CASUAL

...If you want lots and lots of mail, I am told, just misquote Shakespeare in print...

...It reminded me of one of the recent mayors of my city who, on the Fourth of July, announced that he was pleased to be at Grant Park where the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was getting ready to play, as it does every year, Tchaikovsky's Twelfth...

...I finally had to write to inform him that this habit causes me to open his otherwise charming letters with a heavy heart...

...I, in turn, wrote an abject apology for my error...

...Well, I'm a fox...

...It's finest when one catches an enemy or adversary in an error, but catching a person one is quite neutral about will supply the necessary fris-son—and, in a pinch, catching even a friend will do...

...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...

...I was reading the June 1 New Yorker, a magazine known for its careful fact checking, when, in the middle of a piece by George Plimpton about a man who wished to send himself aloft in a chair held up by helium balloons, I came across the following sentence: "The original idea was that Larry would rise to approximately a hundred feet above the Van Deusen house and hold there, tethered by a length of rope wrapped around a friend's car—a 1962 Chevrolet Bonneville, down on the lawn—to get his bearings and to check everything out before moving on...

...Kiddo, I muttered to myself, you are more like a turkey...

...He meant, of course, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture...

...The Greek poet Archilochus said it...

...Tolstoy never said any such thing...

...More intricate but graver in its implications, in the T.L.S...

...I wrote back to say that yes, actually, I had...

...I get a fair number of letters in which readers point out typographical errors in my books...

...Further piquancy was added by his pronunciation of the composer's name as if it were Chick Kowsky...

...The smallness of the error, combined with the fact that perhaps few people under 50 would know it was an error, greatly cheered me...

...My problem is that I have had too many errors of my own, in various degrees of viciousness, pointed out to me...

...Hedgehogs ball around and hold onto one idea, while foxes run from one to another...

...Keep those cards and letters coming...

...The quotation is correctly given in the first sentence of Isaiah Berlin's famous essay on Tolstoy, "The Hedgehog and the Fox...

...Even better, only last evening, reading along in a brief profile in my college alumni magazine, I encountered a professor of rather extravagant intellectual pretensions quoted as saying: "He [Tolstoy] said people are either hedgehogs or foxes...

...That it had got by the excellent New Yorker fact checkers put the cherry on top...

...He actually said: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing...

...They do so, I believe, good-heartedly, thinking that I can arrange to correct them in future editions...

...Chevrolet, I remembered, never had a model called a Bonneville...

...I get kindly and otherwise generous letters from time to time from a dermatologist who cannot resist, usually in a postscript, pointing out some error in grammar, spelling, or semantics in some piece I wrote years before...

...I could have written directly to the professor, pointing out his little mistake, adding that my own motives here went no further than wishing to prevent him from lapsing into the same error again...

...Pfoser, an Austrian, wrote a quite properly angry letter to the editor...

...I not long ago had a splendidly complimentary letter about something I had written, and it, too, was followed by a correction or two, to which the man appended a postscript, asking whether I had ever noted the tendency of people, even when praising, to want to point out errors...

...I normally don't mind apologies, but those abject ones are hell to make...

...I once assigned an anti-Semitic remark— "Literature is what one Jew plagiarizes from another"—to the man who quoted it (Alfred Pfoser) instead of to the man who in fact made it (Herman Bielohlawek...

...I decided to do nothing...

...Pontiac did...

...In a national magazine, I once referred to the Danish Kierkegaard as "that gloomy Swede," which enlivened my mail for weeks...

...The beauty of this little screw-up is that you can see just how it was made...

...Or I could have written to him, on a typewriter and under a pseudonym, informing him that, since he wishes to come off as a pretentious horse's ass, he ought to get his facts straight...

...It's all, I suppose, as Dos-toyevsky said about the owl and the pussycat: The owl gets one big thing wrong and the pussycat several small ones...

...I thought about writing an amusing, only mildly malevolent letter to the editor of my alumni magazine about the hedgehog-and-fox faux pas...