Wolcott Gibbs Tonight: "To a Little Girl at Christmas" -- meet Comrade Jelly Belly

Westbrook Pegler (1894-1969) was, essentially, a professional anti-communist, with a particular anti-union phobia -- and a consuming loathing for Franklin D. (and Eleanor) Roosevelt. Eventually his right-wing views became so extreme that he was invited to disassociate himself from the fanatically right-wing John Birch Society. Wikipedia notes that his "distinctive writing style was often the subject of parody," citing this very piece by Wolcott Gibbs.


"[The future Santa Claus] sat out World War I in a hospital for the criminally insane, having prudently assaulted a six-year-old girl on the very day his draft board invited him to call. He was pardoned in 1919 at the special request of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, whose name happened to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and who even then displayed a strong affinity for the unbalanced."

-- Wolcott Gibbs, in "To a Little Girl at Christmas" (1949)

by Ken

In his New Yorker obituary of Gibbs (which we read last week), E. B. White noted the special pleasure his long-time colleague and friend took in his parodies.

[H]e had absolute pitch, which enabled him to become a parodist of the first rank. The parodies are in a class by themselves: Huxley, Hemingway, Marquand, Saroyan, Lewis, Pegler, Maxwell Anderson, the rewrite men of Time -- a long list. . . . Parody was his favorite form, because it was the most challenging. ("I found them harder and more rewarding to do than anything else.")

The most famous of the Gibbs parodies, no doubt, is his extended 1936 verbal drawing and quartering, "Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce," of "ambitious, gimlet-eyed, Baby Tycoon Henry Robinson Luce, co-founder of Time, promulgator of Fortune, potent in associated radio & cinema ventures." We'll sample just a tiny bit of its verbal delights in the click-through.

Comrade Jelly Belly

FOR MORE ON GIBBS'S AMAZING LUCE PARODY
AND TO MEET COMRADE JELLY BELLY, CLICK HERE


TOMORROW in WOLCOTT GIBBS TONIGHT: Part 1 (of 2) of "One with Nineveh," Gibbs's 1956 account of his first meeting in a long while with journalist, bon vivant, gourmand, railroad historian, and publisher Lucius Beebe


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY TONIGHT,
WILL CUPPY TONIGHT, and now WOLCOTT GIBBS TONIGHT):
Check out the series to date

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