Sleepless night (in Israel), some of the time working on: Desmond MacCarthy, Humanities, 1954. Now at IWP Books. Chapters on Ibsen, Chekhov, T. S. Eliot, De Quincey, Sidney Smith, Leigh Hunt, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Swinburne, Edgar Allan Poe, & More. Two more books by MacCarthy to appear soon: Experience and Shaw.
New at IWP Books: Desmond MacCarthy, Memories, 1953. Chapters on Lytton Strachey, Kipling, Maupassant, Leslie Stephen, Hardy, James Joyce, Landor, Siegfried Sassoon, Logan Pearsall Smith, Max Beerbohm & More.
New at IWP Books: John Jay Chapman, 1924, Letters and Religion. From the Book:
On Horace
It is easier to imagine a substitute for telegraphy than a substitute for Horace’s Odes; for the contrivances that harness electrical power change rapidly — a new one replaces an old. But the vehicles which carry spiritual power around the world are so subtle and complex, so much a part of the human mind’s own history, that they speak to every generation in its home tongue, and live down a hundred theories of scientific truth and ten thousand contrivances of material convenience.
I cite Horace as a symbol, and because he represents, not religion, nor the higher kinds of poetry, nor anything which appeals to a special passion in the reader, but because he is in himself a microcosm of social wisdom more universal than anything which philosophy, poetry, or religion has let loose on mankind. He has a noble and religious attitude toward life, but expresses it not in abstractions, nor in those intense forms of feeling which appeal to highly emotional people, but in glints and glimmers which ordinary, worldly, benevolent citizens understand very well; and whatever else the future world may hold, it is certain to be full of ordinary, worldly, benevolent people. Such among them as have good wits are sure to read Horace.
Horace seems to represent an eternal type of gentleman who reappears periodically, whether under tyrannies, democracies, or socialisms; whether in slavery or at liberty; whether in Australia or South America. Such men will always crop up wherever anything arises that can be called a civilization. One reason for their resurgence is that human civilization is a continuous stream and passes on with the race. The seeds of letters are handed on like the seeds of domestic vegetables. Men will sooner find a substitute for potatoes than for Horace’s Odes.
Perhaps if any one of us had discovered this little flower garden, — or call it a mine of precious stones, — the Odes of Horace, he might have prized them, yet not realized their rarity. He might have said, “How excellent they are! And no doubt there will be more of such things anon. I think I will cut and polish a few like them myself: they are agreeable.” The most brilliant minds of the modern world have attempted as much during the last four hundred years, yet no one has ever been able to rival the Roman. We have thus found out that Horace is an exceedingly rare man. He is unique.
The power to enjoy life is at the bottom of Horace’s popularity. It was a renewed power to enjoy life that revealed the Greek and Roman classics to the enthusiasts of the Renaissance. They rediscovered the classics because they themselves were filled with curiosity and excitement. I am aware that the question is generally stated in the other way, and that the classics are supposed to have awakened the scholars. But this would be contrary to nature. The text inspires not the eye, but the eye, the text. Upon this pin — that of successive reawakenings — hangs the continuity of human thought.
On Personality and Institutions
We see institutions as if they were dispensaries giving out something; whereas their chief use is to be centres of absorption. The mere function of drawing together the talented youth of a country is the main point of a university. The boys make it what it is, and will make it what it shall become. During the last fifty years American boys have looked on college as mothers are apt to look on the infant dancing-class — as a step up in society. Our colleges perform a wonderful social service: they are boys’ clubs and men’s clubs. Educationally they are nearly extinct so far as the old humanities go. They have been put to the service of certain crude new humanities; but when the famine for the old ones arises in the community it will show again in the college. The most valuable stimulus which boys get, they get from one another. The college provides grouping-points; and out of a group springs cultivation.
It is therefore misplaced effort to go battering at our university magnates to try to get them to retain the classics. To them it seems as if you were asking them to do homage to false gods. If you are a scholar, pursue your own tastes, and let their influence leak into the learned world; for, after all, a university is but a cistern into which private tastes have oozed. Those who pursue their own loved studies quietly rule the tastes of the next generation. One man collects old Chinese bronzes; another studies the coloration of animals, or the heritable variations of plants; another, Persian vases; and their tastes turn insensibly into departments in colleges and new wings to museums. The direction of the world’s education depends on the hobbies of amateurs. In the case of poets and thinkers this law has always been recognized; for the poets, the most helpless and whimsical of all men, have led the van of intellect, and — most strange of all — they have the name and fame of leading it.
