Legal Fiction

YANKEE LAWYER: The Autobiography of Ephraim Tuft--Scribner ($3.50).

Ephraim Tutt is one of the few fictitious characters who has ever written his autobiography. Yankee Lawyer is a genial hodgepodge of fact & fiction, includes almost everything a reader needs for a good time: human-interest stories from Mr. Tutt's legal life; anecdotes about Mr. Tutt's nonfictional contemporaries ("Teddy" Roosevelt, Richard Harding Davis, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes); and Mr. Tutt himself, as American as a Stephen Foster song.

Lawyer Tutt, the ramshackle figure in a rusty frock coat, stovepipe hat, stand-up collar and string bow tie, the canny mind that slyly wrenches law into justice, first came to public attention in a story written by Arthur Train in the Satevepost of June 7, 1919. Illustrating the story was a drawing of Tutt by Arthur William Brown (for which Frank Wilson, a retired actor, posed).

Since then Author Train has written almost a hundred Tutt stories. Some of them (says Tutt) have become as familiar to lawyers as folk tales, have been cited from the bench as quasi-legal authority, have helped many a candidate pass his bar examinations. In fact, like Sherlock Holmes, Ephraim Tutt has become more famous than his creator. So by writing Lawyer Tutt's autobiography, Author Train was able to achieve more than by writing (or rewriting) his own (My Day in Court).

Tutt v. Train. By complaining that Train in his stories sometimes twisted the facts for literary purposes, Autobiographer Tutt is able to retell many of his most famous exploits in rescuing justice from the technicalities of the law. He also tells plenty of new stories about murder trials, contested wills, many another social ill the law is heir to.

Says Bachelor Tutt, in describing the library of his home in Manhattan's old London Terrace: "There have I heard confessions of everything from infidelity to murder; there I have seen husbands and wives reconciled, repentant daughters and sons forgiven, restitutions made after many years."

There are innumerable tales about the characters in Pottsville, in western New York (where Tutt first practiced law); in pre-World-War-I Manhattan (where Tutt learned that law is not justice, is a luxury the poor cannot afford); and in the U.S. at large. There is Tammany Boss Croker, who, says Tutt, was no worse than Republican Boss Tom Platt. There is Mark Sullivan, who (in Bull Moose days) was a "semi-Socialist." When the Lusitania was sunk, only Tutt and Frederic R. Coudert Jr.* (at a meeting of 18 prominent attorneys) thought the U.S. should get into World War I. When Tutt asked Calvin Coolidge (whom he had known as a boy in Vermont) what it felt like to be President, Cal replied, after a Coolidge silence: "Well, you got to be mighty careful."

Tutt v. the Law. But Ephraim Tutt's autobiography is not only entertainment. Tutt belongs with Uncle Sam, David Harum and Paul Bunyan as a symbol of what Americans think of themselves, how they would like to be. Tutt's autobiography takes the serious reader to the border of one of literature's most fascinating phenomena : the myth, and its meaning in the ethos of a nation.

Author Train's Ephraim Tutt, says Tutt, is not the real Tutt. Train's Tutt, he continues, is not even consistent, changes from story to story, from "mountebank to philosopher, from shyster to philanthropist, from lawbreaker to up holder of the Constitution." The real Tutt is a rebel.

"I am a natural rebel," Tutt says. "I rebelled . . . against my father's Calvinistic theology and the severity of his paternal discipline, against the artificial social distinctions of my college days, later against the influence of politics upon the courts, and always against privilege, despotism, and the perversion of the law to selfish ends."

The higher the civilization, he says, the fewer laws it needs. "The only way to attain justice," says Tutt, "is by doing it ourselves every day--with our own hands--to each other--at home--and in the world outside."

Tutt is a democrat (with both a small and a capital D). He claims to be a "qualified New Dealer." When the Columbia Law Review remarked that a contribution from Tutt, which it had just published, aroused the suspicion that Tutt was a bit of a fascist, the old man cracked back that "people who lived in glass houses had better refrain from throwing stones. . . ." Whereupon Columbia offered, and Tutt accepted, an honorary LL.D.

Tutt v. Talk. Tutt believes the curse of the modern world is the fact that it is governed by talkers ("whose influence has been multiplied a millionfold by the radio"). Metaphysical notions about the nature of the universe, and human life, do not disturb him. Nor is he disheartened by the slowness of man's progress. Though his life is closing in a clouded world, Ephraim Tutt has faith that in the U.S. "the pennants still fly gallantly and the trumpets echo to the challenge of 'Liberty and Equality' and of 'Justice for the Common Man.' "

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