Barroom Talk

LIFE IN A PUTTY KNIFE FACTORY--H. Allen Smith--Doubleday, Doran ($2).

Smith's new book, a clothesline strung from his best-selling Low Man on a Totem Pole, ought at least keep its author paying stiff-collar taxes. Like Totem Pole it consists of the sort of talk that might be had, by the hour, from any boozy, bawdy, abundant newspaperman. Such talk is dull in spots, complacently boorish in others, childish in some of its conclusions (Westbrook Pegler, though mentally "the human saddle sore" is as a prose stylist "one of the great writers of our day"). At its worst the book has at least the charm of its dialect: the dialect of the vigorous, honest, somewhat cornfed gentlemen of the press. At its best it is" thick with good eccentrics, good phrases, good stories.

One of the book's best features is Smith's own father, an oldtime archetypical rural griper who felt friendly to socialism the minute he saw a picture of the late John D. Rockefeller on a golf course; who reads each issue of TIME "from cover to cover, talking and cussing a blue streak --not really at TIME, but at the human beings whose antics are reported in its pages."

Smith's warmest tribute is to his friend Fred Allen. Quotations from the comedian's letters prove what his friends have always known: that they are even luckier than his radio audiences. Samples:

On newspapermen: "A human being confronts you and you don't regard him as a human being at all. To you he's an item with skin around it."

On a visit to the Mayo Clinic: "So far as I could see, I was the only person in that town who wasn't either on wheels or walking around with a string hanging out of his mouth."

On radio humor: "All humor is a matter of opinion. As for radio, I always feel that someone has just dropped a loaded privy into the air-conditioning system."

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