“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
1921 A Parody Outline of History
1922 Perfect Behavior
1923 Aunt Polly’s Story of Mankind