Word: wits
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...domed head. He dresses meticulously, wears custom-made blue or grey suits (his wife chooses the cloth), recently adopted a diplomat's Homburg. No backslapper, he is well-liked but something of a lone wolf in the Senate cloakrooms. In private he is amiable, with a quick, irreverent wit. When speaking he uses a sweeping sidearm gesture like a baseball pitcher's, rolls out his rounded, often eloquent periods in full, organlike tones...
Next week Hogarth House will publish (at $2.95) The Sexual Conduct of Men and Women, by Norman Lockridge (author of Bachelors' Quarters and editor of The Golden Treasury of the World's Wit and Wisdom). Says a dust-jacket blurb: "We did not plan to publish the contents of this book for some time to come . . . [but] excitement caused by the recent appearance of the Kinsey Report has suddenly brought most of these doubtful factors into a maturity of public interest. . ." Sample spicy headings in Lockridge's work: "What a Man Expects of a Mistress," "Good Women...
...Union (M-G-M). In Howard Lindsay & Russel Grouse's Pulitzer Prize satire, a number of political animals (a presidential candidate, professional politician, lady publisher, big businessman, labor leader, etc.) were herded into a sort of literary abattoir. There they were bludgeoned with ridicule, skewered with wit and butchered with invective; the raw meat was flung to Broadway audiences who ate it up for almost two years. Finally, the whole delightful shambles was tossed (for a down payment of $300,000) to The Great Knacker, Hollywood...
Chinese Nests. James was often the butt of smart young London intellectuals in the years before World War I. Everything about Henry James made him an easy target for their wit-particularly his resolute love of England in the face of the English stories that were told about him and the jokes that were played...
...groped painfully for the right word; his conversation, with its "Chinese nests of parentheses" and its sentences that "dropped to the floor and bounced about like tiny rubber balls"; his way of coming into a room, carrying his silk hat, stick and gloves; his reputation as both a wit and a bore ("Nobody bored him," said Violet Hunt, "he took care of that. . ."); his reputation for incomprehensibility ("Poor old James," said George Meredith, "he sets down on paper these mysterious rumblings in his bowels -but who could be expected to understand them?"); his reputation for social snobbery, and his reputation...