ALL TRIVIA—Logan Pearsall Smifh—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).
I paused, before opening the front door, for a moment of deep consideration.
Dim-lit, shadowy, full of menace and unimaginable chances, stretched all around my door the many-peopled streets. I could hear, ominous and muffled, the tides of traffic, sounding multitudinously along their ways. Was I equipped for the navigation of those waters, armed and ready to adventure out into that dangerous world again?
Gloves? Money? Cigarettes? Matches? Yes; and I had an umbrella for its tempests, and a latchkey for my safe return.
The umbrella-toting hero of this Great Adventure is the soul of Logan Pearsall Smith viewed under the aspect of eternity. Author Smith, ex-Quaker, ex-American, is one of the few contemporary writers of English prose who can afford to be so viewed. For if stylistic perfection, embalming a wry wit and a flawless sense of human folly, has any preservative powers, the four slender volumes* gathered into this brief (197-page) book have a better chance than most contemporary writing to survive the impartial ages.
Logan Pearsall Smith is the only son of a family of pious, prosperous Philadelphia Quakers. He was doomed to a career in the family bottle factory when he coaxed from his father an annuity on which he was able to live austerely, but without working, for the best part of his life. He at once set out (1888) for England, where he has remained (except for brief periods) ever since. In 1913 Logan Pearsall Smith became a British subject.
You, Hypocritic Reader. In the Sussex farmhouse where he lived for some ten years as a secluded bachelor, Smith dedicated himself to discovering a literary form in which to distill his urbane reflections. One day, leafing through the pages of Charles Baudelaire's Poems in Prose, Moralist Smith found the form. It was these lapidary fragments which he called trivia, and in which he condensed the discernments, bafflements, exultations, wry exposures to society and to eternity, and shy self-revelations of the Smithian soul, which in Baudelaire's words is "vous, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère"—"you, hypocritic reader, my likeness, my brother." All Trivia is Smith's amused comments on life, heightened by his sense of the precariousness of living:
"When I seek out the sources of my thoughts," he writes in The Coming of Fate, "I find they had their beginning in fragile Chance; were born of little moments that shine for me curiously in the past. Slight the impulse that made me take this turning at the crossroads, trivial and fortuitous the meeting, and light as gossamer the thread that first knit me to my friend.... So I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents. Why, today, perhaps, or next week. I may hear a voice, and, packing up my Gladstone bag, follow it to the ends of the world."
The Beatific Vision. But sometimes he permits himself to outscorn the indignity of living: