iii · Section 12

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_My Naval Career_, by DONALD OGDEN STEWART (Privately unpublished, 1921).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_