Montaigne with a Brogue

MR. DOOLEY REMEMBERS--THE INFORMAL MEMOIRS OF FINLEY PETER DUNNE-- edited by Philip Dunne. 307 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.

If U.S. bartenders love to sound off on politics, the blame can be put squarely on Mr. Dooley. It has been more than 30 years since this genial bartender with the rich Irish brogue dispensed his political wisdom in the nation's newspapers, but it still has a round, rich taste. In those days, Mr. Dooley was called the "wit and censor of the nation"; and his creator, that hard-drinking, fun-loving Chicago newspaperman, Finley Peter Dunne was the best political satirist the U.S. has ever produced.

The turn-of-the-century U.S. was ripe for satire, and Dunne missed few opportunities. The U.S. had developed imperial pretensions. There were "robber barons" and muckrakers, Prohibitionists and faith healers. Mr. Dooley matched wits with the mighty, and he usually put them down. One of the mightiest was Theodore Roosevelt, whose name Mr. Dooley always managed to mispronounce. "Whin Thaydore Rosenfelt kisses a baby," Mr. Dooley told his pal Hinissy, "thousands iv mothers in all corners of th' land hear th' report an' th' baby knows its been kissed an' bears th' hon'rable scar through life. Twinty years fr'm now th' counthry will be full iv young fellows lookin' as though they'd grajated fr'm a German college."

Dunne's satire was a gentle nudge in the ribs, not a body blow. "Rayformers is in favor iv suppressin' ivrything," Mr. Dooley once said, "but rale pollyticians believes in suppressin' nawthin' but ivi-dence." A favorite Dooley target was John D. Rockefeller: "He looks afther his own money an' th' money iv other people. He takes it and puts it where it won' hurt thim an' they won't spoil it. He's a kind iv society f r th' previntion iv croolty to money." Mr. Dooley deplored the jingoism of the Spanish-American War: "Whin we plant what Hogan calls th' starry banner iv freedom in th' Philippines an' give th' sacred blessin' of liberty to th' poor, downtrodden people iv thim unfortunate aisles--dam thim--we'll larn thim a lesson. We can't give ye anny votes because we haven't more thin enough to go around now, but we'll threat ye th' way a father shud threat his children if we have to break ivry bone in ye'er bodies. So come to our arms, says we."

Down on Gin & Joyce. By the time Dunne got around to writing his memoirs in 1935 (published now by his son), he had given up Mr. Dooley, and his humor had soured somewhat. He wrote his memoirs in plain cantankerous English; there was less Irish charm and more Irish temper. To begin with, Dunne felt ill at ease writing about himself without Mr. Dooley as a shield: "Disrobing in public is not to my taste. There are intellectual and spiritual pudenda as well as physical. The more clothes I put on, the better I look. I plead guilty to preferring port and Montaigne to gin and Joyce or creme de cacao and Andre Gide."

Dunne still wrote warmly of Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain and the Irish patriot Michael Collins, but he was harder on his enemies. When Nicholas Murray Butler joshed him about his weight, Dunne snapped: "Yes, my fat goes under my belt, but yours goes under your hat." At the 1916 Republican Convention, writes Dunne, "Henry Cabot Lodge would have given an eye for the nomination. Or perhaps that is going too far. Let us say he would have sacrificed his dearest friend for the honor."

Dunne loathed no one more than H. G. Wells, who belonged, he said, to the "Take-It-Aisy School of Socialism." With great fanfare, writes Dunne, Wells once met the "taciturn, cynical Lenin with his yellow skin drawn like parchment over his high cheekbones, his little restless eyes, his great bald head looking as if it might have been hewn out of yellow pine with an adze. And here was little Wells, earnest, honest, conceited, describing in his falsetto voice the British conception of a Secialist Utopia of semidetached villas with a pot of geraniums in each window. When the interview ended and our hero strutted out, Lenin gave one of his arid chuckles and said to Trotsky: 'Ah, the little bourgeois; ah, the little bourgeois!' That was all."

Conversion to Capitalism. While he was writing Mr. Dooley, Dunne had been the scourge of Wall Street and all its "malefactors of great wealth." But when fame came his way, Dunne preferred the company of Wall Streeters. When he managed to go broke at the height of the bull market in the 1920s, his well-placed friends bailed him out, and one left him a legacy of half a million. In his memoirs, Dunne describes how he pushed Harding for the presidency for no better reason than that he looked like a President and had a noble handshake.

But Dunne deserves to be remembered for his more lighthearted days, when not even Montaigne was Mr. Dooley's master: "Thrust ivrybody but cut th' ca-ards." "A vote on th' talleysheet is worth two in th' box." "Most vigi-taryans I iver see looked enough like their food to be classed as cannybals."

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