Comrade Broun

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

Being a slightiy intimate portrait of the socialist party's candidate for Congress from New York City

To the stranger who sails into our port and, having seen our skyline and our beautiful women is vouchsafed at last his first glimpse of Heywood Broun in the ruddy afternoon sunlight, this ablest and most celebrated American journalist of our time must seem a singularly untidy behemoth. Indeed, half the legends about him—certainly all those which do not deal with his avarice as a poker player, his woe-begone misgivings as a Don Juan, and his fantastic fluency as a writer turn either on the immensity of his person or on the heroic scale of his sartorial disorder. Or, more often (with a nice flair for cause and effect) on both.

Gossip writers take delight in mentioning that his shabby shoon are four sizes larger than the fabulous footgear of my darling Clementine, who wore, as you may recall, a number nine. A colleague has even referred to him as resembling two-hundred-and-fifty pounds of soiled linen, and on a great occasion when it was reported that Broun, in an action for damages brought against him by an aggrieved tragedian, was put into the witness chair, someone surmised that this could have been managed only by the combined use of a derrick and a shoe-horn. When he joined the startled staff of Vanity Fair about ten years ago, his neighbors were ravished at the thought of this not conspicuously soigné elephant stamping about in its dainty editorial purlieus, and their content with the picture became supreme at the news that he was sharing a cubicle with the editor of The Well Dressed Man department.

Even in uniform, Broun's considerable person proved rebellious. In May, 1917, the then unamalgamated Tribune wrested him from the angry bosom of George Creel and sent him overseas with the first contingent of the A.E.F., where his fathomless appetite for eggs, coupled with a defeatist attitude in his personal war on the French language, won him the soubriquet of Oofs Broun. To the regulation costume dictated for correspondents, Broun added the detail of a fur coat acquired in its declining years for sixty francs. The chauffeurs at Neufchâteau ran a small pool each morning on the likelihood of his having the right legging on the right leg. At Chaumont he was introduced to the immaculate Commander-in-chief. "My dear Mr. Broun," the General exclaimed in genuine concern, "did you have a serious fall?"

Back in New York, his father, who was proposing him for membership in the Racquet and Tennis Club, led him to one of the better tailors and outfitted him so expertly that his fundamental resemblance to John Barrymore emerged briefly from the chaos, emerged just long enough, in fact, to fool the little woman who bears his name—or rather, come to think of it, the little woman who simply cannot bear his name. She ran into him on the street and passed him by, not recognizing him. Shortly after his relapse, in response to an invitation from the haute noblesse, he ambled along Fifth Avenue and rang the doorbell of one of its then surviving mansions. Peering through the shocked interstices of the iron grill, the footman indicated by an annoyed wave of the hand that the tradesmen's entrance was around the corner. When Broun explained implausibly that he had been invited there to play bridge, the footman blanched, bade him wait on the doorstep, and vanished in quest of instructions. A few moments later (with the haggard look of one whose creed has been assaulted by doubt) the footman reappeared and opened the portal. "You are to come in," he said. I never heard whether he resigned the next morning.

Now this is a true story, and but one of many. I have been telling its like these many years. So has Broun, himself. Indeed. I heard this last one from him rather than from the footman. He has been telling them with Gargantuan chuckles and disarming charm. I always assumed that this candid habit was part of the familiar defensive tactics known, I believe, as beating them to it. It occurs to me now that the policy of self-cartooning in this matter may have had a deeper guile. I wonder if all along he was not grooming himself (if that term is not too confusing in this context) to run for office on the Socialist ticket. Just as the late Colonel Roosevelt, though born wearing pearl-grey trousers and a high silk hat, always kept on hand a shabby sack suit and a battered Fedora to wear while campaigning in the middle West, so, perhaps, half the legend of Heywood Broun has been subtle, far-sighted propaganda looking toward this coming election day in the seventeenth Congressional District of New York.

