Waxed Elbow

By John Skow

PASSIONS AND PREJUDICES: OR, SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE PEOPLE by Leo Rosten McGraw-Hill; 188 pages; $9.95

Any book with the subtitle Some of My Best Friends Are People should be flung across the room. The reader is urged to employ this method of criticism with the volume at hand, a collection of Leo Rosten's light essays. Book flinging improves the temper of the flinger, and in this case it improves the book as well. Passions and Prejudices, when it is retrieved and smoothed out, gets down to business and stops apologizing for its intelligence.

Rosten provides, as usual, superior night-table reading for those who like to fall asleep laughing, or even to stay awake thinking. One of his best efforts is a warning to travelers who contemplate using phrase-book French. He reports that when he tried to communicate with a ticket agent in Paris, the following discourse took place:

I (smiling): Bonjour M'sieur! Is not this day reliable?

Ticket Agent: You speak French! (he salutes): What joys! Vive the States United! May I wax your elbow?

I (modestly): Voila! To affairs?

Ticket Agent (beaming): Advance.

I (chuckling): I demand you: When, dear Amy (cher ami), do gentleman trains go toward Lady Nice?

Ticketeer (enthusiastic): They are very nice chemises of iron, wet knight.

I (clearing throat): I fear I have been soft...

Not all his essays are comic turns; Rosten does equally well at carrying weighty subjects lightly. His ideas are unstartling, and in fact they would seem ordinary, if clarity and common sense were ordinary. "I wonder how those faculty members who aided campus revolt will come to terms with themselves in a calmer future," he muses, writing about student takeovers of universities in the '60s. "Did they not give away rights they would have refused to surrender to, say, an investigating committee of Congress, or a reactionary board of trustees, or a witch-hunting press? Did they not ask the law to close its eyes to actions they would never have defended had mobs come to the colleges from a construction site?"

He writes with good humor and some gallantry to an illiberal age. His reports of visits with Evelyn Waugh and Bertrand Russell are deft, and so is his mockery of computer-made verse ("Swish green albino dust/ Through avatars unborn"). Of this last, he adds, "Do you think I am poking fun at electronic devices, or the New, Liberated Poesy? Please believe me when I say: I certainly am. "

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