the Marx brothers. When their star went into the
ascendant in 1924 the Gallagher and Shean partnership had
broken up, and Mrs. Marx was faithless enough to think Al had
better go into the ginger ale business. And now look at him.
Playing so legitimately. Playing so beautifully. She would have
been so proud and happy.

Well, I guess I am just an old fool about Music in the Air.
I haven't been a third time, but that is because circumstances
have sequestered me here for several weeks, I did rush around
again to see it the night before I left town. Several times I found
tears pouring from these old ducts. Very likely it was from fatigue*
Or perhaps I had a cold.

As I write this lettqr, I find myself working up into a
mood that will not be satisfied until I have done a war dance on
Mitrfc in the Air in The New Yorker. To assist me, will you rush
me, if you can, the name of the criminal who sings the Bruns-
wick record, so that I can put him on the spot? Also, if it is not
too difficult, will you have someone at the office send me here
a transcript of the speech Mestayer makes from the orchestra
pit?

While I was in London, under tie most engaging circum-
stances, I received as a gift from the relict of Alice Meynell a
Dickens item which I have reason to think must be new to you,

[119]

and which I shall be glad to let you see if you want it. I could
send it to you by registered mail.

Well, God bless you and keep you. Keep you going, I mean.
I would not go so far as to call you a sight for sore eyes, but I
would call you a boon for sore hearts, and there is not your like
in all the world today.

A. Woollcott

To EDNA FERBER

Washington, D. C.
February 23, 1933

Dear Berber:

Speaking of [Jules] .Bledsoe, did you ever hear
of his misdeed in Lancaster, Pa.? He was in the cast of Deep
River, an American opera which Arthur Hopkins produced in
one of his more bemused interludes. Arthur was so absorbed in
the task of trying to prevent the members of the cast from
becoming operatic on him that other details escaped him such
as the fact that the music wasn't very good, and that the young
romantical New Orleans hero was being played by an Italian
Jew from Frankfort who spoke an English strangely resembling
Sam Bernard's.

Anyway, Arthur was determined that none of the singers
should attack their arias by turning head on to the audience and
letting them rip. Perfect docility in this matter marked all the
rehearsals, but when they opened in Lancaster, Bledsoe sniffed
the audience. It was an old-fashioned stage with an apron. Turn-
ing, he walked forward to the footlights,' squared his shoulders,
threw back his head, and emitted his song. Arthur was embedded
in a packed audience, oblivious of them, forgetful that the rehear-
sals were over. At Bledsoe's defiance, he half raised from his seat
and ejaculated, 'The son of a bitch!" A woman sitting in fcmt

[120]

of him turned around and muttered angrily, "If you don't like it
you can get your money back/* "I wish to God I could/' said
Arthur and stamped out. It seems the woman was wrong, by a
margin of $120,000.

My meditative seclusion here is interrupted only by occa-
sional debauches with Arthur Krock, Alice Longworth, Cissy
Patterson, the Senate Finance Committee, the Senate and House
Committees on Agriculture, Russell Owen, Pat Sturhahn, and
a few relatives.

Be sure to order in advance a copy of The Werewolf of
Paris, a magnificently monstrous book which that sinister ruffian,
Johnny Farrar, is going to publish late in March.

Remember that your heart is God's little garden.

A.W.

To THORNTON WILDER

New York City
March II, 1933
Dear Thornton:

I wish I already had the house in the country
I'm going out to look for today. Will you come and stay a month
some time? A winter month, I think. The point is that if you
are reading Great Expectations, I ought to be in the next room so
you could come in from time to time and report that you have
just met Mr. Pumblechook and Herbert Pocket and Trabb's
boy. And I could tell you how Shaw (mistakenly) points to
Estella as proof that Dickens could paint a real heroine. Estelk,
he says, is Mrs. Patrick Campbell to the life. Which is the wild-
est nonsense, but shows what he thinks of Mrs. Patrick Camp-
bell. Did Ruth [Gordon] ever tell you of that luncheon in our
villa when Shaw talked about Stella Campbell for an hour and
a half until Mrs. Shaw was driven to beating a tattoo with her

[121]

salad fork as a way of warning him that she couldn't stand an-
other word on the subject?

I think I am taking Ruth to see The Cherry Orchard
Wednesday night I would love taking you, too, if you wanted
to come along. Anyway, send me back Cosette as it's my only
copy.

A. W.

To BEATRICE KAUFMAN

Neshobe Island, Vt.
May 31, 1933
Beatrice:

You must come here some part of this and every sum-
mer. It is my favorite place in all the world. I am simply exhausted
from buttering so many griddle cakes and can write no more.

A. W.

To LILLY BONNER

New York City
September 13, 1933
Dear Lilly:

It was to me highly exciting to hear your voice com-
ing out of Surrey, that peculiar soprano chirp which you reserve
for the telephone and "Au dair de la lune." I shall soon indulge
myself again in the luxury of hearing it. It seemed to come from
just around the corner, and I had a feeling that I ought to be
hurrying to Locust Valley to sleep under the uproar of the pky
room and hear about your troubles with the oil burner and join
with Frederick in idle speculation as to whether Mr. Backer
would or would not come.

The play, at the moment of writing, is called The Dark
[122]

Tower, and should go into rehearsals on October 23rd with
George [Kaufman] and me directing jointly. I do not know who
will be in it, but there is talk of Margalo Gillmore, Louis Cal-
hem, Ernest Lawford, Margaret Dale and others you wouldn't
know. The leading part, which is as yet uncast, presents certain
unusual requirements, and during the next six weeks I suppose
we will try out a lot of people in it. My own candidate is Henry
Clapp Smith, and on Saturday night he and George and I are
meeting secretly at the Music Box and rehearsing one or two
scenes as a sample. This is heavily confidential and should not be
mentioned in any letter you may be dashing off to the folks at
home.

It has taken me over two years to recover from the painful
experience of having Locust Valley shot from under me. I have
finally pulled myself together, and on October 5th will open a
country estate, nominally my own, but really held in partnership
by Beatrice, Sam Behrman and myself, and open to all our friends
who feel like paying so much a night. Such a pity that you and
Paul never thought of this. Joe Hennessey will be in charge and
we shall have eight months to experiment We have taken an
enchanting house at Katonah until the first of June.

I enjoyed the week-end at the Backers. They are living for
the present in the old Mortimer Schiff house in East Notwich
beautiful grounds and an interior of stupefying ugliness. I had
Adele's room, a dainty boudoir about the size of the Pennsylvania
Depot. There was a great coming and going of Berlins, Fatios and
the like, and all passed off pleasantly.

I suppose you want to hear the latest Swope story. Burdened
with Gerald Brooks as a croquet partner, he became so violent
that Brooks agreed to do only what he was told and thereafter
became a mute automaton, a condition which Swope enjoyed
hugely. Brooks never moved his mallet or approached a ball
without being told by Swope: "Now, Brooksy, you go. through
this wicket. That's fine. Now you shoot down to position. Per-

[123]

feet!" And so on. Finally, before an enthralled audience, Swope
said: "Now you hit that ball up here in the road. That's right
Now you put your little foot on your ball and drive the other
buckety-buckety off into the orchard. Perfect!" It was only then,
from the shrieks of the onlookers, that Swope discovered it was
his own ball which had been driven off.

The stream of passersby is unmoderated. Tell Sibyl [Lady
Colefax] that Thornton Wilder came in last night all chuckles.
The other day we heard an uproar under my window. It was
Alice Longworth discovering that I lived here and dragging
Wild Bill [Colonel William J.] Donovan up to see me. I am
lunching tomorrow with William Gillette. The Lunts arrive from
Genesee Depot tomorrow afternoon. They sail on the Bremen
for Stockholm, Helsingfors and Moscow before returning to
London in November. Then Egypt and then London again.

I vastly enjoyed a visit from Mrs. Pat Campbell last week.
She came here to dinner, bringing with her a snow-white Pekin-
ese named Moonbeam. In her little bkck velvet vanity bag, in
addition to her powder-puff, lipstick, handkerchief, small change
and letters from Shaw, she had a chicken bone with which to feed
him after his performance in her play. We talked about her book
of memoirs, which was published ten years ago, and I objected
to it only on the ground that she had kept the reader in ignorance
of her most salient characteristic a disposition to make devastat-
ing remarks. She denied ever having made any in her life, but I
would not hear any such nonsense. Why, I said, even in the book
the cloven hoof shows occasionally. "Ah!" she said. "But that's
on the foot that's in the grave now," At eight o'clock I put her in
a taxi, and she and Moonbeam went off to the theatre. An hour
later, when I was going out myself, the doorman told me apolo-
getically that the taxi driver had come back in a state of consider-
able frenzy when he found she had paid Mm in what was not
really legal tender. I made good the deficit by redeeming two
shillings, which are on my desk as I write you.

[124]

Harpo calls from Hollywood to say that lie will be here in
two or three weeks, and after perhaps another two or three weeks,
will go on to Europe, taking his harp with him and giving per-
formances by himself in Vienna, Budapest and possibly Moscow.
Recently he shaved off all his hair and is, I am told, a singularly
repellent object. The other night Winchell announced that he
was secretly married in January to a Miss Susan Fleming. Harpo
denied this, but not, I thought, very vigorously.

I think you must arrange to come here in January. Let Paul
take his safari, or his mufti, or wallah, or whatever it is called, to
the Sudan. You hop on a boat and come here under an assumed
name. I will give you my apartment, where you can hide from all
the Stehlis and Bonners, and run in next door to Alice for ineals.

Alexander W.

P.S. By the way, I am starting broadcasting tonight. Wednesdays
and Fridays at 10.30, Columbia Network, national hook-up,
sustaining program, topical broadcast It's a thing I have been
wanting to do for years, and now they are letting me try it.
After a month of experiment, I ought to be pretty, good. I am so
frantically busy this week that I ought not be writing you at all.
And I darkly suspect that I have dictated this letter over my
breakfast coffee as a means of limbering up before tackling the
broadcast

A.W.

P.P.S. Alfred [Lunt] just rushed in and out hysterical because
he has lost his passport.

[125]

To THORNTON WILDER

New York City
September 18, 1933

Dear Thornton:

I am chiefly writing to tell you that the Ben
Hechts have, on the Palisades at Nyack, one of the most unbe-
lievably desirable houses I ever stepped into. The other night I
lay in Ben s bed and wished him dead, and that his inconsolable
widow would go to Cyprus for five years so that I might rent
her house. It is vastly improved by the fact that the Hechts them-
selves are in Los Angeles and have given the place to Master
Charles Lederer. I have decided to break it to him that you and
Alice Miller and I are coming up on Saturday to spend the week-
end with him. You could sit all day in the gazebo and look down
the Hudson toward the sea. Twenty houses down the main
street of Nyack dwell the MacArthurs. Charlie MacArthur will
by then have arrived from Hollywood, Helen [Hayes Mrs.
Charles MacArthur] will be full of her rehearsals for Mary of
Scotland, and we will see something of that somewhat different
house-guest, Miss Ruth Gordon.

We can wrestle about the book over the week-end, but I
should warn you you are likely to be thrown over the Palisades.
I am inviting readers of The New Yorker to give me a tide, but
I suspect none of them will be as good as the one Lederer has
just devised. He suggests '1 Told You So." I am also running the
letter I got from Nora Wain's daughter. I think I showed it
to you. It is my guess it will escape from its. present flimsy fetters
and have a life of its own in the anthologies.

A. W.

[The final tide, WMe Rome Bums, -was suggested by one of the
readers of The New Yorker. The note from Nora Wain's daughter,
defending her from his strictures on The House of Exile, ended with
this sentence which Woollcott often repeated: "My conclusion is that
you are not a bad man but a too hasty one. 99 ]

[126]

To FRODE JENSEN

[The full story of Woollcott's -relationship to Frode Jensen, a young
Dane who became a doctor in America, is told on page 305. J

New York City
Seftember 26, 1933
My dear Mr. Jensen:

Your nomination of a tide is on file. It will
be duly considered and doubtless rejected. What delights me far
more than your knack for naming a book is the evidence in your
letter that you are not going to Jefferson after all. My acquaint-
ance with that medical school was both sketchy and out of date,
but even so, I had an uneasy feeling you were heading in the
wrong direction.

Both for Grace Root's sake and your own, I wish you would
feel that this flat of mine on the East River is a place to which
you can come any time you feel, as I know newcomers to New
York must sometimes feel, that you need a neighbor. As a sign
of good faith I hereby give you my private telephone number,
which is Plaza 3-0199. If you will call any morning after nine
o'clock, you will track me down. Since I am not making this
offer as a matter of form, I hope you will have an unburdened
feeling that you can make use of it whenever you want to. As I
grow older, I become acutely aware that I have few privileges as
valuable as the occasional privilege of being of service to people

like you.

Yours respectfully,

A. Woollcott

[127]

To FRANK SULLIVAN

[The friendship with this fenow-columnist began on the New

York World.]

New York City
December 14, 1933

Dear Frank:

I should like to dine with you Monday evening. I
think that old room at the Plaza is dosed evenings but the other
room is pretty nearly as good. What do you say to meeting me
there or at the chez Pulitzer, where a cocktail assemblage seems
to be scheduled for that evening. Telephone here and leave word
tomorrow. I shall be rushing around the Atlantic Littoral on
sundry trains and boats, but don't envy me too much, for this
life of ceaseless fame and adulation has its drawbacks just as your

own obscure one has.

A.W.

To LYNN FONTANNE and ALFRED LUNT

New York City
February 1, 1934
My dear children:

I have started so many letters to you only to
get interrupted by this treadmill which, with indefatigable energy,
I seem to have constructed for myself. My life as a broadcaster,
which completely enthralls me, also leaves me so little time that,
except for an occasional trip to the water-closet, I do nothing else.
I submit to this the more cheerfully because I know it will all
end the first of June when I go off to Vermont for four months.
Until then the radio will keep me on a short tether and anyway
I start next week a series of fifteen lectures at Columbia Univer-
sity which would not let me get very far away.

