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0192804685.Oxford.University.Press.USA.The.New.Oxford.Book.Of THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LITERARY ANECDOTES This page intentionally left blank THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LITERARY ANECDOTES Edited by JOHN GROSS OXTORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Introduction and selection © John Gross 2006 Additional copyright information appears on pp. 357–70 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer 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 13579108642 CONTENTS introduction vii THE ANECDOTES 1 acknowledgements 357 index of names 371 This page intentionally left blank 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 their skills as anecdotalists as they sat around the fire. 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, from the Greek. It originally meant ‘something unpublished’, and first achieved regular literary status when the Byzantine historian Procopius applied it, in the plural, to his ‘secret history’ of the reign of the Emperor Justinian, a confidential 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. On that definition, 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 figures. To some extent the explanation for this lies no deeper than the cult of celebrity. Anecdotes about the famous often reflect 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. But there are better reasons too. Many famous figures fully merit our curiosity––and high among them come writers. The public appetite for anecdotes increased throughout the eighteenth century, especially towards the end. In the first 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 clergymen, and other public figures). 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’. And when, a generation later, in , we find Boswell announcing in a letter that his forthcoming life of Johnson will be ‘full of literary and characteristical anecdotes’, he is obviously confident 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 stronger. It was satisfied 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 used to be. Or consider the popularity of literary biographies. They flow 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’s Oxford 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 seems to be both a reasonable working definition––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 fairly firm 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 publishers, a dozen different 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 F. R. Leavis? What did Norman Mailer do when he first 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 celebrated author slips on a banana skin. Is there any essential difference between the two incidents, assuming that is all we are told about them? Perhaps not.
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