Trollope and the day job

The 930 pages of Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right contain a lot of letters. It was a letter-writing culture, after all, and, given the option, what author who cares about plot wouldn't make as much use of the convenience of letters as possible?

With Trollope, though, we can always amuse ourselves by thinking that there might be more going on. Trollope, after all, spent years working for the post office. And in this novel, he tips the knowledgeable reader a quick wink:

Miss Stanbury carried her letter all the way to the chief post-office in the city, having no faith whatever in those little subsidiary receiving houses which are established in different parts of the city. As for the iron pillar boxes which had been erected of late years for the receipt of letters, one of which,--a most hateful thing to her,--stood almost close to her own front door, she had not the faintest belief that any letter put into one of them would ever reach its destination. She could not understand why people should not walk with their letters to a respectable post-office instead of chucking them into an iron stump,--as she called it,--out in the street with nobody to look after it. Positive orders had been given that no letter from her house should ever be put into the iron post.

Trollope, famously, invented that hated pillar box.

T. S. Eliot, meanwhile, did Miss Stanbury one better--this story comes from The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, related by William Empson:

There was a party (I forget everybody else in the room) where Eliot broke into some chatter about a letter being misunderstood. "Ah, letters," he said, rather as if they were some rare kind of bird. "I had to look into the question of letters at one time. I found that the mistake . . . that most people make . . . about letters, is that after writing their letters, carefully they go out, and look for a pillar-box. I found that it is very much better, after giving one's attention to composing a letter, to . . . pop it into the fire." This kind of thing was a little unnerving, because one did not know how tragically it ought to be taken; it was clearly not to be taken as a flippancy.

Letters never sent would do fine for a novel, but I suspect Eliot's method is a bit too arid for actual life.

Adding to the store of anecdotes

As I read P. Y. Betts's People Who Say Goodbye: Memories of Childhood, I was pleased to find this brief second-hand anecdote about poet and fiction writer Walter de la Mare:

According to my mother, as a girl she had had many admirers. She had known a family called de la Mare and had been pursued to the mistletoe by one of the sons who was called Bert. There had been another son called Walter. As my interests widened, I asked her once what Walter had been like.

"Walter? Can't say he made much impression . . . oh, yes, I do remember once at supper at the Bedbrooks, he chased one of the girls round the table with the bread knife. He was upset about something or other, I forget what it was."

Every time I find one of these anecdotes buried in a little-known book, I feel grateful yet again for John Gross, who ferreted out so many of them for his indispensable New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes. Gross died just over a year ago, and the Guardian obituary, which praises him as a classic man of letters, points out that one of the merits of his anthologies was their originality:

John Mullan pointed out in the Guardian that, unlike many anthologists, Gross came up with the unfamiliar--less than 10% of his material had previously appeared in other Oxford anthologies.

The obituary also quotes John Carey, on the Anecdotes volume's unsuitability for the usual role of anthologies as bedside books. That book, said Carey,

should on no account be allowed in the bedroom, or you will find yourself awake in the cold, small hours, still turning the pages.

The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes doesn't include any of stories de la Mare--a mark, perhaps, of its only flaw, that, rather than 1,000 pages it's not quite 400--which makes me feel that I'm doing something useful by extracting and posting the story of this minor incident.

You won't, I expect, be surprised to learn that while de la Mare is absent from Gross's anthology, knives do make some appearances. Nora Joyce wields one in this account, taken from Portraits of the Artist in Exile:

Nora Joyce, who had listened to him intently, now suddenly jumped up, and, while Joyce continued his calm, interested analysis of Hitler's personality from the point of view of its immense force and drive, she grabbed her knife, which she had just then been using on a poulet de bresse, rushed toward him and shouted, "Jim, another calm word about that devil and I will murder you!" Her response had a strange mixture of genuine anger and burlesque acting.

