Man of Trivia

RECOLLECTIONS OF LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH (259 pp.) -- Roberf Gafhorne-Hardy--Macmillan ($3.50).

Logan Pearsall Smith was one of the last of an almost vanished type: the gifted dilettante who lives on inherited income and putters about the suburbs of literature. As the child of zealous Philadelphia Quakers (his father was a glass manufacturer), little Logan fell in love with religion at the age of four and for the next few years became, as he later put it, an "odious little prig" who would clamber aboard horse cars handing out tracts and asking people if they had been saved. Before long he lost his faith; never again would he so thoroughly commit his emotions to an interest outside himself.

In 1888, at 23, Smith left the U.S. to settle in England with a lump inheritance and a passion for foraging fine phrases from great writers who had created more than mere phrases. He would occasionally turn out such little books as Trivia and More Trivia, in which he rubbed his language to a fine sheen and tried to distill the essence of his new-found cultivation into concise paragraphs. Smith's lapidary phrases were admired by such tweedy literary folk as Christopher Morley, but, reread today, they seem rather cold and feeble.*

No Flinching. In his 60s Smith was once rummaging through a bookstore when he met a clerk who shared his enthusiasm for the writings of 17th Century Jeremy Taylor. Bound by this quirk of taste, the old litterateur and the young clerk became close friends. After 17 years as Smith's apprentice and companion, that clerk, Robert Gathorne-Hardy, has written a fascinating memoir of his master's life.

Soon after their meeting Smith offered Gathorne-Hardy an allowance so that he could do his own writing and help compile more Trivia. Two strings were attached: "I was not to get married; and I must not attempt to write bestselling novels." Gathorne-Hardy was not the sort of man to flinch before either condition.

But his life as a combination assistant and disciple was no bed of roses, and his memoir of his patron is, perhaps unwittingly, a murderous indictment of a spoiled and kittenish aesthete. Gathorne-Hardy was allowed plenty of free time, but Smith often made his life miserable with his whims and pouts, especially during his intermittent bouts of melancholia, which he called his "interlunaries." And his penchant for repeating anecdotes would drive Gathorne-Hardy to otherwise unmotivated trips to the washroom.

Beautiful Phrases. Smith lived in the quiet conviction that the world was organized to satisfy his wants. Once he wrote to his disciple: ". . . a beautiful phrase is the most important thing in the world . . . nothing else really matters." Since this sentence was written in total sincerity, it may explain why Smith could never enter into any deep relationship with either people or literature.

Toward the end of his life. Dilettante Smith, by then a corpulent old man, played at the game of dangling his inheritance before a group of younger followers. He was given to fits of genuine madness (he had once lost his wits on a trip to Iceland and accused Gathorne-Hardy of kidnaping him for a ransom). In 1946, in the last weeks of his life, he refused to see the disciple who had been faithful for 17 years, and in the end the inheritance went to another man. Magnanimously, he shared it with the loyal Gathorne-Hardy.

* An example from All Trivia: "When by sips of champagne and a few oysters they can no longer keep me from fading away into the infinite azure, 'you cannot,' I shall whisper my faint last message to the world, 'be too fastidious.' "

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