Humanities' Playboy

AUTOBIOGRAPHY WITH LETTERS--William Lyon Phelps--Oxford University Press ($3.75).

Billy Phelps is the most popular professor Yale ever had. A curricular revolutionist, he started (44 years ago) the first college course in the modern novel. A superb showman, he made world headlines when he invited Gene Tunney, who had just cut Dempsey to ribbons, to lecture Yale students on Shakespeare. [An optimist, he finds Schopenhauer "a charming companion."] Friend of Galsworthy, Conrad, Henry James, Shaw, Santayana, Henry Ford, he is a "hero-worshipper" who once told Joseph Conrad he loved him; a critic who called the swing of Eddie Guest's poetry "perfect," Joyce, Dreiser and such moderns "rubbish."

Such is the phenomenal William Lyon Phelps, playboy of the humanities, Dale Carnegie of the critics, "the world's champion endorser." In the '20s William Lyon Phelps had passed his peak with undergraduates. But with U. S. readers he was at the height of his power, carried more weight than any critic before or since. To his praise were due the sensational sales of A. S. M. Hutchinson's saccharine If Winter Comes, of Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey, many another novel of equal flimsiness.

Last week William Lyon Phelps's Autobiography told the whole amazing story, from his happy, athletic childhood as a New Haven Baptist preacher's son to the latest Yale football team--a personal history whose like will probably not be lived again in the U. S. A giant, discursive volume, it reprints copiously from Billy Phelps's books and "As I Like It" column in Scribner's, contains random commentaries on everything from Browning to blowing smoke rings. Its main bulk is given over to his many letters from famed writers, to his reminiscences of 41 years as English professor at Yale. (He estimates that he has taught almost 17,000 students, the majority of whom "have had for the rest of their lives a strong affection for me.")

Contrary to the general impression that Billy Phelps likes everything and everybody (barring some modern novelists), he protests that he has at least a dozen prejudices: He hates musical comedies, trilogies, "female legs in the daily news," simplified spelling, contact as a verb, big books ("as depressing as soggy porridge"). His own big book runs to 986 pages, weighs 2 5/8 Ib. Now 74, white-haired, deeply tanned, still vigorous, though saddened by the recent death of his wife, William Lyon Phelps is retired from Yale and Scribner's, contributes a column to the Rotarian, picks an annual list of "best books," writes few book reviews. But his influence is by no means extinct. Still one of the most popular of lecturers, he estimates "I'll probably average a talk a day over the next year." These include the ten or twelve sermons he will preach in Boston, New York and New Haven churches, the 13 he will preach in the Huron City Church near his Michigan summer home.

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