Arts and Letters

It is always wrenching to talk about the passing of a member of the Academy, especially when the humane values of our deteriorating culture seem to be one of the few defenses left against its selfishness and corruption. Tonight is particularly wrenching as we pause to memorialize the passing of that gentle giant, Justin Kaplan, familiarly known as Joe. He was a very unaverage Joe, indeed a large man in every sense of the size. As a biographer, he covered almost the whole spectrum of 19th Century literary lights—Walt Whitman, Lincoln Steffens, and particularly Mark Twain about whom he wrote two definitive books, not to mention a defense against stupid politically correct attacks on the so-called racism of Huckleberry Finn.

A proud Jew, he was nevertheless madly in love with Nineteenth Century American culture. His last book was entitled When the Astors Owned New York: Bluebloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age, no doubt his attempt to get a good hotel room at a reduced rate. But Joe loved all forms of literature, because he was a lover of language. He became the editor of the 16th and 17th editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, updating it with his own self-declared prejudices, his own delicious feeling for the politically absurd. Criticized for including only four citations by Ronald Reagan, he replied that he had done the President a big favor. He limited President Clinton only to three, climaxing with his immortal remark to the Grand Jury in the Monica Lewinsky impeachment, “It depends on the meaning of what the word “is” is. If the—if he—if “is” means is and never has been, that is not, that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” This must be the most incoherent quotation in all of Bartlett’s.

With his gifted wife and occasional collaborator, Ann Bernays, he wrote a splendid book called The Language of Names about the etymology of our proper names, and he was involved in another unfinished collaboration with her before his death.

The oddest story about Joe Kaplan, considering his gentle nature, concerns the time when, after being hospitalized for pneumonia, he developed what is called “hospital delirium,” striking a nurse, and threatening to kill his beloved wife and daughter in what was perhaps the only violent moment of his entire life. What fictional world was he feverishly inhabiting then?

Joe was a faithful reader of obituaries. In one of his editions of Bartlett’s, he quoted Woody Allen’s remark (I am tempted to call it Woody’s deathless remark) to the effect that “It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Justin Kaplan was very much there when it happened. But oh, how all of us wish that it hadn’t happened and that he was still here.