The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes | Date: 15 April 2011, 15:37
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Civilians like to imagine that writers talk about writing when they get together. I'm sure, in all of literary history, that has happened several times. But it is not a favorite subject. Sex is. As is Food. Travel. Money. The perfidy of rivals. And did I say money?
Those are ordinary topics. But that doesn't mean we have nothing to gain from hearing what writers have to say about them. These are writers, remember? They're at the most clever when they're envious, scornful or otherwise out of sorts.
John Gross, editor of this anthology, is a particularly witty example of the breed. I stood by him at a party once, and, though I am said to be not entirely dull, I remained mute for a good twenty minutes. Gross spoke in epigrams. He could go lofty or vulgar. He was wise and wicked, and, most of all, funny. No surprise that he has edited a book with those same qualities.
Anecdotes are compressed stories, the more compressed the better. Like this one, about the dictionary-maker and moralist Samuel Johnson: "A young fellow, lamenting one day that he had lost all his Greek --- Johnson retorted, 'I believe it happened at the same time that I lost my large estate in Yorkshire.'"
I was amused to read about William Blake and his wife, sitting in their summer house, naked: "Come in," cried Blake. "It's only Adam and Eve, you know!"
And here's a trivia question. What lines did William Wordsworth write before forking manure into his garden? The opening stanza of the Immortality Ode:
There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light
The glory and the freshness of a dream...
Do you know Jane Austen's last words? "I want nothing but death."
Here we look over the shoulder of John Keats as he coughs up the first drop of blood --- and knows exactly what it means. We hear Ralph Waldo Emerson dismiss Edgar Allen Poe as "the jingle man." We watch Anthony Trollope chow down and explain that he doesn't have a good appetite, he's just "very greedy."
Oscar Wilde pays a visit to Walt Whitman. Wilkie Collins confesses a drug habit. Emily Dickinson exhausts a visitor. Lewis Carroll plays dumb. At a party given by a Duchess, Henry James describes himself as a hermit. Arthur Conan Doyle demonstrates how to make a holy man jealous. George Bernard Shaw reveals the source of his skepticism. A drama critic falls asleep --- and on his face. Another poet pours a beer over Robert Frost's head. Sinclair Lewis brags about his new book.
As we reach the Twentieth Century, the anecdotes turn more political. Ludwig Wittgenstein gives his money away to his rich relatives, on the theory that they can't be further corrupted by it. Vladimir Nabokov has a violent reaction to anti-Semitism. A Communist sympathizer tells George Orwell: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs," causing Orwell to reply, "Where's the omelette?" Samuel Beckett gives his jacket to a tramp --- without emptying the pockets. W.H. Auden contemplates the death penalty for Brecht.
There are more Brits than Americans, which seems just. It also makes the book a better gift for English majors than for civilian readers. On the other hand, the last anecdote in the book is about J.K. Rowling --- scholarly this ain't.
The idea reader of this book: the lover of books with snooty friends. Read this, pen in hand, and you'll have more than enough ammo to dazzle your listeners at high-minded parties. Any writer quoted in these pages would understand that motive.
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