Alexander Woollcott Charms Biographer

By George Barmann

Harpo Marx referred to him as "a big dreamer with a remarkable sense of double-entry bookkeeping." Edna Ferber said he was "just a New Jersey Nero who mistook his pinafore for a toga." And Robert Benchley called him "Louisa M. Woollcott."

This, of course, was the late Alexander Woollcott, the man who came to din ner. And, of course, that is the title of this latest biography, Alexander Woollcott: The Man Who Came to Dinner, by Edwin P. Hoyt (Abelard-Schuman; $6.50).

To backtrack a bit: Aleck

Woollcott (1887-1943) was biographer, essayist, journalist, playwright and, above all, critic. He was a powerful figure in the field of criticism. He was also, in many ways, an actor. He was the

Town Crier on network radio for some years.

ONCE YOU got around his 200 pounds and the spelling of his name, you also discovered he had a public and a private pose. This is what this book is about: Author Hoyt says that Aleck's acid tongue and bad manners and infuriating behavior were a studied public view; in private, he insists, Woollcott was loving and gener-

ous.

"Alexander Woollcott was a sweet and sour man, if one can reduce human character to a pungent example of Chinese cookery," he writes. "The unfortunate matter, as far as memory is concerned, is that the sourness somehow predominated in the recollections of Woollcott that remained a quarter century after his death, and that the substance of the man threatened to be lost.

"This biography is the author's attempt to pay to a fine American, and a very important one in the literary scene, the respect he de-

serves

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THE AUTHOR takes after Woollcott's first biographer, Samual Hopkins Adams, blaming him for the unpleasant portrait of Aleck, "showing Aleck as a monster with a good side, an unpleasant

man who had his pleasant points, a boor with a thin tual eunuch who might even veneer of social grace, a virbe homosexual, and above all, a viper who was to turn against nearly all his

friends."

But the portrait here is quite different-Woollcott in soft colors, getting a man out of a prison, supporting someone else through college, finding jobs for others, lending money he knew would never be repaid.

knew

Alexander Woollcott

(Monty Wooley on Broadway), and obviously this was the real Woollcott.

TO SOME it indeed was.

It was, apparently, to Bennett Cerf:

"I disliked Mr. Woollcott intensely. In literary matters, he was a consistent champion of the second-rate and worse, and the charm that he turned on for the people he considered important was singularly lacking when he was dealing with people he considered his social inferiors. This is not my idea of the way a gentleman Whiteside acts.'

Author Hoyt says that the role of the viper was spread across the country when Aleck played himself in the successful Kaufman Hart play, "The Man Who Came to Dinner." The character was Sheridan

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