The Press: Tower

Professor John Erskine of Columbia University, who has since come to fame as a novelist (The Private Life of Helen of Troy, Galahad, Adam and Eve), was sent to France during the War as education chief for the A. E. F. Early in 1918 he visited the front lines of the French Army. He wrote some sonnets about what he saw and felt. Some of the verses, "At the Front . . . First Impressions," he gave to Franklin Pierce Adams ("F. P. A."), now the New York World's famed colyumist, then a staffman on The Stars & Stripes, the A. E. F. newspaper edited by Private Harold Ross (now editor of The New Yorker). But John Erskine's sonnets never appeared in The Stars & Stripes.

The officer in charge thought them "unsuitable."

Last week F. P. A. printed them in his "Conning Tower." Excerpt: Others behind the conflict, safe and far, Still wage with lips their travesty of war; We catch the rumor when the cannon cease. Here at the front, when most of the cannon rage, The dream-touched actors on this mighty stage In silence play their parts, and seem at peace. Lean, swart and homely, wise and sardonic, "F.

P. A." is, like all his leading New York contemporaries except Heywood Broun, no native New Yorker. In 1903 he inherited a colyum, "A Little About Everything" in the Chicago Journal. Next year he went to the New York Evening Mail to conduct a feature named, by Publisher Henry L. Stoddard, "Always in Good Humor." When in 1913 he transferred to the Tribune, he thought up his heading "The Conning Tower" to be non committal, "so that whatever I printed would not seem incongruous." The Tower was transplanted in 1922 to the World, where it shared the feature page with Heywood Broun and Critic Alexander Woolcott until they departed. The Tower's following is a loyal one and accounts for much of the World's circulation among sophisticates. Famed contributors include Colyumist Adams' good friends Ring Lardner, John Held Jr., Dorothy Parker, Sigmund Spaeth, Groucho Marx, Samuel Hoffenstein, Arthur Guiterman, Newman Levy. Author-Lawyer Levy ("Flaccus") wrote in 1923 what has since become the Conning Tower's "most requested" poem for reprinting, a rollicking narrative called "Thai's." First stanza: One time, in Alexandria, in wicked Alexandria, Where nights were wild with revelry and life was but a game, There lived, so the report is, an adventuress and courtesan, The pride of Alexandria, and Thais was her name. . . . Some of the best contributions are anonymous, so far as the public is concerned. Last week the Conning Tower's annual prize (a watch) was awarded to one M. F. for some verses entitled "David, Aged Four." Christmas is a bitter day For mothers who are poor; The wistful eyes of children Are daggers to endure. . . . My purse is full of money, But I cannot buy a toy; Only a wreath of holly For the grave of my little boy. Well known to Tower readers are Colyumist Adams' hobbies and hates, which he sets forth each Saturday in a Pepys-style diary of the week. Hobbies are tennis, poker, pool, old songs, anagrams, Latin verse, his farm at Westport, Conn., his sons Anthony, 4, and Timothy, 2½.