Books: Bestseller Revisited, Mar. 14, 1960

MAY THIS HOUSE BE SAFE FROM TIGERS (374 pp.)—Alexander King—Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

Ex marks the spot of Alexander King. He is an ex-illustrator, ex-cartoonist, ex-adman, ex-editor, ex-playwright, ex-dope addict. For a quarter-century he was an ex-painter, and by his own bizarre account qualifies as an ex-midwife. He is also an ex-husband to three wives and an ex-Viennese of sufficient age (60) to remember muttonchopped Emperor Franz Joseph. When doctors told him a few years ago that he might soon be an ex-patient (two strokes, serious kidney disease, peptic ulcer, high blood pressure), he sat down to tell gay stories of the life of all these earlier Kings.

The tales (Mine Enemy Grows Older) were tall, often funny, sometimes vulgar, and full of invective. After several plugs on the Jack Paar show, Enemy zoomed to a hard-cover sale of 150,000 copies. Its sequel, May This House Be Safe from Tigers, reached the top of the bestseller list last week, rocketed along at a clip of 1,500 copies a day. Plainly, Alexander King threatens never willingly to become an ex-autobiographer.

Angry Old Man. King is a superior monologuist, even though his prose is not housebroken and some of his stories seem to have filtered through sewer pipes. In style and substance, he is a throwback to the iconoclastic '20s, one of the last of the angry old men who picked up the idol-smashing habit from H. L. Mencken.

Like Enemy, Tigers celebrates oddballs Author King has known. The title itself comes from a Zen Buddhist pal who always uttered "his senseless little orison" on leaving King's apartment. After three years, King exploded, "What is the meaning of this idiot prayer?" "Well," said the hurt friend, "have you been bothered by any tigers lately?"

Then there was Rose O'Neill, a plumpish pixy who invented the Kewpie doll. After a wall switch broke, the lights in her house stayed on uninterruptedly for 16 years. Rosie had a favorite cat that entered her bedroom each morning through a private little six-inch door and dutifully placed a dead bird at the foot of her bed.

The most poignantly comic weirdie of the lot was Waldemar Schindl, a soulful inventor living in an isolated hamlet in the Austrian Alps. When King visited him in the late '20s, Schindl unveiled a machine that looked like a badly made cast-iron bird cage. The contraption gave an enormous heave and one of the wires stabbed at a piece of paper. It suddenly dawned on King that "that poor old chowder-head had — all by himself up here in this moonstruck eyrie — reinvented the typewriter."

The Sausage Machine. The chief character in Tiger is, of course, Author King. He is occasionally graced with a valid in sight, but it is his hates that King truly prizes, and he has collected an awesome passel of them. He loathes beatniks ("clinical psychopaths, overt pansies or fulltime dope fiends") and millionaires. He detests TIME, LIFE (where he was once an associate editor) and FORTUNE, closely followed by The New Yorker ("frequently stinks up the neighborhood") and Look. Art critics are "rapacious vermin," and modern art is in a "putrescent coma." The theater world is full of "exhibitionistic freaks" and "cold blooded connivers."