Personality, Mar. 10, 1952

SIR ALAN PATRICK HERBERT, 61, represented Oxford University as an independent Member of Parliament for 14 years,* has written more than 40 books, a dozen musical comedies, and is the mainstay of Britain's humorous weekly, Punch.

Herbert is an extremely serious man who is always making jokes, and his biggest jokes are the most serious. But to take him seriously is to make him laff. To laff, as they tell you in Dublin, is not the same thing as to laugh; Laughter is a nervous reaction. Laffing is an expression of selfcriticism, of anguish.

Herbert is a logical man. He holds to logic as a drowning man clings to a paper straw. He would have liked to join the navy, the most logical and four-square of professions, if his father had not entered him for Winchester, with an equally austere and monastic tradition, and the law.

At Oxford he took highest honors in law, and could have been a professor, but chose, rather, the more exacting career of a free-lance writer. He was attracted by its uncertainty. He hates uncertainty.

At the outbreak of World War I he joined the Naval Division, and thinking that he would probably get killed, married Gwen Quilter. This, he reasoned, gave him as much happiness as he deserved, and her a reasonable chance of escape. And he very nearly did get killed in Gallipoli by the worst of deaths, dysentery. He recorded this campaign in his lightest verse, laffing at his miseries and terrors.

He wrote, then, a novel, The Secret Battle, which was received by good critics as the first important work of a deeply serious mind. This was quite true. But Herbert, when he saw the critiques, decided he would try a musical comedy.

Herbert has a facial tic, especially when, as usual, he is worried. His eyes blink of themselves. On a park bench or in a railway train he is often startled, in the middle of agonized reflection about the insecurity of everything in the world, by the rising up of some furious young woman to call a policeman or pull the communication cord. And when he tries to explain himself, he is seized with a stammer which still further alarms the lady. The situation, as he expected from the beginning, then becomes hopeless. The lady has hysterics, and Herbert can only laff at the whole disaster.

Punch invited him to join its staff on the strength of his light verse. He gave it in closely reasoned prose a famous course of law called "Misleading Cases," intended to make the English understand their danger among the imbecilities of English law. This made the English laugh and gave Herbert his reputation as a humorist. He himself was too surprised even to laff.

HE is a man who believes, on logical grounds, that humanity should be allowed any possible escape from its misery, any feasible alleviation of despair, such as a drink. He set out, therefore, in 1934, to prevent the whole 1,500 Members of Parliament, Lords and Commons, from taking any drink at all.

His argument was:

The Drink laws of England are foolish.

The Drink laws of Parliament, where anyone can get a drink at any time, do not exist.

If Parliament is brought under the law it will look like a fool.

Therefore, the way to make Parliament reform the laws of England is to make it look like a fool.