'I’m Tickled to Death When They Call Me Comic'

Like porkchops, fame is highly perishable. Writers once read by millions – think of James Michener and, at a far more accomplished level, James Gould Cozzens – have evaporated from literary memory. Newspaper writing and journalism in general are especially biodegradable. Who wants yesterday’s papers, let alone those published a century ago?

Franklin Pierce Adams, known to the public as F.P.A., was once a durably familiar name in American popular culture and a prolific writer of light verse. From 1913 to 1937 his column, “The Conning Tower,” was published in the Herald Tribune and other New York newspapers. With Dorothy Parker and George S. Kaufman, he was a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table, and he joined the panel of experts on the popular radio show “Information, Please” in 1938. Readers and non-readers alike could quote “F.P.A.isms,” the way they quoted Ogden Nash. Perhaps Adams’ most famous line: “To err is human; to forgive, infrequent.” His was an era when wit, not stridency, was prized by a broad potion of the American reading public.

 

Among many other volumes, Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books has digitalized eight of F.P.A.’s poetry collections published between 1911 and 1936. Much of Adams’ light verse is, admittedly, doggerel, just not very good, but he hated free verse and remained loyal to meter and rhyme. That alone makes much of his poetry more readable than most of the sludge published today, though some of the topicality will lose readers. “Why Don’t You Do Something Big?” is the prefatory poem to Weights & Measures (1917) and stands as Adams' poetic apologia:

 

“The Comic Bard is supposed to sigh

For the skill and the power to make you cry:

He’s supposed to yearn, when he has the time,

To make you sob as you read his rhyme.

That thought in many a bard may be;

I only know how the thing strikes me.

For mine aim is low, mine ambish [ambition] atom:

I’m tickled to death when they call me comic.”

 

Adams loved words, which ought to be an obvious thing to say about any poet. Often the strategy energizing his light verse is to undercut grandiosity while not indulging in it. Here is “To a Thesaurus” (The Melancholy Lute: Selected Songs of Thirty Years, 1936):

 

“O precious codex, volume, tome,

Book, writing, compilation, work

Attend the while I pen a pome,

A jest, a jape, a quip, a quirk.

 

“For I would pen, engross, indite,

Transcribe, set forth, compose, address,

Record, submit – yea, even write

An ode, an elegy to bless –

 

To bless, set store by, celebrate,

Approve, esteem, endow with soul,

Commend, acclaim, appreciate,

Immortalize, laud, praise, extol.

 

“Thy merit, goodness, value, worth,

Expedience, utility –

O manna, honey, salt of earth,

I sing, I chant, I worship thee!

 

“How could I manage, live, exist,

Obtain, produce, be real, prevail,

Be present in the flesh, subsist,

Have place, become, breathe or inhale.

 

“Without thy help, recruit, support,

Opitulation, furtherance,

Assistance, rescue, aid, resort,

Favour, sustention and advance?

 

“Ala Alack! and well-a-day!

My case would then be dour and sad,

Likewise distressing, dismal, gray,

Pathetic, mournful, dreary, bad.

 

“Though I could keep this up all day,

This lyric, elegiac, song,

Meseems hath come the time to say

Farewell! Adieu! Good-by! So long!”

 

Opitulation is a new one on me (and my spell-check software): from the Latin, “help, aid, assistance.” From the same Adams volume comes “Broadmindedness,” which has a newfound applicability in the twenty-first century:

 

“How narrow his vision, how cribbed and confined!

How prejudiced all of his views!

How hard is the shell of his bigoted mind!

How difficult he to excuse!

 

“His face should be slapped and his head should be banged;

A person like that ought to die!

I want to be fair, but a man should be hanged

Who’s any less liberal than I.”

Adams died on this date, March 23, in 1960 at age seventy-eight.