Books: Doctor’s Output

Six SIDES TO A MAN—Merrill Moore— Harcourt, Brace ($2).

When Poet-Critic Louis Untermeyer went through Dr. Merrill Moore’s filing cabinet, he counted approximately 25,000 idiomatic, hybrid or “American” sonnets. Some were bad, some good; some had been printed in Walter Winchell’s column, some had appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript, some in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine oj Verse. To conceive of the tremendous industry that could turn out 25,000 sonnets, says Mr. Untermeyer, “one must think of the author as a pundit, an immured octogenarian, devoting all his hours to the fashioning and perfecting of his flexible models.” But Dr. Moore is only 31, spends his days teaching at Harvard Medical School, researching in neuropsychiatry at the Boston City and Boston Psychopathic Hospitals, carrying on private practice, fathering two sons. A semiprofessional swimmer, he competes annually in the twelve-mile race from Charlestown to Boston Light. During the past two years he has been collecting and editing studies on the problems of syphilis of the nervous system.

When he has a split-second to spare Merrill Moore writes a sonnet. He dictates them to his wife, composes them in shorthand between cases at the hospital. improvises them while motoring home. Anything may serve to set him going from the sight of breakfast eggs to the news of the death of the New York World. Typical is his sonnet to the Prince of Wales: My admiration for the Prince of Wales Is far-flung as a fleet of royal sails. Poor fellow, duties he must do as prince, Endless, fatiguing, and yet never wince! …As deep as cotton in a thousand bales My sympathy is for the Prince of Wales!