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February 5, 2004
TT: Where credit is due
A reader inquired about "Alas, not by me," the running head I use to link to choice snippets by other people (usually bloggers) that I wish I'd written. It's a reference to a celebrated anecdote about Johannes Brahms. Back in the nineteenth century, autograph seekers sometimes invited their quarry to inscribe fans--the kind you hold in your hand. Brahms, the story goes, was invited by the wife (or possibly the daughter) of Johann Strauss the Younger to sign a fan, and responded by sketching a musical staff, writing out the first couple of bars of "On the Beautiful Blue Danube," and signing it "Alas, not by--Johannes Brahms."This is such a wonderful story that I fear it may not be true, especially since it could have been: Brahms was a witty gent capable of just such a spontaneous gesture, and his friendship with and admiration for Strauss were anything but apocryphal. (He told Hans von Bülow, for example, that Strauss was "one of the few colleagues I can hold in limitless respect.") I just checked, and two of the most reliable Brahms books on my shelves make no reference to the anecdote, so I plan to check no further. When the legend becomes true, print the legend (alas, not by me).
Incidentally, the word "alas" is one of my too-familiar, over-relied-upon fingerprints, along with "not surprisingly," "needless to say," "much less," "least of all," "I suspect," and (sigh) the use of hyphenated modifiers. Not surprisingly, I suspect that most far-too-prolific writers have, alas, a whole stack of these tics. Used in the strictest moderation, they're part of what turns a voice into a full-fledged style, but I'm not always careful about using them moderately, least of all on this blog, which is frequently written on the fly. When I was editing The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, I determined to trim away all but one or two occurrences of each of my personal clichés. Don't hold me to it, though, and please don't keep score when you're reading A Terry Teachout Reader. I guarantee you'll find them there, in profusion.
Posted February 5, 2004 10:51 AM
