Hack pack
Benny Green
Wit's End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table James R. Gaines (Harcourt Brace £8.40) The disproportionate attention lavished over the years on the Algonquin set is likely to mystify those readers who, having fallen for the self-engendered propaganda of the group's members, go in search of the literary and dramatic fruits of this grand struggle against the philistines. It would not quite be true to say that there are no fruits, but what there is began to turn rotten a long time ago. until today a faint aroma of putrescence overhangs the whole episode. The Algonquin wits were would-be artists who committed the arch-sin of looming larger than their own work, in which regard they evoke distant echoes of Wilde, except that while Wilde put his genius into his life. the Algonquin crowd had none to put anywhere, and consequently talked too loud for too long. about themselves and each other. The rasping noise was not the wit but the sound of backs being scratched.
Why. then, should anyone bother to assess them at length? The answer is an interesting one, particularly for people who write for a living. The difference between the professional writer and the hack is that while the professional does everything for money. the hack does anything for it, and the Algonquin set were manic hacks. The conundrum they pose is this one: To what extent did their relentless mercantile brigandage corrupt their gifts? Probably not at all, the said gifts being so slight that there Was hardly enough room for the worm to get into the bud. But the point is irrelevant to Mr Gaines's surprisingly puritanical book, Which illustrates with terrible inevitability what happens to people who aspire to be artists without knowing or caring what the difference is between lucre and work.
Gaines considerably augments the English reader's meagre factual knowledge of the group, telling us that Charles Brackett once wrote a novel about them, and that Franklin P. Adams collaborated on a failed musical with 0. Henry, but the true value of the book is the way it describes how the group's relentless striving after a metroPolitan sheen left all its members in a condition of hopeless parochialism. Although they performed critical cartwheels m fashionable journals, none of them seems to have had any idea of the constituent parts of literary excellence. Adams, with his subeditor's soul, thought it meant factual accuracy, and jeered at Dreiser for writing of Ann Harbour instead of Ann Arbour. Heywood Broun dismissed Fitzgerald as 'callow', while as for Woollcott, it remains one of the seven journalistic wonders of the modern age that anyone should have taken him seriously. His announcement that Dumbo was 'the highest achievement since the first white man landed on the continent' Is one of his more level-headed verdicts, and his lobbying on behalf of the ludicrous A bie's Irish Rose is surpassed in fatuity only by his subsequent recantation: 'O'Neill's Strange Interlude is the Abie's Irish Rose of the pseudo-intelligentsia.'
Of the rest, Robert Sherwood at least had the gumption to get away and pursue his muse, which turned out to be sentimental melodrama. I don't know if anyone takes Sherwood seriously today, but if it is a good second-rate tearjerker you require, his Waterloo Bridge is the thing. Most imitations of tragedy lack conviction, but Waterloo Bridge is the real thing, a genuine Imitation. Of the group only Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker have retained much credence, although Benchley. father of the distinguished ichthyologist who gave us Jaws, wears less well than one would have hoped. As for Parker, biographers solemnly strive after her, and a few of her aphorisms remain in circulation. Ironically Gaines fails to mention the fragment of Miss Parker's which is heard more often than anything else which either she or the rest of the crowd ever produced. In 1935 she worked on the movie The Big Broadcast of 1936, collaborating with the composer Ralph Rainger on a song called 'I Wished on the Moon'. You can still hear it to this day, usually in some club where the cabaret act, a shade more knowing than most, has discovered it, probably through the old Billie Holiday recording, and sensed in Miss Parker's lyric something a shade more substantial than the average song, but hardly suspecting that the Algonquin epitaph is buried in its innocent cadences : 'I wished on the moon, for more than I ever knew'
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