American nights entertainment

was sent to the Minneapolis office, where he took a keen interest in his job and read the works of H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, and H. L. Mencken; met F. Scott Fitzgerald, and led two cotillions. He was also preparing to take up the Alexander Hamilton business course when he accepted an offer of employment in Dayton, Ohio, with a financial organisation. “Mr. Stewart spent a delightful year in Dayton where he learned to play golf, and read the works of Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve, Casanova, Swift, James Branch Cabell, James Huneker, and William Congreve. He also renewed his piano lessons, getting as far as the Bach three-part inventions and ‘Easy Classics.’ On December 30, 1920, he read the first volume of the Alexander Hamilton business course, after which he decided that he wanted to go in for literature. In January, 1921, Mr. Stewart came to New York City to find a job (literary if possible), but there were so many symphony concerts that month that he didn’t get a chance to look around until the middle of February. “The idea for the _Parody Outline of History_ came to Mr. Stewart in March, while hearing Mr. Mengelberg conduct the National Orchestra in the Pathetique Symphony. “Mr. Stewart is unmarried and very near-sighted. He is fond of Beethoven, Scotch, and Max Beerbohm.” ii So much for Mr. Stewart’s life up to the publication of _The Parody Outline of History_. In the following year (1922)--but let Mr. Stewart again speak: “After the appearance of the _Parody Outline_ Mr. Stewart, having heard a great deal about Europe in the course of his naval war service in Chicago, decided to go abroad. Many of his friends recommended Paris as a pleasant city in which to work, so Mr. Stewart went to Paris, which he found indeed very pleasant but not for work. So after a brief period of recuperation he journeyed to Vienna where he grew a splendid red beard and wrote _Perfect Behavior_. “Finding, however, that the beard was exhausting too much of his creative energy, Mr. Stewart shaved and went to Budapest, where he enjoyed himself immensely at the rate of 700 Hungarian crowns to the dollar. “But in the middle of October he began to feel strangely uneasy, and as his condition grew steadily worse he consulted an authority and learned, to his surprise and delight, that he was going to have another book. “Bidding a hasty farewell to the gay life of Budapest, which now seemed all too empty and frivolous, Mr. Stewart journeyed with his precious secret to Capri, there, under the ever-blue Italian skies, to await the happy event. He prayed with all his heart that it might be a novel, for he had never had a novel, although he had wanted one all his life. But early in February, 1923, Mr. Stewart discovered that the ‘little stranger’ was to be another satire, and although it was a bit of a blow at first, after a few days he got over his disappointment at not having a novel; and when, in June, Mr. Stewart returned to America he took with him, proudly, his little third book, which he had christened _Aunt Polly’s Story of Mankind_.” iii Alexander Woollcott speaking in “Shouts and Murmurs” in the New York Herald of March 18, 1923: “Stewart is a preposterously tall, blonde man, with an enviably large amount of his twenties still to squander. His profile is faintly reminiscent of that most delightful and fantastic of all creatures, Winsor McKay’s Gertie. He knows more about the music than he does about the books of the world, and has, we suspect, gone in for reading so recently that he probably thinks all novels are like Joyce’s _Ulysses_. We ran across him here and there in France last summer, starting out on one pilgrimage together from the Café Valterre, in the Place Stanislas at Nancy, that celebrated restaurant which set forth marvellous dishes even when the bombs were dropping on Nancy every evening and there was not another good meal to be found anywhere else in Lorraine. Up the street somewhere was M. Coué, healing away for dear life, and on the outskirts of the town an imitation Oberammergau was in full swing. But the two of us were minded rather to move on to the battlefields, and for the purpose engaged a morsel of a French car, driven by a youngster who spoke a horrible dialect he had picked up three years before from the Americans stationed at Neufchateau. The memories of that rambling excursion into a cheerless countryside, still littered with the rusted snarls of barbed wire and still gashed with the trenches no one has had time or strength to obliterate, are brought flooding back by the inscription in the copy of _Perfect Behavior_ lying open here on the desk. It is inscribed: ‘In memory of terrible days and ghastly nights on the battlefields of France,’ and winds up with this disconcerting proclamation: ‘“It shall never happen again.”--Stewart.’ “Marc Connelly was agitated the other day by the receipt of a cablegram from Stewart in Capri which read thus: “‘The Queen of Sweden is here. What shall I do?--Stewart.’ “Connelly’s cabled reply must be admired equally for its sagacity and its thrift. It was: ‘Compromise.’” Books by Donald Ogden Stewart 1921 _A Parody Outline of History_ 1922 _Perfect Behavior_ 1923 _Aunt Polly’s Story of Mankind_ Sources on Donald Ogden Stewart _The Making of a Humorist_, by DONALD OGDEN STEWART, suppressed by the author, 1921. _My Naval Career_, by DONALD OGDEN STEWART (Privately unpublished, 1921). _14. Miss Zona Gale_ i No one any longer doubts that Zona Gale belongs in the very small company of American women novelists whose work is of the first artistic importance. Her history is interesting. Of old New England parentage, she was born in Portage, Wisconsin, where she now lives. She wrote, at thirteen, a novel “which almost simultaneously came back to me from a publisher.” At sixteen, just after she had entered the University of Wisconsin, she submitted a 3,000-word short story to the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin, which paid her $3. When she finished college she went to work for that newspaper. “I secured a position by attrition. I presented myself every morning at the desk of the city editor. At the end of two weeks the city editor let me write about a flower show. I have never put such emotion into anything else I have written.” She was another month getting on the staff. Later, by offering a list of suggestions based on the day’s news, she succeeded after many weeks in getting on the staff of the New York World. An anonymous writer in The Bookman has pictured Miss Gale in New York: “When she was a reporter on the World, and as beautiful as any girl could be, she was put on difficult assignments that might well have terrified one as fragile and flower-like and feminine as she; but she never winced.... She covered murders and robberies--anything given her to do she did, at any hour of the day or night. But all the while she was writing exquisite poetry; and every day of her life she sent a letter to her mother, who was back in Wisconsin. If she was waiting for an interview with some financier of the hour, she did not dawdle her time away in the corridor of his hotel. Instead, she pulled out a pad and pencil and wrote as many pages as she could on a short story; or she dashed off a lyric; or she made copious notes for future work. I think she was about the most ambitious girl in New York at that time--too ambitious, some said; her praises were being sung--too much sung was a common rumour; her picture--how lovely she was, and is!--was published repeatedly--too repeatedly, dear enemies whispered; and everyone was waiting to see just how long it would take her to make good.” ii It took some time. Not until the year in which she was 29 did she land anywhere “to speak of,” though for ten years previous to that acceptance, by Success Magazine, she had constantly submitted stories. That was in 1903. Then, in 1911, the Delineator held a short story contest in which over 15,000 stories were received. Miss Gale took first prize with a tale called “The American Dawn.” It was $2,000 and in addition her other two entries (each person was allowed to submit three stories) were deemed good enough to be purchased. But meanwhile she had written stories about Pelleas and Ettare, two old lovers, and stories about Friendship Village--some forty of the first and, ultimately, about sixty of the second--and the process of collecting her Friendship Village fiction into books had begun. Said Miss Gale, in 1919: “The first editor to whom these Friendship Village stories were submitted declined them with the word that his acquaintance with small towns was wide but that he had never seen any such people as these.... I am still not sure that he was not right.” She was the author of ten published books before she produced anything constituting a lien upon general attention. But then, with an effect of extreme suddenness to the world outside of Portage, there came from her pen the 402-page novel, _Birth_. Its length is a point of interest in view of the brevity of _Miss Lulu Bett_ and _Faint Perfume_, both of which are so decidedly under the average novel in length. And yet _Birth_ exhibits the same conciseness of phrase, the same avoidance of unnecessary words so noticeable in the two later books. It is the story of a poor little man, Marshall Pitt, who comes to an insignificant Western town as a pickle salesman and remains there as a paperhanger, a husband and a father. The book’s comments on life have been aptly described as “piercing”--it is a fine needlework of satire--but there are lovely lyrical moments and the tragic action is touched with majesty. Altogether a great novel. Miss Gale considers it the finest thing she has done and for once her judgment of her own work, generally as untrustworthy as most authors’ or slightly more so, is right. Then came _Miss Lulu Bett_, read with the enthusiasm of discovery by the publisher, who telegraphed his congratulations--a thing publishers infrequently do! Except in England, where its merit was quickly noted, _Birth_ had not sold at all well. Six magazine editors had rejected _Miss Lulu Bett_ as a serial. Happily, all signs failed. The crisply-told little novel of the household drudge and her fortunes went into one edition after another; a play from the novel was sought and Miss Gale fashioned it herself; the annual Pulitzer prize was awarded to the play. Whether the concision of style practised so effectively in _Birth_ was not carried a bit too far in _Miss Lulu Bett_ must always remain a matter of opinion. The most interesting point, I think, is the change of ending which the requirements of the theatre forced upon Miss Gale. As she observed, an audience in a playhouse could not reasonably be expected to swallow the spectacle of a woman marrying two men in the space of three hours, even though the indicated lapse of time was much longer than that; she therefore, to make the play, caused Miss Bett’s first marriage to turn out to be valid after all. In this matter Miss Gale was not guilty of “sweetening” her story, as has been charged. She simply was up against a limitation as definite as that which restricts the number of scenes possible in a play. iii And this year she has given us _Faint Perfume_, a study of a finely sensitive feminine personality stifling in the atmosphere of a quite usual sort of American family. Leda Perrin, forced to make her home with the Crumbs, is brought into a fleeting contact with Barnaby Powers, a writer with a temperament of the same response. They meet, together face the defeat of their desire, and go separately apart. At the close there is the briefest possible second meeting