I did have some thought (Noel may have told you) of writ-
ing Sibyl a letter beginning something like this:

[128]

"Dear, dear Sibyl:

It is hard on you, for I can imagine how they
must Toe pestering you all the time, lout it is a great relief to us
to have the Lunts out of America. I don't mind Alfred having a
touch of the tar-brush, or Lynn "being seventy-six if she's a day,
my dear, Tout their habit of lying in a stufor and clad in nothing
lout rather soiled loin-cloths in the middle of Fifth Avenue did
play hob with the traffic. Their excuse for this rather degenerate
fatigue was that exhausting season in Design for Living. I keep
telling them they should have played a repertory of Macbeth,
King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra and Le Cid. This would have
left them feeling fresh and invigorated. Or possibly dead. In any
event and etc., etc"

I say I thought of sending this to Sibyl (and enclosing a
carbon for you) but it seemed upon reflection a laborious jest.
And, anyway, that now famous incident still mystifies me. As it
has come to me second- and third-hand, it just doesn't make
sense. There is a missing piece in the puzzle.

Of The Dark Tower I can report only that it was a tre-
mendous success except for the minor detail that people wouldn't
come to see it Yet it really was a kind of success at that. I mean
that we enjoyed it enormously and it seemed to be attended with
great relish by all of the people (without exception) whose good
opinion I would respect and therefore want. Then, thanks to the
movie rights, it brought me in rather more money than Tarn used
to getting for the same amount of work. George Kaufman seems
to think that Gilbert [Millerl is going to do it in London this
spring. On this point I am skeptical but [Rudolf] Kommer is at
work on the translation for Vienna and the Scandinavian rights
have just been applied for and Random House has published
the play and altogether the episode baffles me. If all this befalls
one who writes a flop, what happens when one writes a success?

Since I seem to be reporting on my own activities I might

[129]

add that I bounced around the other day and wrote and played
the leading role in a movie short It was a speculative response
to a man's suggestion that I make a great string of them. I am to
go around and see it tomorrow hut I go without much interest as
I cannot imagine any offer sufficiently tempting to make me go
through another such day. It was, I think, the dullest and most
exhausting day I ever spent. I did think it would have the com-
pensation of novelty and that I could at least extract some copy
from it, but by noon I was so numb with fatigue and so indignant
at my own stupidity in becoming involved in such nonsense that
I never knew what happened during the rest of the day.

I have so much to tell you. If you will come to the island on
your way home I will tell you about Harpo's return from Mus-
covy, about Lilly Bonner's birthday which we are celebrating
tomorrow, about that hulking young prodigy [Orson Welles] who
is off touring with Kit Cornell, about my ripe romance with Miss
Cornelia Lunt, which is the delight of my declining years, about
Bob Sherwood's expulsion of Mary [Sherwood] from his bed and
board, about my pretty brawl with Edna Ferber, who has an-
nounced to the world at large that she is "weary of the tyranny
of this New Jersey Nero," about certain overtures of forgiveness
from Kathleen Norris which embarrass me because of my guilty
knowledge that the offending article is already incorporated
intact in the book I am publishing next month. I could tell you
how Master Charles Lederer was evicted from the Warwick
(Alas, poor Warwick!) for non-payment of room rent and
how, when the manager went around to throw him out, he
was peculiarly annoyed by a message that the defaulter was even
then shopping at Carrier's. Oddly enough, this was true. He was
designing a Christmas present for Alice Miller; a breast-pin in the
form of a scarlet letter A.

The other evening when Lilly and I had succeeded in
escaping from Paul, we both agreed that you two were the only
people in the world we enjoyed as much together as apart. It's

[1301

just as well perhaps. I enclose a few oddments from my mail.
You might send them on to Romney [Brent]. I hear that you
are a prodigious success and it must be fun for you both and
I should like to know, please, when you are coming home.

Duckey Dee

To ALFRED LUNT and LYNtf FONTANNE

New York City
June 7, 1934
My dear children:

Well, it seems I didn't come over after all.
My expectation of coming was always slight and I found as the
time approached that I couldn't manage even a flying trip. You
see, after letting myself get involved in an imbecile congestion
of overwork I really cracked up rather badly and decided from
the depth of my bed at the Medical Center to lead a new life.
This involved four months of relaxed and serene existence in
Vermont and I have been busy clearing the decks for that
purpose. Taking off weight by a new and rather hazardous medi-
cation, which is part of the program, has already progressed so
far that I am probably in better physical shape than you have
ever found me. I have already lost more than thirty pounds and
intend thus to dwindle with dignity until there shall be no
other word for me but lissome. Lissome my children and you
shall hear

In that entrancing letter you wrote me you spoke of coming
direct to the island from the stage door of the Lyric Theatre
and though I take it that was only a gesture, I shall at least go
through the form of telling you that I shall stand for no such
nonsense. The island is my favorite spot in the world but that
is partly from habit and association and I would not think of
allowing its charm to be subjected to the strain of having it

[131]

visited by two people whose minds were all intent on getting
to Genesee Depot as fast as their legs would carry them. I will
not have you flopping around in my lake thinking all the while
how much you would rather he in that new swimming pool
of yours. It is my hope and expectation to stay at the island
at least until the middle of October and it is my great hope that
both of you will come and visit me there some time late in the
summer or early in the Fall. Just now it is undergoing prodigies
of renovation. I am putting in electric lights, refrigeration, new
beds and a score of other things, and all out of my own pocket,
to the great and unfeeling delight of the other, members. But
what of it, I say. Didn't I just get my share of the cool $100
paid down for the Czechoslovakian rights of The Dark Tower?
While in this mood I bought me one of the new Chrysler cars.
And Pip, my coal-black French poodle, has been taking lessons
on the dirt roads of Westchester County on how to go motoring
without throwing up on the upholstery. A kind Italian gentle-
man named Angelo undertook for a small consideration to take
him out every day in the station wagon. Well, all this is a
foreword to a series of casual excursions around Vermont during
the summer whenever I get restless at the island or whenever
it is visited by people I don't much like. There will only be three
jobs I will really have to do. Those are three lectures on
journalism I am going to give at Bread Loaf. Bread Loaf is the
summer school of Middlebury College. It is on a small mountain
top overlooking Lake Dunmore about fifteen minutes drive from
the island. I think the notion of doing something equivalent to
teaching in Vermont will appeal to my deep and unsatisfied
neighborhood instinct which has been starved. The great excur-
sion will come a little later when Lederer arrives from the
coast (I mean Charles, not Francis) and with him at the wheel
and Pip in the back seat we will repair to Kennebunkport for a
visit to the Tarkingtons.

Helen [Hayes] has been replaced by Margalo [Gillmore]
[132]

in Mary of Scotland and will leave in another fortnight for the
coast. Charlie [MacArthur] and Ben [Hecht] are in ecstasy as
moving picture producers in Astoria (it is their naughty and
admirable aim to destroy Hollywood). Ruth Gordon's son is
now a feature of the American scene. Guthrie [McClintic]
has just bought a play written by Beatrice Kaufman and
Peggy Pulitzer. Edna Ferber has just unnerved Jack Wilson
by renting his Connecticut house for the summer. Kit [Cornelll
will shortly wind up an enormously successful tour which has
made a pot of money and taken her to seventy-one different cities
this season. The best current joke is an anonymous one by
whatever person described The Shining Hour as the English
Tobacco Road. When, as I wrote Noel, the Times inadvertently
billed the new Arch Selwyn production " 'Cora Potts* without
Francine Larrimore," it was Howard Dietz who exclaimed,
4 What a cast!"

I am not sure whether this story by a young Englishman
named James Hilton [Good-bye, Mr. Chips], for which I have
been lustily beating the drum, has yet been published in Eng-
land. It comes out tomorrow as a small book and on the chance
that you may not have seen it I am sending you a copy by the
same mail. I feel it will take me a week of listening to catch up
with you. After a lot of adding and subtracting I would be
inclined to say that the past year has been the most generally
satisfying one I have ever spent. The chief flaw in it was that
you two who are both most dear to me were flourishing so
far away,

Alexander W.

[133]

To NOEL COWARD

Bomoseen, Vt.
August 11, 1934

Dear Noel:

Your little pencilled scrawl filled me with a great
and unexpected longing to see you. I had heard about your illness
in the most helated and roundabout fashion. Your Mr. Lunt
mentioned it in a hurried letter, breaking it to me gently by say-
ing that you had almost died and then going on laughingly to
matters of more real interest to him. As a friendly and endearing
note from Temple in the same mail had failed to mention your
indisposition at all, I was then at a loss to guess how serious it
might have been.

I am considerably upset about this course of action pursued
by the fourth and a half Earl. With the exception of Mrs.
Stanley Baldwin and two or three articled darks living near
Liverpool, the entire citizenry of the British Empire has written
me with great enthusiasm about While Rome Burns, all
explaining that they had borrowed their copy from Earl Amherst
This would seem to indicate that thanks to his lordship's lavish-
ness all sales of the book in England and the Dominions had been
rendered unnecessary. I 'hope the little bleached son of a bitch
fries in hell. As there now seems to be no hope of your buying
a copy, I might as well send you one and will do so when I
return to New York in October. In the interval I am happily
ensconced on my island. I get news of the outside world in the
form of telegrams which are telephoned from Rutland to a boat-
man living on the shore who (takes them down in a firm Spen-
cerian hand and gives them to his son to bring over to me in a
motor boat. This makes my favorite occupation guessing what the
sender really intended to say. Thus, when the Lunts recently
threatened to visit me, I was thrown into an agreeable state of
agitation by a distracted telegram from Alfred which said that
Lynn was "too ffl to take Johnny/' Her condition seemed, indeed,

[134]

desperate. I enclose a clipping which will show you that we here
in the colonies keep up with your work.

By the way, put an order in at Hatchard's for a copy of a
new novel by Charles Biackett called Entirely Surrounded. It is
to be published by Knopf on August 27th. The scene is our island
and all the characters will be painfully recognizable. Neysa
[McMein] comes off best. The portrait of Dorothy Parker [Mrs.
Alan Campbell] is the most astonishingly skillful and the owner
of the island is a repulsive behemoth with elfin manners whom
you would be the first to recognize. He is named Thaddeus
Hulbert and makes his first appearance playing backgammon
with an English actor at a party. He calls a passing redhead to
his side. I quote:

"The fat man clapped a plump, weflrmolded hand, with
dice in the palm, against Henry's copper-colored hair, rubbed it
back and forth. 'Now I douUe; do you take it? 9 'Uncle Thad-
deus is in wine,' the fat mans opponent observed in clipped
British accents. 7 take it, Duck.' Henry had seen the speaker's
tired, eager, charm-furrowed face behind footlights: Nigel
Farraday."

It is a charming book; and now, my blemish, au revoir.

A. Woollcott

To LYNN FONTANNE

Bomoseen, Vt.
September 25, 1934

Dear Lynn:

Thanks for letting me see these Graham Robertson
letters. Anyang he puts down on paper, even when he seems to
do it most casually, acquires at once an incomparable and
unmistakable bouquet. Of course everything he said about the
movies wanned the cockles of my heart, but even so I don't

[135]

think he goes to the bottom of the matter. I think that even if
the scenes and furniture subsided the result would still be
essentially dissatisfying. There is something false and ugly in
the very idea of a talkie. There is something inherently and
permanently outrageous in a talking photograph. It is like that
exhibit which won the first prize in The Bad Taste Exhibition
held in New York a few years ago. It was a Venus de Milo with a
clock in her stomach obviously offensive but undebatably so.
It just was, that's all.

I am just back from a flying trip to New York but already
my days here are numbered. I shall creep back to work more
unwillingly than ever before in my life for this is the only place
in the world I really like. I seem destined to return. When the
dub acquired the island a number of years ago, the original
owner held out for himself a small plot in case he should ever
want to build a house on it for himself. This summer, either
as a threat or out of pique, he actually started to build the house
and at least got the masonry done it is a small stone cottage
with a huge fireplace before he paused dramatically for breath.
In that pause I bought him out, so that now the month of Octo-
ber will be spent in finishing his job and when I come back
next spring I will find a house of my own ready for occupancy.
As long as the club continues to function happily I shall use it
in the daytime as a studio where George Kaufman can write
his plays and Alice Miller can type out her profitable serials
for The Saturday Evening Post. There will be two bedrooms
in it where we can tuck away at night those guests who peculiarly
resent the island custom of getting up noisily about seven o'clock.
Those of us who are hardy enough to favor the sunrise swim
always emerge in the morning with a great deal of clatter and
there has been some snarling about this from those who prefer
to remain unconscious until noon.

Graham's letters have set me to thinking about him as I do
a good deal. One of the games I play with myself as I lie in the

[136]

sun is to select the five pictures which I would like to own and
have in my own house. Even if there could be only five, one of
them would certainly have to be the Sargent portrait of him
when he was such a young man as I wish I might have known.
He assures me that that young man and I would have got on
together famously and I suppose he knows.

I start broadcasting on October 7th, sponsored by Cream
of Wheat. I don't know how I shall enjoy being served out every
Sunday night with a cereal as if I were so much cream and
sugar. It is peculiarly ironic that I should thus be helping to
sell a product which in my new austerity I may not indulge in.
My net loss to date is fifty-five pounds. This alteration of contour
has driven my tailor to the verge of madness. By a rather neat
trick he is turning all my coats into double-breasted ones but
out of each pair of trousers they are having to remove enough
cloth to outfit half the unemployed.

I am going to be in Chicago on October 25th, a fleeting trip
that will leave me no time to come up and see you.

