Updating John's Sockdolager

By Otto Friedrich

The new Bartlett's adds Dylan and shrinks Shakespeare

He was a passionate fisherman and a passionate taxonomist, and so his collected works include Catalogue of Books on Angling, including Ichthyology, Pisciculture, Etc. Once when he caught a seven-pound trout, he sent it to his friend and whist partner James Russell Lowell, and Lowell rewarded him (and the trout) with some forellean verses that began:

Fit for an Abbott of Theleme, The whole Cardinals' College, or The Pope himself to see in dream Before his Lenten vision gleam, He lies there, the sockdolager!

This was John Bartlett, the mild and scholarly proprietor of the University Book Store in Cambridge, Mass., who was asked so often about the origin of some quotation or other that he decided in 1855 to print a small (295 pages) collection that he entitled Familiar Quotations. Out this month from Little, Brown, in which Bartlett eventually became a senior partner, is the 15th edition of his little collection, the first updating in -L- twelve years. Now 1,540 pages, with 22,500 quotations, it is a sockdolager, Nearly 3,000 of the quotations are new| to this edition, ranging from the maxims of Ptahhotpe, an Egyptian vizier of the 24th century B.C. ("Do not be arrogant because of your knowledge, but confer with the ignorant man as with the learned") to the gnomic counsel of Cartoonist Robert Crumb ("Keep on truckin' "). And in the array of such selections lies a whole history of Americans' changing views of the world.

Bartlett's own view was that a familiar quotation should be familiar. "The object of this work," said he, "is to show, to some extent, the obligations our language owes to various authors for ... 'household words.' " The New England household of 1855 was devoutly high-minded. About one-third of Bartlett's quotations came from Shakespeare and the Bible, the rest mostly from worthy English poets. Among the unincluded: Washington, Jefferson, Thoreau.

Bartlett edited eight revised editions, slowly admitting novelties like Ralph Waldo Emerson. At his retirement, he left a literary monument that remained un touched for almost a quarter-century. The year 1914 echoed to the guns of August, and the tenth edition of Bartlett's vibrated with new quotations from foreigners: Lewis Carroll, Nietzsche, Shaw, George Eliot (also, belatedly, Thoreau's Walden, but still no Hawthorne or Melville). The '20s and '30s brought yet another revolution in literary sensibilities, and new Editor Christopher Morley decided in 1937 that the best rule for choosing a quotation was simply his own taste. "We have tried to make literary power the criterion rather than width and vulgarity of fame," he wrote. Morley's view of literary power brought the Bartlett's debuts of Dostoevsky, Blake, Conrad and T.S. Eliot, along with four columns of quotes from Morley's own forgettable works. World War II, in turn, made literary power yield to political power. Enter Churchill, Hitler, Douglas MacArthur and the Charter of the United Nations.

And 1980? Bartlett's editor, Emily Morison Beck, daughter of Historian Samuel Eliot Morison, has reverted some what to Bartlett's original concept of familiarity, and what is familiar today is pop culture. So step aside Shakespeare -- a few inches, anyway -- to make some room for Bob Dylan ("The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind"), Janis Joplin ("Down on me, down on me/ Looks like everybody in this whole round world/ Is down on me"), Timothy Leary ("Turn on, tune in, drop out"), Wladziu Valentino Liberace ("I cried all the way to the bank"), Yogi Berra (";The game isn't over till it's over") and Woody Allen ("Play It Again, Sam"). *

A new generation of literary figures also sounds pop: Mario Puzo ("I'll make him an offer he can't refuse"), Paddy Chayevsky ("I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more") and Andy Warhol ("In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes"). Even the most eminent politicians nowadays are often remembered less for literary-power than for pop theatrics. Richard T Nixon, for example, is trailed by a whole series of unstatesmanlike remarks:

"You won't have Nixon to kick around any more . . . I'm not a crook ... I want you all to stonewall it."

Changing times bring not just new concepts of celebrity but new evaluations of Christmases past.

Wildernesses are In now; belching symbols of industrial power are Out. Abigail Adams? "Remember the ladies" is, of course, obligatory. And, in keeping with its relentless democracy, the new Bartlett's greatly increases the space devoted to the works of Anon. He (she) now provides not only such familiar items as "O.K.," "Kilroy was here" and "Women and children first," but also a cornucopia of cowboy songs, Indian chants and even some less-than-familiar Swahili proverbs ("Speak silver, reply gold").

"I think of Bartlett's as literary archaeology," says Beck, ";in which familiar and noteworthy quotations reveal . . . the nature of the age and the people who created them." If so, the 15th edition, with its chorus of sayings by Neil Armstrong, Muhammad Ali, R.D. Laing, Mick Jagger and the rest of the tribe, reminds one of Victor Hugo's platitude about an idea whose time has come, a quotation that Beck calmly assures us Hugo never said. Bartlett would have been proud of her.

*No, Humphrey Bogart never said what everybody thinks he said in Casablanca. All he said was "Play it!" and all Ingrid Bergman said was "Play it. Sam."

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