Then there's this chilling account of Jonathan Swift's final, mentally disordered years, taken from Irvin Ehrenpreis's The Personality of Jonathan Swift:

One day in mid-March 1744, as Swift sat in his chair, he reached towards a knife, but Mrs Ridgeway [his housekeeper] moved it away from him. He shrugged his shoulders, rocked himself, and said, "I am what I am, I am what I am"; some minutes later he repeated the same thing two or three times.

If there is an afterlife, I like to imagine that it includes, well, probably not a Hall of Anthologists, but perhaps instead a musty, book-lined Nook of Anthologists, or a quiet, out-of-date, slightly down-at-heel-looking Bar of Anthologists. Elbowed on that bar would be John Gross and D. J. Enright, trading drink and tales late into the celestial night.

"Lawrence thinks critics influential and should realize their responsibility," or, D. H. goes to parties

Considering how important he was to the first years of my consciously literary reading--the first year or so of college, say--I've not written that much about D. H Lawrence in the nearly five years I've been writing this blog. That's largely because, as I've joked before, Lawrence, for all his actual virtues, is one of those authors one tend to grow out of: as one's experience widens, the overwrought quality of his depictions of relations between men and women becomes apparent, starts to look less like a clear-eyed acknowledgment of the inevitable struggle of primal forces and more like a self-aggrandizing depiction of willed difficulty. Life and love, for the sane, are just not quite that tough.* I'm reminded of a scene from Harold Nicolson's diaries, collected in John Gross's indispensable New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, telling of a meeting with Frieda Lawrence at a party:

She says that Lawrence said, "Frieda, if people really knew what you were like, they would strangle you." I say, "Did he say that angrily?" She said, "No--very quietly, after several minutes deep thought."

Anthony Powell--whose relatively catholic literary tastes can be trusted to overcome what one would be right to assume would be his social and political dislike of Lawrence--described him well in a review of Lawrence's literary criticism written for Punch in 1956:

Lawrence was in a way too gifted; at least too lacking in self-discipline to control his gifts to their best advantage. Leaning heavily towards the state of being primarily a poet, he was chiefly, as it turned out, concerned with writing novels. As a novelist, with all his force, he is never wholly at ease with his medium. He himself is the only character who ever truly emerges.

Nonetheless, Lawrence and his work remain of interest, so when my coworker Joseph Peterson lent me Edmund Wilson's The Twenties, one of the volumes of his journals that FSG published in the 1970s, I was greatly entertained by Wilson's account of a party given for Lawrence in August of 1923 that Wilson, then twenty-eight, attended:

Terrific argument betwen John Macy and Lawrence about extent to which reviewers were prostitutes. Lawrence thinks critics influential and should realize their responsibility. . . . I found Lawrence's appearance disconcerting. He was lean, but his head was disproportionately small. One saw that he belonged to an inferior caste--some bred-down unripening race of the collieries. Against this inferiority--fundamental and physical--he must have had to fight all his life: his passionate spirit had made up for it by exaggerated self-assertion. (I have never seen this physical aspect of Lawrence mentioned.) On this occasion, he suddenly became hysterical and burst out in childish rudeness and in a high-pitched screaming voice with something like: "I'm not enjoying this! Why are we sitting here having tea? I don't want tea! I don't want to be doing this!" The Seltzers [the hosts], rather stodgy in their bourgeois apartment, sat through it and made no reply, and nobody else took any notice of it. . . . The furious fit soon passed, and he presently came over and began to talk to me in a conventional British way. I don't remember what he said except to ask me a question or two about myself. I had earlier been rather antagonized by his denunciation of Dante as a writer who had tried to intellectualize love.

After which I find myself wanting to turn back to Powell, who, elsewhere in the Punch piece quoted above, wrote of Lawrence,

[H]is whole approach seems largely inappropriate to the world of literature. Lawrence was a frustrated politician or preacher. He wanted power: to force people to do his will. He was temperamentally unable to understand that different people by their nature may require to live different lives; and, accordingly, to find their expression in different forms of art.

All of which, oddly enough, makes me think it may be time--after nearly twenty years--to revisit The Rainbow.