Alexander Dee

To ROSALIND RICHARDS

New York City
October 20, 1934

My dear Miss Richards:

This is a secret and confidential com-
munication which I am trusting you to answer on the sly.
As I gather you know, I am doing a weekly fandango on the
radio. I am of two minds how much I object to being served
with Cream of Wheat but there is no other way to get a good
hour on a nation-wide hook-up. In these broadcasts I am having
considerable fun serenading my ten favorite Americans. I have

[137]

done Mr. Tarkington already and next week we are going to
do Irving Berlin and after TnVn Walt Disney and Charles Chap-
lin, We get the victim's permission and ask him to tell us what
song he would like to have sung under his hypothetical window.
I am writing you to tell me, out of your knowledge of the kdy in
question, whether your mother would be more pleased than
annoyed if I were to visit upon her one of these honest but
conspicuous and reverberant attentions. Will you consult your
own judgment and advise me privily at the address on this sta-
tionery?

I cannot begin to tell you how much I enjoyed my visit to
Indian Point I consider that all the years I never knew Mrs.
Richards were just years wasted by one of destiny's monstrous
mismanagements.

There is some palaver to and fro as to whether I should or
should not lecture this winter at Bowdoin. I don't know how
the matter stands at present but it does sound to me like a good
chance to come up to Gardiner for a dish of tea.

Yours sincerely,

A. Woollcott

To IRA GERSHWIN

New York City
November 10, 1934
Ira Gershwin:

Listen, you contumacious rat, don't throw your
dreary tomes at me. Til give you an elegant dinner at a restaurant
of your own choosing and sing to you between the courses if
you can produce one writer or speaker, with an ear for tihe
English language which you genuinely respect, who uses "dis-
interested" in the sense you are now trying to bolster up. I did

[1381

look it up in my own vast Oxford dictionary a few years ago
only to be told that it had been obsolete since the seventeenth
century. I haven't looked up the indices in your letter because,
after all, my own word in such matters is final. Indeed, current
use of the word in the seventeenth century sense is a ghetto
barbarism I had previously thought confined to the vocabularies
of Ben Hecht and Jed Harris. Surely, my child, you must see
that if "disinterested" is, in our time, intended to convey a
special shade of the word "unselfish" it is a clumsy business
to try to make it also serve another meaning. That would be like
the nit-wit practice of the woman who uses her husband's razor
to sharpen her pencil. The point of the pencil may emerge, but
the razor is never good again for its peculiar purpose.
Hoping you fry in hell, I remain

Yours affectionately,

A.W.

To ROSALIND RICHARDS

New York City
Nwember 19, 1934
My dear Miss Richards:

My plans are jelling beautifully. The

Town Crier wants to serenade Mrs. Richards on the evening of
Sunday, December 9th, and as I know precisely what she would
like to have sung, I need not bother to ask and therefore need
not even tell her she is going to be serenaded. We could make
it a surprise party and I know just how to do it if you will trust
me and act as a fellow conspirator. All I would need would be
some kind of last minute telegraphic assurance from you that she
would be listening at nine o'clock.

I had a most pleasant visit (and some good sherry) with
your brother at St. Paul's. That is a lovely pencil portrait he has

[139]

of Mrs. Richards on his wall. I besought him to have a photostat
made of it so that I may have one. I hope that you will prod
him about this in the course of time if he forgets.
And in the meanwhile, mum's the word.

Yours sincerely,

A. Woollcott

To HAROLD K. GUINZBURG

[From 1934 on, Woollcotf s books were published by The Viking Press.
Mr. Guinzburg is head of the firm.]

New York City
November 19, 1934
Dear David:

I suppose some statistican in advertising would
be able to tell anyone how many households see both the
New York Times and the Herald Tribune on Sundays. But
even without any more evidence than that of my own senses, I
would, were I a publisher, regard the use of the same page ad
in both book sections as proof positive of somebody's laziness
and lack of resource.

From time to time I will thus send you hints, for I am
always glad to do anything I can to put the publishing business
flat on its ass.

Yours with great affection,

A. Woollcott

[140]

To MALCOLM COWLEY

[Mr. Cowley was then, as he is again, one of the editors of The New

Republic.]

New York City
December 7, 1934
My dear Mr. Cowley:

I was deeply interested in your informed
and sagacious piece on Proust which you were good enough to
send me. But I am puzzled beyond expression by the following
sentence: "But Mr. Woollcott, being so eager to have the job
well done, should have done it himself or come forward with a
better translator/' Quite aside from the fact that no public notice
was served about the fearful dearth which led to Dr. Blossom's
selection as translator, I am puzzled by your implied conception
of a reviewer's function. It recalls the happy, far off days when,
as a dramatic critic, I ventured to regret in print that a prima
donna had, throughout the premiere of an operetta, sung firmly
off key. Her ringing riposte was a public statement to the effect
that she would have liked to hear me sing that role. Of course,
she wouldn't have liked it at all. People are so inexact in moments

of stress.

Yours sincerely,

Alexander Woollcott

To MISS K. R. SORBER

[The first two letters in this collection were written to Miss Sorber.]

New York City
January 4, 1935

My dear Miss Sorber:

Of course I remember you and most
gratefully. In my first day at school I was clapped into Miss
Montgomery's class and after the first recess lost my way and

[141]

showed up in your room instead. This was a terrifying experience
but you were so sympathetic in steering me to where I belonged
that I looked forward to being in your class the following year.
I remember when in one report you gave me excellent in every
subject except penmanship, which you reported as "fair but
improving/' Later it deteriorated in so marked a manner that I
now use the typewriter exclusively.

Since you already have a book of mine, I send you an in-
scription to paste on its flyleaf.

Alexander Woollcott

To DOROTHY PARKER

New York City
February 7, 1935

My dear Dorothy:

Your letter was a source of great delight to
me, except in one particular. You say nothing about when you
are coming back. Even if you continue to be the pet of Holly-
wood for years to come, won't there be intervals when you might
visit us here?

I, too, have not been idle. I am working anonymously (hys-
terical laughter) in the new Hecht-MacArthur picture [The
Scoundrel] of which Noel [Coward] is the star. My previous ex-
periences under the Klieg lights had seemed to me unbearably
tedious. Once in Brittany, for several weeks, I was ward master
in a base hospital and carried bed pans to and from moribund
Negro stevedores. I found my foolhardy attempts to act for the
camera somehow more degrading. But it did seem likely that, with
Charlie and Ben directing in their cockeyed fashion and Noel
fluttering about the studio (his name in Astoria is "Czar o all
the Rushes"), it might be fun. It seems I was wrong about this,

[142]

but, as they won't need me more than four days all told, the
damage is inconsiderable. At that, I did extract a wintry smile
from one episode. Did I ever tell you about Owen Davis direct-
ing his first play, which was called Through the Breakers} He
had asked an agency to send him over eleven actors but no one
had told him he was at liberty to comment on their work during
rehearsals, so when it grew unbearable he would dismiss the
company for lunch and then gumshoe after the individual mem-
bers on the street, whispering his criticisms to them singly. As
a director Charlie is tempered by a similar diffidence. After I had
said one line ninety-seven times and begun to forget what it was,
he walked past me and ventured a criticism out of the corner
of his mouth. What he said was that he thought my reading of
the line was "just a bit too violet." But in consideration for my
somewhat exaggerated sensitivity, he spoke so softly I thought he
said my reading was "a bit too violent" In subsequent rendi-
tions therefore I tried to subdue somewhat my too virile man-
ner and, as I watched him out of the corner of my eye, he did
look a bit frustrated.

Professor [Robert Barnes] Rudd has just passed this way on
his annual visit with a good story about one of his sophomores
who, in an English exam, was asked to compare Moll Flanders
with -some contemporary novel. He elected to compare it with
Pernod of which he thought more highly because the story of
Penrod exhibited a more wholesome 'home life.

Alexander Woollcott

[143]

To HAROLD K. GUINZBURG

New York City
March I, 1935

Dear David:

These are the facts:

1 : Departing for Chicago on the night of March 3rd.
2: Address until March 20th Hotel Blackstone.
3: Lecture at the Convocation at the University of Minnesota,

Minneapolis, on the morning of March 7th.
4: Broadcast from Chicago Sunday. evening, March 10th.
Later the same evening, Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein
and I will be the guests of some undergraduate honor
society for several hours of continuous high discourse.
5: March 12th, lecture Northwestern University.
6: March 14th, lecture Toledo.
7: March 15th, lecture Detroit.
8: March 17th, broadcast from Chicago.
9: March 18th, lecture Indianapolis.
10: March 19th, visiting with the Tarkingtons and inspecting

Foster Hall.

11: March 20th, lecture Chicago University.
12: March 23rd, Signet Club dinner, Harvard.
13: March 24th, broadcast from New York City.
14: March 26th, visit to Laura E. Richards, Gardiner, Maine.
15: March 27th, lecture Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine.
16: March 31st, broadcast from New York City.
17: April 1st, death of Mr. Woollcott, as thousands cheer.
18: April 2nd, dancing in the streets; half-holiday in all the

schools; bank moratorium.
19: Burial at sea April 3rd.

Alexander Woollcott

[144]

To COLONEL WILLIAM J. DONOVAN

["Wild Bill" Donovan, now a Brigadier General and head of the Office

of Strategic Services, won his first nlal to fame as Colonel of the

famous Sixty-Ninth Regiment in the first World War.]

New York City
May I, 1935
Dear Bill:

Incidentally, the editors of Fortune recently had what
seems to me a brilliant editorial idea. Wishing to have a candid
and detached profile of George the Fifth written for their mag-
azine, they found it impossible to get one from any Englishman
and in desperation sent Archibald MacLeish to London to
get the material. It was part of their project that his manuscript
should be annotated, however sarcastically, by some representa-
tive Englishman. And that these marginalia should be pre-
sented to the reader together with the original text. For this
purpose Winston Churchill was enlisted but his word-rate for
this patriotic service proved so ruinous tihat he was abandoned
as a collaborator.

The idea, however, is still a good one. And often in read-
ing a book I have wished I could absorb it with certain corrective
annotations. Such a book is the one called Road to War by the
same Walter Millis of the Herald Tribune staff who wrote The
Martial Spirit. In Road to War, which is the May choice of
the Book-of-the-Month Club, Millis writes a chronological his-
tory of the factors which, working between 1914 and 1917,
involved this somewhat startled country in the Great War. It
is an illuminating and disturbing book which I would like to
read aloud to half a dozen men in order to elicit their instinctive
comment on it I would, for instance, like to have a copy an-
notated by Newton Baker and another copy annotated by you.

Perhaps some day after you have read the book, as you
inevitably and reluctantly will, you may come to dinner with
me and tell me over the coffee cups the thoughts it wrings
from you.

[145]'

In the meantime, I remain your humble if somewhat recal-
citrant servant,

A. Woollcott

To W. GRAHAM ROBERTSON

[As a painter, scenic designer, writer, playwright, and collector, Mr.

Robertson figured in the world of Ellen Teny and Sarah Bernhardt.

Woollcott saw him on his last visit to London in 1941.]

Bomoseen, Vt.
August 1, 1935
Dear Graham Robertson,

From the wealth of data given above

you may learn where I am spending the summer, as so often
before, in a healing torpor. Ours is a pine-dad island a mile
from shore. In summer it looks like a green tea-cosy, in winter
like a birthday cake. We are always finding arrowheads on our
island left behind since the days when Vermont was so spunky
a possession of the British Crown that it declared its inde-
pendence fourteen years before the other colonies and so small
a one that nobody not even George the Third noticed the
defection.

My friend Pip [the black poodle] has always had a strong
sense of private property. Last year any granger was met at
the dock by Pip and ordered to leave at once. But this year
he even objects to rowboats and canoes from the mainland if
they venture merely to encircle us. This keeps him pretty busy
and he is exhausted by nightfall, but, singlehanded, he has
created a valuable legend in this part of the country that we
keep three bloodhounds to repel invaders.

All of my neighbors who cherish French poodles owe their
interest in them to Booth Tarkington's various accounts pf his
dear Gamin, this many years dust in some such apple orchard
as your own. Tarkington himself swore he would never own an-

[146]

other too much of an anxiety in these days when motor cars whiz
past on every road. Then last Fall, when he found all his dis-
ciples so happy with their poodles, he weakened. Now a chic
and engaging black down named Figaro is the focus of the Tar-
kington household. I stopped off to see the two of them when I
was lecturing in Indianapolis in March and already Figaro was so
elegantly accomplished a gentleman as to make my Pip seem
by comparison a country bumpkin who had never had any
advantages.

All through luncheon Figaro sat in his cushioned window
seat looking pensively at the leafless trees and thinking, I am
reasonably certain, of squirrels. But the arrival of the coffee
(carried in by a coal-black gentleman named, I am glad to say,
Ethelbert Gillmore) was apparently a signal. Anyway, Figaro
came mysteriously to life and stared expectant at his master,
who asked if he were feeling pious. It seems he was. Or at least
fairly pious. He did rush to the wall and plant both forepaws on
a chair which stood beneath a primitive Italian Madonna, but
his mind was not really upon his devotions and he kept peering
round at us as if more interested in earthly rewards. Reproved
for such half-hearted orisons, he then buried his head deep,
deep between ids paws, so that he became from the tip of his
tail to the now invisible tip of his nose a woolly arc of con-
trition. "Are you a miserable sinner?" Tarkington asked. A faint
moan came from the woolly arc. *Are you" much louder this
time "a miserable sinner?" A considerable groan from Figaro.
"Are you a miserable sinner?" This final repetition elicited a very
wail from an humble and a contrite heart. "Amen!" at which
cue Figaro came bounding from church and was rewarded
with a cracker.

Mr. Tarkington now writes me that he is teaching him to
blush. It sounds like a stiff course. I shall drive over to the Maine
coast in September to investigate the progress being made.

When next I pull myself together, it will be to do a piece

[147]

on 'The Brotherhood of the French Poodle/' There must be a
place of honor in it for your Mouton, whose grave I have
ceremoniously visited and whose portrait is part of a canvas
which will again be one of my best reasons for a visit to London
next spring.

But the main purpose of this letter is to report that I have
heard from the Lunts all about their temerarious proposal that
you visit America, of all places. From dependable spies I hear
that their Shrew is a sumptuous delight. When it reopens in
September for a trial flight before the New York premiere, I
shall go out on the road to see it, so that I may tell the country
all about it when I resume broadcasting in October. If and when
you do come to America, I hope to have due notice, so that I may
be on the dock when your ship comes in and help create the
illusion that ours is an hospitable country.

