Morris Bishop
At its core Bishop's work covered Pascal, Petrarch, Ronsard, La Rochefoucauld, Cabeza de Vaca, and Champlain—embracing literature in Italian, Spanish, Latin, and particularly French.
[5][iii] After that he sold textbooks for Ginn & Co, joined the US Cavalry (and unhappily served under Pershing in the "punitive expedition" in Mexico), was a first lieutenant in the US Infantry in World War I[6] and a member of the American Relief Administration mission to Finland in 1919,[10][11] and worked as a copywriter in a New York advertising agency, the Harry Porter Company, for a year.
[19] He was a frequent contributor of historical articles to American Heritage and also wrote a miscellany of lighter material, including the pseudonymous comic mystery The Widening Stain and humorous verse and prose pieces published by a variety of magazines.
[20] His entry in American National Biography reads: Bishop's more than 400 publications are noteworthy not only by reason of their volume and their varied subject matter but also because of their charming style and formidable erudition.
[42] The review for Renaissance Quarterly, whose author estimated that the content represented "about one tenth" of Petrarch's surviving letters, started: This is a book for students of comparative literature who do not read Latin (if there are any).
[43]The review continued by saying that Bishop's book complemented James Harvey Robinson and Henry Winchester Rolfe's Petrarch the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters (1898), the latter remaining "most valuable" despite its stilted translations.
The review for The Modern Language Journal (MLJ) regretted abridgements and liberties with the translations, but concluded by praising the book as "a worthy effort to bring material not easily accessible to the attention of the cultured laymen for whom it is intended.
"[44] The reviews in both the Renaissance Quarterly and MLJ noted that the letters seemed to have been selected to fit Bishop's interests, or those of the educated lay reader, rather than to represent a more rounded picture of Petrarch's concerns.
[59][x] Before Bishop's translations of Molière into English, those most commonly used had been the "really bad" Modern Library selection by Henri van Laun, who according to the French literature scholar Donald Frame "had a genuine talent for dullness".
[68] "Le Roman de vrai amour" and "Le Pleur de sainte âme" (1958), edited by Bishop's student Arthur S. Bates, presents a pair of poems, known only from a manuscript Bishop had discovered twenty years earlier in Cornell University library,[xi] of "late medieval devotional verse in monorimed alexandrine quatrains [that] possess the absurd but delicate charm of decadent piety".
[77] The review in The New York Times concluded: "Despite an overwhelming mass of detail and despite the fact that most of his characters are unknown to the general reader, [Bishop] has made de Vaca live; and one feels admiration and indignation, as though the issues involved were things of yesterday.
[82] Just six years after publication of his book, Bishop himself acknowledged the superiority of a newly published alternative, writing that Cleve Hallenbeck "has produced the best informed and best argued study of Cabeza de Vaca's route that has ever been made".
The authors of a larger biography of de Vaca published in 1999 give their predecessors, and particularly Bishop and Enrique Pupo-Walker, "low marks for shoddy research and implausible or plainly erroneous readings and interpretations".
[84] A 2013 paper describes Bishop's book as "a breezy narrative about Cabeza de Vaca, spiced with imaginary dialogue"; saying that it "made no attempt to advance a new route interpretation.
[88] The economic historian Irene Spry wrote that although Bishop told Champlain's tale "in a sometimes jarringly skittish style [the book] is based on a serious study of first-hand sources and is full both of human and geographic interest".
[91] The historian Milo M. Quaife also criticized Bishop's exercise of his imagination, but nevertheless said that the book "will be a worthy and entertaining addition to the bookshelf of anyone who cares to read about the American past".
[95] Bishop's White Men Came to the St. Lawrence (1961) earned a dismissive mention in a survey of the literature of colonialism that classed it with Les Canadiens d'autrefois of Robert de Roquebrune [fr] as likely to appeal to the general public and schoolchildren.
[101] History of Education Quarterly's reviewer had high praise for Bishop's portrayal of the founders, Ezra Cornell and Andrew D. White, and indeed for the book as a whole, not least for its "substantial sketches of the wider social, intellectual, and cultural contexts within which [the university's] leaders dreamed and worked".
[20] After noting how light verse had almost completely vanished from the magazines that had previously published it, David McCord (himself an exponent) wrote: But from the twenties on down into the fifties there was Morris Bishop, the one true poet at heart who moved with almost elfin grace amid, yet superior to, the difficulties of an art traditionally chained and fettered by strict rhyme and meter.
[109]: 6 Writing in 1960, Richard Armour put Bishop together with F.P.A., Margaret Fishback, Arthur Guiterman, Samuel Hoffenstein, Ethel Jacobson, David McCord, Phyllis McGinley, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, E.B.
While conceding that "Mr. Bishop is not an originator", he wrote that "he equals and frequently surpasses such contemporary experts in deceptive casualness as F.P.A., Arthur Guiterman, Norman Levy, Phyllis McGinley, and David McCord .
[130] David McCord praised "The Naughty Preposition" as "tops" of poems exhibiting a particular skill of Bishop's: "a couple of seamless quatrains producing the effect of nonsense simply by an unexpected grouping of ordinary words, or by the threading of a string of them like beads in some unusual way".
[109]: 11–12 His obituary in The New York Times called Bishop an "authority" on limericks, and a very facile composer of them;[6] Richard Armour wrote that he was "the only writer of light verse who has had any marked success with them in recent years".
Bishop had a mystery novel, The Widening Stain, published in 1942 under the pseudonym W. Bolingbroke Johnson, rather jokily[xxiii] described on the jacket as a former librarian for the American Dairy Goat Association and Okmulgee Agricultural and Mechanical Institute.
[136] The review in The New York Times concluded, "We do not know who W. Bolingbroke Johnson is, but he writes a good story with an academic atmosphere that is not so highly rarefied as we have been led to believe it should be in university circles.
[139] The novel was very quickly attributed to Bishop,[xxiv] who expressed some regret about it, inscribing a copy within Cornell's library: A cabin in northern Wisconsin Is what I would be for the nonce in, To be rid of the pain Of The Widening Stain And W. Bolingbroke Johnson.
[8] An enthusiastic review in The New York Times of A Gallery of Eccentrics (1928)[xxv] summarized by saying that "the author's fastidious sympathy invests [the twelve] with ironic but kindly humanity".
[140] A warm review by Romeyn Berry described the book as revealing "the lives and vivacities of a dozen piquant individuals", all of whom were outclassed by the narrator, himself an invention of Bishop's, an "erudite, irascible don".
[2] A 1967 profile described Bishop as: an accomplished belle-lettrist, a distinguished literary biographer, a widely published poet, a bon vivant, raconteur, and teacher-scholar who has served Cornell all of his adult lifeand as "one of the charter members of a discreetly exclusive faculty society called 'The Circle', organized by the late Professor George Sabine in the 1920s", and as having been "a long-time member and supporter of Book and Bowl, a considerably less exclusive organization of students and faculty".
[9]: 6 [181] Edgar Newton Kierulff wrote a play, Moving day in Shakspere's England, "[a]dapted from an original piece by Morris Bishop", and published in 1964 in a small edition for friends.
