Austin Tappan Wright was a delightful, funny man. He loved puns and wordplay; he also adored his wife—when he spoke to her from a telephone booth he always, to the amusement of his children, removed his hat. I take off my hat to him, too. He was only an amateur—a lawyer and professor of law who wrote only one book, and that entirely for his own pleasure and amusement. But in Islandia all artists are amateurs, and no work of art is ever sold. This is just one more thing you will have to get used to when you travel there.
RINGGOLD “RING” LARDNER
1885–1933
Stories
Ring Lardner was born in Niles, Michigan, in 1885. As a youngster he was already writing, then editing The Sporting News and contributing columns to various newspapers around the country. When he was just thirty he published his first successful book, You Know Me Al, in the form of letters from a bush league ballplayer to a friend back home. The joke was always on the player himself, although he never realized this, which was very funny and also somehow moving. The protagonist of this book (the letter-writer) kept appearing and reappearing in subsequent books by Lardner.
Haircut and Other Stories appeared a few years later. It includes many of the classic Ring Lardner stories. The title story is the only one I don’t like because of its cruelty. Ring could be cruel, but usually not to good people as he is here. However, I forgive him for the great stories, “Alibi Ike,” “A Day with Conrad Green,” “The Love Nest,” “Horseshoes,” and “Some Like Them Cold.” Come to think of it, some of these are merciless to pompous phonies, liars, and cheats, so I take back what I said about cruelty above.
I have to say that “Alibi Ike” is my favorite of all his stories. Ike is a ballplayer and a very good one, but he can never do anything, either good or bad, without apologizing for it. He always has an alibi even when he doesn’t need one. For example he admits to one of the other players that in the previous season he had batted .357, which is great, but he adds that he would have done better except that he had malaria. A listener remarks, “Where can I go to get malaria?” but of course Ike doesn’t get the point. (I hope you do!) One reason why I like “Alibi Ike” is that I’m always doing the same thing whereupon my wife calls me Alibi Ike.
A later book, The Young Immigrunts, is supposedly written by a kid who is just learning to write dialogue. Here is a taste: ‘“Daddy are we lost?’ the boy asks. ‘Shut up,’ he explains.” Ring Lardner died of TB in East Hampton, at the age of forty-eight. That was the worst of all his jokes. However, his son, Ring Lardner, Jr., survived him and also has had a fine career as a writer.
ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER
1887–1961
Nature and the Greeks
Erwin Schrödinger was born in Vienna in 1887 of a Bavarian family that had generations before settled in Vienna. Highly gifted and richly educated, he studied everything, including the history of Italian painting and almost all then-current theories of theoretical physics. An artillery officer in World War I, he took positions starting in 1920 at Stuttgart, Breslau, and Zurich—the last being his most fruitful period. His great discovery, the Schrödinger Wave Equation, which alas I do not understand, was made in 1926, the year I was born.
In 1927 he went to Berlin as Max Planck’s successor. The city was then a center of scientific activity, but, finding he could not continue to live in Germany, he went to Oxford, then Princeton, and back to Austria. After the Anschluss he escaped to Italy and arrived at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, where he worked until he retired in 1955. He continued to write important papers, however, almost until his death in 1961.
My interest in Erwin Schrödinger stems from my discovery in 1954 of his book, Nature and the Greeks, which was published in that year. The book originated in several lectures delivered in London by him several years before, the titles of which then and still are of exceptional interest. They are: “The Motives for Returning to Ancient Thought”; “The Competition, Reasons v. Senses”; “The Pythagoreans”; “The Ionian Enlightenment”; “The Religion of Xenophanes, Heraclitus of Ephesus”; “The Atomists”; and “What Are the Special Features?” Anyone who has read more or less carefully the first half of this book, and especially the first hundred pages, will recognize my debt to Schrödinger,, although I hope I have been able to add to what he says on various subjects. At any rate I recommend this little book—less than a hundred pages long—to anyone interested in the general subject of the history of science and particularly of its beginnings in Greek thought more than two thousand years ago.
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
1883–1963
Selected Poems
Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883, W.C.W. (as he is often called) was a New Jerseyan through and through (he died in Rutherford in 1963). His greatest work was a long poem—what might have been called an epic in an earlier age—that he called “Paterson.” Paterson is a city in New Jersey, of course, which contains all the kinds of people and human relations and evils and goods that can be found in New Jersey—and anywhere else in America, for that matter. That was the point.
Williams was a pediatric physician who established a practice in his hometown in 1910. He continued to practice medicine for many years and in his “spare time” wrote poems. Many of them are wonderful; some are just repetitive, in the vein of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” He adopted a posture he called “objectivist” and produced some of the most astonishing very short poems in the language. In this he seemed to be influenced by his friend Ezra Pound, although he believed Pound was a bad influence on everyone else.
W.C.W. produced many books of poems, criticism, plays, and stories. He even had time to write an autobiography (in 1951). His last book of poems, titled Pictures of Breugel, won him a Pulitzer Prize that should have come years before. But he was a curmudgeon who offended almost everyone in the poetic establishment, so critical approbation came late. As for being a curmudgeon—it’s not at all a bad thing for a poet to be.
My favorite among his books is Spring and All (1972). It contains one devastating long poem, “By the road to the contagious hospital,” and many fine short ones including “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “This is Just to Say,” both of which are anthologized everywhere. They are easy to read but hard to feel. It’s important to know the circumstances in which “The Red Wheelbarrow” was written, although it isn’t enough to know. My own favorite poem is called “El Hombre.” This is it—all of it: