"The Inanities of 1926"

Wherein a Critic's Vocabulary Sustains the Loss of a Trusty Adjective

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

IT has always seemed to me that among those of us who make writing our trade, even the ones who cannot hope for immortality through some beautiful thing wrought in beautiful letters may at least receive brief honourable mention at the moment of interment because of the things we haven't written.

Thus during the Great War, I personally repelled column after column of oncoming German infantry by writing column after column of undaunted prose. Yet in all that welter of words, my biographer (if, as seems increasingly improbable, any) would search in vain for that nicked old stencil "the supreme sacrifice" and I never once called them Huns.

Then in the days and, more especially, nights when I was a reporter on the good old Times, I was in the midst of a redoubled three-spade bid the night the wireless brought through the air the sinking Titanic's call for help and for the next month I never stopped writing about it, except for brief catnaps and wolf-like snatches at nourishment. The output in sheer words, if laid end to end, must have been only a shade shorter than Les Miserables. But among the pounding typewriters of my generation, mine alone was able to tap off the word "Titanic" without once prefixing it with either of the almost automatic adjectives "ill-fated" or "illstarred".

TO be sure those of us who glow with what might be described as the pride of negative authorship, are sometimes frustrated by the men higher up. I know that when John Wanamaker died and the doughty Russel Crouse was commissioned to write his obituary for the now (and deservedly) defunct Nezo York Evening Mail, he was able, in his prayers that night, to point out thankfully to God that at least in two whole columns about the expired shopkeeper he had magnificently avoided all recourse to one rubber-stamp phrase without the use and recurrence of which it had previously been thought that no newspaper allusion to Mr. Wanamaker could get into type. Next day, when Master Crouse turned proudly to his piece in the paper, he discovered that at the last minute his horrified editor had descended on the manuscript with several sharpened pencils and liberally bestrewn it with the title "Merchant Prince". Mr. Crouse ate a good breakfast, wrote a few hurried notes and, at 3.15 that afternoon, flung himself from Brooklyn Bridge. He was buried with full military honours at Arlington.

We survivors keep up the good work as best we can now that our brave leader is gone. Once I myself (for a small consideration) boasted in the columns of Life that I had written dramatic criticism, off and (more often) on, for thirteen years without once using the words "personality" and "adequate". Of course such stern denial cramps one a bit and now I find I must add to the strain by forswearing another old trusty among the adjectives. I hereby swear off for 1927 the use of the word "memorable". I will not touch a drop of it. I promise. I wouldn't have the face.

This austere resolution had its origin in the recent discovery, on going through my scrapbooks for the past twelve-month, that, in the case of some twenty-seven instances wherein I had described a play or a production or a performance or a première as "memorable", I am now in the embarrassing predicament of being unable to remember any thing about them at all. In this dusk of 1926, the lingering twilight of the year always given over to pensive retrospect, I was searching for data on which to base a contribution to some such annual symposium as publishers are increasingly addicted to. And I found with chagrin and dismay that, instead of dwelling on such mountain peaks as the great Werfel tragedy Goat Song, or the fine fantasy of The Wisdom Tooth., or the matchless loveliness of Raquel Meller, any errant memory went instead to all the minor monstrosities of the two seasons.

I have, I am afraid, always been this way. Not long ago, I stood meditatively beside the yawning hole in the ground which, just a short time before, had been the Thirty-Ninth Street Theatre. It was recently torn down to slake, for a moment, New York's overwhelming passion for putting up playhouses. This may, at first glance, seem an odd and faintly homeopathic remedy for assuaging that passion. But the yearning is continually being discouraged, you see, by the chill economic fact that there are already considerably more theatre seats on the island of Manhattan than there are playgoers (resident or transient) animated by a sufficient impulse to occupy them. This distressing situation is met not by the ignoble and lethargic course of waiting spinelessly until the population should catch up with the theatres. Rather is it met heroically by tearing down the old ones.