Alexander Woollcott

To MRS. OTIS SKINNER

Bomoseen, Vt.
August 2, 1935
My dear Mrs. Skinner,

I think you would have enjoyed or at
least been struck by the sight of me at breakfast Wednesday.
I had come in from swimming and was at table alone, using bits
of toast to scoop up that incomparable honey and weeping
steadily because once again I had come to the great healing last
chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. It always chokes me up and
fills me with a love of mankind which sometimes lasts till noon
of the following day.

Tell Mr. Skinner I enjoy having The Fight and that his
signature has not changed an iota since he gave me his auto-
graph when I was in school. That collection began with the

[148]

signature of Anna Held, with whom I was infatuated. I used
to write the most seductive letters to get them. I remember assur-
ing Mary Mannering that I was her old admirer (at fifteen, to
be exact) and well-wisher. I am not sure whence I got that
archaic locution. Out of Richard Carvel, probably.
I enjoyed your visit to my dear island.

Alexander Woollcott

To D. G. KENNEDY

[This young Hamilton alumnus first caught Woollcott's attention

through an amusing fan letter. Woollcott replied, and from this

beginning a firm friendship evolved.]

Bomoseen, Vt.
August 16, 1935
Dear Gerry:

As for the island, I shall be here intermittendy
throughout September and perhaps you and Folley could stop
off on your way back to school. If this should prove feasible you
might telegraph on to find out if I am here. On receipt of such
a telegram I would not leave unless I were going anyway*

I enjoyed your letter, with its familiar accent of hero wor-
ship faintly tinged with contempt Even so, I could not be
stirred out of my torpor to answer it were it not for the fact that
I have news which I wish you would transmit to that Brazilian
beauty who will run the Theta Delt house next year and whose
name I cannot spell. Jerome Kern, made irrational by the broad-
casts of the Hamilton Choir, has decided to send his favorite
nephew to Hamilton. This nephew is a seventeen-year-old tot,
six feet and one inch in height and reputed to be handsome,
wholesome and sufficiently prepared to get into Hamilton. I
should like to have the Theta Belts get first look at him. Will
you see that that Rio rascal communicates with me on the
subject?

[149]

Hoping that your yellow gloves have become somewhat
dimmed with the passing of time, I heg to remain

Yours fraternally,

A, Woollcott

To HAROLD K. GUINZBURG

Bomoseen, Vt.
August 16, 1935
Dear David:

I enclose two letters. The one from Rebecca [West] I
would like to have back by return mail. The other one can be
thrown in the scrapbasket

I am in receipt of your instructions (conveyed by postal
card specifically transmitted by the S.S. Bremen, you dirty
roscher) to report all matters to you on your return. I have no
specific news beyond the fact that I have recklessly committed
myself to another broadcast series beginning October 6th, and
my entire day is now spent in dreading the necessity of quitting
this island as soon as that.

The amiable [Marshall] Best seems to be taking The Wooll-
cott Reader seriously. I wish I could have a talk with you or
with him about it before I have to start work on my part of it,
about which I feel some perplexity. What I am trying to do is
fa find some unity in the collection and I can't even begin to
look for it until I know what the collection is.

All this discussion by mail will be unnecessary if you hap-
pen to be coming this way in the near future. I wish you could
forget your mischpokah and business and come on the receipt
of this letter. What looks like an entrancing aggregation will
be coming and going throughout the week. But from the 24th
on until Labor Day there is at least a threat of our being too
crowded for comfort. Of course I could always make room for
you in Beatrice's bed, and I suppose you won't mind eating in

E150]

the men's toilet You could defeat this ugly prospect by getting
here first and helping me repel invaders, but between now and
the 24th I can offer you Neysa, Harpo, Lederer, Beatrice, Irene
Castle, Dr. [William] Mann (head of the Washington Zoo)
and the Lunts. The Lunts will occupy my house on the top of
the till. Perhaps you could arrange a design for living with
them*

Letters about "WRB" While Rome Burns] continue to
tridkle in, including one this week from a reader in Berlin who
took dignified exception to one incident in the chapter called
"The Sacred Grove/' Chap named Hanfstaengl. Incidentally,
in a correspondence with Eade Walbridge of the Harvard Club
Library, I had recourse to the abbreviation employed in the
preceding anecdote and it only made matters worse because he
thought I was talking about William Rose Ben6t

My badminton has improved. Nothing to boast about yet
It's like the triumph of an idiot child finally learning to say boo.

A.W.

P.S. I am nuts in a quiet way about The Circus of Doctor Lao.

P.P.S. Harpo was caught by M.G.M. as he was getting into
the plane today. He will be held up another ten days. This means
the congestion will be less grievous and you can come any time,
but the sooner the better for me.

To ERODE JENSEN

Beverly HiHs, Calif.
November 20, 1935
Dear Frode:

I should have written you after my agreeable visit
in Winnetka, but there seems to be an incredible amount: of
business to do, and words from me on this trip will be few and

[151]

far between* I approve highly of the Leonards I think the old
man is a good deal of a darling. You will have to take an entire
summer off each year to teach him how to pronounce Frode.

I am glad to think that you are keeping an eye on Eleanora
[von Mendelssohn], who has had such lousy luck that I can't
bear to think of it ^Fortunately for me, I haven't time to think
of anything. There are more old friends of mine in this corner
of the world than I had suspected more, in fact, than I like,
because I want to spend my time, if possible, with Chaplin,
Disney and a few others whom I came out to see. I have had a
long dinner with Chaplin, an enchanting visit with Disney, a
congested cocktail party at Dorothy Parker's (at the peak of
which Marc Connelly decided to tell me in a loud voice that
my article on him in the Ladies 9 Home Journal was the meanest,
crudest and most malicious thing that had been done to him
in fifteen years). And now tonight I am off to dinner with
Dashiell Hanunett, who shares my ideas, if not my feelings,
about the Lamson case. Commander Brown is off playing tennis
with Harpo's Susan (I think Harpo would better hurry back),
and we are all going off Sunday evening to attend divine services
under the guidance of Aimee Semple McPherson.

What day do you leave for Chicago?

A. W.

To PAUL HARPER

[The agency Mr. Harper represented handled the Cream of Wheat
account which sponsored Woollcott's radio program.]

New York City
November 22, 1935
My dear Harper:

This is an answer to your official letter of
November 22nd in which you announce that:

[152]

"The Cream of Wheat Corporation is unwilling to continue
the 'broadcasts after December 29th unless you will agree to
refrain from including in your "broadcasts material of a con-
troversial nature which, in our opinion, would be offensive
to individuals or groups in the radio audience."

This paragraph would be unintelligible to anyone who had
not previously read your letter of November 14th in which you
transmitted this message from Mr. Thomson and Mr. Clifford
of the Cream of Wheat Corporation:

"They went on to say that they preferred that you didnt
make any more caustic references to people like Hitler and
Mussolini as there are large radal groups who are apt to be
antagonized Toy these references"

Now, in these broadcasts the Town Crier has for several
years been freely reporting his likes and dislikes on the books,
plays, pictures, prejudices, manners and customs of the day. In
undertaking such an oral column, he could not with self-respect
agree in advance never to take pot shots at such targets as Hitler
or Mussolini. Or, for that matter, at any other bully, lyncher or
jingo whose head happened to come within shooting distance. If
he did embark upon a series thus hamstrung in advance, his
own interest in the broadcasts would so dwindle that they would
deteriorate in short order.

I am entirely in sympathy with the viewpoint of Mr. Bull
and his Cream of Wheat associates. If they think an occasional
glancing blow antagonizes old customers or drives away new
ones it would be folly for them to address their advertising to
-such an audience as I might assemble. It is my own guess that
the allusions complained of have no such effect. It would seem
to me as reasonable to expect every crack at Hitler to send all
the Jews in America rushing to the grocery stores to stack up
with Cream of Wheat. It would be as reasonable to assume that
the [Sir John] Buchan broadcast (which Mr. Bull so highly

[153]

approved) with its hands-across-the-sea, England-and-America
shoulder-to-shoulder theme, alienated from Cream of Wheat
every Irish listener and all those whom Mr. Hearst and Father
Coughlin have industriously filled with a distrust of the English.
It would he as reasonahle to fear that the Novemher 10th broad-
cast, which you yourself loudly applauded, may have so infuri-
ated the Scotch that they all reverted to oatmeal in a body. I
have said enough to make dear what a blank check I would be
signing if I recklessly promised to omit all controversial material.
Before each broadcast, you see, there would be so much honest
disagreement as to what material was controversial. The irony
of this impasse lies in my own suspicion that it is these very
elements which most promote interest in the series. The only
reason I don't indulge in them oftener is because I believe they
are more effective when infrequently used. They lend the series
salt, provoke discussion, whip up attendance and enlarge the
audience. The sponsor is therefore most worried by the broad-
cast which serves him best At least, that is my guess, which
may be as good as Mr, Bull's but need not be any Better. And
after all, it is his business and not mine.

I have overheard enough of the experiences of other broad-
casters to suspect that it would be difficult to find anywhere
among the big national advertisers a sponsor who would be as
considerate, liberal and agreeable as the Cream of Wheat people
have been throughout all our dealings. This would seem to
indicate that the Town Crier is unlikely to find any other spon-
sor willing to meet the terms he must insist on so long as he uses
the now established formula which inevitably represents him*
as one citizen leaning over the fence and talking freely to his
neighbors. And since all the good time on the great networks
has been pre-empted by advertisers, that in turn would mean
I must drop out of national broadcasting altogether, which, as
you know, would be a solution entirely acceptable to me. I
would merely be driven back to the comparative privacy of the

1154]

printed page where, in my own opinion, I belong and where,
at long last, I might get some writing done.

Yours sincerely,

Alexander Woollcott

P.S. By the way, in your final paragraph you say that I
have "declined to accept any restrictions made hy the sponsor**
in my choice of material. When you wrote that sentence you
must have been either absent-minded or disingenuous. I told
you yesterday that I had no objection whatever to letting your
representative cut out of my script any joke, anecdote or phrase
which, in his opinion, was either coarse or suggestive. If you
still do not recall this promise, [Leggett] Brown may be able to
refresh your memory.

One other point. You yourself asked why I should ever
need to introduce controversial matter into a broadcast since I
could so easily let off steam in the various publications to which
I can always contribute. Unfortunately, this suggestion is im-
practical. I find the weekly preparation of the next broadcast
and the consequences of the preceding one so time-consuming
that when I am broadcasting I am unable to do any other kind
of work. I haven't even time left to write a post card to the folks.

A.W.

To THE EDITOR, WORLD HERALD,
OMAHA, NEBRASKA

San Mateo, Cdif.
December 19, 1935
Dear Sir:

May I not, as the late Woodrow Wilson used to say,
call your attention to an editorial which appeared in your issue
of December 9th under the caption 'The Woollcott Menace*'?
It has found its way out to me here in San Mateo, out in the

[1551

great open spaces where men are menace. And as it reiterates
a frequently repeated allegation, I am experimenting, for the
first time in some years, in the luxury of answering it for publi-
cation or not, as you see fit.

It is the substance of this editorial that as a recommender
of boots over the radio, I take advantage of a nation-wide net-
work to further the sale of soft, sentimental works. "Marshmal-
lows" was the term employed. Since this series of broadcasts
began, I have cast my oral vote for the following works:

Paths of Glory, by Humphrey Cobb

Life with Father, by Ckrence Day

North to the Orient, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Valiant Is the Word for Carrie, by Barry Benefield

I Write as I Please, by Walter Duranty

The Woollcott Reader, an anthology of seventeen authors
ranging from J. M. Barrie to Evelyn Waugh.

In addition to these there have been brief parenthetical
bursts of applause for

Death and General Putnam, by Arthur Guiterman

Mrs. Astor's Horse, by Stanley Walker

It is quite impossible for any literate adult to think that this
list represents pink publications for pale people. If these be
"marshmallows," then I am the Grand Duchess Marie.

What interests me in this instance is the apparent lack of
journalistic conscience manifested by the editorial I complain of.
If that editorial was written by someone who would think of
that list as so many marshmallows, it was the work of a fool.
If it was written by someone who was not even familiar with
what books I had recommended, it was the work of a knave.
Neither alternative is agreeable for a colleague to contemplate.
Of course, there is always the third possibility that your editorial
writer is a nicely balanced mixture of the two.

Yours sincerely,

Alexander Woollcott
[1561

VI
1956-1957

To FRODE JENSEN

Santa Fe, New Mexico
January 8, 1936
Dear Frode:

You might begin telephoning the apartment along
about the 21st to see if I have come back. You will have tb move
fast if you want to catch me before I go away again.

As for the ceremonies planned for Winnetka on September
12th, I think you would do well to find someone else to stand
up with you. Whether you can lure Hennessey and Brown to*
the midlands at that time of year you can discover only from
them. I have no idea where they will be in September or by
whom employed. I have no idea on what continent I will be in
September.

Even if I were to be in or near Chicago on September.l2th
I would strongly advise against your engaging me as best man.
I can tell you right now what poisonous thoughts I would be
thinking all during the ceremony. I should be wondering whose
love of display and whose servility to fashion had ordained
a church wedding with flocks of ushers and bridesmaids for a
young couple for whose life immediately thereafter such a
parade would be a grotesquely inappropriate inaugural. I should
be thinking how much better the money thus squandered could

[157]

have been spent by any young couple upon their immediate
necessities. I should be wondering whose interests were being
consulted instead of those of the bride and groom, the only people
whose interests ought to be consulted. I should be thinking that
if you and Deb [Deborah Leonard] had slipped over to Middle-
bury and been married with the legal minimum of witnesses,
how much more grace and dignity that wedding would have
had. If you have read thus far even your slow Scandinavian
mind must have taken in the fact that I think church weddings
are vulgar and stupid. They seem to me as much out of date and
as essentially useless as a banquet photograph.

