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WHEN WILL CUPPY died, in September 1949, he had been working on this book, off and on, for sixteen years. During most of that time, of course, he was busy with other projects – a weekly column of reviews of mystery books for the New York Herald Tribune, pieces for various magazines, and a series of books on birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish.

The first of these animal books, How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes, appeared in 1931 and set the pattern for the others that followed. Cuppy often complained that people kept asking him, “Don’t you ever write anything but little pieces about animals?”

Here is the answer: all the time this was really the book he was most concerned about. At his death, he was well on his way toward finishing it.

As published, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody includes chapters devoted to all the famous men and women of history Cuppy wanted to include. (He had worked on all, some at least in skeleton form, before his death.) A few general chapters are missing: he planned to set down his thoughts on where he stood on Betsy Ross, and various other topics which were, for Cuppy, matters of immediate moment. In their place his pieces on the humor and eating habits of the great have been added.

Perhaps a note on how Cuppy worked would be of interest to his readers. First of all, before writing a line on any topic – or even thinking about what he might write – he would read every volume and article on the subject that he could find – including, in many cases, obscure books no longer available in this country. This was standard operating procedure, whether the topic in question was the Giant Ground Sloth or Catherine the Great.

After having absorbed this exhaustive amount of material, he would make notes on little 3-by-5 index cards, which he would then file under the appropriate subheading in a cardfile box. Usually he would amass hundreds and hundreds of these cards in several boxes, before beginning to block out his piece. In some cases, he would read more than twenty-five thick volumes before writing a one-thousand-word piece. Cuppy felt that he must know his subject as thoroughly as was humanly possible before going to work on it.

Sometimes Cuppy would stay in his Greenwich Village apartment for weeks at a time, having food sent in as needed. The apartment overflowed with books – in bookshelves along all living room walls right up to the ceiling, in his bedroom, and even in the kitchen – over the refrigerator, on top of the stove, and on the supply shelves.

Usually his day would start in the late afternoon. After several cups of coffee, he was ready to start sorting cards, or writing notes to himself. He’d work until about eight or nine, then take a nap until midnight, when he’d fix himself dinner – generally hamburger, green peas, and coffee. While enjoying his second and third cups of coffee he would phone his few close friends – often his only contact with the outside world. Then back to work till five, six, seven, or eight in the morning.

These, he discovered, were the quietest hours in the Village apartment which he inhabited during the last twenty years of his life. Cuppy hated noise in all forms, and throughout those twenty years he was tortured daily by the sounds which issued from a school playground directly adjoining the building in which he lived. From his small terrace he was also subjected to the wailing of numerous babies in nearby buildings. Yet he never thought of moving. His only positive action against these young adversaries was to buy a New Year’s Eve noisemaker – the kind that uncoils when you blow into it. When he couldn’t stand the wailing another minute, he’d get out his noisemaker and blow it several times in the direction of the crying child. Then he felt better.

When he grew irritated with the adults with whom he had to deal in his writing assignments, he would compose devastating letters to the offender or offenders, address the envelopes, apply the stamps, and leave the letters on the table near his door, to be mailed. Then the next day he would tear them up.

Beneath the gruff exterior he often affected, Cuppy was a thoroughly generous, kindly human being. He pretended he hated people, and, in fact, he was genuinely uneasy about meeting new people – he was afraid they might not like him or that they’d take up a lot of his time. His friends, though, were constantly receiving funny little presents from kaleidoscopes to hen-shaped milk-glass salt cellars. His Christmas cards were sent out around July 4; their good wishes applied either to the previous Christmas or to the coming one, however his friends chose to regard the matter.

His two favorite places on earth were the Bronx Zoo, where he felt really relaxed, and his shack, Chez Cuppy (or Tottering-on-the-Brink), on Jones’s Island, a few miles east of Jones Beach. Here Cuppy would revert to his earlier days as a hermit, sometimes for several weeks at a stretch. The trip was too much trouble for just a weekend, since Cuppy would have to carry, in large suitcases, a sizable supply of canned goods, books, and index-card-file boxes.

Cuppy has a devoted following, in England and Australia as well as in this country, but he was convinced that no one had ever heard of him. Any evidence to the contrary pleased him very much. The high point of his life, he once said, was the moment when he was walking along Park Avenue with Gene Tunney, then heavyweight champion of the world, and someone passing said to her companion, “Why, there’s Will Cuppy.”

But Cuppy was often equally set up by a lack of recognition. I know he would have been delighted by the error on the part of the newspaper to which he had contributed for twenty years, in its early morning editions following his death. The picture labeled “Will Cuppy” accompanying the obituary was of someone else.

On Cuppy’s death I inherited the job of assembling his material for publication. Except for the war years, I had been in almost daily communication with Cuppy by phone ever since he started on this book in the summer of 1933. These talks always concerned whatever he was working on at the moment.

Sometimes, before the call was completed, there might be a brief reference to some happening in the day’s news. But Cuppy really wasn’t interested in the front pages of the daily papers. Anything that happened after the eighteenth century left him cold. In fact, the farther back in history he went, the more his enthusiasm grew.

I can’t help wishing that this book had been available in history class when I first learned about these famous personages – in a somewhat different, and far less illuminating, perspective. The historians whose works I was forced to read seemed to lose sight of the fact that their subjects were human beings. Cuppy never lost sight of it for a minute.

In closing, I’d like to express my thanks to my wife, Phyllis, who spent many evenings and weekends going through dozens of Cuppy’s two hundred file boxes and deciphering his scrawls, and to Alan Rosenblum, Cuppy’s lawyer, who helped make publication possible at this early date.

FRED FELDKAMP

New York, N.Y.