All of which might have been set down for you by someone who knew Heywood Broun only by sight from a window across the street. Those who know him better than that—those of us who have known him intimately as an endlessly entertaining and courteous companion for a dozen years or more—would have to report a characteristic more salient than any of these mere externals, however eye-smiting. It is so salient that it must find place even in so brief and faintly sportive an encyclical as this one. If I recognize the necessity with regret, it is only because it is a characteristic difficult to pack into a few paragraphs. If, for instance, I were to call it an incapacity for personal friendship, I might be distorting his likeness. I am seeking words for a certain aloof impersonality, the lack of a warm, compelling affection for any individual in this world.

Consider, for instance, that group of seamy ogres who share with him a charter membership in the Thanatopsis. To this weekly poker game, he has run as faithfully as Willie Stevens to the New Brunswick fires. I suppose its games are the greatest pleasure he has in this world. His little playmates—F. P. A., George S. Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Irving Berlin, Herbert Bayard Swope, and your correspondent, to call but half the roll—have further endeared themselves to him by losing to him eight times out of ten in the past decade. I imagine that we represent as close a friendship as he has or wants. Yet each of us knows that if a lucky hit by some bomb-thrower or passing germ should extinguish us all in a single night, Broun would feel nothing of the sorrow that would wrack normally fond and dependent creatures in similar circumstances. Indeed, I seriously think (and so habitual is the candor of his self-examination that lie would probably say the same) that his chief emotion would be a kind of journalistic excitement—even elation —at close contact with so interesting a holocaust. And on the night of the funeral, he would be mooning about town looking for another poker game.

Once I tried to describe this inhuman detachment by saying that I cherished him as I did my set of Dickens, that I could get as much entertainment from one as from the other, and that I would as reasonably expect my set of Dickens to get down off the shelf and come to the boat to see me off. It might be more illuminating to say that if I fell and broke my leg, Broun would not give the mishap a second thought and might even grin with an urchin pleasure at the news. But if he were to hear that Paul Robeson had been hurt or embarrassed by some exhibition of Caucasian effrontery, he would be too angry, uncomfortable, and depressed to sleep that night. And this doesn't necessarily mean that he likes Paul Robeson better than he likes me. You see, he doesn't care about individuals at all. It is for causes that he cares.

I find myself suddenly recalling a repellent phrase from an old schoolbook—the mossy one about its having been "beautifully said that Providence had left George Washington childless so that his country might call him Father." I hope I am not unconsciously imitating that nauseous interpretation of the sterility of the great General's marriage-bed when I say that Broun's lack of talent for personal friendship in his own street has left him free to care a whole lot about the oppressed and the sinned-against, all over the world.

In the editorial comment on bis candidacy, I have been struck by a note of jocularity as if a quite comic buffoon were doing a jig on the political sidewalk. Well, Broun is a comedian. His humour is unfailing and sometimes magnificent. But if he were only or chiefly a comedian, he would not be running for Congress this Fall, and lie would not hold against all comers the place that is his in the gallery of his craft. More salient than his humour surely, more striking than his girth or his colossal dishevelment, is the passion of his hatred for injustice, such a passion as used to fire the Abolitionists in the days of the underground railway. Ever since then, its like has been missing, as salt left out of bread, from the savour of American life. That hatred is the one lamp in his house that is always burning. And (fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky) that is the light you can see for miles across the interminable wastes of American journalism.

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It is the very essence of Broun. In the crisis of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case when, after Dr. Lowell's part in it, Broun branded his own not pre-eminently fair Harvard with the name of Hangman's House, this essence made his column in The World the most splendid pulpit in this country and evoked in the mind of its publisher such a trepidation that, before long, Broun was out looking for another job.

And now, though he got it and still has it, he is also running for Congress. They tell me that the Seventeenth is a Republican district. To that end, it was so designed in Albany that it might easily be mistaken for a missing piece from a jig-saw puzzle. It takes in the theater district and is swarming with actors who usually do not get up in time to register. Then a large part of the district is given over to Central Park, inhabited chiefly by squirrels and sheep. Broun expects the sheep vote to go to the Republican candidate. That is the present incumbent, Ruth Pratt. It has been pointed out in her favour that she has six children, making her five up on Broun at the time of going to press. I find myself wondering, therefore, why she did not get the nomination of the Labor Party. And as these autumnal days grow shorter, I find myself looking into the firelight and asking myself: "Is this to be a Pratt Fall?"