The New Oxford Book Of Literary Anecdotes

400 Pages·2006·4.82 MB·English

by  John Gross

THE NEW
OXFORD BOOK OF
LITERARY
ANECDOTES
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THE NEW
OXFORD BOOK
OF
LITERARY
ANECDOTES
Edited by
JOHN GROSS
OXTORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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Introduction and selection © John Gross 2006
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First published 2006
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The new Oxford book of literary anecdotes / edited by John Gross.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN–13: 978–0–19–280468–6 (acid-free paper)
ISBN–10: 0–19–280468–5 (acid-free paper)
1. Authors, English––Anecdotes. 2. English literature––Anecdotes.
I. Gross, John J.
PR108.N49 2006
820.9––dc22 2005033698
Typeset in Adobe Caslon
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Clays Ltd., St Ives plc
ISBN 0–19–280468–5 978–0–19–280468–6
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
CONTENTS
introduction vii
THE ANECDOTES 1
acknowledgements 357
index of names 371
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INTRODUCTION
The urge to exchange anecdotes is as deeply implanted in human beings
as the urge to gossip. It is hard to believe that cavemen didn’t practise
fi
their skills as anecdotalists as they sat around the re. The word ‘anec-
dote’ itself, on the other hand, was imported into the English language
comparatively late in the day. Elizabethans and Jacobeans, Roundheads
and Cavaliers all seem to have got by without it. It didn’t make its
appearance in England until the second half of the seventeenth century,
after the Restoration, and even then it took a generation or two to estab-
lish itself in the full modern sense. It is a word that comes, via French,
fi
from the Greek. It originally meant ‘something unpublished’, and rst
achieved regular literary status when the Byzantine historian Procopius
applied it, in the plural, to his ‘secret history’ of the reign of the Emperor
fi
Justinian, a con dential and often scandalous chronicle of life at the
imperial court.
When English writers began to speak of anecdotes, they initially used
the term in the same way, to mean glimpses behind the political scenes,
intimate revelations about rulers and ministers. In the early eighteenth
century Swift, in Book Three of Gulliver’s Travels, could still talk about
‘those who pretend to write anecdotes or secret history’, as though the
two things were the same. But by then the word had begun to acquire the
looser sense which it has had ever since––as the Concise Oxford Dictionary
puts it, that of ‘a short account of an entertaining or interesting incident’.
To most people, an anecdote simply means a good story.
fi
On that de nition, it can be about anyone or anything. Most of us like
to tell stories about our friends, our enemies, our neighbours, and (not
least) ourselves. The heroes of many classic anecdotes are obscure; others
remain anonymous. Yet at the same time, a high proportion of anec-
dotes––certainly published ones––have always been about prominent
fi
gures. To some extent the explanation for this lies no deeper than the
fl
cult of celebrity. Anecdotes about the famous often re ect their fame, and
little else; an incident which would be considered commonplace if it
involved a bit-player is assumed to be fascinating when it involves a star.
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But there are better reasons too. Many famous gures fully merit our
curiosity––and high among them come writers.
The public appetite for anecdotes increased throughout the eighteenth
fi
century, especially towards the end. In the rst seventy years of the cen-
tury, some twenty titles containing the word ‘Anecdote’ were published;
 
between and there were over a hundred, some of them works
running to several volumes. In the handful of these later collections that I
have dipped into, authors are well represented (along with lawyers,
viii introduction
fi 
clergymen, and other public gures). But then as early as , an
anonymous contributor to the Annual Register––it was in fact Edmund
Burke––noted that ‘there never was a time in which anecdotes, especially
literary anecdotes, were read with greater eagerness than they are now’.
 fi
And when, a generation later, in , we nd Boswell announcing in a
letter that his forthcoming life of Johnson will be ‘full of literary and
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characteristical anecdotes’, he is obviously con dent that those anecdotes
will constitute a major part of its appeal.
In the nineteenth century, the fashion for big collections of anecdotes
passed, but the taste for anecdotes themselves was if anything even
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stronger. It was satis ed by biographies, memoirs, letters, diaries, and a
mass of journalism. In an age which cherished the picturesque (you only
have to think how many Victorian paintings are anecdotal, for instance),
a nimbus of popular legend formed around almost every major writer and
lots of lesser ones.
There has been no let-up in more recent times. It is true that literature
no longer occupies as commanding a place in our culture as it once did. In
the twentieth century it found itself competing with new forms of com-
munication and entertainment. Other social changes, too, have helped to
switch the spotlight to new kinds of cultural hero. But as against this, the
sources of literary anecdote have multiplied. Authors are still news. The
attention they receive from the media, relative to other groups, may have
diminished, but the media machine itself is far more powerful than it
fl
used to be. Or consider the popularity of literary biographies. They ow
from the presses, month after month. Sometimes it seems as though
people have become more interested in reading about authors than in
reading their work. But we can’t be sure; and meanwhile, any sign of
intelligent interest is better than none.
Like its predecessors, James Sutherland’sOxford Book of Literary Anecdotes

