LIBRARY NOTES
George Plimpton
An Evening with George Templeton Strong
Tuesday, May 6, 1997 at 7:00 PM
Weill Hall, atop Carnegie Hall
Mr. Plimpton has distilled the script from Strong's four-million word diaries, written between 1835, when he was 15, and 1875, when he died. Writer and New Yorker critic Brendan Gill, active in the Municipal Arts Society, the Lincoln Center Film Festival, and numerous New York cultural organizations, will introduce Mr. Plimpton. Louis Auchincloss, the lawyer and writer who edited a selection of Strong's diaries, The Hone and Strong Diaries of Old Manhattan (1989), is honorary chairman of the event.
Strong, a lawyer with the firm now called Cadwallader, Wickersham, and Taft, which his father had founded, was very much a man about town. He served on many New York boards, such as The New-York Historical Society, Trinity Church, Columbia University and the predecessor organization of the New York Philharmonic. During the civil War, he was secretary of the Sanitary Commission, a forerunner of the American Red Cross. He joined the Century Association in 1847, the same year it was founded. And he was a shareholder and frequent user of The New York Society Library. In chronicling the daily happenings in New York, Strong recreates the vibrant life of a vital city in stirring times:
- 1837, April 18:
Bought a copy of Byron this afternoon. Byron, from what I've seen of his poetry, is not such an incarnate of Satan as he's cracked up to be.
- 1855, November 17:
I value Mozart's music higher and higher every year, and am reluctantly conceding him place above Beethoven himself. Quiet strength is a nobler gift than vehement energy and restlessness.
- 1861, October 23:
[Lincoln] is lank and hard-featured, among the ugliest...men I have ever seen. Decidedly plebeian. Superficially vulgar and a snob. But not essentially. He seems to me clear-headed and sound-hearted...
- 1871, June 9:
To Society Library this evening. Reread that admirable "Battle of Dorking" article in the May Blackwood. It has attracted much attention and is the best and most vivid military narrative I ever read. Some of its little touches are worthy of Swift.
- 1873, June 3:
Visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art... on West Fourteenth Street... The gallery of "Old Masters" is not exciting to behold, Johnston has deposited Turner's "Slave Ship" there.
George Plimpton is the author of
Out of My League,
Paper Lion and many books and articles about his personal explorations of sporting and other professional worlds. He founded and is editor of The Paris Review. In the PBS documentary series, "The Civil War", he was the voice-over of George Templeton Strong, reading from the diaries.
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