Only His Are Much Longer

Noticed the other week in The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends:

At the end of the year [1916] the two were corresponding half-seriously about a play on which Mr. [John Butler] Yeats had been working in a desultory way. Sending Quinn some lines of verse from his fragmentary text, he commented: "Like Homer, I have written two poems, only his are much longer."

The senior Yeats's formula is wonderful, and easily adapted:

Like Michaelangelo, I have painted ceilings, only he put pictures on his.

Like Chekhov, I have written short works of fiction, only mine were to explain absences from school and work.

The book is most interesting to dip into for anyone with an interest in the literature and art of the early 20th Century. Quinn was purchaser, patron, benefactor, or lawyer to Synge, Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, among many others. He was active in Democratic politics, an admirer of  Grover Cleveland but not at all of Woodrow Wilson. On solicitation from John Sloan he contributed to the socialist newspaper The Masses, though as a lawyer he represented such clients as Standard Oil. Yet for all its interest, the book is forbiddingly thick, and I'm not sure what short of a two weeks quarantine will settle me down to read it through.