an open letter to will rogers

JOHN RIDDELL

containing some honest and homespun advice, for america's drug store cowboy, in his own most amiable manner

DEAR WILL,

Well, all I know is just what you write in the papers.

For instance, I been watching how you write all these Open letters to people in the newspapers and in the Saturday Evening Post and other places, telling em just what is wrong with them and what are their Faults and what they ought to do about it. I seen a lot of letters where you been explaining how to run the Goverment, or telling what you would do if you was A1 Smith or Coolidge, and I know it must keep you pretty busy taking care of everybody elses Business for them. Well, so I kinder figgered, if Will can write these open letters to people telling them where to get off, why then I dont see why somebody cant write an open letter to Will.

Poor Will, probly he gets pretty lonely writing all these Open Letters and nobody ever answers him, why I should think he would be darned glad to have somebody write back fer a change. Sometimes a feller gets a curious idear of himself, sometimes he begins to get Notions he is Mark Twain, or Mr. Dooley, and that he is a famous humorist who is sort of the Spokesman of the common people, and I kinder figgered it might be quite a relief for a feller like that to find out that this aint the case at all, and nobody would ever confuse him for a minute with Mark Twain or Mr. Dooley, and as for the common people, most of them I ever talked to think he is really pretty much of a Snob.

So that is why I am writing to you, Will, of course I dont want you to think this aint just a friendly little letter, I am being just as Friendly and good-natured and loveable as you was to A1 Smith, or to the Prince of Wales before you met him. I only thought it would be mighty nice for you to hear some familiar home talk for a change.

Course I may not always remember to spell my words wrong, but that shouldent mean I aint being just as quaint and homespun as you are. Just because my grammar is sometimes right, or I forget to put an e in shouldent, dont you think my Heart aint in the right place or I aint only kidding you just in fun, like you kid everybody else.

Well, I was glad to see the other day that you was all dressed up in a Cowboy outfit again and endorsing Beechnut gum. I never got around to tell you before, but I think that cowboy outfit was a swell idear. People know that a feller from the great Open spaces he wouldent do anything petty or mean, and so when you write a piece about how Cal is stingy or Mr. Edison is deaf or how A1 Smith has a funny accent, why people just put it down to how Cowboys act.

Because you see, Will, we know about Cowboys in the East here, too. In the East we got a kind of a local cowboy, he don't exactly swing a rope like you, but otherwise he is just the same. This Cowboy we got here is usually found standing in front of a drug store, or on the corner, and when the girls walk by he whistles There She Goes, There She Goes, All Dressed Up in Her Sunday Clothes, and everybody laughs. This Drug Store Cowboy usually has got quite a reputation as a wit, in fact, because whenever anybody walks by him he always makes some wisecrack about them out loud, and all the crowd hanging around him laugh so he wont make no crack about Them after they have gone.

Only there is just one Difference. This kind of Cowboy has got sense enough not to write down what he says for it to ever be read. He knows that cracks about people walking by sound funny when you make them out loud, but when you write them down they aint quite so funny, in fact they are kind of Sad, and he wouldent want people to find out that he was maybe just a boor who got his laughs by being Rude.

Now Will, I dont want you to think you aint funny, sometimes you are as funny as this other Cowboy. Course you know what you are doing, you been advising Presidents and Kings and Congress and Mussolini so long that you should ought to be able to advise yourself, but if' I was you, Will, if I was you I'd do like that other Cowboy. I'd realize that these cracks you make about people aint really literature, they are just cracks, and I'd stick to the Stage. As a comic writer you are a good vaudeville Actor.

Now I don't want you to get sore at what I am saying to you. Will, I mean it for your own good, I am trying to Help you like you have helped A1 Smith and Coolidge at one time another. Now I know it has worried you how critics aint been nicer about what you Write, it is because we are very fond of you and we kinder hate to see you wasting your time with Literature when you might still be known as a funny feller with a Rope, like when you first started on the Stage. I can remember when you first started, Will, you was being natural then, that was before you begun to write and get took up by Society.

Not that we aint very proud of you Will. We like to see you getting ahead in Society so well. Besides it is very flattering when you keep on pretending you are just one of us Common People, and go around Europe chewing gum and acting like Just Folks, when all the time you are hobnobbing with Kings and Princes and people that Matter. We are mighty glad you got so many nice friends, every time we read one of your articles we realize how many Important people you know, I guess nobody practically gets onto the Front page that you don't know him in a day or two, usually by his first name.

We like to see you get ahead like that, Will, and if it helps you to pretend that you are just a Regular feller like the rest of us, so you can call Alice Longworth Alice or play polo with the Prince, why that's fine. We are always glad to read in the Times that you just been to dinner with Henry Ford, or flew in a plane with Lindy, or done a little favor for the Hoovers, that's real nice to see you stepping out so well in Society. We know what a big Kick you get out of it, it dont fool us none when you say you are Democratic, but that only makes it all the funnier. I told you I dident want you to think you aint funny, because you are. •

Only I just wish you wouldent try to be funny in print. I wish for example you wouldent write a book like Ether and Me, although I got to admit the title of that book is a pretty good suggestion how to read it.

There now, you see, Will, thats the kind of a nasty crack I was talking about, thats the kind of a crack where it wouldent have hurt if I'd made it out loud, but when I come to write it down just now it sounded pretty mean. Shucks, Will, you ain't mean.

Well I got to run along, its been real nice to have this friendly little chat and let you know how a lot of us here in America feel about you. You got a lot of friends here that like to see you get up on a Stage and do rope tricks and make wisecracks out loud. But when it comes to writing, if I was you I'd stick to chewing-gum endorsements and let any other Literature alone.

Yours,

JOHN RIDDELL

BALANCING THE BOOKS

Random Reviews of Recent Volumes

This is written at that dead moment in midAugust, when the Fall Lists topple menacingly and threaten to descend at any moment like a great sea and swamp this department entirely. With one eye on this impending deluge, we can only make a distracted summary of the past season, acknowledge a few debts of gratitude for pleasant books, and then turn to face a descending wave of titles which we can never hope to breast before next summer, at the very earliest.

Continued on page 126

Continued from page 90

Nothing else can happen this year, of course, like All Quiet; books like that are rare in a lifetime; but several other books of this past spring and summer do not deserve to be overshadowed entirely by this German epic. This is the year, also, that Ellen Glasgow produced the most deft and gracious ironic novel of her distinguished career, which is to say that They Stooped to Folly is one of the subtlest and one of the most delicately devastating comedies of indiscretion in this American generation. It is delicious reading.

Then, too, this is the year (I am writing for posterity, of course) when the astute mind of Mr. Harrison Smith joined with the astute mind of Mr. Jonathan Cape and formed a publishing house that has the unprecedented, and deserved, good fortune to find themselves the proud publishers of some five best sellers within a month after their inception. These five books moreover represent only the first few pages of their distinguished catalogue; Heaven knows where they will be when that bag of tricks is fully opened. Already The Wave has proved tidal in its sweep toward the hinterlands; a strange colossal compendium of Civil War pictures, with the patience of a Dreiser novel but without its plodding dullness. See How They Run, on the other hand, is merely a feminine Van Vechten (if that is possible) ; and Ex-Wife is merely sensational. Adventures of an Outlaw, their non-fiction runner-up, presents a sadistic picture of convict brutality a century ago, purports to be authentic, and is certainly an exciting and savage document. The Unlit Lamp is by the author of The Well of Loneliness.

There is a vague madness in the prose of The Innocent Voyage by Richard Hughes that grows on you, like a nightmare picture. On a second reading the whole book still has the unreal, heartless comedy of a nightmare; things are all out of proportion; fancies swell and distort beyond all reason, and facts like life and death shrink away and spread out squatly in the far shadows; events follow with the dream-like inconsequence of Alice in Wonderland. In fact I found myself thinking constantly of Alice as I read: perhaps because the mood is a curious blend of Alice and Gulliver's Travels, or perhaps because the book is so profoundly true a picture of the child mind. "Children are mad," says Richard Hughes blandly; and this observation furnishes the simple and terrible mechanism of his satire: the normal run of adult life seen suddenly from this insane, unreal, diabolic and utterly innocent viewpoint. I have read few books at once so bitterly savage and so ineffably sweet and haunting.

Katherine Brush's Night Club is a group of short stories which I enjoyed, upon rereading, fully as much as when I first followed them with breathless interest in the magazines. Miss Brush's technique is so faultless as to be deceiving; the reader, flung headlong the length of her swift prose and bringing up with a crash against the last sentence, wobbles suspiciously to his feet and feels his forehead, and wonders if it were all a trick. But the effect lingers; there is a third dimension in all her stories; it makes Miss Brush an important as well as an entertaining writer.

Which brings us up roughly to the middle of August; and marks the last time that this department will be caught up for many months to come.