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... waisberg.micro.blog
Gary Saul Morson, “Lucky Joe” [Joseph Epstein]
Tomorrow night: Mary Murphy
Joseph Shaw, Why Do Bishops Cover Up Sexual Abuse?
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.
Who are your heroes?
My Unholy Trinity has been Jesus, Galileo, and Oscar Wilde.
Which living person do you most admire?.
Among my personal friends, Jacques Barzun. Among the more distant, Nelson Mandela.
Which living person do you most despise?.
I try not to despise anyone, and I usually succeed. Contempt is bad for the soul.
—Eric Bentley, “A Proust Questionnaire”
From John Jay Chapman, Letters and Religion
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, … waisberg.micro.blog
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. Th… waisberg.micro.blog
John Jay Chapman on Horace
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 a… waisberg.micro.blog
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 ma… waisberg.micro.blog
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 Boo… waisberg.micro.blog
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 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… waisberg.micro.blog