The work before us is the pricking of the bladder—a jest highly effective, but somewhat barbarous. M. Josephson simply translates Apollinaire’s masterpiece, adds an apparatus criticus in the manner of T. S. Eliot, and then retires discreetly to wait for the yells. They will make a dreadful din, or I am no literary pathologist! For what does “The Poet Assassinated” turn out to be? It turns out to be a dull pasquinade in the manner of a rather atheistic sophomore, with a few dirty words thrown in to shock the booboisie. From end to end there is not as much wit in it as you will hear in a genealogical exchange between two taxicab drivers. It is flat, flabby and idiotic. It is as profound as an editorial in the Washington Star and as revolutionary as Ayer’s Almanac. It is the best joke pulled off on the Young Forward-Lookers since Eliot floored them with the notes to “The Waste Land.”
M. Josephson rather spoils its effect, I believe, by rubbing it in—that is, by hinting that Apollinaire was of romantic and mysterious origin—that his mother was a Polish lady of noble name and his father a high prelate of the Catholic Church—that he himself was born at Monte Carlo and baptized in Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome. This is too much. Apollinaire was, like all Frenchmen of humor, a German Jew. His father was a respectable waiter at Appenrodt’s, by name Max Spritzwasser: hence the nom de plume. His mother was a Mlle. Kunigunda Luise Schmidt, of Holzkirchen, Oberbayern.
10
Sweet Stuff
SIX DAYS OF THE WEEK: A BOOK OF THOUGHTS ABOUT LIFE AND RELIGION, by Henry van Dyke. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. [The American Mercury, March, 1925.]
I offer a specimen:
As living beings we are part of a universe of life.
A second:
Unless we men resolve to be good, the world will never be better.
A third:
Behind Christianity there is Christ.