The Passing of the Thanatopsis

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

Being the Narrative of the Rise, Exploits and Decrepitude of a Famous New York Poker Club

THE Thanatopsis—less frequently but more accurately known as the Young Men's Upper West Side Thanatopsis and Inside Straight Club—is no more. At least, I suppose it isn't. Three of its most reliable members—Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly and I—have handed in our resignations, and it seems hardly probable that the remaining ten or twelve members will care to continue forlornly holding the meetings every Saturday evening.

We have resigned because poker (with just three final rounds of jackpots, everybody up at nine o'clock in the morning) is a preposterous waste of time. That's what we say—a waste of time. The persistent rumors that we resigned from pique at our losses are unworthy of those who circulate them. It just happens to be true that recently Mr. Connelly (as always) and Mr. Broun and myself, for a change, did suffer some rather severe misfortunes; but, as we always say, it all evens up in the course of a year. To be sure, George Osborne said the same thing to Dobbin as long ago as the pre-Waterloo chapters of Vanity Fair, but it's still as true as ever. Just about.

No, our objection to poker is that it's a waste of time. Just what we will do with the time thus saved has not yet been definitely decided. Broun will doubtless write a few novels, or plan to. I remember his first announcing his contract to write The Boy Grows Older. I might (and, in fact, will) add that it was at a birthday dinner of mine when he explained that it was to be done in a few months. That careful craftsman, Alice Duer Miller, knowing how much other work he had on hand, protested that he would not have time. '''Well," muttered Broun doggedly, "I'm not very busy Friday afternoons."

Connelly, I imagine, will revert to rum at the Players' Club (the game, not the potion), and I will spend some quiet evenings alone with my books.

When Friendship Fails

IT was more than the mere waste of time that led to our resignation from the Thanatopsis Club. Some of the finer fibered members have been feeling for some time that, beneath its surface jollity and cameraderie, there was brewing a distinct animosity. We had all been very good friends at the start, and most of us are still speaking. But hardly a member has been adroitly called home when he was several hundred dollars ahead, who has not been sped on his way by the hearty hope of all his pals that he would fall down and break his neck. Indeed, the only brother who enjoyed the unbroken good .will of the fraternity was Brother Marc Connelly, whose charming, childlike and quite incurable curiosity as to what the other guy might be holding made him an invariable loser. In fact, there were many weeks when his royalty checks from Merlon of the Movies and To the Ladies were laughingly divided every Saturday evening among his cronies of the Thanatopsis, who voted him a jolly good fellow, you may be sure.

Other jolly good fellows, at one time or another, have been Jerome Kern, who is a good composer; Robert E. Sherwood, the bitter movie critic who, unfortunately, became extremely married; Montague Glass, cautious but dependable; John V. A. Weaver, who lost in one perfectly delightful afternoon the entire royalties of In American for the preceding six months, and so had to sort of eat around for some time; Donald Ogden Stewart, who, at poker, is even funnier than in his books; and, bless his heart, Prince Antoine Bibesco, the engaging Minister at Washington from Roumania.

In all honesty, I cannot keep up a pretense that all the casual visitors to the Thanatopsis were jolly good fellows. As I recall, William Slavens McNutt proved hopeless when regarded as a victim. And Haldemann-julius, that snappy publisher out Kansas way, who is always breaking out like a rash in the magazines with his positively last, final offer to send you, postpaid, an entire set of Oscar Wilde for five cents—Haldemann-julius left none of his profits with his hosts.

The Ladies' Auxiliary

NOR did the only two women who have ever been tolerated in the game prove to be either so jolly or so good as we could have wished. Indeed, both Neysa McMein and Mrs. Raoul Fleischmann (known to the Middle Western press as "Quincy's talented daughter " and "Quincy's untalented daughter", respectively)—both of these fair visitors played shrewdly, pocketed their winnings, and refused ever to play again on the grounds that the stakes were too high.

Then there was that least jolly fellow of them all—a certain rich man who was brought in one night by a sponsor, who explained that he would be almost too easy. Next day we looked the fellow up in Dun and Bradstreet, which gave his fortune as $60,000,000. We wrote that excellent bureau a little note.

"Dear Sirs:" we said, "He now has $60,000,210."

The passing of Prince Bibesco caused a mild hilarity in the Thanatopsis. His seeming unawareness of what was going on led to the friendliest welcome being accorded him. With a delicate accent that is simply unreproducible in type, he would inquire in the midst of a painful pot: "Does the—what do you call them? I forget. Oh, yes—does a sequence excel in competition with three facials?"

"He probably means", someone would explain gruflly, "does a straight beat three kings?"

"For Ways that Are Dark—"

BUT when it began to dawn on the guileless Thanatopsis that the Prince knew full well what a straight would beat, and that, as a matter of fact, he was beaming at the time on a brave but busted flush, a dark suspicion was born among the members that Balkan diplomacy was lifting its ugly head in their innocent revels. It was found, to be sure, that one could get even with the Prince by referring to his game as "funny without being Bulgar", or by pretending to confuse Roumania with Serbia. But on one occasion, he achieved a feat in poker so excruciating that these minor reprisals were felt to be inadequate. Then was Herbert Bayard Swope, the thunderous editor of the World, inspired to an immortal dismissal. It was an expulsion necessary and just.

"Boy", he cried to the nearest flunkey, "boy, the Prince's hat and cuffs!"