"The writer of half a century has outlived his critics; and, alas! has survived those whom he once had an ambition to please."

One of the most rewarding of my many current fascinations is Isaac D'Israeli's monumental collection of literary opinion, quotation, gossip, and anecdote, Curiosities of Literature, which D'Israeli shepherded through nine editions between 1791 and 1834. The preface to the ninth edition supplies the title to today's post, which finds me looking at Isaac's son, novelist and, later, prime minister Benjamin Disraeli.

Benjamin published his first novel, Vivian Grey (1826), at age twenty, and while it sold well, the critical response was savage. The worst of the reviews, in Blackwood's Magazine, called Disraeli "an obscure person for whom nobody gives a straw," and according to the The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, we can read the following passage from Disraeli's later novel Contarini Fleming (1832) as a lightly fictionalized account of the effect it had on him at the time:

With what horror, with what blank despair, with what supreme appalling astonishment did I find myself for the first time in my life the subject of the most reckless, the most malignant and the most adroit ridicule. I was sacrificed, I was scalped. . . . The criticism fell from my hand. A film floated over my vision, my knees trembled. I felt that sickness of heart that we experience in our first scrape. I was ridiculous. It was time to die.

Though the elder D'Israeli was, according to Benjamin's most recent biographer, Adam Kirsch, so wrapped up in his books as to be "an almost ethereal presence," Isaac does strike me as the sort who would at least take note of the bad review, and perhaps even think to send his son a note directing him to the wisdom offered in the Curiosities under "Sketches of Criticism."

In that essay, D'Israeli displays his admirable habit of getting straight to the point:

It may perhaps be some satisfaction to show the young writer, that the most celebrated ancients have been as rudely subjected to the tyranny of criticism as the moderns. Detraction has ever poured the “waters of bitterness.”

After which he offers us a ringing catalog of the calumnies under which the most celebrated of ancient authors have suffered, both in their lifetimes and after their deaths. Regarding Plato, for example, we are given a catalog of epithets that gathers momentum as it descends from the heights:

Plato, who has been called, by Clement of Alexandria, the Moses of Athens; the philosopher of the Christians, by Arnobius; and the god of philosophers, by Cicero; Athenæus accuses of envy; Theopompus, of lying; Suidas, of avarice; Aulus Gellius, of robbery; Porphyry, of incontinence; and Aristophanes, of impiety.

An account of Horace, on the other hand, reminds us that, as JT still assures us these many centuries later, what goes around comes around:

Horace censures the coarse humour of Plautus; and Horace, in his turn, has been blamed for the free use he made of the Greek minor poets.

D'Israeli's account of the criticisms of the Attic Nights of Aulus Gelius (who himself, you'll recall, had the temerity to call Plato a robber) are worth including both for their turn of phrase and for their invocation of an old favorite, Robert Burton:

The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, and the Deipnosophists of Athenæus, while they have been extolled by one party, have been degraded by another. They have been considered as botchers of rags and remnants; their diligence has not been accompanied by judgement; and their taste inclined more to the frivolous than to the useful. Compilers, indeed, are liable to a hard fate, for little distinction is made in their ranks; a disagreeable situation, in which honest Burton seems to have been placed; for he says of his work, that some will cry out, “This is a thinge of meere industrie; a collection without wit or invention ; a very toy! So men are valued! their labours vilified by fellowes of no worth themselves, as things of nought; who could not have done as much? some understande too little, and some too much.”

As the ghost of Robert Frost will surely haunt me for writing, one could do worse than be a botcher of rags and remnants.

But perhaps the sweetest consolation came far too late for either father or son to see it: Blackwood's Magazine itself offered praise for Vivian Grey in its February 1905 issue. In an unsigned article titled "Musings without Method," the magazine wrote of a recent rise in the critical opinion of Disraeli's novels--and specifically of Vivian Grey:

That it has the faults of inexperience is obvious. "Books written by boys," said Disraeli, "which pretend to give a picture of manners, and to deal in knowledge of human nature, must be affected." And Vivian Grey is affected in style, in plot, and in character. Nevertheless, it possesses the quality of sincerity--a sincerity to youth and high spirits.

