Books in Brief: Whose Little Boy Are You?

WHOSE LITTLE BOY Are You?, by Heywood Hale Broun (St. Martin’s/Marek, 224 pp., $14.95)

Heywood Hale Broun, one of the few entirely respectable network television personalities, here tells his own version of growing up. As the only child of famed newspaper columnist Heywood Broun and ardent feminist Ruth Hale, he had, Understandably, a difficult time of it. As if it wasn’t enough to have to figure out what the Algonquin Round Table was all about, Woodie had to grow up under “progressive” parents. This meant, among other things, calling them both by their first names, promoting socialism, and coping with freedom from most discipline and all religious instruction. Broun’s parents were both “moderns” trying to right the world’s wrongs, and both were rather shy when it came to their son. “In fact, of course, shyness is just the inability to be open and spontaneous and is frequently merely a nice word for cold,” writes Woodie. He searched for reassurance and affection and was invariably denied both. What this eventually led to was four years of psychoanalysis and this book. Broun comes to terms with his parents and himself—albeit by way of such lines as “So repressed was I, indeed, that I passed through the years of adolescent rebellion with no more than a little additional withdrawal.” Whose Little Boy Are You? (which young Woodie answered with “You know goddamn well whose little boy I am!”) is a painfully intimate memoir, and one that tells more about the Brouns and the rest of the Algonquians than most of the books and articles on the subject. Broun, the author of the stylistically richer A Studied Madness (1965), about acting, and A Tumultuous Merriment (1979), about sports, should write more books. joe mysak

JM

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Joe Mysak

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WHOSE LITTLE BOY Are You?, by Heywood Hale Broun (St. Martin’s/Marek, 224 pp., $14.95)

Heywood Hale Broun, one of the few entirely respectable network television personalities, here tells his own version of growing up. As the only child of famed newspaper columnist Heywood Broun and ardent feminist Ruth Hale, he had, Understandably, a difficult time of it. As if it wasn’t enough to have to figure out what the Algonquin Round Table was all about, Woodie had to grow up under “progressive” parents. This meant, among other things, calling them both by their first names, promoting socialism, and coping with freedom from most discipline and all religious instruction. Broun’s parents were both “moderns” trying to right the world’s wrongs, and both were rather shy when it came to their son. “In fact, of course, shyness is just the inability to be open and spontaneous and is frequently merely a nice word for cold,” writes Woodie. He searched for reassurance and affection and was invariably denied both. What this eventually led to was four years of psychoanalysis and this book. Broun comes to terms with his parents and himself—albeit by way of such lines as “So repressed was I, indeed, that I passed through the years of adolescent rebellion with no more than a little additional withdrawal.” Whose Little Boy Are You? (which young Woodie answered with “You know goddamn well whose little boy I am!”) is a painfully intimate memoir, and one that tells more about the Brouns and the rest of the Algonquians than most of the books and articles on the subject. Broun, the author of the stylistically richer A Studied Madness (1965), about acting, and A Tumultuous Merriment (1979), about sports, should write more books. joe mysak