But, as I have said, it gradually became apparent that poker was undermining the amiability of even the most equable members; that its acid was corroding the oldest friendships. For instance, this must have dawned on Henry Wise Miller one evening. (Mr. Miller is the only member of the Thanatopsis who is in trade, being literary only by marriage. He represents Alice Duer Miller at the meetings, for her only game is cribbage, and she is no whiz at that.) One evening, Brother Miller stepped outside to spank his automobile, or whatever it is that motorists do to their cars when they step outside to look at them. Even as he stepped, on this occasion, he cried for help. There, half way down the street, a gang of larcenous thugs were struggling with the locked machine.

"Ah, moi!" cried Miller, in his admirable French. Now if, on that evening, he had been a jolly good fellow—but his brothers just looked at the preposterous, hoarded mass of chips from which he had been thriftily investing as the game waned. They looked at it and grinned.

"Ah, moi!" The voice of Miller sounded fainter and fainter down the block.

"I open it," said F. P. A. "I open it for $13-50

Sins of the Father

THE same suspicion of unfriendliness must have dawned, too, on the usually successful and not at all jolly Heywood Broun this Fall when, after losing $250 one night at the Thanatopsis, he went into the country for a rest and, amid somewhat complicated pastoral scenes, next night lost $850 more. Thus one week-end had cost him a sum which, if properly invested, would, in time, have provided two much needed years at Hamilton College for H. 3rd.

Yet, when he came plaintively back to town and told his story to the brethren, they did not say, "Heywood, draw on me for anything you may need." They did not say, "Tough luck, old fellow", nor silently press his hand in the quiet way of strong men. Not they. They did, in fact, none of these things. Without exception, his pals almost died laughing.

The aforesaid suspicion certainly ate into the heart of John Peter Toohey, the author of Fresh Every Hour, who gave the Thanatopsis its name and is usually addressed as "Our Dear Founder ". One night he arrived late at the game, explaining with difficulty that he had had the hiccoughs for forty-eight hours and might die if any one held three aces on him. Every one laughed heartily and there was only immense good humor when, from time to time, our Founder would withdraw to the hall and do something to himself that seemed to help for a while. But finally he grew desperate.

"I have heard", he said, "that a last resort is to stand on your head. I am afraid that I shall have to ask two of you gentlemen to hold my feet." But this intrinsically entertaining appeal came at a time when the game was growing haggard and when the winners, at the slightest interruption, would seize the chance to slip of! home to the wife and kiddies—the dirty crooks. "I am afraid—", our Founder began again, but no one was listening.

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At last, when the game did dissolve, two brothers agreed to drop Toohey at the Presbyterian Hospital on their way home, inasmuch as they would be passing it anyway. But, by this time, he was so discouraged about the human race that a nervous panic seized him when he found it would be necessary to wake the night nurse. Indeed, he was so alarmed at the way she would take this interruption of her slumbers that when she did come drowsily down, the hiccoughs had been scared out of him, and have not recurred since.

Thanatopsian Anecdotes

THOSE of us who have now withdrawn from this corroding atmosphere will not be missing so very" much after all. The famous banter of the Thanatopsis, the wit which was supposed to glance dazzlingly off its stacks of chips, has been grossly exaggerated and, under present conditions, would, I think, be pretty forlorn.

To be sure, George S. Kaufman has been known to lift the general average by occasional contributions, as when he upset the club's gravity one evening by observing casually that he was descended from old Sir Roderick Kaufman, who went on the crusades. Fourteen eyebrows rose in well bred surprise, and Kaufman added, hastily, "as a spy".

But, for the most part, the Thanatopsis jokes have become routine; and I, for one, shall not greatly miss hearing Kaufman, every time he holds an ace and a nine, say he is going to make an ace-nine bet. Or every time he has a two in the hole and a three is dealt him, hearing him complain bitterly that he is being tray-deuced.

I was amused enough when, on the night I forgot to bring a promised liqueur to the game, Mr. Broun offered to go back to my house for it. He would always, he said, be glad to walk a mile for a kiimmel. But I grew rather tired of his little joke about the port he always served on rainy nights. It was a second rate rabbinical beverage; but, as Broun used to say, with a fatuous delight in his own (I suppose it was his own) wit, "Any port in a storm".

I shall not even miss the singing. There was the song which escaped into the outer world through the medium of F. P. A.'s column. It ran something like this:

"Oh, Mr. Connelly, oh, Mr. Connelly,

I'll wager thirty dollars on this hand;

I think its pretty fair,

Perhaps I have a pair;

Have you got thirty bucks at your command?"

"Oh, Mr. Broun, oh, Mr. Broun,

I'll call you, for I think you are a loon.

As upon your hand I gaze,

I see just a pair of trays."

"What have you got, Mr. Connelly?"

"A pair of sevens, Mr. Broun."

No, the delights of the Thanatopsis were not sufficient to outweigh its evils. Thus, a club that was formed on the Butte Montmartre during the war, passes into history. It was started there by Harold W. Ross, a buck private who was editor of the Stars and Stripes and who, at Nini's little hole-in-the-wall near the Place du Tertre, used to show a good time to the sundry lieutenants who used to come up to Paris for a week's leave and who, sometimes, left despondently for their outfits the second day. (Ask one of them who is now in the faculty at Johns Hopkins.) Back in New York, this game gradually took form as the weekly Thanatopsis. Now that, too, has passed.