MAURICE SAGOFF, 88,
A MASTER OF TERSE VERSES
ON LITERATURE
At first blush it might not seem all that obvious that, say, “Crime and Punishment” required reduction to 10 couplets, even (or especially) these:
Up-tight student
Axes pair.
Fearful, with the
Cops aware.
Yet vainglorious,
He won’t chicken
Till by saintly
Sonia stricken;
Then confession,
Trial and sentence:
Eight Siberian years.
Repentance
Floods his spirit,
Hang-ups cease,
She will join him
Seeking peace . . .
In that bleak
Siberian hovel,
Watch him, Sonia,
With that shovel.
Indeed, even Mr. Sagoff had long been content with the Dostoyevsky version. Then he read about a Middle Western university that had appropriated $2 million for a gymnasium and $20,000 for library books, and it set him to thinking, for Mr. Sagoff a process that frequently veered into the absurd, in this case producing the notion that with library space clearly at a premium, what the world needed was a one-inch shelf of great literature.
Mr. Sagoff shared his view in a tongue-in-cheek 1968 article for Mademoiselle magazine, which included an abbreviated “Alice in Wonderland” (“Holed up / With bunny, / Pre-teen / Acts funny / Aberrations- / Hallucinations- / Wild Scenes / Tarts, Queens / Clearly, she / Needs therapy”).
For Mr. Sagoff, who for years had been dashing off doggerel to celebrate special occasions, the subversive excursion into mock literature might mercifully have ended there if the verse had not caught the eye and tickled the fancy of Elizabeth Charlotte, a New York book editor.
As Ms. Charlotte recalled, she wondered if Mr. Sagoff had enough similar verses to justify a book, called him and reached his wife, who assured the editor that her husband had composed dozens of shrinklits.
It was not until after she had commissioned a book that the editor discovered that Mr. Sagoff had no such supply but had been spurred by her interest to churn them out.
First published by Doubleday in 1970, the book was an immediate sensation, making the New York Times best-seller list and eventually becoming a staple for Workman Publishing Company, which issued a version in 1980 including modern classics like “Portnoy’s Complaint” (“Alec Portnoy, none too choosy, / Went for any willing floozy; / Still a jerk in matters phallic / Alec also went for Alec . . .”).
By the time “Shrinklits,” his only book, was published, Mr. Sagoff, a native of Cambridge, Mass., had graduated from Boston College, spent one happy decade working as a research librarian for the Boston Public Library system and two miserable decades working as regional editor for Fairchild Publications.
Gratefully taking early retirement in 1954, he was contentedly managing the visitor center at the Boston Children’s Museum when he came up with the idea for shrinklits.
The success of the book, which has sold more than 150,000 copies and is still in print, spurred him to sell his verse to a variety of publications, including The New York Times.
He had recently finished a volume of Clerihews, a rarefied and not especially celebrated form of verse whose four lines always begin with a name, a format that allowed Mr. Sagoff to continue his interest in literature (“Oscar Wilde / Married, and fathered a child, / Which proves, you might say, / He was not toujours gai”), while expanding his humorous horizons to fields like painting (“Michelangelo Buonarroti/Carried his own personal potty/High up in the Sistine/To keep it pristine”) and anthropology (“Pithecanthropus, said Mrs. Erectus,/Your friends, the big apes, may reject us,/But I think it’s time you began/To stand up and act like a man”). For reasons that might seem all too obvious, he had planned to have it published privately.
Mr. Sagoff, whose first wife died in 1969, is survived by his second wife, Charlotte; two children, Sara Mitter of Montpellier, France, and Mark, of Bethesda, Md., and four grandchildren.
March 29, 1998
CORRECTION: An obituary on March29about Maurice Sagoff, a writer of terse humorous verses, misspelled the names of the New York editor who commissioned his book, “Shrinklits.” She is Elisabeth Scharlatt, not Elizabeth Charlotte.