His Better Half

By Philip Herrera

RUBE GOLDBERG

by PETER C. MARZIO

322 pages. Harper & Row. $12.50.

By the 1920s he was widely syndicated, a national institution more or less on a par with his friends Ring Lardner, Will Rogers and Charlie Chaplin. His grand subjects were the quirks of everyday life, things like the difficulty of navigating through revolving doors.or reading a medical thermometer. But Rube Goldberg's zany imagination and zippy drawing style really blossomed with the Inventions of Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts--those incredible falling domino devices that poke fun at the complex concatenations of modern technology by deploying sleepy dogs, melting ice, steam whistles and levers to light a cigar in an open car going 50 m.p.h. or pluck the cotton wadding out of a pill bottle.

By the early 1930s, when Goldberg was in his 40s, his quality began to decline. Still, he continued to work successfully for years as an ultraconservative editorial-page cartoonist with the New York Sun and Journal. Goldberg died in 1970 at the age of 87. Neither Biographer Marzio's scholarly research nor the cartoonist's own occasional triumphs-- he won a Pulitzer Prize for a cartoon in 1947 -- can disguise the fact that the man had lost his inspired, raffish touch; most of his late work was simply dull. All of which poses a question: How can a person leave this or any similar book half unread without feeling the slightest qualm? With a bow to Professor Butts, one answer might be the cartoon below.

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