Pundits Twain

There are Pundits and pundits. A capitalized Pundit is a member of a queer, recondite, fraternal clique, annually replenished from among Yale students by famed Academic Tycoon William Lyon Phelps.

Pundits wear on their watch chains a little god--suspected by the envious of being tin. Harder to define are uncapitalized, courtesy-title pundits. Gene Tunney might be considered one, partly because queer (as a prize-fighter), partly because friended by William Lyon Phelps.

Last week sport writers were ecstatically delighted when Mr. Tunney announced that next August he will go on a European walking tour with a famed, Yale-graduated god-wearing Pundit: Novelist Thornton Niven Wilder, author of the best selling Bridge of San Luis Rey.

Pundit Wilder explained last week, in the small cozy room which he occupies as an instructor at Lawrenceville School, Lawrenceville, N. J.

"I admire Mr. Tunney very much. I met him in Florida, last winter. Our acquaintance grew from talking about books. . . . Yes, I suppose we shall resume our conversations abroad. . . . But I shan't attempt to teach Mr. Tunney anything. ... I shall rent Henry James's house at Rye, in the South of England if I can. . . . Mr. Tunney will join me there [after his bout with Tom Heeney on July 26]."

Intimates of Pundit Wilder suspect that his interest in "bigness," in "potency," may have drawn him to pundit Tunney. The novelist is said to have confessed that he finds the pugilist almost without a sense of humor, but interestingly athirst and groping.

In the Cabala, Mr. Wilder's first novel, he was concerned with potent, polished, punditical aristocrats and churchmen in Rome. Significantly he said last week that he does not "dare" to write a novel with a U. S. background, "not at least until I feel sure of myself."

What, queried observers, could be more assuring, more 100% U. S., than the broad background of Gene Tunney?

At New Haven Undergraduate Wilder was not a 4-year-man, but a late Junior year arrival. His habit of asking classmates and professors soul probing questions qualified him as a Pundit. It was so obvious that he asked and asked for the simple, Punditical reason that he wanted to know--for example--such things as how the football captain got a certain, curious nickname.

After his own fashion Novelist Wilder used to grope. Today he grasps, selects, polishes exquisitely and sets before his readers a literary fare which choosiest critics approve--a fare which pundit Tunney has declared to be in his opinion, inferior only to Eugene O'Neill and Shakespeare.