Wolcott Gibbs Tonight: Part 1 of "One with Nineveh" -- Gibbs's reencounter with Lucius Beebe

Lucius Beebe in 1939

"At Yale, it was his merry custom, on returning from weekends in New York, to attend his first Monday-morning class in full evening dress, wearing a monocle and carrying a gold-headed cane, and the [Yale Daily] News, stunned by such gloss in a contemporary, reported that 'two hemispheres knew him at nineteen.'"

-- Wolcott Gibbs, in "One with Nineveh" (1956)

by Ken

Curiously, in the New Yorker archive presentation of the issue in which "One with Nineveh" first appeared (March 24, 1956), the piece is identified as "Fiction." Not in the magazine itself, mind you, just in the archival presentation apparatus. In the magazine it appears with no identification or description other than the title at the top and the Gibbs byline at the end. Still, it's abundantly clear that the piece is not fiction. (In the Gibbs anthology More in Sorrow it appears in the section "Some Matters of Fact.") It seems to fall somewhere between a "profile" and a personal history related to the subject.

In this first part of "One with Nineveh," Gibbs recalls his acquaintance with Beebe during his previous incarnation as a bon vivant and habitué and chronicler of what he dubbed Café Society.


TO READ TONIGHT'S FIRST INSTALLMENT
OF "ONE WITH NINEVEH," CLICK HERE

"Situated at the confluence of the Tigris and Khosr, Nineveh was an important junction for commercial routes crossing the Tigris. Occupying a central position on the great highway between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, thus uniting the East and the West, wealth flowed into it from many sources, so that it became one of the greatest of all ancient cities." (crystalinks.com)


TOMORROW in WOLCOTT GIBBS TONIGHT: In the conclusion of "One with Nineveh," Gibbs is welcomed into the Virginia City, the private railroad car of Beebe and Clegg


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY TONIGHT,
WILL CUPPY TONIGHT, and now WOLCOTT GIBBS TONIGHT):
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