Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

I first encountered the term “Commonplace Book” when W.  H.  Auden published a book under that name as a kind of catch-all for bits and pieces of writing he’d found sufficiently meritorious over the years for him to want to save them.  I’ve decided to turn this freshly baked blog into my own Commonplace Book.

I launch it with an extract from the “Notes and Comments” section of that unique magazine “The New Yorker”, which struck me at the time as a model for writing the English language.  It has no date in the journal I kept at the time, but the context places it in the early 1950s.  Like all things in that section of the magazine during its first incarnation (edited by its founder Harold Ross, then by his protégé William Shawn), it appeared anonymously, but I’d bet you money, marbles, or chalk that it came from the finest writer on the magazine’s staff, possibly to date: E.  B.  White.)

During my first trip to Europe in 1949, I had the extraordinary privilege of meeting two of my British literary idols, Evelyn Waugh and Christopher Fry, and both told me, spontaneously and independent of each other, that in their opinion the finest writing in English appeared as a regular thing in “The New Yorker”.  On another occasion I may recount my own experience writing for “The New Yorker” – briefly: they accepted the first piece I ever sent them, an exceptionally long report from French Catalonia that appeared under the generic heading “Our Far-Flung Correspondents” – and never again did I offer them anything that interested them….)

A ludicrous event in New York’s harbor inspired this paragraph I found literarily outstanding enough to hand-copy it in a notebook I kept at the time, and from that longhand transcription I copy it now.  Back when airplanes had only begun to replace ocean liners, the French Line, which almost led the pack with its “Ile de France” (competing with Great Britain’s “Queens” and the United States Lines’ “Independence”), had just sent that elegant ship’s smaller sister, the “Flandre”, on its maiden trans-Atlantic voyage.  Here you have an account of its arrival that made all others pale by comparison, from the traditionally anonymous editorial “we”:

“We salute the ‘Flandre’.  New as we are to each other, we have already established a relation.  Indeed, from the moment of her belated arrival here, we began to feel that sense of shared gaffes that is so often the first long leap into affection. To be towed into port on one’s maiden voyage – yes, we thought, that is precisely what would happen to us if we were a ship.  The winch powerless to raise the anchor, the lights slowly dimming and going out, the horn, intended for who knows what sonorous gasconading, uttering instead a few piteous bleats – poor ‘Flandre’, dear friend, we tasted your shame, your blushes were our blushes, wave on wave.  For the ignominy of your début has been ours at a dozen times and places, not all of them in dreams: it is the stumble as one crosses the platform to accept the beribboned diploma, it is the turning from the altar to kiss one’s bride and kissing air, it is the mind gone blank in the third sentence of the speech that was to be so witty and urbane.  Take comfort in the fact that perfection has no lovers, only hangers-on.  Who could pretend to intimacy with the ‘Independence’?  What has any ordinary mortal in common with the ‘Queens’?  But you are one of us, and it was wise to give us the good news at once.  Now that the comedy of our first meeting is over, we can go on to fine times together, with the anchor up, all lights ablaze, and the horn carving hollows in the sea.”