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...LETTERS OF ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT-Edited by Beatrice Kaufman and Joseph Hennessey-Viking...
...boatload of trippers who were circling Vermont's Neshobe Island, summer hideaway of the late Alexander Woollcott, spied, under a vast straw hat, a vast bulk swathed in a dressing gown. "Who on earth is that?" screamed one of the ladies. "Marie Dressier," said her benchmate-thereby adding another quip to the many already provoked by Mr. Woollcott's complex personality...
This volume includes 336 letters written by Woollcott between 1897 and 1943 (the year of his death). Most of them reflect only the genial, humorous, enthusiastic side of the man whom the N.Y. Herald Tribune once called "the final arbiter of things literary in the United States." "He wrote angry, cutting, and sometimes cruel letters," say Editors Kaufman & Hennessey, "[but] none of them is included . . . for the reason that they were withheld by their recipients." But this collection of Woollcott's letters is jampacked with anecdotes about Woollcott's distinguished friends & enemies, touching stories couched in the Little...
Seven Pincushions and a Milk-Shake. Early Woollcott letters are fraught with characteristic Woollcott appetite and enthusiasm. "My dear Smyser, Your charming letter received. . . . We enjoyed our straw-ride very much. I ate a bag of candy, a bag of peanuts, 2 bars of popcorn, a glass of Huyler's ice-cream soda, a chocolate Milk-Shake. . . . I have played over 300 games of croquet. . . . I have just finished the fourth of seven pincushions I am emboidering (don't consider spelling). . . . It is sweet to be remembered...
...later years, correspondents were often surprised to find that Woollcott had never outgrown his love for renaming both his friends and himself. "Lamb of God," he would begin a letter to Noel Coward. Poet Archibald Macleish he addressed as "Ambrose-Son-of-Heaven." Sometimes he signed himself "Pumblechook...