THE OTHER DAY I was signing a few books, after a talk I gave at a women’s club in Chicago, when someone remarked on the weather, and a very nice woman cited Mark Twain as saying, “It’s heaven for climate, it’s hell for company.” I hesitated, then remarked, “Forgive me, but Mark Twain wasn’t the first to say that. J.M. Barrie was.” One-upsmanship isn’t really my style, and neither is correcting someone my notion of a good time. I do, though, have a stake in that particular quotation, for, having once heard it used by a Mark Twain impersonator, I had attributed it to Twain in a New Yorker piece I wrote some years ago on Ambrose Bierce. A well-mannered fact-checker at the magazine called to tell me that three different dictionaries of quotations had qualified attributions of the comment to Twain, but a fourth, Bergan Evans’s “Dictionary of Quotations,” claimed it was often misattributed to Twain but really first appeared in a Barrie play.
How many other quotations are misattributed to Twain? Probably, my guess is, a great many. Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill, Dorothy Parker also must pick up credit for things they never really said. Samuel Johnson, too, is among the most quoted of writers, but his utterances are so characteristic that no one is likely to attribute to him something said by, say, Yogi Berra.
That most quoted author of all, fellow name of Anonymous, once said that you are only truly famous when someone insane imagines he is you. But I wonder if having witty or penetrating quotations you never made attributed to you doesn’t also qualify.
People quote other people for all sorts of reasons. At the low end, they do so to show that they are decently well read or modestly cultivated. “Brush up your Shakespeare,” the Cole Porter song from “Kiss Me Kate” has it, “start quoting him now . . . And the women you will wow.” Others use quotation to back up their arguments. How can I be wrong when a sterling dude like Cicero felt pretty much the same way? Some writers use quotations to close off further discussion: “As Hannah Arendt put it,” “As Richard Rorty says,” “As Harold Bloom remarked . . .”
When I was editing a magazine, the American Scholar, I felt that my writers shouldn’t be allowed to quote below a certain level, at least not when they expected the material quoted to carry Q.E.D. authority. The three people mentioned at the end of my last paragraph, for example, would not qualify; each has said too many wrong or foolish things. My own sense is that, in prose, there ought to be a moratorium, in which one waits 50 years after an author’s death before he ought to be considered quotable in an authoritative way.
Some writers appear to have written for quotation, and not alone those with an aphoristic style. Consider Alexis de Tocqueville, whom I have taken to calling “the inevitable Tocqueville,” for if you write at any length on almost any subject on America you will find yourself, inevitably, quoting, usually to good effect, Tocqueville. I am about to launch out on a little book on Tocqueville, and already feel it is a great drawback that I shall not be able to quote Tocqueville on the subject of Tocqueville.
A fairly quotatious fellow myself, I write down interesting items from my reading, which I keep in small notebooks. I have more than 20 such notebooks. My entries run from the elegant to the penetrating to the historically odd: “. . . Pompey’s eldest son Cnaeus, who had a short and cruel temper” is a recent entry I took from Anthony Everitt’s biography of Cicero; Hobbes’s phrase for laughter, “sudden glory,” is another. These notebooks have become too numerous to serve as a filing system. Yet I cannot resist copying out items I find of genuine interest, including, sometimes, one writer quoting another: “The spirit, says Aristotle, ages like the body,” wrote Montaigne, himself one of the great quoters.
I have a weakness for quoting Paul Valéry, the French thinker and poet, who said so many smart things usually seasoned with a nice tang of paradox. “Everything changes but the avant-garde” is a characteristic Valéryism, as is “The future isn’t what it used to be.” Sometimes people one generally doesn’t care for say dazzling things, and so one quotes them with a touch of regret. “What are the three saddest words in the English language?” Gore Vidal asked, then answered, “Joyce Carol Oates.” Whenever I quote that I generally follow it up with Henry James’s remark that the two most beautiful words in the English language are “summer afternoon.” An Arab proverb runs: “When your son becomes a man, make him your brother.” Lovely, and in my case it turns out to have been perfectly and pleasingly true. But why couldn’t it have been a Jewish proverb? Quoters, alas, cannot always be choosers.
–Joseph Epstein
