BSI ARCHIVAL HISTORY

and its Irregular recorder

salute the anniversary of

Christopher Morley’s birth
and

The Grillparzer Club of the Hoboken Free State’s

efforts to keep the Memory green.

(May 3, 2105)


In 1937, Henry Seidel Canby was succeeded as editor-in-chief of the Saturday Review of Literature by the historian and critic Bernard DeVoto, and one of the new editor-in-chief’s decisions for remaking the magazine was to drop in 1938 Christopher Morley’s “Bowling Green” column of literary chitchat that had been part of the weekly since its creation in the mid-1920s. (Wallace Stegner, The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto.) In hurt, Morley left the magazine, and had far less to do with it henceforth. (Others took over his second column there about the publishing industry, “Trade Winds,” Bennett Cerf especially.)


To remain connected with Manhattan literary life, and perhaps because he found it hard to work productively at home, Morley took an office atop a four-story walk-up at 46 West 47th Street, which he called 46W47. It was in the same neighborhood (the SRL was over at 25 West 45th), little further away from Christ Cella’s on East 45th, and just a few doors down the block from the Midtown branch of Billy the Oysterman, which would now increasingly eclipse Cella’s as Morley’s watering hole and luncheon spot with Irregulars like Edgar W. Smith and others.


It was a pleasure to place a chapter of my historical novel Baker Street Irregular at 46W47, using that as the chapter’s title. My protagonist Woody Hazelbaker is summoned there cryptically by Morley on the afternoon of June 28, 1940, to be one of a small number of Irregulars to meet the equally real Canadian industrialist William Stephenson, whom Winston Churchill had just sent to New York to run the Secret Intelligence Service station there, and to undermine U.S. neutrality so Britain could survive its war against Hitler. Woody has never been to 46W47 before, and is startled by its appearance by the time he and Fletcher Pratt get to the top of the stairs and inside:


Any woman alive would have condemned that room. Beneath curtainless windows a scarred desk stood on a threadbare rug. Rough bookcases lined the walls, but books and papers were everywhere, including the floor. Ashtrays overflowed. So did the wastebasket. Dust was thick everywhere and hung in the smoky air where sunlight fell through unwashed windows. Chris sat on the edge of an ancient davenport in close conversation with two other men. One was the big frame and boyish face of Gene Tunney, but the other was a stranger, short and thin with a freckled face, blue eyes, and brown hair going gray. At the far end, Rex Stout sat in a dilapidated armchair with his feet on a footstool, arms around his knees. Elmer [Davis] occupied a smaller chair nearby, and Edgar Smith perched between them on an upturned beer crate.


That description in my novel was based on pictures of 46W47 in Steven Rothman’s The Standard Doyle Company, and on what I’d been told about it in 1998 by Miriam “Dee” Alexander, Edgar W. Smith’s Irregular secretary at General Motors Overseas Operations during 1946-49: “I remember huffing and puffing up, up to the 4th floor walk-up Morley office with both Morley and Smith. The ‘office’ was a dusty, musty, books-and-papers strewn room with an ancient sagging sofa. I was quite appalled. Obviously no one had been there in years to clean. I said nothing to Morley or Smith who were laughing and not noticing their surroundings. (It was so good to eventually huff and puff my way downstairs again!) Those two always had a good time together — wherever!”


So it was a pleasure to discover, quite recently, an interview with Morley at 46W47 that appeared in the New York Times Book Review of November 15, 1942. By that time Morley had worked in that hideaway office of his for some four years. They had been productive ones, including the writing of his greatest bestseller, Kitty Foyle, the story of an Irish Philly working girl versus Philadelphia’s WASPish Main Line (where Morley had been born, in 1890 in Haverford). The novel had been published in 1939, and turned into a movie in 1940 starring Ginger Rogers, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the role. Now Morley was writing a new semi-autobiographical novel, Thorofare, and soon would go to work on his book for the BSI’s 1944 Trilogy event, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson: A Textbook of Friendship.


By the time of this 1942 look at 46W47, Morley had grown a beard. (There are before and after pictures of him with the article’s appearance in the Times Book Review, below.) His work there was assisted by his bright young secretary Elizabeth Winspear (sic), whom he later called “task force and test tube” in dedicating Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson to her. But by that time she had gone off to war as an officer in the WAVES, and would remain in the Navy after the war was over. The article startles us by stating that The Three Hours for Lunch Club “is now disbanded,” without elucidation; and of mention of The Baker Street Irregulars, there is none. But the week it appeared, Morley and Edgar W. Smith were exchanging letters on BSI matters more or less every other day (see Irregular Records of the Early ’Forties, p. 162), and getting ready for the 1943 annual dinner in January.


















My discovery of this Times Book Review article came just in time to mention in my latest BSI Archival History volume, Sources and Methods, which came out in late January this year. I wish, though, that it had come to my attention years ago, in time to use one detail in it in my novel Baker Street Irregular, to which Sources and Methods is a companion volume. That detail is a large map of the Atlantic Ocean on 46W47’s wall, to which Morley drew his interviewer’s attention — saying that “The Atlantic is the hero of [Thorofare]—the ocean that is the thoroughfare between England and ourselves, that bridges us together and that keeps us apart.” I would like to have had him say that to Mr. William Stephenson in the 46W47 chapter of Baker Street Irregular, at that fateful hour in June 1940 when Britain stood alone against Hitler. And with Edgar W. Smith, Elmer Davis, Fletcher Pratt (who’d huffed and puffed up those stairs to Morley’s aerie with Woody Hazelbaker), Rex Stout, and Gene Tunney as an Irregular audience and amen chorus.


“Anglo-American osmosis,” Morley calls it in this interview article. The Three Hours for Lunch Club and The Baker Street Irregulars are no less, and both themselves are, to borrow Morley’s word, “textbooks of friendship.”


      Jon Lellenberg

      “Rodger Prescott,” BSI



The article is Robert van Gelder, “An Interview With Christopher Morley,” November 15, 1942.