Pumblechook

THE LETTERS OF ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT--Edited by Beatrice Kaufman and Joseph Hennessey--Viking ($3.50).

One day a boatload of trippers who were circling Vermont's Neshobe Island, summer hideaway of the late Alexander Woollcott, spied, under a vast straw hat, a vast bulk swathed in a dressing gown. "Who on earth is that?" screamed one of the ladies. "Marie Dressier," said her benchmate--thereby adding another quip to the many already provoked by Mr. Woollcott's complex personality.

Even his best friends disagreed about the Town Crier's real nature. Acid Poetess Dorothy Parker believed he had "done more kindness than anyone I have ever known." Novelist Edna Ferber called him a "New Jersey Nero who mistook his pinafore for a toga." Sometimes his most devoted admirers found his cantankerousness hard to bear. "I find you are beginning to disgust me, puss," he once snarled at a guest. "How about getting the hell out of here?"

This volume includes 336 letters written by Woollcott between 1897 and 1943 (the year of his death). Most of them reflect only the genial, humorous, enthusiastic side of the man whom the N.Y. Herald Tribune once called "the final arbiter of things literary in the United States." "He wrote angry, cutting, and sometimes cruel letters," say Editors Kaufman & Hennessey, "[but] none of them is included . . . for the reason that they were withheld by their recipients." But this collection of Woollcott's letters is jampacked with anecdotes about Woollcott's distinguished friends & enemies, touching stories couched in the Little-Womanish prose that led MGM's Howard Dietz to rechristen his friend "Louisa M. Woollcott."

Seven Pincushions and a Milk-Shake. Early Woollcott letters are fraught with characteristic Woollcott appetite and enthusiasm. "My dear Smyser, Your charming letter received. . . . We enjoyed our straw-ride very much. I ate a bag of candy, a bag of peanuts, 2 bars of popcorn, a glass of Huyler's ice-cream soda, a chocolate Milk-Shake. . . . I have played over 300 games of croquet. . . . I have just finished the fourth of seven pincushions I am emboidering (don't consider spelling). . . . It is sweet to be remembered."

In later years, correspondents were often surprised to find that Woollcott had never outgrown his love for renaming both his friends and himself. "Lamb of God," he would begin a letter to Noel Coward. Poet Archibald Macleish he addressed as "Ambrose-Son-of-Heaven." Sometimes he signed himself "Pumblechook."*

The Letters reflect the brimming Woollcott emotions. "I just cried quietly," he wrote to Noel Coward after seeing the Lamb of God's movie, In Which We Serve. "Courage is the only thing that makes me cry." After previewing Goodbye, Mr. Chips, he burst into "a great, astonishing sob" and fell down the projection-room stairs. "One of the characters in Of Mice and Men," he wrote to Harpo Marx, "is an amiable and gigantic idiot. . . . I tried to get [Heywood] Broun to take this part and he was very hurt." "Just a big dreamer," said Harpo of Woollcott, "with a good sense of double-entry bookkeeping."

Pillar of Jello. The best Woollcott letters are the cattiest:

P: "Russel Grouse [Life With Father] has gone away . . . for a week with [Funnyman] Frank Sullivan, on whom he leans heavily but calls his Pillar of Jello."

P: "Mrs. Leslie Banks was telling me about a weekend hostess in England who recently felt alarmed when a too easily impressed young girl was led out into the moonlight by H.G. [Wells] . . . 'See here, my dear,' she said, 'if you're not careful you'll find yourself the shape of things to come.' "

Woollcott's heart grew weaker in the last years of his life, but his pen kept its cutting edge. "When people stand around me in a bright, idiotic chorus," he wrote, ''telling me to take everything very easy, I feel like making the response Max Beerbohm made privately to Queen Mary during the last war when she asked him . . . to read from his works at the Albert Hall. . . . He replied that he would be glad to accede . . . but that he was too busy: Admiral Beatty had just asked him to take command of one of the battleships in the North Sea."

*A puffy, fishy-eyed, obsequious character in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.

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