New at IWP Books: Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia, 1933.

Arthur Krystal (A Word or Two Before I Go, 2023) on L.P.S.:

Shoulders and elbows were also necessary to secure my 1922 second edition of Trivia by Logan Pearsall Smith, published in 1917 by Doubleday, Page & Company, as well as my 1921 first edition of More Trivia, published by Harcourt, Brace, and Company. I hadn’t heard of Logan Pearsall Smith (the best name ever for an essayist, though he mainly composed vignettes in “moral prose,” some no more than half a page long) until Gore Vidal wrote a piece about him for the New York Review of Books in 1984. Smith may not be to everyone’s taste, but to me he was the adult in the room: sensible, sensitive, and looking in my mind like Leslie Howard. Well, he didn’t as it turns out (Google Images set me straight), but he looks every inch a man of letters, without my knowing, of course, what that looks like.

Paging through the essays today, I see that reading him at too young an age is an affectation, while reading him in old age calls into question the slightness of many of the pieces. There may be no happy medium. Here is the entire last entry of More Trivia; it’s called “The Argument”: “This long speculation of life, this thinking and syllogising that always goes on inside me, this running over and over of hypothesis and surmise and supposition – one day this Infinite Argument will have ended, the debate will forever be over, I shall have come to an indisputable conclusion, and my brain will be at rest.”


New at IWP Books: Eugene and Roswell Martin Field, 1896, Echoes from the Sabine Farm


Patrick Kurp on Franklin Pierce Adams.


F.P.A. at IWP Books (Update):

  • Tobogganing on Parnassus (1911)
  • In Other Words (1912)
  • By and Large (1914)
  • Weights & Measures (1917)
  • Something Else Again (1920)
  • So There! (1923)
  • So Much Velvet (1925)
  • The Melancholy Lute (1936)

The W-Word by Theodore Dalrymple. “The idea that the sex of a person is simply a matter of choice is a giant ideological lie.”


Hope for Harvard? by James Hankins. “Few indeed were left who had seen the republic.”


From F.P.A., the Life and Times of Franklin Pierce Adams by Sally Ashley (1986):

As the months passed, the top of Frank’s rolltop desk became cluttered with clippings and newspapers, notebooks, and bits of paper, half-finished verses and cascades of mail from readers. As he worked, he smoked big black cigars and ashes fell everywhere, including all over his clothes, speckling them with little brown holes. His was an untidy mien, although he was unexpectedly fastidious, as when he compulsively scrutinized the column over the linotyper’s shoulder to catch last-minute mistakes, or displayed an intense concern with its cosmetics, how it looked with different sized type, boxes, italics, printer’s symbols, its paragraphs and verses clustered with an eye to attractive arrangement. He always filled his fountain pen with green ink and wrote his copy painstakingly with a distinctive wedding invitation handwriting. (p. 63)

In 1920, thirty-nine-year-old F.P.A.’s unique fame soared, more than the sum of its parts. Fifty years later Groucho Marx remembered that “in those days we all tried to get a piece into his column. When I finally got a little piece in it, just a little one, not more than an inch, I thought I was Shakespeare.” Morrie Riskind, who, with George S. Kaufman, wrote the scripts for the hilarious Marx Brothers movies, said, “It would be almost impossible [now] to realize the influence Frank Adams had in New York at that time. If Frank recommended a book, people bought the book. If he recommended a show, you went to see the show. He had a tremendous influence. It was the thing everybody read. You could become well known just by getting your name in there.” And after nurturing by F.P.A., a grateful John O’ Hara dedicated his first novel, Appointment in Samarra, “To F.P.A.” (p. 117)

F.P.A. easily tired of phonies and blowhards. One evening at dinner when Ellis Lardner asked him the kind of person he preferred, he answered, “People without pretense.” He took every opportunity to ridicule the self-righteous or those who pretended to know right from wrong in murky matters of the heart. “What has taken all our waking time,” he wrote, “is the compilation of a list of Ten Lists of ‘Ten Books I Enjoyed Most’ I enjoyed most. Thus far our favorite list is that of Professor Stuart P. Sherman. He says he enjoys Boswell’s Life of Johnson and Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Now, it takes all kinds of readers to make a world, and among them may be those who ‘enjoy’ Boswell; but it seems to us that anybody who says he ‘enjoys’ Samson Agonistes would rather do calisthenics in the bathroom mornings than play golf or tennis. To our unbigoted notion any list of Enjoyable Books that fails to include Davy and the Goblin is just ridiculous. … Reading of most of these lists leads to the conviction that they should be entitled ‘Ten Books I Want People to Think I Enjoyed Most.'” (p. 165)

