A writer's block

It could be, on any given day, the electric coral socks. Or maybe the red half-glasses. Either way, he's always got an arresting Kandinsky kind of a thing going with striped shirts, patterned suspenders, chalk-striped suits and a parliament of bow ties. The man would feel positively naked without the whole package.

Spooner, 70, is a managing partner of Smith Barney and resides in a corner office with wraparound windows high above the dank, dreary part of Boston we call the financial district.

For decades, he has balanced life as a successful stockbroker with writing of all persuasions. Nine books and counting, magazine work, a couple of unpublished screenplays, a delightful column in the Improper Bostonian. I'm sure there exist other money guys with a novelist's eye, but, like the Himalayan Yeti, I've yet to meet one.

Spooner's favorite writing haunt is the Charles Street eatery Toscano, where he will scribble at night, alone at a table there. He is something of a Boo Radley at the place, a solitary figure in a corner absorbing the conversations around him.

Spooner's father was a partner in a hoary New York brokerage firm and leaned hard on the kid to follow suit. Said kid did, but planned to stick around Wall Street for a few years and then bolt.

"Then," he says, "I made this incredible discovery that the market is more about human nature than math." This explains a sublime chart of fear and greed, populated by salivating wolves, on an office wall.

What changed Spooner's life was a nonfiction book he wrote in 1971 under the pen name Brutus titled "Confessions of a Stockbroker, A Wall Street Diary." It made serious dough, and that tided him over during the gunmetal gray market of the 70s. "It kept the family alive," he recalls.

More important in the long run, he adds, "It brought me money from all over the world from people who wanted to invest with me."

Anyway, Spooner was in two Hasty Pudding shows as a Harvard undergraduate in the class of 1959. Like many who participate in them, he had more fun on that stage than anywhere else in the place. At his 45th reunion four years ago, he was prepared to add money to "a really small scholarship fund" he had created as his contribution to the Harvard College Fund.

But a guy named Jack Megan, who runs the university's Office for the Arts, approached Spooner about giving his money to help refurbish the Pudding's charming and dilapidated building on Holyoke Street. Spooner was stunned, then delighted, and did precisely that.

This was followed by radio silence from Harvard until about six weeks ago, when two envoys from the Harvard development city-state invited him to lunch.

This pair first explained that a major donor had been given 30 seats in the new, 500-seat theater which can be inscribed with anything he wants. The words will be on small silver plaques - 2 inches by 4 inches - mounted on the left arm of each one.

Spooner took this in and asked, "What do you mean, 'anything'? Song titles, things like that?"

Yes, they replied, and there are another 30 seats up for the same treatment.

"How much does it cost the next person?" he asked. They answered, "You've already bought them." It turns out that Spooner was being honored in this same way for being the first to steer money toward the reconstruction.

"No strings?" No. "I can say anything I want?" Yes.

"This," he tells me, "is the most interesting thing Harvard has ever done."

A week later, Spooner had come up with a list of inscriptions for each of his 30 seats, every choice incubated with Oban single malt scotch over ice.

He began with songs from the two Pudding shows he was in. (He played the Dutchess of Wopping in "Busy Bodies" in 1959.) Then "Eight years of college down the drain" from "Animal House" and "We are all in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars" from Oscar Wilde.

He needs his Hemingway - "Isn't it pretty to think so?" from "The Sun Also Rises" and Fitzgerald - "So we beat on, boats against the current" from "The Great Gatsby." Then Gilbert & Sullivan, Kipling, Mickey Spillane, Cole Porter, Joni Mitchell, Samuel Pepys, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Dickens, you name it.

Also: "A little madness in the spring, is wholesome even for a king" from Emily Dickinson and my personal favorite, "No poems can please for long that are written by water drinkers," compliments of Horace.

Spooner wisely sought spontaneity from the outset. No agonizing over selections. He freely admits he'd probably have a slightly different mix had he done it today. And, of course, lists trigger other lists.

Me, I'd need O'Hara in there. Dylan, Babar, and Saki too. But that's the beauty of lists. There's no accounting for taste. What they are is a great way to find out what's under your hood.

Imagine the shock of a person who, years from now, sits down amid the Spooner Anthology and reads on his chair, "Juno is a man" from Mickey Spillane. I remark to Spooner that his seats could turn out to be the way he is best remembered.

Fine by him.

"I'd rather have one of these plaques than my name on Widener Library."

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com