Where Shelley rubs shoulders with Seinfeld

John Bartlett (1820-1905) was a pioneer in the now well-plowed field of reference books. Although a native of Cambridge, Mass., he found the great majority of his quotations in what was then called English (today it has to be “British”) literature. In preferring favorite passages from longer works to sayings or quips, Bartlett anticipated Gertrude Stein’s “Remarks are not literature” (itself a remark, of course). Unlike this one, the first edition even eschewed the Duke of Gloucester’s comment on Volume 2 of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”: “Another damned thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble. Eh, Mr Gibbon?”

Here we have a damned thick one too. Mainly American in his contemporary addenda, general editor Justin Kaplan has also gone back both to Europe and to classical antiquity for a fat chunk of what Bartlett ignored, or preceded. The latter’s first edition came too soon to register Oscar Wilde’s most scintillating epigrams, but he would surely have endorsed his successor’s Wilde selection (49 entries). I am less confident of his applause for scriptwriters’ one-liners. Why would anyone look up “Taxi Driver’s” Paul Schrader’s “You talkin’ to me?” To check the spellin’?

Dictionaries of quotations are the running buffets of literature: If no single dish satisfies, you can at least get it fast. Bits and pieces is all our culture now. With the proliferation of print and verbiage, even an unsleeping, Methuselean bookworm could never read a quarter of the world’s acknowledged masterpieces. Who today would dare to echo T.E. Lawrence (2 entries), who claimed to have read, as a student, all the books in Oxford’s Bodleian Library? The unsporting Robert Graves (6) worked out that, even before World War I, Lawrence would have had to read 300 books a day to make good his boast. Today, it would be more like 3,000. We have no choice but to rely on anthologists and epitomists.

John Bartlett flattered his readers by assuming that they resembled him (son of a bookseller) in being “familiar” with the literature he culled, if only “with just enough of learning to misquote,” as Byron (151) put it. His lordship fails to evict the later, prosaic and very similar Simeon Strunsky (1): “Famous remarks are very seldom quoted correctly.” That superfluous “very” should alone have disqualified the gentleman.

Of others who make the cut by virtue of a single entry, none is more worthy than Joseph Nye Welch, who in 1954 said to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?” Bartlett’s does overlook the best monosyllabic retort of recent history, though the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations does not, U.S. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe’s to the German demand that he surrender Bastogne, Belgium, in December 1944: “Nuts.” Louis XVIII of France is in, for saying, “Punctuality is the politeness of kings,” but not for his tenderly heartless one-word response to the dying Talleyrand. When the old scoundrel told his majesty that he was suffering “the torments of the damned,” Louis only asked, “Deja?” (Already?)

The gourmand, faced with a sumptuous choice, will always remark what is missing: for gaping instance, Letizia Bonaparte’s reaction to her son Napoleon’s coronation as emperor of the French: “Pourvu que ca dure” (Provided it lasts). The French, arguably the wittiest race, are done no favors here. But then, as the Duc de la Rochefoucauld suggested, there is something in their misfortunes which does not wholly displease their friends.

What writer can deny being a little like Cyril Connolly, who could not pass an index without checking whether he was included? He would be relieved that he makes it here, although not for “Narcissus with his pool before him,” an apt slogan for those who see their wit, or fame, reflected here, nor yet for “It’s closing time in the gardens of the West,” a slogan he coined for the outbreak of war in 1939, which severed him from the France whose literature, and foie gras, meant so much to him. Latin poet Horace’s uncited self-description “Epicuri de grege porcus” (a pig from Epicurus’ herd) was always Connolly’s likeliest epitaph.

Horace (104) is well represented, but a certain New England prudishness (Kaplan is a Harvard professor) is evident: The Horatian tag “Non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum,” translated as “It’s not everyone that can get to Corinth” is alluding not to “the expense of the life there,” as Kaplan notes, but to Corinth’s delectable courtesans.