Having thus brightened your day and suspecting that if
I am the best man you could think of, your plight must be
pretty desperate, I remain,

Yours with deep affection,

Alexander Woollcott

To FRODE JENSEN

Chicago, IU.
January 15, 1936
Dear Frode:

I doubt if my stern letter distressed you unduly. I
did have the notion that you might show it to Deb and that
she might show it to her father and that possibly a great
light might then dawn on him. This would have extricated you
young people from a burdensome mess and I still think it's
worth trying at least if Deb is with you and me in this matter.
Maybe she herself wants to wallow in orange blossoms, roto-
gravures and sweaty ushers. However, I realize that there are
factors involved in the problem of which I know nothing and
which from a distance I cannot sufficiently take into account.
So I will say no more.

[158]

After all, as you both must dimly suspect, you are niy joy
and pride and no good or ill fortune can come to you without
my sharing it. I may even so far forget my preferences as to
attend the repellent ceremonies you are planning, but I cannot
possibly decide that question until you finally tell me when
they are to be held.

I shall arrive in New York in false whiskers on the morning
of Monday the 20th, but don't tell anyone.

Your affectionate uncle

A. Woollcott

To MRS. NEWTON D. BAKER
[Mr. Baker was Secretary o War under President Wilson.]

New York City
February 3, 1936
My dear Mrs. Baker:

When I first went abroad in the unsus-
pecting spring of 1914 I was a saucer-eyed young journalist
sent by the New York Times and bent on storing up all kinds
of impressions against the time when I should be old enough
to sit in the sun and remember. Among my great occasions was
an invitation to have tea with Barrie in his mullioned aerie in
Adelphi Terrace. I went there intending to note Barriers every
syllable for subsequent relation to my grandchildren. I was so
excited by the sheer eventfulness of meeting ihim that I talked
a blue streak and in the two hours and a half I was there he
never got a word in edgewise. I will say that once or twice he
tried to interrupt, but I struck him down.

I suspect you will find something vaguely familiar in this
episode. For a good many obscure reasons, at some of which
you could not possibly guess, I was enormously exhilarated by
the household in which I found myself on the 19th of the

[159]

month just past If I were a real neighbor and could come in
once in a while this would subside to manageable proportions.
The irony of it lies in the fact that, of the deficiencies in my life
of which I am most acutely and hungrily aware, one is the need
to have more contact with minds like Mr. Baker's. Such contact
would give me the refreshment, correction and stimulation I am
most desperately in need of. And what do I do when I get a
chance to sit at his feet and listen? I know what I do. I drown
him out I drown him out and I shout him down and perform
on trapezes and, like the man in his own very bad story, forget
what I came for. By the way, you tell him die best variant of
that is the helpless little boy who went to the druggist "What's
the matter?" asked the old apothecary. 'Did you forget what
you came for?"

"Oh, yes," said the boy, much relieved, "that's it Camphor."

I often find myself thinking what fun it would be to live
in a town of two hundred people provided I could name the
two hundred name the editor of the paper and the priest"
with whom I would talk over the affairs of the parish and the
atheist with whom I would play cribbage at the corner saloon.
Mr. Baker could have any job in that town he wants.

Will you tell him for me that in 1934 Ian Colvin wrote
the second and final volume of the life of Lord Carson which
had been left unfinished by the obnoxious and self-slain Eddie
Marjoribanks. Tell him also, please, that among the jobs I hope
to do when I go to London on the 20th is to persuade the pub-
lishers of the Notable British Trials to put out a volume which
would contain the complete record of the Archer-Shee case.
You might also tell Mr. Baker that I am counting on his send-
ing me not only Mr. Wilson's commutation decisions in the
four capital cases during the war, but, if possible, the memoranda
on which he based those decisions.

I have had the translucent paper-cutter and ruler outfitted
[160]

with a new and unsullied glass. I now brandish it so effectively
that I am more like Mrs. Fiske than ever.

Yours sincerely,

Alexander Woollcott

To LADY COLEFAX

[Lady Colefax's hospitality greatly increased Wooflcott's enjoyment

of his trips to England, as before the war she was hostess to many

figures in the literary, political and artistic worlds. Now she has

turned ner salon into a canteen.]

On Board S.S. Manhattan
April 10, 1936
Dear Sibyl,

This shall be posted at Queenstown to tell you how
kindly and how fondly I am aware of the part you pky in mak-
ing any visit of mine to London something to enjoy at the
time and long afterwards when I am old and can only sit in the
sun and remember. You have a great talent for friendship and
I count myself fortunate in knowing you

Alexander W,

To LC7CY CHRISTIE DRAGE

[Lucy Drage's daughter, Betty, with her husband, Fred Harvey, was

killed in an airplane crash a few days after she disembarked from the

Manhattan in New York.]

York City*
Mav 13, 1936,
Dear Lucy:

It was only at the last minute that I deuueu iu wiuc
back on the Manhattan, which left Southampton on the evening
of the 9th. I had been planning to return on the Aquitania

[161]

which left the day before, but my chief objective overseas was
a meeting with J. W. Dunne. He lives down near Banbury
in Oxfordshire but was staying with his mother at Montreux
throughout the winter and was so late in returning to England
that I could visit him at all only by staying over a day. I had
rather counted on spending most of the return trip on the
Aquitania in the company of Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, an enchant-
ing old woman who is a great crony of mine. However, my
friend, flgwy..3g^jy r T would be returning on the Manhattan.
He and Icame down" from London to Southampton together
for the midnight sailing.

My eyes were hardly open next morning when the assist-
ant to the Chief Steward popped in with the gracious announce-
ment that I was to sit at die Captain's table. I am much too old
a bfecLto be caught by that bait any mor& Sometimes I have to
work up the theory that I am hard at work on something and
must be left undisturbed to read throughout dinner. Thereafter
I always have to keep the title of my book out of sight for fear
it will be discovered that my researches are in detective litera-
ture. But this time I had Backer for an excuse. We would be
eating together, I explained. Much shocked, the assistant retired.
When news of my recalcitrance reached the Chief Steward
he came in personally to repeat the invitation and, as a special
inducement, offered the information that I would be sitting next
to a Mrs. Harvey, the daughter of an old friend of mine. I
replied that Mrs. Harvey might desert the Captain and sit with
us if she wanted to, but that I was much too irregular and
unsocial a traveler ever to sit at the Captain's table. I was
afraid this might seem a trifle churlish so I sent around a note
to Betty's cabin asking her to have cocktails with me in the
bar that evening.

I had seen her only once or twice and that so, many years
ago that I wasn't sure I would know her and kept inspecting
every youngish woman who came into the bar. But when Betty

[162]

herself arrived, there was no mistaking her very lovely looking
and radiantly healthy and particularly attractive to me because
of her beautiful walk. She was being indulged by the line with
a large, hideous sitting-room all to herself. And everywhere
she carried her new dog, a tiny threermonths-old Australian
terrier, so small that it could stand on my cigarette case and so
fierce that it repelled all invaders. Its name was Sophia. Poor
Sophia; I see that the newspapers mistook her for a monkey.

Betty and I became great friends at once. She used to call
me every morning and demand that I come around to her cabin
for coffee and every evening I used to carry her away for coffee
and liqueurs after dinner. This used to annoy the old Captain
tremendously. He didn't like this at all because he liked Betty*
He wrote me quite a desolate note about her. He had implored
her not to fly.

Betty and I had long talks together. She told me so much
about you and her father and Charley and Charley s wife and
Charley's baby and David not so much recent things as things
long ago, he^t^BleTwra and die cures she had taken

him to, her close bond with David and the time when she
went to Pomfret to see him and found him in trouble and got
him out of it (he had been caught smoking, I believe, and was
going to be expelled and Betty saw the headmaster and burst
into a torrent of old Christie tears and got Trim forgiven). I
take it she had no great respect tor or confidence in Charley's
marriage and was skeptical about his and its future. I gathered,
too, that she had always adored her father and that everything
he had ever said ancT done was the most tender memory to her.
What she thought of Fred Harvey I have no notion. Not the
faintest But you were the great enthusiasm of her life. I
gathered .as much from a hundred things she said to me and
from what she said to other people. I am not inventing this to
comfort you. Indeed you must know I am not. You must know
how much she admired you and how she felt about you.

[163]

She was a good deal of a surprise to me. I cannot remember
now where in some past years I had picked up the notion that
she was superficial and scatterbrained. Instead I found her wise
and grave and realistic and extraordinarily perceptive. I did,
however, get the impression that this was a new phase of her,
that she was but recently matured, that if she had a real serenity
it was something she had recently achieved. From things she
told me and from things she didn't know she was telling me I
gathered she had been through some storm, with tormented,
twitching nerves and the like, but that she had come out of
all that as a person comes at last out of fever. She was clear-eyed
and composed and enormously in possession of herself, as if
she knew just where she was going and how to get there. I found
myself enjoying her company and admiring her profoundly.
As you know, this is no polite afterthought. I am so gkd I wrote
you that note on her last Saturday. You must have found it
in your mail on Monday morning if you saw your mail on
Monday morning.

The last morning, she and Backer and I loitered together
in the sun of the open deck as the ship waited at Quarantine
and then came slowly up the Bay. After we docked, I did not
see her again because she was planning to leave her maid to
pilot the luggage through the customs while she herself departed
immediately with Fred to whatever hotel he had picked out.
She went off with my telephone number in her purse and, just
before she started West, she called me up. I was not in, but my
maid took the message. Mrs. Harvey was leaving and wanted
me to be sure and send her the address of my camp as she wanted
to wire me and tell me when she was coming to the island.
You see, it had been all fixed that she was to visit us this sum-
mer in Vermont

Alexander W.

[164]

To LADY COLEFAX

New York City
May 14, 1936

Dear Sibyl:

Along with this same mail I am sending you a copy
of a novel Charley Bracket* wrote about the island. I can't for
the life of me remember whether you ever saw it.

However, I am writing you now for quite another purpose.
I am in some slight embarrassment because I happen to be privy
to the secret of a Christmas present you are going to get. And
it is my notion that it might be a convenience to you to know-
about it in advance. After some irresolution I decided to tip
you off. But you need say nothing about it and must be as
surprised as one o'clock when the time comes. In brief, a half-
dozen of your American friends, fearfully annoyed at the pros-
pect of not seeing you for a long time, have decided to give
you for Christmas (instead of a pair of candlesticks or even
book-ends) a trip to America with all expenses paid, including
three weeks of debauchery in New York. It is our idea that
you would best enjoy cashing this check some time after
the Christmas holidays. January, perhaps, or something like
that

I would throw in as one detail the promise of a dinner party
for you at my new house but I cannot at the moment of going
to press tell you precisely where that will be. The offer for the
house I want has been made and is now in the hands of the
Surrogate and some sort of decision may be handed down even
while this note to you is on the Atlantic. I find one is extremely
vulnerable when, as rarely happens with me, one happens to
want something a lot.

By the time this reaches you I will have shifted my base to
the island for the summer. My address there, as you know, is
Bomoseen, Vermont. I still think often and gratefully. of the

[165]

good times you gave me when I was last in London.- 1 set great
store by my friendship with you.

Alexander W.

P.S. I have gone onto a heroic diet in an effort to keep my
weight from becoming a peril and an inconvenience so I couldn't
munch on those chocolate pebbles of yours even if I were in
London. But what about that enchanting aroma as of burning
pinewood that greets the guests as they step across the threshold?
How is that produced? Is it some kind of tea that you have
smoldering in the umbrella stands? If so, how and where could
I get some?

To LADY COLEFAX

Bomoseen, Vt.
July 8, 1936
Dear Sibyl:

One of my favorite people in all the world seems
likely to come to England for several months in the Fall. I am
so anxious that his visit should be happy that I shall have to
repress from motives of common sense and economy an impulse
to go over and manage it for him. His name is Robert Barnes
Rudd and you would be simply enchanted with him. He was a
classmate of mine at school. While I was starting work on the
Times to learn my trade he went to Merton for three years.
Now he is a professor of English literature at our college and is
the somewhat surprised father of five incredibly beautiful chil-
dren. Being slightly insane, he and his wife and all five children
are sailing for Marseilles in August and will stay with her brother
who has a farm near Pau, Once they are all planted there, Bob
will leave them flat and go on to London for die weeks between
early September and Christmas. I suppose he will go down to
Oxford for a while for old time's sake, but mostly he wants
to stay in London and do some reading. His sole problem will

[166]

be financial. I assume he will have to live on next to nothing
at all, but he is used to that. I know he will want to call on
Graham Robertson for he too belongs to the brotherhood of the
poodle, and you are just the person to see that he is in on one
or two experiences that would provide pleasant memories for
him to take home with him. I will have a greater notion of
what these might be before the time comes and I will write
you again.

Alexander W.

P.S. I have been having a debauch of reading, including a
colossal life of Andrew Johnson, the wretched man who was
shot into the presidency by the assassination of Lincoln and who
was the chief victim of the post-war hate which always takes the
naive human race by surprise. In the persecution of Johnson,
one of the chief villains was a corrupt and flagrant Congressman
who was later Grant's running mate in the next election. And
why am I telling all this to you? Because his name was Coif ax
Schuyler Coif ax. He was known as Smilar Colfax and appears
to have been a good deal of a louse. I thought you would like
to know.

To MARGARET MITCHELL

Bomoseen, Vt.
August 7, 1936
My dear Miss Mitchell:

I have just finished reading Gone With
the Wind and found it completely absorbing. Its narrative has
the directness and gusto of Dumas. I enjoyed it enormously. I
was almost through it when I said to myself: "God's nightgown!
This must be the Peg Mitchell who wrote me once about the
little girl who swallowed a water moccasin and the tall man in

[167]

the wrinkled nurse's uniform who thronged the road from
Atlanta to Miami/* Is it?

