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Turf Writing Good and Bad BY SALVATOR Considering the glamour and the glitter the excitement sometimes amounting to de ¬ lirium tho kaleidoscopic shift and change the zcsl and color and sparkle wnlch are characteristic of racing and of life on the turf generally speaking I have often paused to wonder at the tameness and tediousness of most socalled turr litera ¬ ture A library anything like complete devoted to racing and breeding would be one of large proportions while aside from the bound book side of the subject there is the journalistic journalisticMostly Mostly however the student finds himself obliged to read for instruction for infor ¬ mation rather than anything else For the books invested with any charm of style which bring to their themes any grace or diction or literary merit are few and far between Sometimes it seems to me to bor ¬ der on the miraculous that so many books all so tedious tiresome stuffy and hum ¬ drum should be devoted to subjects which would seern above almost any other to in ¬ spire the scribe to the production of some ¬ thing vibrant brilliant and absorbing absorbingPAUE PAUE PAUETT TT Oil TUIIF UTEKATUKE UTEKATUKEEngland England being the mother country of the turf as the modern world knows it is also the parent of turf literature Perhaps it is because the patterns she has set have been for the most part so matteroffact and stodgy that the same sort of dry rot has become the regular thing everywhere I would hesitate to estimate the number of British books upon racing that I have read together with those devoted to breeding and tho subjects of biology and heredity as ap ¬ plied to equine affairs affairsThe The thoroughbred horse when displaying the speed with which the Creator has gifted him is one of the most magnificent spec ¬ tacles which this earth affords one of those most calculated to make the onlookers pulse leap and his heart thump in his i bosom It is moreover a fact that the j exhibitions of his speed move the Briton j himself in the mass to displays of enthu t siasm that considering the general respecta ¬ bility of the race is little less than aban ¬ don But if the retrospective reader would turn to some printed page wherefrom to vicariously enjoy the like experience in im ¬ agination he will be sadly disappointed disappointedThe The few exceptions to this rule may be found among writers who occasionally rise to the occasion without falling fiat but never without seeming to imply a doubt of hav ¬ ing transgressed good form What is more even their productions are all pat ¬ terned In them you seldom encounter anything fresh or new some vividly etched picture or unforgetable phrase that re ¬ mains a permanent and precious possession In America turf writers for many gen ¬ erations formed themselves upon English models which were indeed the only ones And they might have done far worse for truth to tell the models of them good old days were far worthier of imitation than are those of today William T Porter created what amounted to a sensation by the verve of his narrative descriptions of various historic contests and in so doing 1m departed to a considerable extent from his models Some of his pages may still be read with pleasure though most of them have aged William T Herbert Frank Forrester was an expatriated Englishman EnglishmanENGLISH ENGLISH EXPATRIATES EXPATRIATESAs As I survey the lengthy retrospect I real ¬ ize that I have also waded through enough periodical literature to sink a ship provided all of it were to be dumped upon one un ¬ fortunate boat simultaneously And the im ¬ pression that remains with me is as a whole of something deadly dull or when not so apt to be disfigured by truculence violence offensive personalities and the like likeIn In the wide prospect gray upon the gray two green and pleasant spots ap ¬ pear likes oases in Saraha They bear the names respectively of Nimrod and The Druid and represent the only writers that I have ever been able to reread simply for the pleasure their pages afforded me There are many other books about the thor ¬ oughbred which may be designated as good or valuable But not for literary reasons By no means It is for their matter not their manner that they deserve shelf room and for that alone aloneBOTH BOTH LOXG PEAT PEATIt It is invidious to name contemporary names Ximrod and The Druid have been long long dead and both lived and wrote in periods more picturesque than ours when the sport has become little but a thoroughly commercialized proposition the motto of whose leading players is get the money no matter how with few exeptions Cut those versed in the latterday literature of the turf will have no difficulty in calling to mind various names noted or even cele ¬ brated of writers long the most prominent in their particular field who having spent their lives in the thick of it manage to invest when they sit down to tell their stories what they have seen and known with the thrill one would obtain from an ency ¬ clopedia or a patent office report They reportThey all write wclL They use carefully selected words deployed with excellent syn ¬ tax Quite often they allow themselves a Latin quotation a survival of the days of their youth when that tongue was laboriously flogged into them never in some of its phrases to be forgotten And occasionally one of them with a gesture suggestive of a staid maiden lady lifting her eyebrows at a flapper may quote a bit of American slang They make their meaning clear which in itsself is a virtue not to be de ¬ spised and is indeed their highest virtue But one and all they progress through his ¬ tory and the making of it on a slow jog ¬ trot trotCharles Charles J Foster Privateer a far finer Horary craftsman was also an expatriate from the mother country and never for a moment forgot it as none of mem ever can Foster and air Vosburgh so far surpass all other American writers on the thoroughbred that none of the latter can seriously compare with them Editorial exigencies unfortu ¬ nately years ago removed Mr Brunell and Mr Kiley virtually from the field and only occasionally have they turned their pens during that period to the task of enter taining the reader as distinguished from informing him As for the fearure stories which do duty nowadays in the daily press they have lowered turf journalism to the same level as the other departments of the papers in which they appear and ve wiin Mutt and Jeff and Petey Dink in their grotesque absurdity absurdityFrench French turf literature is truly amusing though unintentionally so The French lan ¬ guage is the most highly finished expressive and best adapted to artistic purposes of any modern tongue But its vocabulary of turf terms is borrowed largely from across the channel whence racing itself also was im ¬ ported French prose writers are the great ¬ est modern masters of literary style the most graceful charming and brilliant or pen painters But none of them could write about racing without violating most of his proprieties proprietiesCOMIC COMIC ITALIAN TURF WRITING WRITINGItalian Italian turf journalism is really funny It is a crescendo of language such as the prima donna of grand opera twitters at the tenore robusto interlarded with the argot of Newmarket The mixture is something indescribable If Dante were alive he would idd a new circle to his Inferno ana add to it the manufacturers of this awful lin ¬ guistic brew brewAs As for the German article it is awfully funny or funnily awful in a quite different way Pedantry is the hallmark of the Ger 1 man writer who takes himself and his subject with a seriosity that grazes the sublime It is the same thing when he turns to the turf and attempts to express himself in his terrific Teuton tongue with its appalling concatenations of compound j words endless sentences and paragraphs i pages long The emotions of the nonTeu ¬ tonic reader are akin to those of a fly fatal ¬ ly ensnared upon a piece of tanglefoot He soon gives up the struggles and longs languidly for death
