i

ABOUT two years ago, when Donald Ogden Stewart had just abandoned the bond business for the pursuit of a literary career, he was asked to write a brief account of his life, with the following result:

“Donald Ogden Stewart was born in Columbus, Ohio, on November 30, 1894. In his early years he gave manifold evidences of his gift for humour, and many of his bright childhood remarks are still related by his proud mother upon the slightest provocation, or in fact, upon no provocation at all. There were others, however—principally among the guests at the hotel where Donald lived—who did not think that this child prodigy was so funny. Mr. Stewart bears a long red scar on his head—such as might be made by a brick or other missile—as mute evidence of one little red-headed girl’s particular lack of appreciation of his early humorous efforts.

“At the age of 14 he was sent to the Phillips Exeter Academy because it was a good preparatory school for Harvard. In the fall of 1912, Mr. Stewart entered Yale. While at New Haven, Mr. Stewart went out for all the athletic teams possible, and was always among those of whom it was said in the college paper at the end of the season, ‘And we also wish to thank those members of the third and fourth teams who have worked so faithfully without reward—and yet we cannot say without reward—for they are rewarded with the knowledge that they have worked for old Yale,’ etc.

“Mr. Stewart was graduated in 1916 and selected a certain large public service corporation as the scene of his future success. It was his desire to start at the bottom and work up; the first half of this wish was readily granted him. After a brief, inspiring visit with the head of the corporation, Mr. Stewart was sent to the Birmingham, Alabama, office which was about as far away as the head of the corporation could possibly send Mr. Stewart. While in Birmingham, Mr. Stewart took a keen interest in his job and read the complete works of Anatole France, George Moore, Fyodor Dostoievski, Henrik Ibsen, Gustav Flaubert and many others. He also intended to read the Alexander Hamilton business course, but did not quite get around to it before he was sent to the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, office.

“In Pittsburgh, Mr. Stewart took a keen interest in his job and read the works of Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Nietzsche, G. B. Shaw, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and others. He also started to take piano lessons and got as far as ‘The Happy Farmers.’ He was just on the point of reading the Alexander Hamilton business course when he was sent to Chicago. After ten months in Chicago, Mr. Stewart joined the Navy. Having never been on a ship or the ocean in his life, he was at once appointed an instructor in Practical Navigation, Seamanship, Naval Ordnance, and Signals. This experience was invaluable and Mr. Stewart came out of the Great War a deepened man.

“His old position with the great corporation awaited him and Mr. Stewart went back to the work of the world in the spring of 1918. He was sent to the Minneapolis office, where he took a keen interest in his job and read the works of H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, and H. L. Mencken; met F. Scott Fitzgerald, and led two cotillions. He was also preparing to take up the Alexander Hamilton business course when he accepted an offer of employment in Dayton, Ohio, with a financial organisation.

“Mr. Stewart spent a delightful year in Dayton where he learned to play golf, and read the works of Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve, Casanova, Swift, James Branch Cabell, James Huneker, and William Congreve. He also renewed his piano lessons, getting as far as the Bach three-part inventions and ‘Easy Classics.’ On December 30, 1920, he read the first volume of the Alexander Hamilton business course, after which he decided that he wanted to go in for literature. In January, 1921, Mr. Stewart came to New York City to find a job (literary if possible), but there were so many symphony concerts that month that he didn’t get a chance to look around until the middle of February.

“The idea for the Parody Outline of History came to Mr. Stewart in March, while hearing Mr. Mengelberg conduct the National Orchestra in the Pathetique Symphony.

“Mr. Stewart is unmarried and very near-sighted. He is fond of Beethoven, Scotch, and Max Beerbohm.”

ii

So much for Mr. Stewart’s life up to the publication of The Parody Outline of History. In the following year (1922)—but let Mr. Stewart again speak:

“After the appearance of the Parody Outline Mr. Stewart, having heard a great deal about Europe in the course of his naval war service in Chicago, decided to go abroad. Many of his friends recommended Paris as a pleasant city in which to work, so Mr. Stewart went to Paris, which he found indeed very pleasant but not for work. So after a brief period of recuperation he journeyed to Vienna where he grew a splendid red beard and wrote Perfect Behavior.

“Finding, however, that the beard was exhausting too much of his creative energy, Mr. Stewart shaved and went to Budapest, where he enjoyed himself immensely at the rate of 700 Hungarian crowns to the dollar.

“But in the middle of October he began to feel strangely uneasy, and as his condition grew steadily worse he consulted an authority and learned, to his surprise and delight, that he was going to have another book.

“Bidding a hasty farewell to the gay life of Budapest, which now seemed all too empty and frivolous, Mr. Stewart journeyed with his precious secret to Capri, there, under the ever-blue Italian skies, to await the happy event. He prayed with all his heart that it might be a novel, for he had never had a novel, although he had wanted one all his life. But early in February, 1923, Mr. Stewart discovered that the ‘little stranger’ was to be another satire, and although it was a bit of a blow at first, after a few days he got over his disappointment at not having a novel; and when, in June, Mr. Stewart returned to America he took with him, proudly, his little third book, which he had christened Aunt Polly’s Story of Mankind.”

iii

Alexander Woollcott speaking in “Shouts and Murmurs” in the New York Herald of March 18, 1923:

“Stewart is a preposterously tall, blonde man, with an enviably large amount of his twenties still to squander. His profile is faintly reminiscent of that most delightful and fantastic of all creatures, Winsor McKay’s Gertie. He knows more about the music than he does about the books of the world, and has, we suspect, gone in for reading so recently that he probably thinks all novels are like Joyce’s Ulysses. We ran across him here and there in France last summer, starting out on one pilgrimage together from the Café Valterre, in the Place Stanislas at Nancy, that celebrated restaurant which set forth marvellous dishes even when the bombs were dropping on Nancy every evening and there was not another good meal to be found anywhere else in Lorraine. Up the street somewhere was M. Coué, healing away for dear life, and on the outskirts of the town an imitation Oberammergau was in full swing. But the two of us were minded rather to move on to the battlefields, and for the purpose engaged a morsel of a French car, driven by a youngster who spoke a horrible dialect he had picked up three years before from the Americans stationed at Neufchateau. The memories of that rambling excursion into a cheerless countryside, still littered with the rusted snarls of barbed wire and still gashed with the trenches no one has had time or strength to obliterate, are brought flooding back by the inscription in the copy of Perfect Behavior lying open here on the desk. It is inscribed: ‘In memory of terrible days and ghastly nights on the battlefields of France,’ and winds up with this disconcerting proclamation: ‘“It shall never happen again.”—Stewart.’

“Marc Connelly was agitated the other day by the receipt of a cablegram from Stewart in Capri which read thus:

“‘The Queen of Sweden is here. What shall I do?—Stewart.’

“Connelly’s cabled reply must be admired equally for its sagacity and its thrift. It was: ‘Compromise.’”

Books by Donald Ogden Stewart

Sources on Donald Ogden Stewart