Morley's Revisions

THE TROJAN HORSE--Christopher Morley--Lippiucott ($2.50).

BARTLETT'S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS -- Edited by Christopher Morley & Louella D. Everett--Little, Brown ($5).

Christopher Morley's first 41 books have been notable for affable after-dinner humor, a slightly ponderous display of undergraduate learning, a unique brand of lecture-platform whimsy. His 42nd, The Trojan Horse, is a scrambled modernization of the tale of Troy, complete with radio broadcasts, scenes in night clubs, pacifist demonstrations. In it Troilus is cast as a kind of star quarterback; the siege is a cross between a football game and a marathon dance; Cressida is a modern young woman whose wisecracks seem not quite so up-to-date; Pandarus is a Wall Street sophisticate; the Horse is a symbol whose exact significance cannot be determined from the text.

But if The Trojan Horse seemed likely to bewilder more readers than it pleased, another Christopher Morley revision of a classic. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, gave free play to his quotation-loving mind, resulted in a fat, handsome volume that was interesting reading, valuable for reference. The first Bartlett's was published in 1855, when Josiah Bartlett, then a Cambridge, Mass, bookseller, brought out his personal collection of apt phrases to show "the obligations our language owes to various authors for ... familiar quotations which have become 'household words.' " By 1891 Bartlett had published nine revisions; the tenth appeared in 1914. Despite its encyclopedic scope, Bartlett's left out Hawthorne, Melville, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, included many forgotten patriots of the Revolutionary War, many forgotten minor poets. Cutting down these, reducing the quotations from Byron and Wordsworth, Editors Morley and Everett have brought in moderns from Archibald MacLeish to William Butler Yeats. Shakespeare still leads with 77 of the 1,126 pages of quotations, the Bible is second with 32 pages.

If the quotations from moderns seem less striking than those from the past, it may be because there are so many moderns in the Morley revision. Editor Morley included George Ade ("Never put off until Tomorrow what should have been Done Early in the Seventies"), many newspaper rhymesters, Eliot, Lenin, Pound. Marx ("The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt"). Generous to his colleagues on The Saturday Review of Literature, he gives two pages to William Rose Benet, almost three pages to Stephen Vincent Benet, a half-page each to Editor Bernard De Voto and ex-Editor Henry Seidel Canby, a page to himself. The Morley Bartlett includes enough contemporary wisecracks. ephemeral fragments of minor living poets, to make other future revisions seem likely, but it shows that a few moderns (Thomas Mann, Bernard Shaw, Henry Adams) are as quotable as the giants of the past.

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