Books: Vanishing American

JOHN JAY CHAPMAN AND HIS LETTERS —M. A. DeWolfe Howe—Houghton Mifflin ($4).

The average American, asked who John Jay Chapman was, might emerge from a mental merry-go-round of Roy Chapman Andrews, John Hay, Gerald Chapman and John Hays Hammond with the guess that he was anything from a diplomat to a gunman; his times anything from the early eighteen hundreds to the present day. Fact is, he was a law-trained, wealthy politicaster, Manhattan-born, Harvard-bred and of old New England stock, who never held public office but was rampant in all the reform movements around the century’s turn; who wrote widely and voluminously on subjects ranging from children’s plays to the philosophy of Plato, from the Antigone of Sophocles to Al Smith; and who died, having known practically everybody and dabbled in everything, as recently as 1933. Tall, active, heavily-built, deeply bearded, John Jay Chapman had such a drastic sense of personal justice that he voluntarily burned his left hand (so badly that it had to be amputated) to expiate a blow he had struck a friend. His consciousness of civic responsibility was so strong that he went from Manhattan to Coatesville, Pa., on the anniversary of a lynching there, to conduct a public prayer meeting and so assuage his soul.

Such men, who combined a classic culture with an interest in public affairs and whose activities seemed to spread effortlessly in all directions at once, are now a disappearing U. S. type. In John Jay Chapman and His Letters the biographer’s style, more than faintly George Apley-esque, adds if anything to the museum atmosphere. Made up half of letters and half of commentary, its appeal for most readers will be in the peppery aphorisms of the man himself, scattered through his correspondence: “The essential lack in Wagner is after all a want of sanitary plumbing.”

“Santayana is a very agreeable man, with good manners. . . . He makes the impression on me of not knowing more about life than a kid-glove exposed for sale in a shop window.”

“Subtract the time-consuming possibilities from New England females and you’ll throw a large mass of very questionable produce on the market. Take eyeglasses from a virgin about here, and what are you going to do with the remainder?”

“I swear I am hungry for something to read every time I lay down Stevenson.”