On Propaganda
All propaganda are seen to generate counter-irritants of their own. We observed this process with regard to the German propaganda in America in the years 1914–15. The more the Germans explained their cause, the more horrified we grew. It did not occur to us that we were herein getting sight of an unsuspected natural law, which may be expressed thus: Any statement that exactly suits the view of some organization is never quite true. The better the fit, the more obvious to the rest of the world is the untruth. People argue instinctively that a certain view must be false, because it suits the British, or the French, or the Jews, or the Jesuits, or the Socialists, too snugly. Propaganda defeats itself; and to this natural law we owe the preservation of society. Otherwise, the world would become all one thing. For instance: The Masons are historically hostile to the Roman Church. The Masonic order is, therefore, singled out by the Catholics for special reprobation, and vice versa. Each party thus points out a camp on a hill to which its enemies may resort, and thus consolidates the numbers of its foes.
New at IWP Books: Desmond MacCarthy, Criticism, 1932. Chapters on Samuel Butler, George Santayana, Boswell, Literary Booms, Literary Snobs, James Joyce, Proust, Defoe, Aldous Huxley, and More. From the Chapter “A Critic’s Day Book”:
I still read for pleasure — that is a statement which would strike most people as hardly worth making. Yet I could assure them that if it caught the eye of a fellow-reviewer he would drop this book in astonishment. Very likely on second thoughts he wouldn’t believe it. Several most capable reviewers have, I happen to know, almost entirely lost the faculty of reading. They can now only read to review. Why should a gardener take up a spade unless he is going to dig, or a dentist a pair of forceps unless he is going to pull out a tooth?
Tyler Piccotti on Artemus Ward.
Albert Jay Nock on Artemus Ward (1924) and on Artemus Ward’s America (1934). From 1924:
Ward is the property of an order of persons — for order is the proper word, rather than class or group, since they are found quite unassociated in any formal way, living singly or nearly so, and more or less as aliens, in all classes of our society — an order which I have characterized by using the term intelligence. If I may substitute the German word Intelligenz, it will be seen at once that I have no idea of drawing any supercilious discrimination as between, say, the clever and the stupid, or the educated and the uneducated. Intelligenz is the power invariably, in Plato’s phrase, to see things as they are, to survey them and one’s own relations to them with objective disinterestedness, and to apply one’s consciousness to them simply and directly, letting it take its own way over them uncharted by prepossession, unchanneled by prejudice, and above all uncontrolled by routine and formula. Those who have this power are everywhere; everywhere they are not so much resisting as quietly eluding and disregarding all social pressure which tends to mechanize their processes of observation and thought. Rabelais’s first words are words of jovial address, under a ribald figure, to just this order of persons to which he knew he would forever belong, an order characterized by Intelligenz; and it is to just this order that Ward belongs.
For Patrick Kurp.
New at IWP Books: Desmond MacCarthy, Portraits, 1931.
Arthur Krystal (A Word or Two Before I Go, 2023):
Thirty years ago I contemplated writing about the British critic and raconteur Desmond MacCarthy. Accordingly, I headed off to Broadway and Thirteenth Street. In those days the literary criticism at the Strand was stuck in with Literature, which was somewhere toward the back of the store, near the left wall. Before I reached the rows designated by the letter M, a book fell from an upper shelf, just missing my head. I knew it was from a high shelf because of the loud clap it made on hitting the floor. It was Desmond MacCarthy: The Man and His Writings, a collection of essays put together by the British biographer David Cecil and published in 1984 by Constable and Company Limited. It wasn’t the book I was looking for, but what were the chances of this one dropping at my feet, not just in a demure way, but seemingly pushed from a spot it shouldn’t have been in the first place at the exact moment I was passing by? This was no random occurrence. The universe and I may not have been reconciled, but at least we were in sync.
But to what purpose? I never did write a piece about MacCarthy, even though I soon found the book I was looking for in a used bookstore in Englewood, New Jersey. Titled simply Criticism, it was published in 1932 by Putnam and printed in England, and its preface concludes with a nod to Logan Pearsall Smith for help with the selections. Both books were a small revelation. Most critics write as though they know a lot more than their readers, but MacCarthy scribbled or typed as though we all belong to the same bookish fellowship. His prose conveys a modesty that complements rather than distracts from his considerable learning: “When I come across a profound piece of criticism into which the critic has, I feel, been led by surrendering to his own temperament, I wonder if my own method of criticizing is not mistaken.” Striving to read impartially, he tamped down his biases and predilections in order to go “straight to the spot where a general panorama of an author’s work is visible.”
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):
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:
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.
New in Translations: Patrick Branwell Brontë, 1923, The Odes of Quintus Horatius Flaccus
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: