The Jesters of “Who’s Who”

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 684, 8 June 1929, Page 18

The Jesters of “Who’s Who”

■DUCATED by God and self (private tutor Intervening). One of the first literary contributors to ‘Comic Cuts.’ . . . Recreations: Tennis, horse-racing, dancing in harmony with good-humoured ladies, and indulging m satiric banter with dull-witted gentlemen.” That you might dip into the sedate pages of “Who’s Who” and therein find humour, „would seem like expecting altogether too much of Old England; yet the humour’s there, as the above sample, culled from the halfcolumn of information about Dennis Bradley, the satiric historian and critic, adequately proves. And a little patience, an hour or two to skim through the one thousand or more pages, and lo! like shafts of sunlight out of the mountain of embalmed facts about Colonel This or the Hon. Mr. That, M.P., come gleams of humour . . . particularly from the paragraphs about writers.

George Bernard Shaw, for instance, chuckles into his beard and writes—trust Bernard to be funny—that among his exercises is “public speaking/* while his recreation is “anything but sport.*’ Then you get a glimpse of the Socialist: “Trade Union: Society of Authors, Playwrights, and Composers.” And finally: “Diet: Vegetarianism.”

Then there are the Sitwells, that extraordinary trio of English poets and ironists—two brothers and a sister. They are the literary freaks of the British Empire. With their usual originality and bizarre brilliancy they contrive between them to fill nearly a column with confessional gems.

Saehereverell Sitwell, the youngest and tamest of the trio, informs you that in early life he “avoided games and sought work; now tends more and more to avoid work and .seek recreations.” And those recreations are sufficiently diverting to satisfy the most finicky of us: “Catching that rara avis, the London omnibus, lis-tening-in, and Mr. J. C. Squire.” Conol O’Riordan, the Irish playwright and novelist, who was better known a few years ago as “Norreys Connell,” has one recreation: “Sleep.” And Vachell Lindsay, the American poet, leans toward what is for a poet a strange and incongruous recreative pursuit: “Motion pictures.” So there is yet hope for Hollywood! The people quoted, you will note, are all of the genus literati; and if you w-ould delve into “Who’s Who” for further shafts of fun like these, you must be warned that it is useless looking up the tabloided careers of retired politicians or retired colonels. Politicians or retired colonels are not funny.