Wit's End

LONG, LONG AGO--Alexander Wooll-cott-- Viking ($2.75).

Manhattan's volubly witty Town Crier, the late Alexander Woollcott, had ten light literary fingers in a good many more pies, but what endeared him to his admirers was his habit of pulling out the juiciest borrowed plums in public with a happy little verbal smirk that meant: "What a smart boy am I." Last month he did it again (posthumously) in Long, Long Ago, a very satisfactory second course to his highly comestible While Rome Burns (TIME, March 12, 1934). Most of Wooll-cott's plums are still on the sugary side, but the best ones have a pleasantly astringent pit.

Long, Long Ago contains stories, sketches, anecdotes and an occasional verbal sob. Practically everybody anybody ever heard of is cited, thumbnailed, keelhauled, cuddled, cried over or extolled.

The characters run from Lord Jeffrey Amherst and the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to Harpo Marx and the only man in the world who ever persuaded a camel to walk backwards. There is a heroic, the-play-must-go-on story about Katharine Cornell, who once arrived late for her show in Seattle, found her audience patiently waiting, and between 1 and 4 o'clock in the morning presented The Barretts of Wimpole Street, sustained only by one egg rustled up for her at 2 a.m. by Producer Guthrie McClintic. There is a story about Editor Robert Quillen, who used to spice his Fountain Inn (S.C.) Tribune with genealogical notices like:

"Born, on Monday, January 27, to Mr. and Mrs. Jim Daderight, a son. The little fellow has the community's sincere sympathy. On his mother's side are three idiots and one jailbird of record, and nobody on the father's side of the house can count above four. With that start in life, he faces a world that will scorn and abuse and eventually hang him through no fault of his own."

There is a story about H. G. Wells and Vegetarian Bernard Shaw. Said Wells: "I don't like to peach on a pal, but Shaw cheats." Woollcott "tried to imagine the author of Candida and Saint Joan giving way to beefsteaks as a solitary vice." "Yes," said Wells. "He takes liver extract and calls it 'those chemicals.' "

The best story is probably the one about Abraham Lincoln and Justice Holmes, when Holmes was a colonel in the Union Army. One day Holmes was conducting Abraham Lincoln around the Union lines when they came under Confederate fire. "Get down, you fool," cried Holmes. Said the President, who knew how to talk to soldiers, "Colonel Holmes, I'm glad to see you know how to talk to a civilian."

Long, Long Ago may not be quite up to its predecessor, but in the field of storytelling it is, at its best, near tops.

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