“Lady Dillon told Sir F. Chantrey that English women were more buxom than Italian women. The delicate way she put it was, ‘you will find that Italian women can sit much closer to a wall than English.'”
— George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book, 2002
Society
Fair and Square
From Good-Bye to All That, poet Robert Graves’ 1929 account of his experiences in World War I:
Beaumont had been telling how he had won about five pounds’ worth of francs in the sweepstake after the Rue du Bois show: a sweepstake of the sort that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
In 2003, the Journal of Political Economy reprinted this paragraph with the title “Optimal Risk Sharing in the Trenches.”
In a Word
scribacious
adj. fond of writing
moiler
n. a toiler; a drudge
demiss
adj. downcast; humble; abject
guerdon
n. a reward, recompense, or requital
By the end of the 1960s, William Gaddis had secured an advance and an NEA grant that allowed him to work full-time on the novel J R.
“Even then, however, Gaddis would be so in need of money that he would ghostwrite articles for a dentist in exchange for root canals. His son recalls one day happening to find his checkbook, and noting the balance, meticulously calculated, of twelve cents. This was at the time when Gaddis had just won the 1976 National Book Award.”
From Joseph Tabbi’s introduction to Gaddis’ “Treatment for a Motion Picture on ‘Software'” in The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings, 2002.
Grammar
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WILL NOT, AND OTHERS MUST NOT, PICK THE FLOWERS.
— Notice, Woodenbridge Hotel garden, County Wicklow, Ireland, 1919
Small Talk
(Until William Herschel’s advances in telescopes, stars seemed to have “rays” or “tails.”)
At a dinner given by Mr Aubert in the year 1786, William Herschel was seated next to Mr Cavendish, who was reputed to be the most taciturn of men. Some time passed without his uttering a word, then he suddenly turned to his neighbour and said: ‘I am told that you see the stars round, Dr Herschel’. ‘Round as a button’, was the reply. A long silence ensued till, towards the end of the dinner, Cavendish again opened his lips to say in a doubtful voice: ‘Round as a button?’ ‘Exactly, round as a button’, repeated Herschel, and so the conversation ended.
— Constange A. Lubbock, The Herschel Chronicle, 1933
The Other Half
Who’s Who invites its contributors to list their recreations. Some responses are unusual:
Charles Causley: “Playing the piano with expression.”
John Faulkner: “Intricacies and wildernesses.”
John Fowles: “Mainly Sabine.”
Bevis Hillier: “Awarding marks out of ten for suburban front gardens.”
James Kirkup: “Standing in shafts of sunlight.” (In old age he changed this to “Standing in shafts of moonlight.”)
Edward Lucie-Smith: “Walking the dog; malice.”
Frederic Raphael: “Painting things white.”
Constant Hendrick de Waal: “Remaining (so far as possible) unaware of current events.”
Keith Waterhouse: “Lunch.”
Roy Worskett: “Looking and listening in disbelief.”
In 1897 George Bernard Shaw listed his recreations as “cycling and showing off.” In 1980 Sir Harold Hobson listed “Bridge; recollecting in regretful tranquillity the magical things and people I may never see again — the Grand Véfour, Lasserre, Beaumanière; Proust’s Grand Hotel at Balbec (Cabourg); Sunday afternoon teas at the Ritz; the theatrical bookshop in St Germain-des-Prés; the Prado; Edwige Feuillère, Madeleine Renauld, Jean-Louis Barrault, François Perier; collecting from ephemera of the Belle Epoque the cartoons of Steinlen; and always and inexhaustibly talking to my wife.”
(Via John Julius Norwich, More Christmas Crackers, 1990.)
02/05/2025 UPDATE: John Cleese lists his as “gluttony and sloth.” (Thanks, Bryan.)
Fundamentals
In 1955, the editor of a Michigan high school newspaper wrote to E.E. Cummings, asking his advice for students who wanted to follow in his footsteps. He sent this reply:
A Poet’s Advice to Students
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn’t.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.
It’s the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.
(From the Ottawa Hills Spectator, Oct. 26, 1955.)
Some Lost Snowmen
In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), Giorgio Vasari notes that in January 1494, while Michelangelo was working on his first full-scale stone figure, “there was a heavy snowfall in Florence and Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s eldest son … wanting, in his youthfulness, to have a statue made of snow in the middle of his courtyard, remembered and sent for Michelangelo and had him make the statue.”
A heavy snowfall did occur that month: One chronicler wrote, “There was the severest snowstorm in Florence that the oldest people living could remember.” And it was a tradition on such occasions for outstanding artists to sculpt large snow figures, including the Marzocco, the heraldic lion that is the city’s symbol. But “What snow figure Michelangelo fashioned is not known,” writes critic Georg Brandes, “only that it stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici.”
Seventeen years later, Brussels residents protested the wealthy Habsburgs by building 110 satirical snowmen, more than half of which were said to be pornographic. There’s no visual record of that, either. It’s known as the Miracle of 1511.
Perspective
Two evenings spent at La Scala, Milan, one of them standing up, the other sitting down. On the first evening, I was continuously conscious of the existence of the spectators who were seated. On the second evening, I was completely unconscious of the existence of the spectators who were standing up (and of those who were seated also).
— Simone Weil, quoted in W.H. Auden, A Certain World, 1970
Chesterton’s Fence
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’
— G.K. Chesterton, The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, 1929