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_~ | = \e es * ‘THE ALGONQURPWITS. Edited by Robert E. Drennan, Hlustrated. Citadel. 176 pp. $5.95. By Heywood Hale Broun Historical plays about the Founding Fathers usually depict them as men fully aware that their majestic Presence on insurance company calendars is already in the bag. They meet and greet each other in dialogue as flexible’ as the bronze on which it is engraved... “You know Ben, it seems to me that the sunshine patriot and the summer soldier are always with us." “Too true, Tom, but it might, console you to re- member that carly to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Say, here comes Jef- ferson. I want you to hear his views on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” ~-So in other areas of legend, Shelley is slways pas- sionate and Queen Victoria never is, Florence Night- ingale is always adjusting a bandage and saying some- thing kind, Henry VIII is always tearing « chicken . carcass and saying something coarse, and the collection . of playwrights, columnists, press agents and actors who used to meet at the Algonquin Hote! in the Twenties and Thirties are always filling the air and the ears of those privileged to sit near them with trenchant, witty things, Well, of course, there are grains of truth in all this. Shelley was probably more fan at a party than Victoria, and if you broke your arm Miss Nightingale would be mere help than Henry Tudor. So, too, the group around the Algonquin’s Round Table was certainly livelier than the average alumni luncheon, bankers’ club get-together ee Heywood Hale Broun reports on sports for the Colum- bia Broadcasting System. A few words about TE MORTALITY MERCH y G. Scott Reynolds. _ They were young, they were witty ~ ae) ‘Heywood Broun {Sr.}, by Pegey Bacon or a publisher's cocktail party. Still, searching through the collection of distortions, legends, half-truths, mis- understandings and keen insights which make up my ‘own memories of those days and those people, it seems to me that repartee, while an honored guest at those luncheons, was not really the master of the revels. This book is simply and directly a joke book, 2 col- lection of paragraphs in the format if not the atyle of that old traveler's timé killer “On a Slow Train through Arkansas.” In reading through it one is im- pressed by the number of lines drawn not from the re- ported talk but from-the writings of the Round Tablers, the bits that survived the xxxxs and wwwwws on the lonely typewriters to which they returned after lunch. Of course, the talk was good but not perhaps of that order where only a tape recorder is needed to create « 1 | life insurance t the attendant higher mortality rates. In this case the i book. Indeed s tape'th BeBands of Boswell migh damaged the reputation of Johnson, and in the ca: the magic young people in the privileged middle « fun-filled faraway 1920s, as in the case of all the “eclebrated salons, the legend is, for us, the reality. ‘The jokes are often lame, but in our age of the the Pop, the Put On, and the Absurd — when the seam of Modern Art shows Turner and the Metropo! displaye a modern work which its owner describe terms of its overwhelming square fool wouldn’t venerate a bunch who seemed to kno. 4a how best to spend the oh-so-few hours which one: afford? Certainly it is not legend but documented the ledgers of galleries, publishers, theaters and c. cert halls that the wits, critics and attendant bon viva: of the Algonquin could drop fame on one as easily a gently as they dropped their napkins on the table at { ~end of lunch. When Marc Connelly came into the d ing room the day after a Ziegfeld Follies had universal raves and said cheerily “Well, shall we let run?” there was the exhilaration of power behind joke. When a young actor took the Provincetown Theater for a Sunday evening concert, it became th event of the season because Heywood Broun, Deen Taylor and Franklin P. Adams announced in the N. } World that anyone who missed Paul Robeson's singin debut would regret it all his life. The it tr umph was Robeson’s but the crowd which ai the street begging for tickets was proof of the\.. enc of the group. Lawyers and judges sit at the Round Table now but perheps this is appropriate, In a more comple. world, they deal magiaterially with the fundaments uncertainties of our society, as, long ago, the youn, writers in s society: fairly eure of-iteelf dealt wit seeming certitudes, 4 While there are also questions ae ¢~ --t-"