Quote of the Day (Frank Sullivan, on Why To ‘Keep Yule’ Even With ‘No Great Cause for Mirth’)

“It may be argued, and with some reason,

That we could skip this Christmas season,

There being no great cause for mirth

And precious little peace on earth.

Not me. I'm sorry, but I'll keep Yule

With any kindred spirit who'll

Accompany me in a Christmas caper,

So how's about it, Muriel Draper?”—Frank Sullivan, “Greetings, Friends!”, in The New Yorker, Dec. 23, 1939

“Greetings, Friends!” is a New Yorker tradition that began in 1935. Frank Sullivan, who started and maintained it for the next four decades, was, recalled his longtime editor Roger Angell in an interview with Jenna Krajeski eight years ago, not only one of the magazine’s early humor writers, but also “a famously charming and sociable guy” who often listed friends like the Marx Brothers and John O'Hara in these holiday verses. At its best, whether under Sullivan or the successors who carried on the tradition, Angell and, more recently, Ian Frazier, these Yuletide light verses still contain the same verve.

At one point or another, many of us have found “no great cause for mirth” anywhere, either in our personal lives or in the wider world. But back in 1939, this may have been even truer, what with a Great Depression not really shed yet (the economy had experienced another downturn in 1937-38) and, of course, war breaking out beyond the shores of North America. Even so, Sullivan found reason to rejoice—and so, in our own dark time, should we.

(By the way: If, like me, you may have wondered about Sullivan’s Muriel Draper reference, she was a society hostess, arts aficionado, decorator, and writer prominent in the Harlem Renaissance.)

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on a Publisher’s View of Authors)

“ ‘Funny egg, my uncle,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I think he’s a little mad.’

‘Not at all,’ I assured him. ‘I have dealt with authors all my life and he’s quite the sanest one with whom we’ve ever dealt. He never tried to borrow money from us; he never asked us to fire our advertising department; and he’s never assured us that all his friends were unable to get copies of his book in Boston, Massachusetts.’”— F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The I.O.U.,” The New Yorker, Mar. 20, 2017

As soon as I saw on my newsstand copy of its March 20, 2017 issue, that The New Yorker had a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I knew that I had to read it immediately. And so I did. The story, written in 1920 but rejected by Harper's Bazaar (and only recently rediscovered by the author's estate, more than three-quarters of a century after his death), wasn’t a finely wrought mature masterpiece on the order of “Babylon Revisited,” but I wasn’t expecting anything like that, anyway. If you start reading it with modest rather than great expectations, you’ll be rewarded.

The one aspect of all this that surprised me was that there even remained any unpublished work by my favorite writer. Nothing like this situation existed in the case of his frenemy, Ernest Hemingway: in the last 15 or so years of Papa’s life, his physical and mental decline led him from false start to abandoned project again and again, resulting in as long a period of posthumous as regular publications.

In contrast, Fitzgerald had largely abandoned short-story writing after 1937, when desperate financial straits led him to Hollywood, where he concentrated first on screenwriting, then, when a drunken spree led him to be fired from that job, on his half-finished novel of Tinseltown, The Last Tycoon. But now, enough previously unpublished pieces have been unearthed from archives and family papers to fill out a new collection, I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories, due out next month.

In one sense, it’s an anomaly that this Fitzgerald piece appeared in The New Yorker. Of his 164 stories that appeared in magazines, only three—plus two poems—came out in this publication. The primary vehicle for the work that sustained his and wife Zelda’s extravagances was The Saturday Evening Post, whose Middle American readership was far removed from The New Yorker’s more Manhattan-centric sensibility.

But The New Yorker is one of the last general-interest magazines where short, non-genre fiction still appears on a regular basis, and the saucy tone of “The I.O.U.” is just the type of piece that the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, might have felt in keeping with the mission he proclaimed in the publication's prospectus: “Not for the little old lady from Dubuque.”

Fitzgerald was only 24, one year after writing his first major success, the novel This Side of Paradise, when he created “The I.O.U.” Already, however, he was somewhat used to the vagaries of publishers who would reject his pieces for less than good reasons, so his satire here was informed by experience.

In time, Fitzgerald grew more and more like the insane authors he parodied in the above quote. The publishing figure who may have endured his eccentricities and manias most stoically—certainly most repeatedly—was Harold Ober. This agent was canny enough to earn Fitzgerald $193,300 for 64 Saturday Evening Post stories alone, and he was kind-hearted enough to let the financially hard-pressed author’s teenage daughter Scottie live with him and his wife while she attended school on the East Coast.

But there was a limit to what even this man could tolerate. At one point, Ober wept in showing a visitor the illegible, beer-stained corrected sheets that his client had sent him. For nearly a decade, at one point or another, he had acceded to Fitzgerald’s endless requests for advances. But when he had finally begged off doing so again, Fitzgerald severed their relationship.

By the end of his career, then, “I.O.U.” had become freighted with all too much meaning for the author. But, despite containing all the hallmarks of apprentice fiction, this piece is still filled with what Fitzgerald biographer Andre le Vot called “the giddy spontaneity, the burlesque fantasy of his early work.” He was already displaying  the powers of close observation  that so marked his greatest work, including the following:

“I had come quite close, half hidden by the magnolias, and was about to address him when I saw a girl in a purple morning dress break, stooping, through the low-branched cluster of apple trees that made the north end of the garden and move across the grass toward the house. I drew back and watched her as she came directly up to the open window and spoke unabashed to the great Dr. Harden.

