Abstract

Woollcott and Fourier

In the following article, the author pays tribute to scribe Alexander Woollcott. When I first came to New York and met Woollcott, I did not connect him with the Woollcotts of Red Bank or the curious old Fourierist building, half barracks and half hotel, to which I had been taken to call as a child. At that time, when I had just started working in the office of "Vanity Fair," to which he was a distinguished contributor, I saw his more erinaceous side. I provoked him to ferocity one day by asking him who the Father Daffy was to whom he was in the habit of referring as if he were the Apostle Paul. I had spent a year and a half in France during the war but had never happened to hear of Father Dully; and I had not grasped the fact that Woollcott had created for himself a calendar of saints whose glory must not be questioned.