Books: Period Wit

JOHN KENDRICK BANGS—Francis Hyde Bangs—Knopf ($3).

Sleek, Bourbon-faced John Kendrick Bangs, who died in 1922, was a humorist, a lecturer, an editor, a critic, a librettist, a politician—and successful as all six. Lillian Russell played in his chipper Gilbertian revision of The School for Scandal. As a lecturer he earned $500 a week for discreet blends of laughter and sentiment on such subjects as Salubrities (nice celebrities) I Have Met. As an editor he diapered the old Life’s first years, brightened up “The Editor’s Drawer” of Harper’s Monthly, ran Harper’s Weekly until Colonel George Harvey crowded him out. He set a whole generation’s style of tame, facile humor, in which the cheerful shades of the great pseudophilosophized and gagged politely (sample: Wellington pulls a campstool from under Napoleon). His House Boat on the Styx became a best-seller and was credited with having relieved the U.S. reading public of its fear of hell.

So prolific was Bangs that the number of his pseudonyms put a strain on his wit. They included Shakespeare Jones, Gaston V. Drake, Periwinkle Podmore, Horace Dodd Gastit, A. Sufferan Mann. In politics he was defeated for Mayor of Yonkers, but became a very useful bird dog for the imperialism of Roosevelt I and General Leonard Wood in Cuba (on which he wrote a book) and in the Philippines. Had Wood been nominated in 1920, Bangs would probably have gone to the Court of St. James’s. In the reconstruction of France he more or less worked himself to death. On his deathbed he said: “Give Billy Phelps my love, and tell him that although I’m prostrate I know the world is safe in his hands.”

Son Francis Hyde Bang’s biography is a rather docile portrait of a personable, energetic, businessman-of-letters making good through capitalizing a bottomless facility for thin wit. It also evokes a rather sterile era in U.S. cultural history. The merry dinners of Bangs and his circle still echo bloodlessly in Manhattan’s Century Club, and their humor, which used to roll the genteel families of this continent in the aisles, still lives palely in a few faculty-censored class annals. Today it seems hard to believe that a whole generation could laugh at both Bangs and Mark Twain without changing color between.