January 4, 2003

• Opening of the Graves

  Revelation 20:12 
  I saw the dead,
  the great and the small,
  standing before the throne,
  and they opened books.

  The Dead —

  The Great: 

  On January 4, 1965,
  T. S. Eliot
  died.

  The Small:

  On January 4, 1991,
  T. S. Matthews,
  author of
  Great Tom:
  Notes Towards the Definition
  of T. S. Eliot,
  died.

  From the website of the Redwood Library and Athenæum, Newport, Rhode Island: The Library of a 20th-Century Man of Letters Redwood is the delighted recipient of part of the personal library of Thomas Stanley Matthews ([Jan. 16] 1901- [Jan. 4] 1991), a shareholder from 1947 until his death and a generous benefactor. Matthews, who summered in Middletown for over 50 years, began his journalism career with The New Republic, where he served as assistant editor between 1925 and 1927 and as an associate editor between 1927 and 1929. He was then hired as books editor at Time, where over the next 20 years he held the positions of assistant managing editor, executive editor, and managing editor. In 1949 he succeeded the magazine’s founder, Henry Luce, as editor. Upon retiring in 1953, he moved to England. Matthews edited The Selected Letters of Charles Lamb (1956), for which he wrote the introduction. He published two volumes of memoirs, Name and Address: An Autobiography (1960) and Jacks or Better (1977; published in England as Under the Influence); two volumes of poetry; The Sugar Pill: An Essay on Newspapers (1957); O My America! Notes on a Trip (1962); Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot (1974); a volume of character sketches, Angels Unawares: Twentieth-Century Portraits (1985); and eight volumes of aphorisms, witticisms, and verse. Shortly before his death, Matthews expressed the desire that all his books be left to Redwood Library…. [including] books by Seamus Heaney, Louis MacNeice, Ezra Pound, Laura Riding, Edward Arlington Robinson, W. H. Auden, e e cummings, and Robert Graves. Of particular interest are the 16 volumes by Graves, most of them autographed by the author….

  
   
  “Like the beat, beat, beat
  of the tom-tom….”
  — Cole Porter, 1932 
  

  colporteur

  n. itinerant seller or giver of books,
  especially religious literature.

  

  Now you has jazz.

  — Cole Porter, lyric for “High Society,”
  set in Newport, Rhode Island, 1956

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