"Come on," he shouted, "I am always better after vomiting."

Looking for a temporary distraction from the unremittingly grim fourth section of Roberto Bolano's 2666, this evening I dipped into the nearest repository of lit-nerd manna, The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (2008), where I once again found some good stuff to share.

We'll start with a story that has the distinction of featuring a couple of recurrent I've Been Reading Lately fascinations: Lord Byron (whose admonition to his friend Edward John Trelawny provides this post's headline) and inappropriate pets. From Leslie Marchand's Byron: A Portrait (1971):

When he returned to Cambridge in the autumn, he bought a tame bear and lodged him in the small hexagonal tower above his rooms. He enjoyed the sensation he made when he took bruin for walks on a chain like a dog. He announced with pride to Elizabeth Pigot: "I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame bear. When I brought him here, they asked me what i meant to do with him, and my reply was, 'he should sit for a fellowship.'"

For another comment on Byron, we move to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from the entry of May 18, 1866 in the diary of poet William Allingham:

We spoke of Byron. T. greatly admired him in boyhood, but does not now.

"When I heard of his death (it was at Somersby, my Father's rectory) I went out to the back of the house and cut on a wall with my knife, 'Lord Byron is dead.'"

"Parts of Don Juan are good, but other parts are badly done. I like some of his small things."

A.--"Any of his Tales, or Mysteries, or Plays?"
T.--"No."
A.--"He was the one English writer who disparaged Shakespeare. He was a Lord, and talked about, and he wrote vulgarly, therefore he was popular."
T.--"Why am I popular? I don't write very vulgarly."
A.--"I have often wondered that you are, and Browning wonders."
T.--"I believe it's because I'm Poet-Laureate. It's something like being a lord."

I love the query, "Why am I popular?" Is Tennyson actually mystified, or is he simply fishing for compliments?

Following the chain of references, we come unexpectedly to Churchill. In this excerpt from Violet Bonham Carter's Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (1965), Sir Winston, about to be made Home Secretary in 1910, discusses with Bonham Carter the question of suitable reading material for prison inmates:

I asked what books he thought they would enjoy and he trotted out several old favourites from his first days of self-education at Bangalore headed by Gibbon and Macaulay. I expressed some doubts about the popularity of his list. "If you had just committed murder would you feel inclined to read Gibbon?" "Well, the stern and speedy process of the Law might place a noose around my neck and string me up before I had time to launch myself on that broad stream. But for robbery with violence, arson, rape . . ." Here followed a long inventory of crimes well fitted to whet the appetite of their authors for Gibbon. I said that I would rather be hanged than endure a life-sentence. He vehemently disagreed. "Never abandon life. There is a way out of everything--except death." He was obviously confident of finding his way out of a life-sentence and I daresay he was right. I quoted Dickens, "Life is given us on the understanding that we defend it to the last." He liked that and repeated it to himself. "'Defend it to the last'--I'd do it. So would you. What is it you once called yourself--'red in tooth and claw'? I like to see you plunge your claws--those delicate and rosy claws--into the vitals of a foe." "It wasn't my phrase, it was Tennyson's." "Never read him. Should I like his books?" "Not much I think, nor would the criminals."

I agree: it's hard to imagine Parker dipping into Tennyson should he find himself unlucky enough to be behind bars. And what must the rest of Churchill's list of Gibbon-suitable crimes have included?

Which leads me close with an anecdote of Edward Gibbon himself, from Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers (1856):

Gibbon took very little exercise. He had been staying some time with Lord Sheffield in the country; and when he was about to go away, the servants could not find his hat. "Bless me," said Gibbon, "I certainly left it in the hall on my arrival here." He had not stirred out of doors during the whole of the visit.

Now there is a point at which we modern folks--even those dedicated readers who are the natural audience for this wonderful anthology--have an advantage: in the absence of the brace of servants that Gibbon had at his beck, we at least have to put the book down and leave the house every once in a while. The gin, after all, does eventually run out.

"I presume you have heard that Mr. Shelley & Capt. Williams were lost on the 7th Ulto."

{Photos by rocketlass.}

If you don't have Bill Peschel's Reader's Almanac in your RSS reader, you should: it offers an interesting and well-told story from literary history every day. The lead item for this past Monday, August 18th, an account of the cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley on a beach in Italy in 1822, was gruesome enough to send me back to my bookshelves to learn a bit more. I recommend you go read Peschel's account now, then come back here.

Shelley had drowned a week earlier, along with his friend Edward Williams, and worries about disease led Italian officials to order the pair temporarily buried where they washed up until a proper funeral could be arranged. Shelley's opportunistic and somewhat irritating--but, one has to admit in this case, loyal--friend Edward John Trelawny took charge, and Williams was burned first. In her biography of Lord Byron, Fiona MacCarthy relates Byron's description of Williams's pyre:

"You can have no idea," he told Tom Moore, "what an extraordinary effect such a funeral pile has on a desolate shore, with mountains in the back-groudn and the sea before, and the singular appearance the salt and frankincense gave to the flame."

The next day, the men set out in search of Shelley's grave, which, according to MacCarthy, was poorly marked:

It took about an hour to locate it, by which time Byron and Leigh Hunt had arrived from Pisa, accompanied by two mounted dragoons and four foot soldiers to keep prospective sightseers at bay.

They finally found Shelley's body, which had been rendered grotesque by the water, and set about their work. Peschel points out that Trelawny forbade Byron to take Shelley's skull, which ultimately disintegrated; yet, when Shelley's heart, in Byron's words, "would not take the flame," Trelawny himself eventually grabbed it. MacCarthy goes into detail, drawing on Trelawny's later Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author:

Trelawny's recollections of the scene provide more details: the heart "although bedded in fire--would not burn." They waited an hour, continually adding fuel, until "it becoming late we gave over by mutual conviction of its being unavailing--all exclaiming it will not burn--there was a bright flame round it occasioned by the moisture still flowing from it--and on removing the furnace nearer to the sea to immerse the iron I took the heart in my hand to examine it--after sprinkling it with water: yet it was still so hot as to burn my hand badly and a quantity of this oily fluid still flowed from it."

