MY FRIENDS LOOK BETTER THAN EVER

.... and they are John Hersey, Ernie Pyle, Will Irwin, MacArthur and Eisenhower, George M. Cohan and Otis Skinner, Charles Coburn, Jimmy Cagney, Woollcott, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Kathleen Norris- and many, many others who are remembered here in a casual chronology of conversations, stories, anecdotes, letters. Joseph Cummings Chase, an artist, is a familiar of the National Arts Club and the Players Club, an old New Yorker who has known many of its notables, and in this fragmentary recall has a little to say himself- about beauty, gentlemen, religion, taste, Christmas, the wars he fought in. A sentimental, quasi-philosophical, occasionally humorous appreciation which is not without its bless-you benevolence, this is for quieter, conservative tastes and has the touch of an old timer.