Merry Gentlemen (And One Lady)
Bryan, J. III
Gaiety has lately led to loose talk. Either the good word is commandeered by homophiles, or the experience it names is confused with sillyass frivolity. Clearly, the playful,...
...Over the years, his work has earned him the praise of his fellows and made him one of the most respected craftsmen of letters in America...
...The essays on Benchley, Farr, Sullivan, Parker, and Troy are character sketches that belong with the classics of the genre...
...For him there persists a , willingness to suspend moral judgment or, better yet, a readiness to accept his friends unconditionally...
...Bryan of Richmond, Virginia was born there in 1904, in itself a good omen...
...He conjures up a classy neighborhood in the Republic of Letters, where bright talk and coruscating banter, plentiful drinks and victuals, lively house parties and frolicsome outings, congenial gentlemen and vivacious ladies made for the good life well lived...
...Bryan's prose is about as good as a writer can make it, and the voice one hears in these essays is urbane, debonair, and full of fun...
...They resonate with exuberance, ribaldry, and fellow-feeling...
...Such unhappy persons should not buy this book unless they promise to read it in good faith...
...Bryan recounts instructively...
...His reluctance to moralize is in part what makes him an affable narrator and, beyond that, what gives his book a fine seriousness...
...His is a strange story, one Mr...
...Keep in mind the book is about the Bryan Circle (he wouldn't call it that), admission to which certifies the bearer as most amusing...
...By the way, a few of Mr...
...Prospective readers whose strenuous consciences make mirth a breach of the social contract and a threat to moral rectitude will doubtless find Mr...
...Hugh Troy is another less familiar figure, unless one recognizes him as the most inspired practical joker Cornell has given to America...
...Bryan is unsurpassed...
...Not seriousness, mind you, as a solemn duty, but as a graceful effort (an essay, really) to understand and appreciate the vital characteristics of actual persons...
...He was, for all I know, the only great humorist to come from Harvard, which has succeeded in turning out many unintentionally funny people...
...How John Steinbeck got in this gallery was beyond my ken until Mr...
...Bryan's recollections distressing...
...Robert Benchley's essays, movie shorts, and theatre reviews are sui generis...
...In large measure, then, Mr...
...The book will likely be banned in Newton, Massachusetts on both counts...
...Bryan's title description of his friends as merry, his portraits bring out a spectrum of tones and hues, dark and melancholy as much as light and buoyant, although the wit and humor are dominant...
...Finis Farr's striking moniker should be known to biography fanciers and readers of National Review...
...No, Mr...
...New England, or Brisbane, Australia...
...Bryan's chapters are rewrites of earlier pieces, artfully recast and touched up...
...What Mr...
...Moreover, it is about free spirits who rejoiced in their freedom and, for the most part, put it to splendid use...
...is for Joseph—spares us sentimental journeys to the frenetic urbanity of "little old New York," although a few who supplied the ethos are on display, whether in Philadelphia and Bucks County, Hollywood, Chicago, Kent Owen is The American Spectator's Indiana Editor...
...Time, Fortune, Parade, the New Yorker, Town and Country, and the Saturday Evening Post (the authentic, Philadelphia-based magazine— accept no substitutes) until 1940 when he became a freelance and settled back home in Richmond...
...One is fortunate to be spared the likes of Lillian Hellman...
...Mr...
...Perelman, Arthur Samuels, John Steinbeck, Donald Ogden Stewart, Frank Sullivan, and Hugh Troy, Dorothy Parker does more than her share to compensate for minority status...
...Friendship is the governing principle in this generous offering, certainly as much as merriment...
...To divulge the gist of his tales wouldn't be sporting—he's a superb raconteur—and it wouldn't be fair to inveigle you into the tent with teasingly terrific lines—^jests leap about the pages Uke zany acrobats...
...Damn that self-pity...
...J. Bryan, Ill's assortment of familiar essays strikes a blow for liberty...
...On everyone else Mr...
