Benvenuto Redivivus

Benvenuto Redivivus*

This is a volume of exploits, explanations and ego. It is Benvenuto Cellini, reincarnated as a Scotch-American jack of all tricks and trades including newspaper cartooning, reminiscing at spry 65 over a career that began in the horsecar period. It brings in, with insouciant yet convincing familiarity, more famous names from all rosters of life than (perhaps) any other book ever published in the U. S. Its purpose is not to be historical, but since an age of arrogance is chronicled by one of its most superb exemplars, history is served with unwonted solicitude,

Exploits began before this latter- day Benvenuto left his rural play-fields (Newark, N. J.) to cross the game-infested Campagna (the Jersey flats) and seek his fortune in gaudy Rome (Manhattan). He now recognizes that he was marked for high destiny when President Grant helped him shinny a post to see a horse race; when a supercilious, teasable "Oyster Bay runt" called Teddy Roosevelt told him he was shortsighted and gave him one of his own thick eye-lenses; when he gouged "Bound to rise!" on a shingled steeple, counterfeited tickets to Barnum's circus, made cigar-box labels for Oscar Hammerstein and an aluminum fan for Mrs. Astor.

His artist-father's house on grass-grown Market Street (Newark) was "the resort of notabilities." Thither came Henry Ward Beecher, General McClellan, Horace Greeley, Edwin Booth, Frank Leslie. Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun had used to come. Buffalo Bill called next door. Thomas Edison had a shop around the corner.

Over in Manhattan, free-lancing and working for the World, he remembers having:

Made it fashionable to wear fur coats in daytime.

Warned Charles A. Dana the Sun would have some day to print pictures.

Refused stock in the B. R. T. and Prudential Insurance.

Helped invent the modern cabaret.

Exploded the great scheme for talking with Mars.

Been the "first regular he-artist since Hogarth" to join the vice-crusade.

Suggested the site for the Statue of Liberty!

Explanations abound, correcting many a roseate popular illusion, alleviating the author's feelings and his passion for unvarnished verity. They are mostly revelations of people, beheld in their reactions to McDougall or his cartoons of them. J. P. Morgan Sr. was small-minded about his big nose; Rudyard Kipling, rude; Tom Nast, vain and petty; Mark Twain, grumpily grudging; Thomas Wanamaker, "a nasty little commercial person"; Woodrow Wilson, "a sort of swift floor-walker's smirk"; Joseph Pulitzer, a social climber, ingenious blasphemer -- for instance, the epithet, "too inde-god-dam-pendent."**

Ego, sweet or bitter, is the essence of autobiography. Cartoonist McDougal's is exhilaratingly tart. Roosevelt once warned: "He can sting like an adder," but could have amended, from his knowledge of the man and of adders, that he was not wantonly poisonous. The tongue that flickers through these pages feels for its cheek oftener than not. And another thing: adders do not boast.

Certain amorous adumbrations add a behavioristic bond to McDougall's kinship with Benvenuto. And in a literary way, they twin across the centuries. Their kind of writing is vivid, newsy, racy without stint.

*THIS IS THE LIFE--Walt McDougall-- Knopf ($3.50).

**Later recoined, or adopted, by dynamic Coach W. W. "Bully Bill" Roper of Princeton football elevens--and by others.