Wonderful Waster

A VICTORIAN IN THE MODERN WORLD--Hufchlns Hapqood-- Harcourt, Brace ($5).

Not long ago Hutchins Hapgood was reminiscing about the good old days of pre-War bohemianism when "I was connected with all the isms and all the radical hopes and all the enthusiasms ... of the wonderful new world that we all felt was coming." Then he added up: "I have sinned, I have suffered, I have wasted, wasted, but how I have enjoyed!" His confidante nodded gravely. "Yes, Hutch," she said, "you have lived a wonderful wasted life."

Part of Hutchins Hapgood's "wonderful wasted life" has been told in the candid memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan, for whose famed Manhattan salon he once served as chief talent scout. He appeared again in the autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, under whom he got his start as a journalist specializing in Bowery bums, thugs, anarchists and trends. His late brother Norman, famed reformist editor, and Mary Heaton Vorse are among a half dozen others who included him in their autobiographies. Last week he gave his own version of his story.

Comfortably brought up in Alton, Ill., in a period when a girl was "much more than a girl," young Hapgood was athletic, introspective, drawn to people "who are not worth while." At Harvard he read Shelley and Wordsworth, was complimented by Santayana for a deeply philosophical remark: "All girls are beautiful." Post-graduate study in Europe included art museums, mistresses, drinking, sightseeing, conversation, desultory reading. Said young Novelist Robert Herrick one day: "Hutch, you don't do a damned thing, do you?" Like many another obtuse observer, says Hapgood, Herrick was apparently correct. But "if I wasn't busy, something was busy with me."

His newspaper days, the picturesque radicals and polyglot bohemians who were his friends, glow warmly in Hapgood's memory. But with the years some of his old friends developed a second nature which saddens him. Gertrude Stein, one of his first acquaintances in Europe, was once charming, filled with "a deep temperamental life-quality." Her "overweening ego" has now "made her life to my feeling ugly and her human relations and work ridiculous." Gertrude's brother Leo, once her idol, shared his disgust. Said he in a letter to Hapgood: "When Jesus said, 'Verily, verily,' the second verily added much to the expression. But if He had said, 'Verily, verily, verily, verily, verily, verily, verily, verily,' it wouldn't have been so good."

Of all Hapgood's fellow travelers the one who comes off best is, curiously enough, Mabel Dodge Luhan. He admits that she is sometimes caustic, callous, rude, jealous, possessive, vindictive, and worse. But he knows that these traits stem from her "eager love of 'It'--the infinite--with which she wants to be naturally, strongly, connected. She wants to repose quietly and physically on the bosom of God." That Hutchins "Hapgood can understand.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.