Mary Shelley ultimately ended up with the heart, but not before Leigh Hunt tried to put in a claim that is astonishing in its presumption and lack of feeling:

[T]he next day [he wrote] indignantly to her, "With reagrd to Ld B. he has no right to bestow the heart, & I am sure pretends to none. If he told you that you should have it, it could only have been from his thinking I could more easily part with it than I can."

An interesting final note to all of this is that, though Byron earlier that month, in writing to his publisher, John Murray, had praised Shelley extravagantly--

You are all brutally mistaken about Shelley who was without exception--the best and least selfish man I ever knew.--I never knew one who was not a beast in comparison.

--he later that year wrote to Mary Shelley an unexpectedly distant account of their relationship:

As to friendship, it is a propensity in which my genius is very limited. I do not know the male human being, except Lord Clare, the friend of my infancy, for whom I feel any thing that deserves the name. All my others are men-of-the-world friendships. I did not even feel it for Shelley, however much I admired and esteemed him; so that you see not even vanity could bribe me into it, for, of all men, Shelley thought highest of my talents,--and, perhaps of my disposition.

Three things that you might reasonably assume that we know . . .

. . . yet which recent reading has revealed to me that we don't.

1
The location of the Rubicon

Adrian Goldsworthy, in his Caesar: Life of a Colossus (2006) explains,

On the road from Ravenna to Ariminum (modern Rimini) the boundary between the province and Italy itself was marked by the Rubicon, a small river that to this day has not been positively identified.

Tom Holland, who named his Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic (2003) after the fateful river, points out that not only is our knowledge of the river limited mostly to the fact that it was "narrow and obscure," but we're not even sure when it was crossed. The consensus is that it was on the night of January 10th, 49 BCE, but that's by no means certain:

One source tells us that the Rubicon was forded after sunrise. Others imply that the advance guard had already passed into Italy by the time that Caesar himself arrived on the river's bank. Even the date can only be deduced from extraneous events. A scholarly consenss has formed around 10 January, but any date between then and the 14th has been argued for--and besides, thanks to the vagaries of the pre-Julian calendar, what the Romans called January was in fact our November.

2
What the Library of Alexandria looked like

This one I'll leave to Alberto Manguel, who writes of the Library of Alexandria in the first chapter of his lovely new book The Library at Night (2008):

It is infuriating not to be able to tell what the Library of Alexandria looked like. With understandable hubris, every one of its chroniclers (all those whose testimony has reached us) seems to have thought its description superfluous. The Greek geographer Strabo, a contemporary of Diodorus, described the city of Alexandria in detail but, mysteriously, failed to mention the Library. "The Museion too forms part of the royal buildings and comprises a peripatos [deambulatory], an exedra with seats, and a large building housing the common room where scholars who are members of the Museion take their meals," is all he tells us. "Why need I even speak of it, since it is imperishably held in the memory of all men?" wrote Athenaeus of Naucratis, barely a century and a half after its destruction. The Library that wanted to be the storehouse for the memory of the world was not able to secure for us the memory of itself.

I am particularly impressed by the misplaced confidence of Athenaeus of Naucratis: no matter how well-remembered a place was, after a century and a half, wouldn't you think at least a thumbnail description might be in order?

3
Which of Byron's feet was lame

This one, I'll admit, is less world-historically important than the other two. That's somewhat balanced, though, by the fact that it concerns a person who lived relatively recently, and who was an object of intense fascination even in his lifetime, making the uncertainty all the more surprising.

Fiona MacCarthy examines the question in her Byron: Life and Legend (2003):

Which was Byron's lame leg? So much mystery has shrouded the subject, some of it created by Byron himself in his attempts to draw attention away from his deformity, that Thomas Moore, collecting information for his biography of Byron only a few years after Byron's death, could not arrive at a consensus of opinion. Elizabeth Pigot, Byron's old friend from Southwell, Augusta Leigh, his half-sister and lover, and the old Nottinghamshire cobbler who made young Byron's special shoes for him, all said it was the right leg. Leigh Hunt and Mary Shelley maintained it was the left leg, as did Jackson the pugilist, drawing on his memories of Byron's stance when sparring, and Millingen the surgeon who attended Byron in his final illness. The notoriously inaccurate Edward Trelawny, in a high-flown description of his visit to "the embalmed body of the Pilgrim," claimed to have discovered that both Byron's feet were clubbed. However, we can safely take his mother's word for it. As she told her sister-in-law, Mrs Frances Leigh, "George's foot turns inward, and it is the right foot; he walks quite on the side of his foot."

It does seem as if the more reliable sources agree on the right foot, but I'm still impressed at how much uncertainty there is, especially because of the role that Byron's lameness has long been presumed--even by his friends--to have played in the formation of his character. Edward John Trelawny--who on his visit to Byron's body waited until Byron's valet William Fletcher left the room, then sneakily uncovered his dead friend's feet--spoke for more than just himself when he wrote, in Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (1858,

His deformity was always uppermost in his thoughts, and influenced every act of his life, spurred him on to poetry, as that was one of hte few paths to fame open to him--and as if to be revenged on Nature for sending him into the world "scarce half made up," he scoffed at her works and traditions with the pride of Lucifer.

But don't worry, folks: future readers won't suffer under unanswered questions like these--anything any descendants of ours could conceivably want to know will surely be somewhere in the Twitter archives, right?