Preface

One would naturally assume that Sketches Sartorial, Tonsorial and the Like were composed at the very end of St. Claire Bullock’s life, but such (save for a few possible exceptions) is demonstrably not the case: “Notes for the American Reader” were found with them among his papers, mainly in the handwriting of his wife (a California native), who died almost two score years before him. This raises the question of why he allowed them to remain unpublished – especially in view of the fact that he depended on his writing for income. While we shall probably never have a definitive answer to this question, nobody who reads the Sketches could conclude that it was because he considered them inferior to his published light verse. An unfinished draft accompanying them suggests that he planned to add more poems before consigning them to the press, but was never able to find anything suitable to rhyme with “peplum”.

It was long a puzzlement to me why Bullock chose me as his literary executor. After all, he had many distinguished friends who would gladly have served in that capacity. I, on the other hand, was scarcely dry behind the ears – a very junior academic whose acquaintance he had made only a short time earlier.

Recently, I hit upon the answer: Bullock’s original literary executor, Albert Heath Chesterfield, predeceased him by seventeen years. His second, William Cutler Bates, predeceased him by fourteen years. His third, Asa Pond, became unable

This realization brought with it an awareness that I am now in the evening of my life, and that, preoccupied with my own affairs, I had neglected the high responsibility entrusted to me. Therefore, it is with a sense of remorseful urgency that I hasten to make these hitherto unpublished verses of Bullock at last available to the reading public.

R. V. Andelson
Auburn, Alabama, January 2002