Enchanted Aisles*

Enchanted Aisles*

The Story. But then, of course, there isn’t one—who so pedantic as to expect it? For here is the delightfully discursive scrivener of The Sun (New York) spattering ink joyously, provocatively and with impartial zeal through the fields of Art, Music, Writing, Soldiering, after-dinner Speeching, and his own particular stamping-ground of the Theatre. He sees everything.

The sketches are grouped ingenuously under two heads—”Enthusiasm” and “Resentments”; and there trip from the pages as variegated a group of characters as ever graced an Actors’ Benefit: De Pachmann, Irving Berlin, Bernhardt, Neysa McMein, Booth Tarkington, Maeterlinck, “F. P. A.” Mr. Woollcott burns incense at antithetical altars: Duse of the beautiful hands and the voice of moonlit magic, and in the very next chapter, Charles Chaplin, who “does not rattle around even in the word ‘genius'”; and Elsie Janis, upon whom he has these many years kept “an often startled but always affectionate eye.”

One chuckles at the scene conjured up of Ethel Barrymore making her “nervous, half-choked first appearance,” and a kindly voice from the gallery calling down: “Speak up, Ethel, you’re all right. The Drews is all good actors.”

Or that historic achievement of Morris Gest’s early career when, as publicity agent for Oscar Hammerstein, he proudly brought back from Europe a “stolid Berliner and his wife, sister and daughter, whom Gest bedecked in Moslem costumes, instructed to pray ostentatiously to the East every day on the boat coming over, and covered with fleeting fame by having them rejected at a Broadway hotel where they had tried to register as Abdul Kaffir and wives.”

Then there is that little matter of a Theatre Guild banquet—”the most prodigiously dull dinner of my experience.” But despite his misfortune one would not have had him miss it. There were 13 speakers, which may have had something to do with it. It began with Heywood Broun, who “said a few graceful things of no special import and then fled craftily into the night.” And it dragged on through all the other twelve, with various victims rising and stealing toward the door, till at length “the gaps in the audience made the room look like an old comb with half its teeth gone. The faithful remainder sat weary, wilted, their yawns breaking from control, their eyes turning glassy in their grim determination not to let them close in slumber—so stunned that when it was all over they didn’t believe it. Friends had to prod them into rising and going home.”

For the avid colyum-hounds, there is an engaging account of “the Thanatopsis,” a poker club composed of such literary, social and other lights as Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, John V. A. Weaver, who “lost in one perfectly delightful afternoon six months’ royalties of In American, and so had to sort of eat around for some time;” Haldemann-Julius, that snappy Kansas publisher; and, “bless his heart, Prince Antoine Bibesco, the engaging Minister from Rumania, whose seeming unawareness of what was going on led at first to the friendliest welcome being accorded him.” But when it became apparent that he knew full well what was going on, and was in fact, at the very moment of some particularly guileless inquiry, “beaming upon a brave but busted flush, then was Herbert Bayard Swope, the thunderous editor of the World, inspired to an immortal dismissal. ‘Boy,’ he cried to the nearest flunkey, ‘boy, the Prince’s hat and cuffs I'” There was also that occasion when George Kaufman upset the club’s gravity by remarking en passant that he was descended from old Sir Roderick Kaufman, who went on the Crusades—and when “14 eyebrows rose in well-bred surprise, added hastily, ‘as a spy’.”

The Significance. The sketches form a sort of running commentary, achieved with engaging informality, covering a goodly number of Mr. Woollcott’s contemporaries. For those who have no passports for those “enchanted aisles,” yet unconsciously expand with pride at vicarious acquaintance with them, he has served up a delectable morsel.

The Author. Alexander Woollcott born in New Jersey in 1887, was graduated from Hamilton College 1909, has been dramatic critic for The New York Times, The New York Herald, The Sun, since 1914. His books include Mrs. Fiske—Her Views on Acting, Actors and the Problems of the Stage, The Command is Forward.

*ENCHANTED AISLES—Alexander Woollcott —Putnam ($2.50).