Pedagog Perry

In all of Harvard's curious and celebrated faculty, none is more distinguished than Professor Bliss Perry, incumbent of the Francis Lee Higginson Chair of English Literature. He it is who gives the famed course, English 41, which most Harvardmen remember for the lecturer's reference to Gabriele D'Annunzio. In this perennial discourse, Pedagog Perry tells his students that once, while lying ill in Europe, he undertook to read all of the stormy Italian poet's work. He concludes: "At the end of which time, gentlemen, I came to the decision that D'Annunxio has a dirty mind." Harvardmen were sorry to hear, last week, that Pedagog Perry was resigning his chair to become an Emeritus Professor, having served the University well for 23 years.

Novelist (The Broughton House), essayist (The American Mind), biographer (Walt Whitman, Whittier), he is a sparkling ingredient of Boston's erudite Tavern Club. There, in the little Colonial clubhouse hiding in a courtyard behind the Teuraine Hotel, he converts fellow members to the Americanisms and poetics of Walt Whitman. With Professor Charles Townsend ("Copey") Copeland he attends the club's dinners, carrying lighted taper in hand, singing "Wreathe the bowl with flowers of soul," and wearing a bright-hued vest with evening dress. To recognize the decade in which a member was admitted, each Tavern Clubman sports a dinner waistcoat of distinctive color.

But of all his characteristics, Bliss Perry is best known for his literary commentaries and his skill as an angler. Even during the ten years that he was breathing the breath of life into the Atlantic Monthly, flavoring it with humor, human interest and gentle irony, he did not forego fishing or writing about it. Every complete angler is familiar with his quixotic essay "Fishing With A Worm," a stirring defense of the practice.

With true fisherman's fatalism, two months ago with calmness and clarity he reviewed U. S. letters since 1900 in The Saturday Review of Literature. The essay, Perry-patetically called "Salmon Not Running," concluded that "big" books, like big fish, must be awaited in patience but are worth the trouble when they appear. Said he: "I once asked an old fellow in a military cloak, watching his line in a sluggish stream in Alsace, 'What kind of a fish are you expecting to catch?' 'All kinds,' was his gruff but very proper answer....I confess that I do not care to hear a publisher shouting from his crow's nest 'There she blows!' when I have reason to think that his whale is only a porpoise. But meanwhile there are few pleasanter sights than porpoises rolling in the sunshine, and, any morning, now, we may really catch sight of a White Whale." --Time.