Author: Isaac

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)

Patrick Branwell Brontë

In Collections of Translations & More: Patrick Branwell Brontë, 1923, The Odes of Quintus Horatius Flaccus. From the Introduction, by John Drinkwater:

These translations seem to me to be his best achievement, so far as we can judge, as a poet. They are unequal, and they have many of the bad tricks of writing that come out of some deeply rooted defect of character. But they also have a great many passages of clear lyrical beauty, and they have something of the style that comes from a spiritual understanding, as apart from merely formal knowledge, of great models.

New at IWP

In Collections of Translations & More: Robert Louis Stevenson, 1916, An Ode of Horace. Experiments in Three Metres by Stevenson. From the Preface, by Clement Shorter:

But all that needs to be said here is that Stevenson loved Horace as most men of cultivated and spritely mind have done, and it should prove no small satisfaction to the few possessors of this little book that it will introduce them for the first time to the one effort of R. L. S. to render an Ode of Horace into English. These three experiments of Stevenson’s upon one of the most captivating of the famous odes should not fail to give pleasure, even though they fall short of other efforts in the same direction. Stevenson never propounded a theory of the hundred best books, but he did once make a note of his ten favourite authors, and we see that Horace was one of these: Montaigne’s Essays, Horace, his Odes, Pepys, his Diary, Shakespeare, Hazlitt’s Table Talk, Burns’s Works, Tristram Shandy, Heine, Keats, Fielding. The only other reference to Stevenson’s love for Horace that we find in his biography is that while at Davos a young Church of England parson, who knew him but slightly, was roused one morning about six o’clock by a message that Stevenson wanted to see him immediately. Knowing how ill his friend was, he threw on his clothes and rushed to Stevenson’s room, only to see a haggard face gazing from the bedclothes and to hear an agonized voice say, “For God’s sake, have you got a Horace?”