Month: March 2024

Trivia

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.”

F. P. A.

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)

Tobogganing

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)

Horace Translations (Update)

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 Collections of English Translations of the Odes.

  • 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)