(3 of 4)
He Is Prominent in the Rotary Club of Literary New York Alexander Woollcott has added a species of small tippet to his facial equipment. What does one call such a beard when it rests on the under reaches of the lower lip? At any rate, the dramatic critic of The New York Herald, after illness, a trip abroad and a sojourn in Vermont, has acquired a new beard with which to astonish early first night audiences in New York City.
Mr. Woollcott is not only a dramatic critic, he is an essayist of marked abilities. In addition to these facts, his person is engaging enough to have jumped bodily from the pages of Charles Dickens, an author whom, by the way, he greatly admires. In the first place he is short, rotund, jovial, given to elaborate and biting statements punctuated by gestures which are often as grotesque as they are incisive. Then, he was born in Phalanx, New Jersey. That, in itself, is Dickensian. Woollcott, to me, is the most interesting of our dramatic critics, for he not only seems to have a knowledge of the theatre but he occasionally permits himself rare and unreasoning enthusiasms off the track of popular approval. This is good. Any critic worth his salt, it seems to me, must have the entire world disagreeing with him at least once in a season.
The first time I ever saw Alexander Woollcott was in Heywood Broun's Paris studio, on New Year's Eve, 1918. He was then a private in the United States Medical Corps, and his O. D.'s made him look more like Bairnsfather than Dickens.
With his enthusiasm for Dickens, which gave birth to a delightful volume, Mr. Dickens Goes to the Play, is linked his enthusiasm for the Army and the doughboy, which occasioned The Command is Forward, and his unqualified admiration of Mrs. Fiske, which gave the world Mrs. Fiske—Her Views on Acting, Actors and the Problems of the Stage. To these three volumes we may add a recent collection of essays, Shouts and Murmurs.
I have already spoken too often of the so-called Algonquin group. Not having eaten lunch in that much publicized hostelry for over five months, so far as I know the group may be actually a myth by now, as it always tended to be. Still, Richard Barthelmess, a most serious-minded young man, spoke of it with awed accents not long ago; so probably the effervescent Mr. Woollcott is still its gayest respected member and it has probably become the Rotary Club of literary New York.
He is often cordially hated by those who cannot stand frankness when it is mixed with wit; but his underlying mood of fairness and understanding has won him, according to Mr. Babbitt, " a host of friends." J. F.
Fall Lists
Now is the Season of Hope and Despair for Publishers