Books: Current & Various: Oct. 8, 1965

THE WORLDS OF ROBERT E. SHERWOOD, Mirror to His Times by John Mason Brown. 409 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

The editor of Vanity Fair looked up from his desk. And up. And up. Looming above him was a young man who stood six-foot-seven and was wearing kilts. He said he wanted a job, and Editor Frank Crowninshield, delighted to have such a piece of bric-a-brac on the premises, stowed him in an office occupied by two other odd objects—Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley.

During the next 25 years, Robert Emmet Sherwood became successively a well-known movie and book reviewer, magazine editor, script doctor, playwright (Idiot’s Delight, Abe Lincoln in Illinois, There Shall Be No Night) and speechwriter to President Roosevelt. In this effusive biography, Critic John Mason Brown leans heavily on the lighter side. The reader hears all about Sherwood’s sensational buck and wing, his low-keyed Algonquin witticisms, his red-eyed passion for high-stakes poker, model airplanes, and croquet in Central Park at $10 a wicket. Unhappily, Biographer Brown requires 386 pages to take his subject from 1896 to 1939; and there he stops, just as Sherwood’s most interesting years are about to begin. A sequel is promised.

THE STRONGHOLD by Meyer Levin. 319 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

What nobody will question is that Nazi SS men were often savage sadists, that Jewish survivors of Buchenwald endured incredible torments, and that a bunch of high-ranking political hostages bottled up in a Bavarian castle keep and threatened with execution would try very hard to escape their German jailers. What few will accept is the mawkishly pro-Semitic suspense novel in which Meyer Levin (Compulsion; The Fanatic) fiddles with these familiar themes.

MY DOG TULIP by J. R. Ackerley. 159 pages. Fleet. $4.95.

Published in England nine years ago and only now exported to these shores, My Dog Tulip divided dog lovers there into two neat halves: they either loved it or loathed it. Both responses are acceptable. There is no denying that Bachelor Ackerley has described with great literary skill, affection and wit the ties that often bind man to dog—in this case an Alsatian bitch. There is also no denying that Ackerley endlessly dwells on what some circles consider a dog’s least lovable proclivities: elimination and procreation.