How to Disappear for an Hour
DODD, MEAD, $3.00
OF ALL the regular contributors to the New Yorker magazine, Geoffrey Hellman comes nearest to personifying the urbanity that the entire staff strives for so incessantly. A tall, affable man, born in New York City and educated at Yale, Hellman has the uncanny knack of writing prose that his employer, Harold Ross, does not mind reading. It happens, more or less coincidentally, to be excellent prose. How to Disappear for an Hour is a collection of his best pieces — several short biographical pieces (“profiles” in New Yorker parlance) and a generous sprinkling of random essays (“casuals”).
Hellman was voted the second wittiest man in his class at Yale ('28); or, to be exact, he polled second in the vote for the wittiest man. It is not this distinction, however, that guarantees him immortality, but the fact that he discovered a Pekinese dog listed by name in the 1936 Social Register. Hellman is an inveterate reader of reference books. Once, in a piece called “Mother Taft’s Chickens,” included in the present collection, he kindly pointed out to the administrative department of Taft School the addresses of several dozen graduates who had been listed as “missing,” and about whom the school had sent out a request for information. lie had found the addresses in the reference books on his desk. He remarked in this piece, “I can find out practially anything I want to know by calling up the Times, the Public Library’s information desk, the British Library of Information, the French Information Center, or by asking my sister.” It is no idle boast, either.
Everybody who stays at the New Yorker serves a term as an editor. Hellman is remembered as an editor whose ideas verged on parody. Once he suggested that the Talk of the Town department run a piece about the second oldest member of the Racquet Club. As his colleagues’ brows rose, he explained, “We’ve already had a piece about the oldest member.”It takes some people that way. It is Hellman’s foible — forgivable, perhaps, but not lovable — to write pieces about ornithologists and other people in the field of natural history; he has certainly written more such pieces than any other journalist, living or dead. The book includes profiles, written at generous length, of Dr. Frank Chapman, Curator of Ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History; Gilbert Grosvenor, Editor of the National Geographic; and Jean Delacour, Technical Adviser to the New York Zoological Society. I will trade any or all of these pieces, however, for the one in which he speculates about Mr. Smithson’s reasons for establishing the Smithsonian Institution. When he wants to be, Hellman is one of the funniest writers in the country; but I sometimes feel he thinks it isn’t quite respectable to be a funny writer. And maybe it isn’t.
RUSSELL MALONEY