If your royalties have begun to come in, kindly send a
large share of them as per the enclosed instructions and oblige

A. Woollcott

To RALPH HAYES
[Secretary to Newton D. Baker during the first World War.]

Romoseen, Vt.
August 8, 1936
Dear Ralph:

In the matter of the coming election, I will attempt
Lere only to report that I, myself, intend to vote for Franklin
Roosevelt. I was driven into his arms through the peculiar re-
pulsiveness of his opponents. In 1918 I had some misgivings
about the course Woodrow Wilson was taking, but at that time,
and immediately thereafter, one had to go along with him in
order to avoid even seeming to reinforce such swine as Henry
Cabot Lodge. The crowd that has been grooming Landon seem
to me indistinguishable from the element that gave us Warren
Harding. As you know, I could have wished another than
Franklin Roosevelt to have been nominated in 1932. Now I de-
voutly hope he will be re-elected.

A. Woollcott

To MRS. HENDR1CK EVSTIS

Bomoseen, Vt.
August 10, 1936
Gruesome Grace:

The island is perfect now, and I can't help
thinking that any time you spend flouncing around Hollywood

[168]

will be just so much wear and tear. I am able to report that
Beatrice's chairs will have arrived before the week is out and
that the Duchess [A. W/s black shepherd dog] has had a bath,
a quasi-public affair in the shallows of the lake in the manner
of the late Susannah. She appeared to enjoy it, and I must con-
fess to a marked improvement. Her reputation on the mainland
has advanced by leaps and bounds due to the decision of a boat-
load of assorted females to land at the point The Duchess
decided they shouldn't and attacked in so startling a manner
that they were all half drowned trying to get into their boat and
launch it at the same time. You never heard such shrieks.
An arena full of edible early Christians must have sounded
something like this.

Black Neysa is becoming a tough baby. She rackets around
with the boys a good deal and has even developed a habit of
charging down to the shore and mewing at passing motor boats
in what she imagines is an intimidating manner.

I stopped off at chez MacLeish on my way back. Your health
and whereabouts were publicly inquired after. I think they will
be up here soon perhaps this week, more probably during the
week of the 17th.

Leggett Brown tells me he is devoting some of his time to
preparing Hollywood for your arrival,

A.W.

To STEPHEN EARLY

[Wooflcott's friendship with President Roosevelt's secretary began
wjien they were on the Stars and Stripes together in 1918.]

Bomoseen, Vt.
September 10, 1936
Dear Steve:

This note is a sequel to our talk across die luncheon
table (you paid the check) last February. I am now seeking your
sober advice as to whether a Roosevelt broadcast by me let us

[169]

say a fifteen minute declaration of my reasons for thinking die
country .would be best served by his re-election would be so
valuable a contribution that I ought to make it despite my several
private reasons for wishing not to do any radio work this Fall
at all.

And if you do think I should thus do my bit, please tell me
how and through whom I should make the offer. Here is my
perplexity. I am reluctant to seem fussy and self-important but
after all the whole point of my letting out a peep is 'the fact that
I am reputed to have a considerable radio following. I don't want
to enter in at all unless the offer is considered important enough
to insure some preliminary drum-beating in order to assemble
at least a part of that audience.

I think if I'd been lost like Stef ansson in the Arctic for sev-
eral years and returning, had heard only the arguments against
Mr. Roosevelt, I should have decided, on the strength of them
alone, to vote for him. I had heard those same arguments before
the same words from the same people. Then they were
launched against Theodore Roosevelt and later against Woodrow
Wilson, The last time they were triumphant they ushered in
normalcy and Warren Harding.

A. Wooflcott

To RALPH HAYES

Bomose&n, Vt.
September 28, 1936
Dear Ralph:

You should have received ere now evidence aplenty
fhai: your letter posted to this address came to hand. I can't be
pried loose from this hideout before the middle of October.
After that, I shall go into winter quarters at Sneden Landing,

[170]

having sold my flat to Noel Coward in one of my recurrent
spasms of dislike for New York

I read Mr. Baker's piece in Foreign Affairs with tremendous
satisfaction, plus considerable exhilaration. He has the best prose
style of any living American and I doubt if he realizes it or
cares much. I sent five copies of the issue to sundry friends, but
I hope it will soon be available as a modestly priced book. This
is so obvious a publishing project that I assume it is even now
issuing from some press, but you never can tell and on the
chance, I suggested to my own publishers that they try to get
it. That's the way Little Brown got Good-lye, Mr. Chips. It had
caused a small sensation in The Atlantic but no one had thought
of making a book out of it

Well, I must run now and look up "pixilated" in the dic-
tionary.

A. Woollcott

P.S. On October 20th Tm going to do a broadcast telling why
I'm voting for Roosevelt. The real reason is as persuasive, I
should think, as any I could manufacture. I want to disassociate
myself from the swine who, almost in a body, are out for Landon.
Some good men are out for Landon. All the heels are.

To STEPHEN EARLY

New York City
October 20, 1936

Dear Steve:

Something possibly your stepping on High pro-
duced immediate action. At least I am now scheduled for WABC
on Tuesday, the 27th, 10.45 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, and
announcements to that effect are already going out over the air

[171]

and will, I assume, be printed in the radio programs on Sunday.

I wish I might have spoken sooner only because I must
now give the impression of one who took the precaution to wait
and pick a winner. Judging from all I hear in this neck of
the woods, anyone who rushes out now to declare himself for
Roosevelt is a little like someone having the impertinence to
"discover" a neglected little work like Gone With the Wind.
Aside from that, I shall speak for your chief with the great
enthusiasm I really feel.

After Election I shall be in Washington for a few days
during the fortnight of Noel Coward's engagement. I have
known him since he was a shabby youngster in his teens who
either ate at the expense of some rich wage slave like himself
or didn't eat at all. It is part of the ritual of the American theatre
that old Uncle Woollcott should go down on these occasions
and hold his hand during the tremors of a try-out. I shall also
be there collecting a hundred dollars from Alice Longworth,
who will owe me same after the returns are in on Election Day.

Good luck, and God bless you.

Alexander Woollcott

To LILLY BONNER

New York City
October 31, 1936
Dear Lilly:

My immense enjoyment of the new Hamlet here
was complicated all during the first half of the performance by
my agonized inability to think who it was [John] Gielgud
looked like. It was about the middle of the Closet Scene that it
came to me. In every detail of feature, walk, voice, manner
and what not, he is the spitting image of you.

Then I must tell you about my tremendous enjoyment of

[172]

the hunting season this year in Vermont. It's the first time IVe
ever really enjoyed a hunting season. It was pretty bad when
all the nimrods began arriving the last of September. The
island was carpeted with pointers, and these Daniel Boones
stood around hefting their guns in the familiar manner I find
so fatiguing to watch. Then, when the first came, they went
out each morning at dawn and came back late at sundown with
not a Goddamn bird. It didn't lessen their discomfiture that I
named them the Audubon Society. Finally, at the rate of about
one a day, they did accumulate four partridges. These were
hung high on the wall of the house outside the kitchen door
against Thursday night's dinner. Thursday afternoon the cook
went to pluck them and found that the Black Duchess, my
shepherd dog, was just polishing off the third. She's now known
all over Vermont as Woollcott's bird dog.

The Black Duchess and my cat, Black Neysa, will be
coming down to live with me in New York this winter, as I have
sublet Hope Williams' apartment in Grade Square for three
winters. This is part of a program which includes the purchase
of half the island from the dub, and the converting of my little
stone shack into a big, nine-room, all-year-round house, from
which I expect, in due time, to be buried.

But why, as they say in the kind of pkys usually backed
by Paul, am I telling all this to you? Because, obviously, I want
you to write me the real lowdown about Wallis Simpson. In-
stinct tells me that the public guess is all wrong, that the real
story is importantly different from the one surmised. I chiefly
hope that the King will be happy. He has that in him which
makes many people hope this. I saw him only twice, but I feel an
immense good will for him. But tell me all about it as con-

o

fidentially as you wish what has happened, what is happening,
and what is going to happen. Write me at 10 Grade Square.

Alexander W.

[173]

To DR. A. P. SAUND'ERS
[For many years Professor of Chemistry at Hamilton College.]

New York City
November 19, 1936
Dear Percy:

I have just sent a book to you called Ferdinand, but
that is not the point of this note.

Eckstein, who is like no one in the world except Chaplin'
and who, though he will be forty-six on his next birthday, is a
gnomelike and tiny creature suggesting a frost-bitten twenty-
two, is, all told, as enchanting a fellow as ever I saw. I took him
down to Washington so that I might see him at the zoo with
Bill Mann. Some time I must tell you about how he and the
birds began talking to one another at a tremendous rate the
moment he crossed the threshold. However, I am going to try
my luck luring him to ^Hamilton to get a degree and you shall
have him in the garden in June.

But this is the point: I have it in mind to give a small din-
ner party for him in New York when he comes back from Cin-
cinnati three weeks hence. The date will be the 10th. I would
make it a dinner of no more than eight and in composing my
list of guests I haven't got beyond him and Anne Parrish. I am
writing to inquire what chance there is of your being able to
get down here for it. I could, of course, give you lodging for
the night, as I have a guest room here*

Alexander W.

P.S. Hennessey Jbas gone up to Vermont to select stone for the
new house. He is also under orders to bring back my cat, shep-
herd dog, music-box and binoculars.

A.W.

[ Woollcott did not know Dr. Gustav Eckstein, Professor of Physiology
at the University of Cincinnati and friend and biographer of the
Japanese scientist Nogudhi, until lie read Eckstein's book, Canary.
He was fascinated by the personal quality of the scientist's relationship
to his birds, and wrote to him about it A strong and continuing bond
then developed between them.l

[174]

To LADY COLEFAX

New York City
November 23, 1936
Dear Sibyl,

As for independent sorties and projects while you are
here, that's your own affair, but you mustn't expect me to be
sympathetic with them. You know I think you do four times too
much, not only for your own good but for the full enjoyment
of the things you would do even if you did much less. As I
have to struggle with the same deleterious tendency in myself,
I am alert to all signs of such folly in others. I do deeply feel
that you must need some rest while you are here. That's why
I roared with enraged disapproval last night when Lynn timidly
suggested that you might like a brief triumphal tour of Holly-
wood. It seems likely that we all will be here when you come,
for I think even Alice Miller will be back from the Coast by
then and that the Lunts will still be doing such business with
Idiot's Delight as to have found no excuse to go on tour. I myself
am certain to be here because on the 5th I start broadcasting
again and will have to be in or near New York every Tuesday
and Thursday for some time to come. You will be here in time for
my fiftieth birthday on the 19th, although I think it likely
that I shall actually spend that day or part of it in Washington,
as it is the eve of the inauguration. Since Washington will be
intolerably congested at the time and since our great public
occasions are rigorously lacking in the spectacular, I shall resist
with my last ounce of strength any proposal of yours to come
along. Noel, of course, will be in a dither with his new plays,
which open here tomorrow night, and even John Gielgud will,
I think, still be playing Hamlet. His final weeks are announced,
but that is all eye-wash. When Leslie Howard presented a com-
peting Dane, the press for Gielgud was even better than when
he had opened himself, and as vast multitudes had apparently
waited to see which Hamlet was the better bet, they are now

[1751

going in droves to see John's. Leslie's was embarrassingly bad
a monotonous and rather pretty schoolboy reciting pieces
taught him by his governess.

As the time approaches and I shall have to act on some of
your communications, I must insist that you typewrite them. I
know you think that my comments on your handwriting are
fretful and spoilsport, but some day I shall succeed in convincing
you that I have never been able to do more than guess at what
you were trying to say. It would be a pity if I guessed wrong on
some crucial matter like a date or an address. As the time ap-
proaches I will let you know what your New York address is
to be and you can always get in touch with me if you will
remember that my cable address is ACKIE, New York.

A.W.

RS. The sum and substance of the above, in case you forget,
is that if you don't have a good time when you are here I shall
be bitterly disappointed, and if you don't take it easy, I shall
bash your head in.

To LAURA E. RICHARDS

New York City
December 12, 1936
My dear Mrs. Richards,

My delighted encounter with 'Tom the

Pigman" at breakfast yesterday morning also served as a reminder*
that I must report the collapse of all my plans to get to the State
of Maine this year. All my notions of what I would do after the
middle of October went awry in the excitement of the campaign.
The Republican tactics drove me into Mr. Roosevelt's arms and
I was in a lather until I could get on the air and ring my bell
for him. I have since had withering comments from a neighbor

[176]

of yours [Booth Tarkington] in Kennebunkport who professes
to sympathize with this rush of mine to the aid of an imperiled
cause and ventures to hope I will come up in the spring unless
the President gets into trouhle again.

Meanwhile, I seem to he leading a sufficiently violent pro-
fessional life to need a New York headquarters and its address
you will find duly engraved at the top of this writing paper. I
am busy now putting together the contents for the second Woott-
cott Reader and in general trying to dear my desk so that I
can begin broadcasting in January. It is to be every Thursday
and Tuesday evening at seven-thirty.

I went to Anne Sullivan Macy s funeral and as long as I
live I shall remember the sight of Helen [Keller] coming up
the church aisle after it was over. Her secretary, Polly Thomp-
son, a Scotch woman and as fine a person as ever drew the
breath of life, was weeping beyond all control, and as they
passed the pew where I sat I saw the flutter of Helen's hands
as she sought to comfort her. I had not seen any of them nor
heard from them since spring. They sent me word at last only
because just before she lost consciousness for good and all,
Mrs. Macy tapped into Helen's hand, "You must send for
Alexander. I want him to read to me." They were together
forty-nine years. I cannot imagine them apart.

Under separate cover I am sending you a book called
Canary which is the present apple of my roving eye. If you like
it, I will write and tell you all about the astounding little man
who wrote it. Also because it's just your dish a book called
Ferdinand.