“ ‘I want to have a talk with you,’ she said abruptly.”

Quote of the Day (John Lindsay, on the Man Born to ‘Make the Mummies Dance’)

“Tom has a natural, unstudied political talent. There's nothing he can't do....He is a thoroughly civilized man. He understands the dynamics of institutional life. In the [Metropolitan] Museum [of Art], he’ll make the mummies dance.”—New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay on Thomas Hoving, quoted in John McPhee, “A Roomful of Hovings,” in The John McPhee Reader (1976)

Longtime supporters of some institutions might praise them as “stable,” but other “s” words would spring to the lips of detractors, such as “staid,” “starchy” and “stultifying.” Thomas Hoving—born on this day in 1931 in New York City—belonged to this latter group.

John Lindsay, who campaigned into Gracie Mansion on the strength of the juicy Murray Kempton quote, “He is fresh, and everyone else is tired,” saw a kindred disrupter in Hoving, who left his job as the mayor’s Parks Commissioner after only a year to take over the Met. Hoving lasted in his new post for a decade, but in many ways his controversial leadership there shaped him even to his death in 2009.

Like many a born plutocrat (his father, Walter, was the formidable head of Bonwit Teller and Tiffany’s), Hoving harbored populist aspirations. At the Parks Department, he sponsored “Happenings” where people could fly kites, paint on canvases, and build castles of plastic foam, and he spearheaded the building of vest-pocket parks throughout the city, including its most poverty-stricken areas. At the Met, he organized crowd-drawing blockbuster exhibits, including the one that absorbed much of his energy toward the end of his tenure, on King Tut.

One of Hoving’s most controversial practices was deaccessioning, or removing an item from the museum, usually through a sale to raise money for new acquisitions or for closing budget gaps. As Hilton Kramer wrote in 2005 for The New Criterion, the practice is not illegal and can even be justified if the item lies outside the mission of the institution, but is often ethically shady because it results in the loss of a property given in good faith. Hoving’s resort to this, involving the sale of important impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, seemed particularly questionable.

Eventually, the Met board, tiring of Hoving’s high-flying ways and unorthodox manner, forced his ouster. In 1981, he took over Connoisseur, shaking things up there as thoroughly—and, perhaps, more catastrophically—than he had at the Met. Under his leadership, the publication switched its focus to examine the inside world of museums, giving full vent, for instance, to Hoving’s beefs about the Getty. Connoisseur went under in 1991.

His memoirs written after his Met stewardship, King of the Confessors and Making the Mummies Dance (the latter drawn, of course, from Lindsay’s colorful remark), told great stories but at the expense of Hoving’s reputation for probity. The man who could write, “I had always been able to lie convincingly,” did little to persuade longtime critics that his departure from the Met was an awful thing. At the same time, they demonstrated why he felt that leading the Met not only required “a gifted connoisseur, a well-trained scholar, an aesthete, a patient diplomat, a deft fundraiser, an executive, and a conciliator,” but also “part gunslinger, ward heeler, legal fixer, accomplice smuggler, anarchist, and toady.”

McPhee’s profile, written for The New Yorker only a few months after Hoving took over at the Met, is, like another early piece on Bill Bradley, an affectionate look at a fellow Princetonian. It does not overlook its subject’s wild youth (including expulsion from Exeter for slugging a Latin teacher for only giving him an A-). But it also captures his lack of snobbishness and his longstanding cultivation of his powers of observations—honed at first in an unhappy stint at a clothing shop in his youth, where he sized up quickly the apparel and footwear tastes of prostitutes and gays, then later as a low-level curator for the Met in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Hoving was a curious figure who practiced his curiosity to the utmost, especially in his abiding interest in forgeries. His remarks to McPhee on the subject say much about the primary instrument for anyone involved in the study of art:

“Your eye is king. Get in touch with other scholars - everybody you think is expert . . . Learn the history of the piece - where it is from, what collections it has belonged to, all the information surrounding its discovery. Then get the work of art with you and live with it as long as you possibly can. You have to watch it. Watch it…. A work of art will grow the more it is with you. It will grow in stature, and fascinate you more and more. If it is a fake, it will eventually fall apart before your eyes like a piece of plaster."

Quote of the Day (E.B. White, on ‘The Miracle of Christmas’)

“The miracle of Christmas is that, like the distant and very musical voice of the hound, it penetrates finally and becomes heard in the heart—over so many years, through so many cheap curtain-raisers. It is not destroyed even by all the arts and craftiness of the destroyers, having an essential simplicity that is everlasting and triumphant, at the end of confusion.”—E.B. White, “Comment,” The New Yorker, December 24, 1949 issue, in Christmas at The New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art (2004)

Quote of the Day (A Climate-Change Xmas Carol from ‘The New Yorker’)

“Sleigh bells ring, are you listening?  

In L.A., hail is glistening.      

In New Mexico, there is six feet of snow.     

The desert is a winter wonderland!”— Ethan Kuperberg, “Shouts and Murmurs: Climate-Change Christmas Carols,” The New Yorker, Dec. 22 and 29, 2014 issue