Bright Boy

BEFORE I FORGET -- Burton Rascoe-- Doubleday, Doran ($3).

Burton Rascoe has always been a bright boy. As an urchin in Kentucky, a lad in Oklahoma, a stripling in Chicago, a young man in Manhattan he showed the same kind of promise as the Napoleonic private with a marshal's baton in his knapsack. On the U. S. literary front of 15 years ago, if they wanted a man to encourage the van or to harass the foe from the rear, Burton Rascoe was just the man. This week, when he published his long-promised reminiscences, he was no longer even a front-line sentinel. The tide of literary battle had flowed over him, left him well in the rear, guarding nothing more strategic than a few abandoned ammunition dumps. How his militant literary career soared so far is the explicit theme of Before I Forget; why it never rose far is the implicit question which between-the-line readers may be able to answer for themselves.

Voluble, enthusiastic, intellectually naive, Before I Forget, especially in its earlier sections, is an appealing record of how a bright, ambitious local boy can fool the city slickers by making good. On the whole, it is a saddening commentary on the changes & chances of U. S. literary life. Burton Rascoe's 44-year-old writing is a shocking reflection on his newspaper training. Such sentences as these, though not typical, are fairly representative: "My grandmother's conversation with, and admonitions to, me were never prefaced by, or attended with, those proverbs from, or references to, the Bible, which were so much the parts of speech of her sisters. . . . Therefore, for a very long time even the fact that my mother and father were acquainted with one another any more than a servant and mistress are acquainted was kept by them a secret. . . ."

Arthur Burton Rascoe came from such acorny beginnings that sentimentalists of success might well have expected his career to achieve oaklike stature. Born (1892) in Fulton, Ky. where his father tended bar, he spent his barefoot childhood in the peaceful democracy of a small provincial town. Shortly before Prohibition shut down on Hickman County, Father Rascoe moved his family to the cruder boom environment of Shawnee, Okla. There Burton grew up with his peers, played football and baseball, fell in love and out again. But inwardly he was not so conformist; at 15 he confided to his journal: "My inward thoughts on things now differ so greatly from the thoughts of people about me that if I should speak out I should offend or horrify them. I love these people, and I want to learn from them, so I keep my peace, which is, I think, good manners. . . . This would be a strange and impossible world if it were inhabited by truth-telling men, men who always spoke out just what was in their minds."

At 16 Burton was president of his high-school class and editor of the student magazine. From his experience as newspaper carrier he evolved a more efficient scheme for handling deliveries, soon became a factotum in the newspaper office. As assistant in the public library, to him for advice came worried clubwomen with literary papers to write; soon he had a strictly private little business of ghostwriting. By the time he had graduated from high-school no one was surprised that hardworking, bright young Burton Rascoe had decided to go on to the University of Chicago.

The University was a disappointment, but Chicago was not. For two years Rascoe struggled to combine the academic with the journalistic life, finally decided that college was interfering with his education, and quit to join the staff of the Chicago Tribune as a reporter. Rascoe's eight years on the Tribune changed him from a wide-eyed, indefatigable tyro into a slightly narrower-eyed, still indefatigable professional. He quickly graduated from mere newshawking, soon held down half-a-dozen jobs, among them assistant Sunday editor, rotogravure editor, editor of the weekly "highbrow page," editor and chief critic of the book-review section. When the regular dramatic critic, portly Percy Hammond, was sent to Versailles to help cover the Peace Conference. Rascoe pinch-hit in that department too. For this array of jobs, and with a wife and two children to support, he was paid the princely sum of $37.50 a week (afterwards raised to $60). He managed somehow, and enjoyed it. "Being literary editor, writing of books, staging fights among the literati, hailing meritorious new authors, stirring up the intellectuals, attacking the censorship, fighting what I believed to be the good fight for life and literature--that was what pleased me most then; that was what I considered true fun." For the policies and politics of the Tribune itself he had little sympathy, says "the paper has had no political influence as long as I have been acquainted with it." He tells of a stereotyper who made enough money to buy an apartment house by standing bets against any candidate or project approved of by the Tribune. For Joseph Medill Patterson (then the paper's co-publisher), whom he calls "a renegade Socialist," he had a qualified admiration; for the other head man, loud-speaking Robert Rutherford McCormick, no audible admiration at all.

As literary middleman Burton Rascoe did the briskest trade in Chicago, if not in the U. S. His particular specialty was James Branch Cabell. before Cabell had much market value. So long and loudly did he cry up that stock that when best-selling Jurgen appeared, it was dedicated to him. Looking back now on the commodities he dealt in, he betrays a curious attitude: "All art is the result of frustration . . . energy deflected from its normal course. . . ."

Rascoe's reminiscences stop with his departure from the Tribune and Chicago (he was fired by Publisher Patterson at the behest of Christian Scientists, for having mentioned Mrs. Eddy disrespectfully), and it is a good stopping place. In Manhattan he wrote the first and most successful of the literary gossip columns ("The Book-man's Daybook") for the New York Tribune; his bank account increased but his reputation waned. Like an ageing squirrel-whose preternatural agility is not what it was and whose chatter has long ceased to astonish the natives, Burton Rascoe is content with the quiet perch of monthly reviews for Esquire. His journalistic epitaph was penned some time ago by his fellow columnist, tart Isabel Paterson: "As a critic he is a wonderful newspaper man."

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