“I should not say so! South Broadway, I guess. I’ve just motored up from Florida. But your speaking of West Broadway reminds me: I’ve written a piece for George Lorimer of Saturday Evening Post. You see my book, West Broadway, brought me so many letters my arm ached from answering them. What car did you drive? Where d’y’ get gas in the desert? What’s the best route? And thus et cetera. So now I have wrote me a slender essay answering everything that anybody can ask on this or other transcontinental subjects. Mr. Lorimer will publish, and who knows—as they say in fiction—it might make a book afterward.”
“How’s Florida?”
“I left it fine, if it doesn’t get in trouble while I’m away. I’ve bought a ranch, for fruit only, on the East Coast, between Palm Beach and Miami, but not paying these expensive prices, no, not never. And I shall live there for better but not for worse, for richer, but most positively not for poorer. I pick my own alligator pears off my own tree unless I want to sell them for fifteen cents on the tree. Bathing, one-half mile east by motor.”
“Been reading your piece, ‘How I Have Got So Far So Good,’ in John Siddall’s American Magazine.”
“Yes, I thought I would join the autobiographists—Benvenuto Cellini, Margot Asquith, Benjamin Franklin, et Al, as Ring Lardner would insist. Do you know Ring? He and I are going to have one of these amicable literary duels soon, like the famous Isn’t That Just Like a Man? Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are! which Mrs. Rinehart and Irvin Cobb fought to a finish. But speaking of sport, I have discovered my grandest favourite sport, in spite of motoring, which is deep sea fishing, nothing less. Let me inform you that I landed a 9-pound dolphin which he is like fire-opals all over and will grace the wall of my dining-room no matter if all my friends suffer with him the rest of their lives. He was a male dolphin; get that! It makes a difference from the deep sea fishing sportsman’s standpoint. And this place of mine at the end of South Broadway where I can roll cocoanuts the rest of my life if I want to is at, in or about Delray, Florida. D-e-l-r-a-y; you’ve spelled it.”
“We’re publishing your new book on how to get thin, Tomorrow We Diet.”
“Oh, yes. Well, I am several laps ahead of that. Now, I am going up to my home in Madison, Connecticut, to work. Later, I’ll maybe drive out to Yellowstone Park or some place. Well, I might stay here at the Brevoort for a month; run down to Philadelphia, maybe. Did you know I once wrote a book for children that has sold 500,000 copies? And, besides a young son whom I am capable of entertaining if you’ll let him tell you, I have a few ideas....”
Hold on! This isn’t so easy as it looked.
Probably Nina Wilcox Putnam is inimitable. This one and that may steal Ring W. Lardner’s stuff, but there is a sort of Yale lock effect about the slang (American slanguage) in such books as West Broadway which is not picked so easily. As for the new Nina Wilcox Putnam novel, Laughter Limited—if you don’t believe what we say about N.W.P. inimitableness just open that book and see for yourself. The story of a movie actress? Yes, and considerable more. Just as West Broadway was a great deal more than an amusing story, being actually the best hunch extant on transcontinental motoring, outside of the automobile blue books, which are not nearly such good reading.
And then there’s Tomorrow We Diet, in which Nina Wilcox Putnam tells how she reduced fifty pounds in seven months without exercising anything but her intelligence. But if you want to know about Nina Wilcox Putnam, read her story in her own words that appeared in the American Magazine for May, 1922. Here is a bit of it: