Flattering Autobiography

THINKING IT OVER--Hesketh Pearson--Harper ($3.50).

Hesketh Pearson is an impressionable, aggressive English biographer and actor, a hater of psychology, politics, literary "style," for whom "two and two equal any sum that takes my fancy." This last credo has made his biographies (Doctor Darwin, Tom Paine, Gilbert and Sullivan) lively with anecdotes, slack on background. A onetime clerk who answered his boss's questions with quotations from Shakespeare, Pearson began his theatrical career under Beerbohm Tree, whose advice consisted mainly of such enigmatic nonsense as telling him not to suck his thumb. As an actor, he had one brief success, when he substituted in a butler part.

Of chief interest in Biographer Pearson's own life is the period he spent as an officer in Persia during the War; he outstared and outran the natives, boasts of making tough army men eat out of his hand. Of main interest to the reader are his anecdotes of George Bernard Shaw, Chesterton, Frank Harris, Hilaire Belloc, Conan Doyle. The best of them--a sizzling dialogue, between Shaw and Chesterton, Frank Harris' belligerent interview with Galsworthy--are secondhand. Also among the secondhand are such random anecdotes as one concerning a friend of a friend who once found himself in the company of a bunch of U. S. millionaires aboard a trans-atlantic liner. Feeling out of things because they were talking nothing but big money, he ordered 365 glasses of creme de menthe, whereat the millionaires treated him as one of them. Firsthand, the funniest thing he remembers is when the left-wing press said his Tom Paine should have been written by "a competent Marxist." In a lame conclusion he tells in detail how he wrote each of his biographies, stresses above all the need for complete candor. In the light of this maxim, his own self-biography will seem to most readers a conspicuous exception.

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