Books: What’s Familiar?

FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS (1,831 pp.)—John Bartlett—12th Edition Revised & Enlarged by Christopher Morley & Louella D. Everett—Little, Brown ($8).

It is 93 years since Boston’s John Bartlett first tried to show “the obligations our language owes to various authors for numerous phrases and familiar quotations which have become ‘household words.’ ” In 1937, when Editors Christopher Morley and Louella D. Everett put Bartlett’s eleventh edition together, they went far beyond the founder’s original scheme. They tried “to seize also some of the Mindhold Words . . . which the world hardly yet knows it has absorbed.” Consequently, a large proportion of their “Familiar Quotations” were totally unfamiliar to most people, but their Bartlett was not only a useful reference book but a first-rate bit of reading.

Editors Morley & Everett had hoped that their 1937 edition would serve until 1960. “But by 1940 it was plain that enlargement was already desirable. Man in his Penultimate War was saying words that had to be recorded.” Voices that had seemed too faint in the ’30s (Winston Churchill was not even included) were now fairly screaming for attention. Result: the editors have left Bartlett unchanged from Poet Caedmon (A.D. 670) to Poet Rudyard Kipling, but from there on nobody will recognize the old household.

Snows of Yesteryear. Looking at the latest arrivals is often like looking at yesterday’s skirts and hats—they appear more “dated” than the ancient wimple or the crinoline. Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes is still fresh as a daisy after 300 years, but who now hums Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, or remembers the purple passages of Norman (“This is It, kid”) Corwin?

Surer of echoes in the American ear are certain voices of the more-distant prewar era (now making Bartlett for the first time): Joe Jacobs’ “We wuz robbed” and “I should of stood in bed”; Mae West’s “Come up and see me some time”; Noel Coward’s “Mad dogs and Englishmen”; Henry Wallace’s “Century of the common man”; Archibald MacLeish’s “America is promises.”

Who’s Who? What words will survive or die? That is what is called (today, at any rate) “the $64 question.” Editors Morley & Everett have taken no chances. They have included a host of minor poets whose work is unknown outside the little magazines. They have recorded some of the most banal remarks ever made, simply because the authors sit in 1948’s high places (e.g., Secretary of State Marshall England s Princess Elizabeth), or had high hopes of sitting there (“That’s why it’s time for a change,” says Thomas E Dewey; “We want to feel dry and solid ground under our feet again,” says Earl Warren).

But despite this editorial caution, the new Bartlett is full of inconsistencies and badly lacking in proportion. Some of the major poets and novelists seem to be there merely for the record, their best known lines omitted. It is human enough to give Churchill top rating among the new entries with 9½ columns, and to give quotable Ogden Nash four, but in general | the space allotted to each “name” seems arbitrary, to say the least.

On what grounds does Poet T. S. Eliot rate less than four columns when Poet Stephen Vincent Benét rates nearly seven? It would be unkind, perhaps, to grudge Simeon Strunsky and Jan Struther nearly a column and a half apiece but would it not have been better to allow more room for Ernest Hemingway (one), E. M. Forster (4/5), Lytton Strachey (½) and a shade less to Editor Christopher Morley (four)? Similarly, 5¼ columns for Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay seem extravagant in a book that spares less than two to Leo Tolstoy, one column to V. I. Lenin and less than one to James Joyce, twelve lines to Scott Fitzgerald, 13 to André Gide, five to James Thurber, one to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and nothing at all to Arnold Toynbee, Edmund Wilson and the “Big Three” of psychology (Freud, Jung, Adler), whose words have become only-too-painfully”familiar.”

What Bartlett needs now is to have its splendid, grab-bag riches winnowed and put in order by a touch of scholarship.