OF course the Thirty-Ninth Street was not very old. Compared with Drury Lane or even the old Walnut Street in Philadelphia, it was a poor upstart cut off in its puling infancy. It was built, in fact, no longer ago than 1910. But in a town where it has become unsafe to make a rendezvous for the next afternoon without first verifying by telephone that the old trysting place is still standing, a sixteen year old temple of the drama is about as near to a dear, ivied, memory-stained playhouse as we can boast.

So, if I wanted to commune with my memories of bygone glamour, my souvenirs of great roles and great occasions, I was more or less obliged to content myself with the crumbling ruins of the Thirty-Ninth Street, to stand amid its rubble-heaps, upheaved sidewalks and cement vats and approximate, as best I could, the mood of one who goes conscientiously to the Coliseum in Rome to stand bare-headed in its pillared moonlight.

I had been present on the night of its inauguration when Nazimova wove about its stage in the Scandinavian distresses of Little Eyolf. I had seen Romance there with Doris Keane. I had seen Margaret Anglin and Annie Russell and Emily Stevens act upon its stage. Yet out of the rubble rose no memory of these at all but the ghost rather of Fruhlingserzvachen (translated by Hey wood Broun as The Spring Offensive) wherein one pretty scene dealt with an amorous assault upon a little girl in a haymow by an eleven year-old-boy, the latter role played with great gusto by a somewhat aggressively adult actor who seemed ever about to burst from his knickerbockers in the manner of a roasting chestnut. It was a sweet matinee, that one, made immortal by the circumstance that this actor was so displeased at Mr. Broun's little criticism of the performance that he sued him for $10,000.

Then it was also at the Thirty-Ninth Street that I saw Easy Street, wherein the young couple had an odd custom of keeping their dead baby's little worsted shoes in the sideboard, seemingly so that they could always count on a good cry while setting the table.

AND, above all, it was at the Thirty-Ninth Street that some men still living saw Love's Call; a Drama of Primitive Passion by Joe Byron Totten. There for once I was prophetic in calling a play memorable. I find in my notes of that occasion this prediction:

"The audience of old meanies who tittered helplessly through its three steaming acts will long remember it as among the more endearing of the terrible plays which each season brings to Broadway. One scene in particular I believe they will even tell their grandchildren about when those tots of tomorrow gather round the old knees of a winter's eve. That was the scene in which the villainous Don Pedro de Scarillo stalked into the clearing of the Devil's Pass and found his Piquita folded in the arms of a tall, cold handsome man from the North. That, at least was the way the pretty half breed was ever wont to describe her gringo. He, however, had an odd way of referring to himself, even in casual discourse, as Clyde Wilson Harrison. The embrace between these two had reached that approved point where equilibrium was threatened when the jealous Don Pedro came in, and, as I recall, briefly announced his intention of torturing the gringo to death. At all events I shall never forget the primitive ejaculation which then fell scorching from the lips of Clyde Wilson Harrison. 'I suppose so,' said Clyde Wilson Harrison, 'but the thrill of passion I have just experienced was worth it.' At that point two dramatic critics and four laymen had to be picked up out of the aisles and put back in their seats before the play could resume."

And that, Heaven help me, is the kind of play I do remember. So that now, when I have been asked to glance lightly back through the year and write a chapter on the most memorable event of 1926 in the theatre of New York, I find myself writhing with indecision. Should I devote it to a play called The Half-Caste and briefly described in its program as "A Story of Love and Sacrifice in a Land of Forgotten Men"? In it an actress styling herself with simple dignity, just "Veronica" was compelled by the exigencies of the management to disport herself in the more prominently lighted portions of the stage, clad only in a few beads and three or four well-placed doilies.

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Or should I treat of Tarkington's Seventeen as it was turned into a musical comedy, with the Parcher family developing the odd custom of keeping a grand piano in their garden in case any one should want to dash off a nocturne and with Genesis's dog Clem- atis renamed Run Tin Can as a splendid play on the name Rin Tin Tin.

Yet I am inclined to think that I will remember longest out of the American drama in the year 1926 that moment in the musical version of Little Miss Browm when, in the first scene, a swarm of school girls descended from a stalled Pullman and, mingling with the conductors, lifted their voices in a ballad entitled—believe it or not——Choo-choo Love.