Alexander Woollcott

[177]

To LAURA E, RICHARDS

New York City
January 23, 1937
Dear Mrs. Richards,

My fiftieth birthday found me toiling in
Washington, but after the broadcast there was a small birthday
dinner (without cake) given by young Joe Alsop of the Herald,
Tribune staff. He is a grandson of the late Mrs. Douglas Robin-
son and, therefore, a cousin of Alice Longworth and of Mrs.
Franklin Roosevelt He looks like the late Count Fosco and,
although he went through Groton and Harvard, he comes
extraordinarily close to being what I should call an educated
man. Anyway, he gave this dinner for me and Alice Longworth
and Rebecca West and, to my delight, Mrs. Winthrop Chanler.
We talked about you and she said she had had some of the
sherry, and I found her delightful, but I am still faithful to you.

I did get the brochure. It's just up my alley. The song and
dance I do on the subject is usually limited to attacks upon the
people who nick the edge of a good word by trying to use it for
something it was never intended for. It's the transpire-happen,
prone-supine, imply-inf er group that I have in my mind. Indeed,
I am thinking of doing a broadcast about it, calling upon the
people to rise and kill off all those who use flak under the im-
pression that it means knack or talent or aptitude.

I meant to write you a long letter about Dr. Eckstein, but
I have been discouraged by two things. First, I had really said
my say in the magazine piece I sent on to you and, second, my
best story on frim needs too much pantomime to tell in a letter.

Alexander W.

[178]

To ARTHUR HOPKINS

New York City
February 15, 1937
Dear Arthur,

I think it was those two hundred banquets I had
to attend during my novitiate as a reporter on the Times which
gave me a neurosis about public dinners. I would not have
believed that I could attend one in any capacity, even as a guest
of honor, and have so pleasant an evening. This, I realize in
.retrospect, was all due to you. It also dawned on me that most
of these people, from Henry Hull to Helen Hayes, came not
because the dinner was for me but because you had asked them.
As that was why I came, I can not quarrel with their motivation.
I feel we have written another chapter in a long and still far
from finished story about two neighbors you and

Yours affectionately,

A. Woollcott

To DAVID McCORD
[Author, and editor of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin.]

New York City
February 15, 1937
My dear David,

This is a tardy acknowledgment of your Notes
on the Harvard Tercentenary in which I did the required read-
ing and some more. From afar 'I followed that observance with
an envious and admiring eye.

I find I shall be in Boston on the 26th as I have promised
to speak there for the Seeing Eye. I don't know where the
meeting will be held, but I do know that I shall be lodged at
the Ritz and after my show and theirs I am having the Lunts
for supper. I would be gkd to have you, too. If, as seems im-
probable, you want to go to the Seeing Eye meeting, let me

1179]

know and I will have a seat sent to you. I think it's to be at
Symphony Hall and I doubt if it is open to the public.

In a quiet way and on good but scanty evidence, I have a
tremendous admiration for President Conant. This is based
partly on what I hear about him, partly on things I know he has
said and done, and partly on the glimpse I had of him that night
when he rose superior to all ineffectual turmoil at The Signet
dinner. Do you suppose that if I lingered over in Boston on
Saturday the 27th and Sunday the 28th or even Monday the
first, I might have a chance to call upon him and talk to him?
My reasons are two. One is that I wish I knew him. The second
is that as a trustee of Hamilton, where for use after next year
we are going to need a new president, I should like to ask him
to keep us in mind and to suggest one or two men whom the
committee of trustees could interview and meditate upon.

A.W.

[The Seeing Eye, which trains dogs to help the blind attain physical
independence, was the institution nearest to Woollcott's heart. He
lectured about it, broadcast about it, and contributed to it generously
from his own funds.]

To MRS. HENDRICK EUSTIS

New York City
February 23, 1937
Puss Eustis,

I wonder if it can be possible that, behind this poor
mask of disgust and under a steady barrage of abuse, I have ever
really succeeded in concealing from you the fact that I look on
you as one of the most enjoyable companions and the most
admirable human beings it is my good fortune to know.
Print this in the Journal and see what it gets you.

Your lovesick

Pickwick

[180]

To MARGARET MITCHELL

New York City
March 19, 1937
Dear Margaret Mitchell,

Well, that's the most tantalizing para-
graph in your letter of March 4th the one in which you said
you were sending me the work of another Georgia author. I am
driven to ask whether you did actually send it.

As you may suspect, the new books go squealing through
here like pigs through a slaughter house. But I have elaborate
devices for singling out the ones I'm going to want and I'm
pretty sure that no such opus has gone through as the one
which you make sound so alluring. IVe been slightly hampered
by the fact that you told me everything about it except the tide
and the name of the author. If, even so, you did send it and it
has eluded me, I may kill myself. I can't begin to tell you how
startled I was to learn that Atlanta isn't on Eastern Standard
Time. This has thrown my whole sense of American geography
into confusion. I'm still holding on pathetically to a conviction
that it's in the South.

Speaking of the South, there came this week from Birm-
ingham in Alabama the most gratifying letter my earnest efforts
have ever elicited. A woman named Vance reports that her
Negress cook asked permission to listen to one of my broadcasts.
When it was over she said, 'There's voodoo in his voice but glory
in his tales." I'm arranging to have this embossed on my pro-
fessional stationery. I've often thought of getting out a pink
glazed professional stationery with photographs of me in various
roles the way character actors do. In my time I've played Puck
and Henry the Eighth, which is quite a range.

If you're reading anything at all these days let me recom-
mend Of Mice and Men.

A. Woollcott

[181]

To HARPO MARX

New York City
March 24, 1937

Dear Harpo,

This is the reminder I promised about Helen Kel-
ler. She and Polly Thompson will sail April 1st from San
Francisco on the Asctmu Mow. For two days ahead of that
they will be at the St. Francis Hotel. If you have it in mind
to send flowers, remember that for a blind person one flower
that smells like all get out is better than the most costly bouquet
which may be merely something to look at

[Charles] Lederer is here having his tooth pulled and
pacifying MacArthur, who strikes me as being at the half way
stage between Lederer and John Barrymore. I have pointed this
out to Lederer. He didn't care for it

Have you read Of Mice and Men? Just your dish. Just your
length. Beatrice, as you probably know, has bought the dramatic
rights. I'm in on it with her. One of the characters is an ami-
able and gigantic idiot, so tender that he has to fondle every-
thing he likes and so clumsy that he eventually breaks their
necks mice, puppies, rabbits, tarts whatever he happens to
be petting at die moment I tried to get Broun to take this part
and he was very hurt.

I've forgotten what you look like. I guess that's a good break
for you, at that

The Prince Chap

P.S. Come to think of it, Helen would prefer a botde of
bourbon or scotch to a mere bouquet any day.

A. W.

[182J

To MARGARJET MITCHELL

New York City
April 3, 1937
Dear Margaret Mitchell,

You're just goading me on to tell that

story of the elevator. I wrote it years ago for The New Yorker
and it was my first encounter with folklore. In that version die
scene was an elegant Southern home with the scent of magnolias
in the air and the crunch of wheels on gravel. It was a hearse
that came by and the driver with the livid face took off his
top hat and looked up at the window and said, "Room for
one more/' It was those words issuing from the selfsame face
(but this time the face of the man operating the elevator)
which, in a department store up North the following winter,
led her to recoil in the nick of time.

I have since learned that that elevator has been crashing
steadily since the late Eighties. It crashed at A. T. Stewart's
in New York and the rescued girl was none other than Lucy
C. Lillie. But you are too young to have known Harper's Young
People when Mrs. Lillie was writing for it. So am I, for that
matter, but I was the youngest of five and any kid knows best
the books his older brothers left around the house.

More often than not there is a hearse, though I, too, have
known the man to carry the coffin. There's always a hearse
where, as it does periodically, the apparition visits the chaste
precincts of Randolph-Macon. It is a hearse that's heard on the
cobblestones at Dijon and the crash occurs afterwards at a
hotel in Paris. In America the face is usually livid with a scar
across it As you get past the Rhine the story has long had
currency around Warsaw the man is distinguished by a shock
of scarlet hair, crowning a face the color of a fish's belly. Very
pretty.

This past glimmer when you came roaring back into my
quiet life, did I tell you my adventures with the legend of

[188]

Sherman's missing one fine house on his march to the sea be-
cause the family ingeniously succeeded in hiding it from him?
I inquired ahout this in a broadcast a little more than a year
ago and received volumes of assurance that the house stood
near Chattanooga, Vicksburg and Atlanta, but suddenly from
a most interesting source I got confirmation (once removed)
from Sherman's own lips. Did I tell you about that? And even
if I didn't, maybe you are a wee bit tired of William Tecumseh.
You must tell Mr. Marsh [Margaret Mitchell's husband] of the
bitter complaint I heard on the lips of Mrs. Lloyd Lewis. She
said (with a snarl) that she had lost her husband in the Civil
War.

A. Woollcott

To CYRIL CLEMENS

New York City
May 10, 1937
Dear Mr. Clemens:

I shall be very happy to receive the Mark
Twain Medal and shall feel that I am in very good company.

After an examination of my credentials for a place in the
Mark Twain Society, I can find only one item. Having always
traveled light through this world, I still own, at fifty, only one
object which I also owned when I was ten. That is my copy
of Tine Adventures of Tom Sawyerl
With all good wishes,

Yours sincerely
Alexander Woollcott

[184]

To DR. GUSTAV ECKSTEIN
[See note on page 174.]

New York City
May 19, 1937
Dear Gus,

I expect to be at the island and visitable there by
anyone proposing to convert it into one of the Canary Island
group on the following dates:
May 28 3 1 , inclusive
June 4 7, inclusive
June 18 21, inclusive

Elegant time in Canada. Plenty of exercise getting up to
drink toasts to the King. General condition greatly improved.
Lingering protests and portents from the alimentary tract.
Sounds and signs of mutiny down there. Another yip out of that
region and I'll give it something to worry about a few Welsh
rarebits and some strawberry shortcake.

Yesterday at two-thirty New York time frantic calls from
Omaha where the Lunts had encountered a mayor who for-
bade their show unless they made some sixteen deletions from
the text, which has since been referred to by some New York
scrivener as "Idiot's Delete." Lynn had written a statement
she wished to make to the public before the rise of the curtain
but I denounced them both as poltroons not fit to be trusted
with a play by Sherwood or anybody else if they didn't have
the gumption not to play at all. This advice entranced them so
they told the mayor to go to hell and he colkpsed at once.
The play was therefore given last night as written. I shall get
the details by air mail. But you may have read all this in
your funny little local newspaper.

Meanwhile, the Omaha World Telegram a newspaper
of which I know nothing beyond the fact ttat it once printed
an editorial called 'The Woollcott Menace" has wired for
permission to print the somewhat tedious and sententious broad-

[1851

cast I did last night. I refused, but offered ta give them in its
place a few opinions of my own on their mayor. That's the
situation at present

My love to your mother and "Big Gus" and Mrs. Wehner
and 'Wisdom Tooth."

A. W.

To SOPHIE ROSENBERGER

[Miss Rosenberger was Woollcott's teacher when he was in the second
grade in public school in Kansas City.]

Bomoseen, Vt.
August 28, 1937
My dear Miss Rosenberger,

Is this my Miss Smoot the one

who taught the first grade in the Franklin school when I matric-
tdated there in 1892? I remember my Miss Smoot as a formi-
dable woman who subjected me to my first public disgrace. And
it was unmerited. At least I was innocent. "The woman tempted
me/' You remember when we were all made to sit at attention,
each with his hands clasped in front of him on the desL This
was a way of keeping us out of mischief. Once Miss Smoot gave
that order because she wanted to go out of the room. I never
would have thought of relaxing if two little girls in the front row
hadn't turned around and giggled at me. Then one of them
thumbed her nose at me. I did not know the significance of this
gesture Imt I felt that it called for a reply, so I unlocked my
hands and was thumbing my nose just as Miss Smoot walked in
the door. I was made to stand out in the hall for what seemed
several years but I suppose was no more than jiplf an hour.
I remember my agony of apprehension that one of the grown-
ups of twelve or thirteen from Aldine Place would pass up or

[186]

down the stairs at that time and report my outcast state at home*
Well, that was forty-five years ago and here is Miss Smoot
taking baseball lessons in New York

Alexander W.

To FRANK SULLIVAN

Bomoseen, Vt.
September 1, 1937
Dear Frank,

Can you come up here some time this week and stay
for a meal, a night, a week, or until October 20th, when the
water will be shut off? At this time I can easily provide trans-
portation. After September 9th, I shall still have a car but my
chauffeur will have resumed his classical studies at Hamilton.
I don't think you would enjoy having me drive you.

Alice Miller (with a small flock of satellites) is scheduled to
arrive Wednesday, bringing (I believe) Dan Silberberg.

My piece on Jack Humphrey (very good) has gone in to
The New Yorker. The reason I am telling all this to you is be-
cause I have decided I must start work today on a book and
writing to you is as good a way as any of postponing parturition.

A. W.

P.S. IVe ordered one of my ten privately bound two-volume
editions of the Ackie Reader sent you. It will arrive shortly after
the 10th.

A.W.

[Woottcotfs Second Header was published in November 1937. Ite
nickname "Adde" was also Woollcott's cable address.]

1187]

To LAURA E. RICHARDS

Bomoseen, Vt.
September 1, 1937

My dear friend,

Yes as you asked me on August 9th and here
it is nearly a month later before I answer I am still faithful
but I see no prospect of my getting to Maine much before mid-
November when you will be at Gardiner. For all I know, you
may be there already but on the chance that you aren't, I am
sending this to Indian Point. As I may have told you, I am in
the throes of building me an all-year house here on the island,
one fortified against the slings and arrows of a Vermont winter,
and here I expect to make my base from now on, lingering this
year until the end of December, but making one or two expedi-
tions in October and November, including one that will take me
to Mr. Tarkington's doorstep and yours.

I have sent for A City of Bells on your say-so, but have not
so much as looked inside it yet. Indeed I have been reading only
what I had to in preparation for Woottcott's Second Reader
which is to come out in November and on which I am even now
getting in my last licks. Some of the things in it you will like.