( ) and Donald Hall’s Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes

( ), the present book is restricted in its range to authors writing in
English (although unlike them, it includes material from outside the
British Isles and the United States). I have also followed Sutherland and
Hall in equating literary anecdotes with anecdotes about authors. This
fi
seems to be both a reasonable working de nition––especially if ‘being
about authors’ is stretched to include being about their books and their
readers––and a handy organizing principle.
But it still leaves open the question of at what point, if any, a story
about an author ceases to qualify as literary. James Sutherland took a
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fairly rm line about this: he believed that ideally a literary anecdote
‘should relate to a writer in his capacity of author’. Donald Hall, on
the other hand, allowed himself more latitude. He was ready to include
anecdotes irrespective of their explicit literary content, and I feel he was
introduction ix
right: his policy is one I have tried to follow myself. Many of the anec-
dotes in this collection illustrate the working habits of authors, their
sources of inspiration, their attitude to colleagues, their dealings with
ff
publishers, a dozen di erent aspects of their careers. Many others,
however, have no direct bearing on authorship or literary life.
Boswell gave the warrant for such a mixed approach when he described
his Johnson anecdotes as ‘literary and characteristical’, without drawing
any particular distinction between the two categories. (Indeed, he virtu-
ally seems to be running them together.) We value anecdotes about a
writer, beyond their immediate point, because they bear the stamp of his
or her personality. How did Jane Austen face death? How did Joseph
Conrad respond when the Daily Mail asked if he would write an article
about Dr Crippen? What did C. S. Lewis think was the best thing about
fi
F. R. Leavis? What did Norman Mailer do when he rst joined the US
army? The answers to such questions are bound to contain some detail, at
the very least, which surprises us. Circumstances are unpredictable. But
in most cases there will also be satisfaction at seeing writers react in
character, and relating that reaction to what we already know about them
from their work.
This is scarcely less true of those anecdotes where the protagonist’s
reaction is not on record. An ordinary man slips on a banana skin. A
ff
celebrated author slips on a banana skin. Is there any essential di erence
between the two incidents, assuming that is all we are told about them?
Perhaps not. But if the writer is someone whom we have read, or whose
legend has touched our imagination, we are likely to bring a whole com-
plex of feelings to bear on the story. It takes on its own distinctive tone.
(No one slips on a banana skin in the pages that follow, I should add; but
there is an account of one of the greatest English writers falling fully
clothed into his bath.)
Many anecdotes show writers acting out of character. Such stories are
the reverse side of the coin: they get their piquancy from defeating our
expectations. And they remind us, incidentally, that it is in the nature of
human beings to be inconsistent. All human beings, that is. It would be
the same if we were studying any social group.
Still, the inconsistencies of authors have a particular fascination. The
gulf between real and ideal can seem so great. In their work, writers take
us into a world which is more compelling than the one we are used to,
more coherent, more satisfying, more fully realized. They themselves, or
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so we like to think, have a special aura. And then we meet them, and nd
that they are often no better than other people. Sometimes they are
worse. It is not so much a question of their acting out of character, in fact,
as of their having two characters––the one who writes the books, and the
one who gets through the rest of the day. And while the one who gets
through the rest of the day may be admirable or formidable, he may
equally well be vain, jealous, mean, cantankerous, or plain weird. There is