…one morning he suggested that Hitler’s calendar should omit the months of “Jewn” and “Jewly.” (p. 201)


Franklin P. Adams at IWP Books:

  • Tobogganing on Parnassus (1911)
  • By and Large (1914)
  • Something Else Again (1920)

New in Books: Tobogganing on Parnassus, Franklin P. Adams, 1911. On F.P.A.: “In those days of wildly competing newspapers and hired girls, no New York City name was better known than Franklin Pierce Adams, no printed space more coveted than the top of his column, The Conning Tower….” The column ran from 1904 to 1937; “no other by-line before or since has matched that record of thirty-three straight years; F.P.A. was the Lou Gehrig of newspaper columnists, and while his column at its height was syndicated in only six papers, everybody read it.” (Sally Ashley, Franklin Pierce Adams, 1986)


New in Translations: Quintus Horatius Flaccus: A Selection of His Works, Rendered into English Verse by Two Boston Physicians, Fred Bates Lund and Robert Montraville Green, 1953.


New in Translations: My Head is in the Stars, by Quincy Bass, 1940.


New in Translations: The Odes of Horace, Translated by Leonard Chalmers-Hunt, 1925. Chalmers-Hunt was one of the founders (in 1933), and the first secretary, of The Horatian Society.


I spent a few days at the British Library making copies of translations. The numbers in parenthesis show the number of translations added to each of the different collections since the last update (all in all, 109). They are all available at Translations.

  • 185 (+10) translations of Solvitur Acris Hiems (Odes I.4)
  • 422 (+5) translations of Ad Pyrrham (Odes I.5)
  • 240 (+10) translations of Vides Ut Alta (Odes I.9)
  • 235 (+8) translations of Carpe Diem (Odes I.11)
  • 263 (+9) translations of Integer Vitae (Odes I.22)
  • 193 (+9) translations of Vitas Hinnuleo (Odes I.23)
  • 260 (+9) translations of Persicos Odi (Odes I.38)
  • 174 (+7) translations of Aequam Memento (Odes II.3)
  • 184 (+9) translations of Rectius Vives (Odes II.10)
  • 192 (+8) translations of Eheu Fugaces (Odes II.14)
  • 231 (+6) translations of Otium Divos (Odes II.16)
  • 290 (+6) translations of Donec Gratus Eram (Odes III.9)
  • 197 (+7) translations of Fons Bandusiae (Odes III.13)
  • 205 (+6) translations of Diffugere Nives (Odes IV.7)

New in Translations: Patrick Branwell Brontë, 1923, The Odes of Quintus Horatius Flaccus


Publication Date, 1483.


New in Translations: Robert Louis Stevenson, 1916, An Ode of Horace


A Restoration of Vitality to American Institutions by Philip K. Howard


Patrick Kurp on Rudyard Kipling.


New in Translations. As far as I can ascertain, these are not available elsewhere online:

  • Gilbert F. Cunningham, 1935, Horace: An Essay and Some Translations
  • G. R. Sayer, 1922, Selected Odes of Horace

IWP Books at The Horatian Society News Page.


New in Translations: John Conington, 1870, The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry of Horace


From Alfred Noyes, Portrait of Horace:

It is strange to reflect that the thread of the life we have been considering was so closely interwoven with those which played so memorable a part in the mighty pattern. In earlier days at Rome Horace may have actually seen Herod passing in pomp through the streets when he made his famous visits to that city. In later life Horace actually knew Tiberius who, in turn, became acquainted with a certain Pontius Pilate. The Roman poet may have touched the hand that, a little later, touched the hands of the most disastrous judge in the world’s history, the hands that, with the most modern of all gestures, waved the truth away and then vainly tried to wash themselves clean of the guilt. At only one remove the Roman poet had touched them, not knowing; and not knowing that on the cross of the slaves, of whom his father had been one, there was soon to die the supreme and perfect exemplar of his own poor, groping pagan words:

virtus recludens immeritis mori

caelum.


New in Translations: Alfred Noyes, 1947, Portrait of Horace


Collections of English Translations of the Odes. Update: One new collection, 75 new translations added to the others.

  • 175 translations of Solvitur Acris Hiems (Odes I.4)
  • 417 translations of Ad Pyrrham (Odes I.5) – NEW!
  • 230 translations of Vides Ut Alta (Odes I.9)
  • 227 translations of Carpe Diem (Odes I.11)
  • 254 translations of Integer Vitae (Odes I.22)
  • 184 translations of Vitas Hinnuleo (Odes I.23)
  • 251 translations of Persicos Odi (Odes I.38)
  • 167 translations of Aequam Memento (Odes II.3)
  • 175 translations of Rectius Vives (Odes II.10)
  • 184 translations of Eheu Fugaces (Odes II.14)
  • 225 translations of Otium Divos (Odes II.16)
  • 284 translations of Donec Gratus Eram (Odes III.9)
  • 190 translations of Fons Bandusiae (Odes III.13)
  • 199 translations of Diffugere Nives (Odes IV.7)

From T. R. Glover, 1932, Horace: A Return to Allegiance:

When Cervantes discusses Don Quixote with his friend in his sore need of introductory sonnets and marginal glosses, the friend suggests that he should write the sonnets himself; he could “father them on Prester John of the Indies”; and then he should gather phrases and scraps of Latin which he knows by heart or can easily find; the first specimen is from “Horace or whoever said it,” and the next is still more authentic, if anonymous —

Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas

Regumque turres.

Erasmus learnt all Horace (and Terence) by heart as a schoolboy. Luther himself has a strange Horatian echo in a serious passage; forgiveness is indeed a problem, nodus Deo vindice dignus (cf. A.P. 191). Ben Jonson translated the Art of Poetry and some of the Odes; Drummond of Hawthornden records how he repeated his version of Beatus ille, “and admired it” — the added clause suggests that Drummond felt as we all feel about other people’s translations of Horace, which in itself suggests fresh thought as to our poet’s appeal. Robert Burton in the Anatomy of Melancholy steadily quotes Horace; Sir Thomas Browne in his most serious moments turns to him, and Herrick in his lighter moments. Milton writes sonnets on Petrarch’s model, in which Cyriack Skinner may read his Horace again and find himself almost Maecenas.

But, as the Times reviewer of Miss Goad’s book said, Horace seems in Queen Anne’s reign to have burst upon the English world as a new and popular author. The urbanity, the quiet satire, the common-sense view of life, all appealed. Addison, Pope and Johnson are steeped in him. Fielding gave to The History of Tom Jones the Horatian motto, Mores hominum multorum vidit — cut away in the modern reprints. He inspires the light verse of Prior — “Horace is always in his mind”; William Cowper with his Classical scholarship, his humour, his grace, comes even nearer him; Burke quotes him to the House of Commons in arguing for conciliation with America, and Pitt for the abolition of the slave trade. Praed’s verse, all English light verse where touch and wit have play, goes back to Horace. William Makepeace Thackeray is a born Horatian, more Horatian perhaps than he guessed, anima naturaliter Horatiana. I opened the Roundabout Papers at random the other day for another purpose and I found three Horatian echoes in one opening, two or three words being enough to remind you. It was No. viii. Thackeray’s speech is full of Horace, and his heart; — no slight testimony to the worth of Horace. You might say that Horace never lost his seat in Parliament till Gladstone retired and solaced his retirement by translating him. Well, Thackeray is not the fashion of the moment with our modern novelists, nor is Horace. A clerical headmaster has, indeed, lamented that “the philosophy of the average public school product is still fundamentally Horatian.” To which The Times rejoins that one passage of his doctrine remains steadily ours; aequam memento, even if we didn’t quote it, was an integral part of out lives in the years of the war. A great old English characteristic — but is it also waning today? If the Horatian echo has dropped out of our talk and writing and out of our thought, perhaps we need not at once congratulate ourselves; let us remember that, when Jack Wilkes censured it as pedantry, Dr. Johnson at once rejoined: “No, Sir, it is a good thing; there is a community of mind in it. Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.” It is hard to feel sure that Parliament and the press, literature or reviewing, are any the saner for the decline of his influence; extravagance never had a friend in him. Horace belonged to the Augustan age, and perhaps he needs an Augustan age, or something like it, to appreciate him and that is the last description that will be given of this Twentieth Century. Mark Antony, so fat, is much more than Octavian our model, brilliant, disorderly, unstable; and, if Horace hated anything, it was the kind of life, public and private, that Antony affected. The triumphal ode for the battle of Actium is not the only evidence for this.