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perfunctory that the two young people seem almost to have been ordered to bond. Wisecracking protected Kaufman from having to peer too deeply into the human swamp, as O’Neill did. Plainly, he was not nearly so great a figure as O’Neill. But it was his very emotional astringency, his horror of the false—even of the heartfelt—that made him so representative a figure of this age of urbanity; for much of the drama, and much of the sensibility, of the twenties was based on a repudiation, whether comic or tragic, of the easy sentimentality of an earlier age. And this, in turn, explains why both Kaufman and O’Neill strike us today as “modern,” though almost none of their predecessors do.

Kaufman was absolutely and utterly a creature of Broadway. He rarely strayed beyond walking distance from Times Square; almost all of his friends were show folk. He kept his job at the Times years after he no longer needed the measly salary, though it’s hard to say whether this was owing to his love of the milieu or his ever-present fear of failure. And Kaufman wrote about what he knew; Broadway gave him his setting, his characters, and his language. The characters in The Butter and Egg Man, for example, speak an almost impenetrable vaudeville slang—“I done six clubs for the wow at the finish, and done it for years!” “Butter and egg man” was the Broadway pejorative for one of the freshly minted midwestern plutocrats who could be counted on to back stage productions; the play’s main character is a starstruck rube from Chillicothe, Ohio, whom a scheming producer separates from his inheritance. (The play-within-the-play features a trial scene, a brothel scene, and a dialogue in Heaven between a rabbi and a priest who “talk about how everybody’s the same underneath, and it don’t matter none what religion they got.”) Kaufman’s Beggar on Horseback concerns a gifted young composer who agrees to marry a bubble-headed heiress in order to avoid having to write commercial dreck for the theater. June Moon takes up the same theme in reverse: the main character, Fred Stevens, is a sentimental dolt who makes a smash debut as a Broadway songwriter.

The surfaces of Kaufman’s plays are so glittery, and the characters so busy amusing themselves and one another, that it’s easy to miss the underlying ferocious disgust with the business ethic and middlebrow taste; in fact, Kaufman’s contempt for the world of success is scarcely less bitter than that of his more notoriously sardonic contemporary, H. L. Mencken. Many of Kaufman’s plays have a character like Fred Stevens, or like Leach, the movie scenarist from Dulcy, who has achieved commercial success through sheer force of mediocrity. Most of Beggar on Horseback, which Kaufman wrote with Marc Connelly, consists of a surreal dream sequence in which the bohemian hero, Neil McRea, is trapped in the bourgeois world of his in-laws as inescapably as O’Neill’s Rob is on the farm. Neil’s new father-in-law, dressed in golf knits, barks into the phone, “Buy 18 holes and sell all the water hazards!” while six corporate automata march about mindlessly repeating “Overhead,” “turnover,” “annual report.” Neil is gradually driven insane by the cacophony of banalities; he murders the entire family, only to be subjected to a trial that turns into an antic musical comedy, in which he is pronounced guilty of writing unpopular music. Kaufman somehow managed to churn out one popular and meticulously crafted play after another without ever compromising his view that the marketplace demands craven pandering.

FOR ALL HIS MOODY silences and his tics, George Kaufman was a gregarious man who loved company and who seems to have hated to work alone. In an era when everyone worked with everyone, Kaufman was the arch-collaborator. He worked with fellow playwrights like Marc Connelly, novelists like Edna Ferber, even greenhorns like Moss Hart. And he was a charter member of the great floating cocktail party–poker game–mutual admiration and ridicule society of the day. Hart, still a wide-eyed observer of the Broadway scene in the late 1920s, records