Clinging Oak

By Stefan Kanfer

WHOSE LITTLE BOY ARE YOU?

by Heywood Hale Broun

St. Martin's; 215 pages; $14.95

The doctor looks down and pronounces judgment: "This child is dying." The mother's reply: "Don't you think he speaks English, you dumb son of a bitch? Pack your bag and get out!" The boy recovers and grows into an excruciating adolescence. He tentatively displays a picture of his new girlfriend. The father's response: "What are you doing in drag?"

Surviving in such an emotional climate was a challenge that Heywood Hale Broun was barely able to meet. It has taken the television commentator 50 years to recover, and even now he bears scars. Yet in this poignant memoir, Broun, 65, manages to salute two forthright eccentrics who "probably shouldn't have gotten married; probably should never have had a child; and probably shouldn't, after 17 years of marriage, have gotten divorced."

The child, called Woodie, was named for his father, one of the most popular and whimsical journalists of his time. Typically, at the zenith of a Florida hurricane, the elder Broun took his son to a golf driving range. Swinging a nine iron, he yelled over the wind: "You'll never get distance like this again." He got more mileage from his columns, evocative pieces that spoke knowledgeably about politics, baseball and Broadway. Between deadlines he founded the Newspaper Guild and remained its president until his death in 1939. Ten thousand mourners attended his funeral.

Woodie's mother, Ruth Hale, was an early feminist and first president of the Lucy Stone League, a group of married women who retained their own names. Friends called the couple "the clinging oak and the sturdy vine." The Brouns believed in absolute equality of the sexes and ages; what better place to demonstrate their faith than in the home? Accordingly, the boy who ached to be special was instructed to call his parents by their first names, just like everyone else. When he was seven, Ruth gave him lessons in deportment: "May I remind you of the words of Oscar Wilde? A gentleman is never unintentionally rude."

There were no curfews; instead, Woodie was put on his honor to be home on time for adult dinner parties. "Was I not," he asks, "in the sad fiction we were maintaining, a co-host?" That fiction held him tighter than chains. "I did not even sulk," recalls the author, "since honor forbids sulking, but rage ran through my head." It worked itself out through his body. The miniature adult suffered from a debilitating series of allergies and diseases.

As Woodie slowly pieced himself together, his home disintegrated. Heywood Sr., a large, rumpled man of prodigious appetites, prided himself on looking like an unmade bed. It was a bed that welcomed many female visitors. The warring Brouns kept the marriage alive by retreating to separate houses. Woodie shuttled between them until he was forced to choose between parents. He opted to live with his father, a decision that merely added to his misery and guilt. A year after the divorce, in 1934, Ruth was dead. Broun Sr., a lifelong atheist, converted to Roman Catholicism shortly before his death at 51. He left behind a bewildered preppie who, for years afterward, wanted only "to set up a house where my parents could go on living, a place with three floors and a basement, one floor for each of us and a basement where we could all get together."

Whose Little Boy Are You? is that basement. Here, three souls continue to skirmish in a classic recollection of liberalism carried to the point of tyranny. Perhaps in her reading, Ruth Hale ran across another observation by Oscar Wilde: "Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them." This is one of those rare and rueful times.

--By Stefan Kanfer This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.