Henry Miller (2) gets in for “Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race,” from “The Tropic of Cancer,” but not for the famous turd-in-the-bidet passage from “Quiet Days in Clichy.” Jean Genet (3) is denied “Nous ne sortirons jamais de ce bordel” (We’ll never get out of this whorehouse/mess), which has a thousand metaphorical uses. T.S. Eliot (130) has his posthumous blushes spared by the omission of “the jew is underneath the lot.” But why no sign of Theodor Adorno’s “It is barbarous to write a poem after Auschwitz”?

Kaplan alerts us to how much is recycled, not to say pirated, by successive writers. Epicurus (3) is noted for “Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not,” which was echoed, but not here, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who rendered it: “Death is not an event of life, it is not lived through.” Gore Vidal (3) added a snappy gloss by saying that when any of his friends has a success, he dies a little. Vidal will be relieved that Truman Capote doesn’t outscore him, but Norman Mailer goes in one ahead (why no reference to his seminal Dissent article about the “white Negro”?).

Last words too have family resemblances. The emperor Augustus, Rabelais and Lord Byron all offered variations on “e finita la commedia,” although only Rabelais is cited. Byron’s friend Shelley recalled Rabelais’ comment about death being the “grand peut-etre” (great maybe) when caught in a storm on Lake Leman. Lytton Strachey gets in with his “If this is dying, then I don’t think much of it,” but I miss the theatrically superb last words of Sir Walter Raleigh to the executioner, “Strike, man, what do you fear?”

Thomas Babington Macaulay might have been unique if his (apocryphal) first words had been quoted. He was supposedly silent until the age of 3 or 4, when he banged his head. A lady later asked if he felt better, to which he replied, “Thank you, madam, the pain is somewhat abated.” Pablo Picasso should have raised his score with his definition of modern art as “a sum of destructions.” He could have displaced his verbose neighbor, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whom Peter Medawar conclusively debunked. Kaplan’s lifeboat should have been big enough to find a niche for Karl Popper, if only at the expense of others.

Since the entries are presented in the order of the authors’ births, it is tempting to draw a chart, giving weight for talent, to discover the ups and downs of Western literature. It would begin on a high, with the Bible and the classics, dip into the almost mute Dark Ages, recover sharply with the Elizabethans, maintain a bullish profile with Augustans and Romantics, and then surge again in the Victorian age, before dropping toward the present.

If you had to choose the single most illustrious five-year vintage, from whenever BC till the present day, how could it not be 1871-75? Marcel Proust, Paul Valery, Bertrand Russell, Ford Madox Ford, Colette, G.K. Chesterton, Karl Kraus and Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Frost and Walter de la Mare, Gertrude Stein, Somerset Maugham, Stephen Crane and Winston Churchill form the A-team; which leaves Max Beerbohm, Hilaire Belloc, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, not to mention Karl Jung, G.E. Moore, Maurice Baring and John Buchan on standby.

Kaplan and his collaborators have, on the whole, done a valiantly sustained job, knowing that they could never be sufficiently comprehensive. I cannot, for instance, discover who said, “Why write aphorisms? To help the mind lose weight.” Among the aggrieved, Dorothy Parker (10) might have winced at not being credited with her remark at a dull Hollywood party after which, she presumed, the guests would “crawl back into the woodwork.” For citing Elton John and Bernie Taupin as its authors, in the maudlin lyrics in memory of Marilyn Monroe (later shamelessly recycled to shroud Princess Diana), Kaplan risks incurring another of Mrs. Parker’s uncited lines: “This book is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.”

I certainly do not take that view, but who can fail to be conscious of how deep a dive that quality-control graph takes when it comes to the modern samples? Comedian Jerry Seinfeld is a funny man, but who needs his newspaper remark that “Everybody lies about sex. People lie during sex. If it weren’t for lies, there’d be no sex”? For this, the author of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” Choderlos de Laclos, must be effaced? And how good for the ages is “Sesame Street” with “It’s not easy bein’ green” or, come to that, the two most recent presidents of the United States, quoted on the back of the jacket? Our modern calves are rarely golden but, as Robert Graves once said, about certain modern poets whom he scorned, “These be thy gods, O Israel.”