Earlier in the summer I did look inside Harry in England
and, even though it was meant for the very young, found my-
self reading it all through with interest and pleasure. It was a
happy idea to have Reginald Birch illustrate it.

Two or three years ago he came to call upon me, a figure
of somewhat frayed elegance, very dapper, charming and gallant.
On the fiftieth anniversary of Fauntleroy it came out the same
year as HueltdeToerry Finn which served as a happy corrective
I mentioned in a broadcast how all the little boys in America
had to be rigged out by their mothers in Fauntleroy get-up.
All except me, who had to importune my parents for a Fauntle-
roy costume. At the first sight of my huge bullet head with its
five cowlicks rising out of that lace collar, the whole family went

[188]

into gales of inconsiderate mirth and promptly ordered the entire
regalia given to the laundress* s little pickaninny. Whereupon,
hearing this or hearing about it, Birch did a water-color sketch
of Faunderoy at Dorincourt Castle, golden curls, velvet panta-
loons, huge mastiff and all, with only one variation my face
in the place of Cedric ErrolTs. The effect was singularly sick-
ening.

I shall be free in the Fall to come moseying along the road
to Maine because, beginning on October 1st, I intend to blow
myself to a year off a year free, that is, from long-term con-
tracts, radio programs, magazine commitments and the like. I ex-
pect to twiddle my thumbs and, in the good, old medieval phrase,
make my soul. If, as I expect, I also write a book, I hope it will
be a good one.

I am taking a huge interest in this house which is the first
one I have ever had. I was two when my folks started their
migrations and what with this and that IVe never setded any-
where since. The house is stone with many fireplaces and bath-
rooms of such marble elegance that they are already the scandal
of Vermont. I was in the midst of selecting a name for it when
with one horrid accord all my friends started calling it Glamis,
for reasons which I fear will not escape you.

My salutations to your husband and your daughter.

Old Faithful

To DR. G17STAV ECKSTEIN

Bomoseen, Vt
September 10, 1937

Dear Gus,

A most extraordinary thing has happened. Frank Lloyd
Wright, filled with a noble grief because I had let Hennessey
do my house for me instead of getting him to do it, sent me a

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letter of forgiveness together with a notice that he was at least
sending me something to put in the house. In due course I
began to get notices all along the line that a valuable package
would be awaiting me at the express^ office in Castleton. It turned
out to be a set of Hiroshige prints fifty-three of them, starting
at dawn from the bridge in Yedo and ending up at Kyoto in
the sunset Frank writes me thus: 'When the series of views
was made by Hiroshige, eternity was now. I think it is destined
to endure longest of any graphic masterpiece whatsoever. In it
a unique civilization lives for posterity. But for this record by a
native son, that civilization will have vanished before long/'

Frank says that -there are only seven complete sets in the
world and this is one of them. Such a gift embarrasses me. It
seems to me this set should be given at once to someone equipped
to enjoy it Shall I leave it to you in my will?

Even now, even before the sugar-maples have begun to
turn, each day is enchanting. Do you remember in Tennessee's
Pardner how the newspaper accounts of the hanging told what
the prisoner wore, what he had had for breakfast, and who was
there to see him hanged? But none of them mentioned "the
blessed amity of earth and air and sky."

Today there came a letter from Thornton Wilder, full of
his adventures backstage at the Cam6die Franchise and visiting
Gertrude Stein in the Ain. Then he picked up Sibyl Colefax
and carried her off to Salzburg for four of the Toscanini con-
certs. Much sitting around beer gardens with Erich Maria
Remarque. Nighdy dinners at Schloss Leopoldskron with Max
Reinhardt and Fraulein Timmig. Great proposals that I join
him for Christmas in Zurich. But I would rather be here. I would
rather be here than anywhere in the world. I was never so sure
of anything as that I want to lie back for a year and be quiet

I suppose you will be coming here when it best fits in. I
think if you can stay only one week I would like best to have
you see that first or second week in October when the coloring

1190]

is likely to be its most brilliant Yet if you came earlier, you
might find Noel here (he and Neysa come on the 22nd) or
young Alsop returning. But then Anne Parrish is coming some
time, too, and Percy Saunders will be driving over from Clinton
and none of these would entertain you as much as the pup
would. He's as big as Pip now and his four feet, which have
thoughtfully anticipated the size he is going to be, make his
tread sound like that of the stone-footed gods in Dunsany's The
Gods of the Mountain. The other evening he patiently chewed
his way through an electric insulation. His immediate reaction
to the shock was to send out a whirling spray of urine and to fill
the island air with banshee wails that could be heard as far as
Rutland.

My furniture came last night at sundown. Odds and ends
that I have picked up all over the world without ever meaning
to at all. This will be their last resting-place as far as I am
concerned. I may not stay but they will. They came across the
Idee after the wind had gone down with the sun came on trip
after trip of a barge made by putting a raft on three rowboats
lashed together* Tomorrow and next day the floors will be
waxed and all this duffle slips into place and by the end of next
week your room will be ready. Are you bringing Pawley?

Alexander W.

To FRANK LLOYD WEIGHT

[Woollcott was an admirer of Mr. Wright, the leading exponent of
modern architecture in America.]

Bomoseen, Vt.
September 15, 1937
Dear Frank,

I don't know quite what to say, which is not a char-
acteristic difficulty. It isn't enough to call die Hirosihige portf olio
a handsome gift Fcl say d* of a bowl of chrysanthemums or

[191]

a case of wine, which would both be gone before Christmas.
So 111 just say that it is a gift drawn to the scale of the giver
and let it go at that.

Since the prints* came, I have already made the journey
three times. I hope to make it next under the guidance of Dr.
Gustav Eckstein of Cincinnati. He's the minute and astonish-
ing teacher from the medical school there, who once wrote a
play called Hdkusai and is best known, I suppose, as the
biographer of Noguchi. Are you ever in Cincinnati? You must
go to his laboratory where a tribe of canaries has the run of the
place. I wonder if you have read his book Canary. On the chance
that you have not, I shall send it to you this week. Eckstein
will be coming this way for a visit during one of these Fall
weeks when the Vermont hills are in their glory.

The house has turned out to be one I would show you
without embarrassment It is a one-story house of stone, built
on two levels and, like one I once saw in Wisconsin, running
along the crest of a hill like a vine. It was built by an amateur
a crony of mine who engaged no architect and no contractor.
The result is astonishingly right right for me and right for
its setting.

I was born in a frame house with eighty-five rooms in it.
This belonged to my grandfather and at die time when I was
bom it hadn't been painted since before the Civil War. Come
to think of it, it hasn't been painted yet. Vines kept it from fall-
ing apart a protective outer coat of white-grape and trumpet
and wistaria and crimson rambler. For a long time it was die
only home I knew. I was homesick for its sloping green when
as a kid I was exiled to the dust of a hot Kansas City street All
through my school days I hurried to ft for every vacation. The re-
turns which remain most vividto this native were the ones which
each year began the Christmas holidays. I would reach die
station five miles away in die early dark of a winter afternoon,
hire a smelly hack and drive home over die rutty roads. It

[192]

would be too dark to see where I was at any time, but I would
know by the hoof-beats on the bridges. Finally there was the
last bridge but one and I would know that in another moment,
through the leafless trees, I could see the house itself the twelve
French windows down the front all lamplit because the tribe
would be homing for Christmas. Not since then have I had any
feeling of attachment for any place until I found this island.
I get something of the same sweet sense of homecoming when,
two miles down the road, I take the left turn at Casdeton
Corners.

I began coming here seventeen years ago and have come
more and more ever since. At last I realized that I was spending
more time here than anywhere else, so it seemed sensible to
make this my base instead of New York. Hence the house and
Eckstein coming to see me and the Hiroshige prints to be kept
in a place of honor.

I have decided that I can't thank you enough for the prints
so I shan't even try. My obeisances to your wife.

A. Woollcott

To D. G. KENNED?

Bomoseen, Vt.
September 15, 1937

Dear Gerry,

You're in some confusion of mind. It wasn't I who
thought you ought to go and get a writing job; that was you. I
was the one who thought that you might better practice kw
and write on the side write something every day on the side
write something every day on the side for a year or two with-
out necessarily any thought of its ever being printed. I have a
distinct feeling about people who think of writing. It is this. If
anything can stop them it is probably no great loss.

I'll be here without a break until the 20th of October and

[193]

then again all during the early part of November. If your present
occupation leaves you any leisure days you will, of course, always
be welcome here. This might go without saying and won't be
said again.

Al [Getman] is coming with Louise for the week-end of the
25th and 6th and then coming back again alone for tihe first
week in October,

A. W.

To DR. GUSTAV ECKSTEIN

New York City
October 31, 1937
Dear Gus,

On Thursday I was lunching with Alice Longworth
in her suite at the Ritz when the desk phoned up that there
was a telegram for me. It was your affable message from Cleve-
land. The only theory I can construct is that you had forgotten
I was at the St. Regis and guessed I might be at the Ritz. It is a
hotel I have never stopped at and seldom frequent; it was the
first time I had lunched there in seven years. The telegram came
during the hour I was there. Seen from your end, there may be
some simple explanation of this, but on the face of it it looks like
an instance of clairvoyance which might be filed for reference
with the extrasensory boys at Duke University.

I speak my piece for La Guardia early this evening and will
be lunching on the island tomorrow. I am having Dick Wood
send you two photographs he took while you and Kit [Cornell]
were there. I was glad to hear that you had dropped off and
visited the Saunders' household at Clinton. I will be expecting
to hear how you found Ruth Gordon on and off.

. A.W.

[194]

To DR. GUSTAV ECKSTEIN

Bomoseen, Vt.
November 22, 1937
Dear Gus,

I grieve for you about Polly [a macaw]. You will miss
her beyond all telling.

On the chance -that you may be eastward bound, I write to
report that I will be at the St. Regis in New York from the 30th
until the 4th witih one day s absence, the 2nd when Jack
Humphrey and one of the Seeing Eye dogs and I are to do our
act at the old Academy of Music, the shabby cavern where I
heard my first symphony (Fritz Scheel conducting the "Path&-
tique") and my first opera (Faust with Pol Plangon) and from
a seat in the vertiginous topmost gallery caught my first glimpse
of Mrs. Fiske, The play was Mary of Magdda and she wore high
heels and stood on her toes because she was unhappy about being
short.

I'm to eat my Thanksgiving turkey at Kennebunkport along
with Booth Tarkington and Kenneth Roberts, who linger on the
Maine coast long after every other house in their colony has been
shut up until another June. And even as I set all this chatter
down I keep thinking of Polly and remembering that Millay
poem which begins "Listen, children. Your father is dead" and

ends with the lines: T ,

Ltfe must go on.

I forgpt just why.

I can't believe I've known you less than thirteen months.
It's ridiculous.

A.W,

[195]

To CHARLES LEDERER

Bomoseen, Vt.
December 6, 1937
Dear Master Charles:

I started to write this on a typewriter but
these old fingers have lost their cunning. There are three things
I hope you will do for me.

(1) Remember that you are to sign up Harpo and Irving
[Berlin] for a radio benefit to be held some time in March or
April. What I want to do is to nail them and the Lunts and Kit
Cornell now. Then I can go ahead with my negotiations and
round up the rest of the cast as the time approaches.

(2) What is the correct name and present address of that
Riskin or Ryskin or whatever whom you brought to Grade
Square for a little gaming and to whom, on the eve of his sail-
ing with you, I sent a charming check which he never cashed
and may never have received?

(3) I have an idea I wish you would present to Harpo
but only if you yourself are sympathetic with it. It is based on
my belief that we who know ihim have seen an even better show
than the public has ever had a chance to see. I wish that just
once he could appear in a picture all by himself and governed
only by his taste and his imagination. As this would present
many difficulties both personal, professional and financial, it
is my idea that he should do a short or three shorts just for
the hell of it. Just for himself, or for that matter, just for me.
I can envisage it as a combination of Benchley and a Disney
symphony. You or Benchley or MacArthur or all three could
write it for him. Why not?

(4) Are you still interested in trying out that play with me?
I advise you to answer candidly.

A.W.

[196]

To LAURA . RICHARDS

Bomoseen, Vt.
December 6, 1937
My dear Mis. Richards,

A wily dealer in second-hand books has

just filled up the gaps which yawned in my old file of St.
Nicholas, with the result that last evening when I should have
been at work on a piece for The Atlantic, I sat reading a delight-
ful serial called 'When I Was Your Age/* which escaped me at
the time of its publication because I was brought up on Harpers
Young People. I cannot begin to tell you how I enjoyed the pic-
ture of Laura reading poetry to old Margaret in the feather room.

Just about the time you were committing that account to
paper, I was writing my first letter. Or rather dictating it. It
was addressed to one Celeste, who was my first love. She never
answered it but when next she came to see me (forty-two years
later) she had it with her. It had been written on July 3, 1891,
and contained, among other items, the vainglorious announce-
ment that 'I had sixteen torpedoes, twenty-three cents and a
verbena. Its other details brought suddenly to life a forgotten
and uneventful day long ago in the house where I grew up and
a resurrection so abrupt and so accidental had an effect on me as
disquieting as if some dislocation had turned back time itself.
The process of memory is pleasurable for me but here were
things which I had altogether forgotten so that they came back
like ghosts and left me feeling haunted.

I treasured the Binyon verses.

You won't hear from me at Christmas because Fve sworn
off Christmas. How about some sherry for your birthday?

My salutations to the Skipper and the resident daughter. I

wish I lived in Gardiner.

Alexander W.

[197]

To FRANK SULLIVAN

Chicago, III
December 17,1937
Dear Frank,

While you (or so they tell me) are being rheumy in
Saratoga Springs, I am being weak-minded in Chicago and will
still be here on Christinas Day. I won't get back to the island
until after the first of the year.

I thought you would Kke to hear about the telegram just
sent by the printers on a small-town Connecticut newspaper to
the foreman of the composing room on the occasion of his mar-
riage. It consisted of one word "Stet"

A. Woollcott

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