...This is man's work...
...the former was a cheeky Navy buddy of Bryan's whose wisecracks dented the brass, the latter a tony magazine editor whose "deviltries" were ingenious...
...The present book is a treat clean through, and it's his best...
...otherwise, the stories will be wasted on them, depriving the more deserving...
...If you haven't sampled Nimnally Johnson's movies or letters, Frank Sullivan's antic sketches, Corey Ford's parodies and articles, or Marc Connelly's plays, you're missing some of the best humor Americans have created...
...Bryan—^J...
...He worked on a Chicago newspaper...
...This means he has seen the elephant and heard the owl, not to mention choicer parts of the century along with its worse, from fine points of vantage...
...Some of his friends were remarkably generous, kindly, and sympathetic, and their modes of humor reflect those virtues...
...J. Bryan, III has obliged them honorably and nobly...
...I doubt that he intends "merry" to be understood as ironic, but that reversal of meaning, or ambiguity, is evident in most, maybe all of the lives...
...Bryan's book is about the manifold joys of friendship as embodied in his friends...
...Bryan himself imparts is that of the ideal friend: amusing, attentive, encouraging, understanding, loyal, and, in the highest sense, true His friends are lucky indeed to have him as their interpreter...
...Then there's Donald Ogden Stewart, who was a skillful satirist and screenwriter, but also, peculiarly enough, a fervent, humorless Communist in spite of (or maybe because of) all the money he made and spent...
...He uses the handy device of appendices attached as afterthoughts to each essay, most as entertaining as Gibbon's footnotes, and with less Latin...
...Some had styles of wit that were keen, lacerating, often cruel, but, even so, wildly funny when the stroke was thrust and funnier when recollected in tranquillity...
...As Dorothy Parker (the one lady of the title) wrote as an antidedication to an anthology she had helped to edit, "Dear Readers, Wherever you are and however kind you be, these stories are too good for you...
...I was also disappointed by the Fred Allen piece, perhaps because so many of his lines, devastatingly droll when intoned in that handsaw voice, fall rather flat on the page...
...This is too serious a concern to be entrusted to drunks in lampshades or cut-ups with whoopee cushions...
...In point of fact, he was also a talented muraUst with a penchant for adding unrequired details to his commissions...
...The "merry gentlemen" are Fred Allen, Robert Benchley, George Etond, Marc Connelly, Finis Farr, Corey Ford, Nunnally Johnson, S.J...
...Clearly, the playful, highspirited life-lovingness that true gaiety should mean deserves better...
...Bryan presents is a set of vivid images of the forms that friendship takes: the pleasures of good company, memorable talk, colorful experiences shared and recalled over a lifetime...
...Thus, somewhere wedged in the crannies of the Steinbeck shelf must be amusing passages—Tfavels with Charley may be the place to look—but I've overlooked them...
...To my taste the Connelly and Perelman pieces are undernourished, probably because I was hoping for an antidote to the recent biography of the wizardly Perelman, which examines him in a harsh, unforgiving light...
...his letters are delight tempered to comic genius, as signed, for instance, by "Peiping Tom, the Chinese Voyeur...
...The word games Farr and Bryan invented, "Spurious Lincoln Anecdotes" and "Plantation Proverbs," should not, repeat should not, be read by anyone who must keep stitches intact or is prone to convulsions...
...Without it the human condition runs a deficit...
...What we need is not mere restoration of definition, but revival of the blessed state of being...
...The book will at once gladden those who cherish wit, conviviality, and fellowship— and sadden with nostalgia those of us who yearn for that lost world we were born too late to enjoy...
...Bryan explained it...
...Finally, the impression Mr...
...it can ruin a party faster than light beer or accountants...
...You may not have heard of George Bond or Arthur Samuels...
...Despite Mr...
...By now the Honest Abe fabrications are probably working their way into history texts while the bogus adages are being tracked down and stamped out by the Urban League...
Vol. 19 • November 1986 • No. 11