While the journal acknowledges that,

It is Byronic, it is lackadaisical, it is fantastic. Its hero cares not for dinner so long as he is in time for the guava and liqueurs.

--at the same time it admires the fact that

[U]nder the velvet glove of aestheticism there is the iron hand of action, and Vivian Grey, when he is not displaying his eloquence, is ready to manage mankind "by studying their tempers and humouring their weaknesses." In other words, he has always a smile for a friend and a sneer for the world. But to whatever page you turn in this romance you find traces of the life and energy which were characteristic of its author. He tried many things in his life and save in poetry he always succeeded.

I, for one, would be happy with such an epitaph as that last.

Assuming D'Israeli senior continues to hold my interest, I just may have to also dive into the works of Disraeli junior; I'll report back what I learn.

Fielding, Richardson, and Dr. Johnson, or, This one's for Maggie

Last Christmas I gave my friend Maggie a gift that was at least as much a challenge as a true present: Samuel Richardson's 1,536-page epistolary novel Clarissa (1748). Her letter to me in response--for Maggie is not one to back down from a dare--is nicely summed up in her line, "I would not say I didn't enjoy the book, but there is so, so much of it."

I thus couldn't help but think of her tonight when, flipping through The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (2006), I came across this deliciously nasty account of Richardson's self-regard, from Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature (1791-1823):

The extreme delight which he felt on a review [revision] of his own works, the works themselves witness. Each is an evidence of what some will deem a violent literary vanity. To Pamela is prefixed a letter from the editor (whom we know to be the author) consisting of one of the most minutely laboured panegyrics of the work itself, that ever the blindest idlolator of some ancient classic paid to the object of his frenetic imagination. To the author's own edition of his Clarissa is appended an alphabetical arrangement of the sentiments dispersed throughout the work; and such was the fondness that dictated this voluminous arrangement, that such trivial aphorisms as "habits are not easily changed," "men are known by their companions," etc. seem alike to be the object of their author's admiration. And in Sir Charles Grandison, is not only prefixed a complete index, with as much exactness as if it were a History of England, but there is also appended a list of the similes and allusions in the volume.

Literary history does not record a more singular example of that self-delight which an author has felt on a revision of his works. It was this intense pleasure which produced his voluminous labours.

Even the staunchest partisan of Richardson have to admit that D'Israeli's vitriol has a certain fierce glory, no? It makes me think a trip to the library in search of that volume may be in order . . . what other authors suffered under his withering gaze?

In the interests of Richardson fans, such as Laura of Popscratch and Jenny Davidson of Light Reading, I feel that I ought to at least allow a defense of Richardson; since I'm not qualified, having not read him, I'll allow Samuel Johnson to enter the lists as his champion. In James Boswell's Life of Johnson we find this vigorous praise, wrapped up in a blast of denigration heaped on the wonderful Henry Fielding (with the role of Johnson's friend Erskine played, admirably, by Maggie):

Fielding being mentioned, Johnson exclaimed, "he was a blockhead;" and upon my expressing my astonishment as so strange an assertion, he said, "What I mean by his being a blockhead is that he was a barren racal." BOSWELL. "Will you not allow, Sir, that he draws very natural pictures of human life?" JOHNSON. "Why, Sir, it is of very low life. Richardson used to say, that had he not known who Fielding was, he should have believed he was an ostler. Sir, there is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's, than in all Tom Jones. I, indeed, never read Joseph Andrews." ERSKINE. "Surely, Sir, Richardson is very tedious." JOHNSON. "Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment."

Elsewhere in the Life, Johnson says of the pair,

[T]here was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate.

Boswell, characteristically, prefers the livelier Fielding. Though in conversation with his hero Johnson he seems to have only tepidly argued the point, in the Life he offers a defense that I think truly touches the heart of the charm underlying Fielding's comedy:

Johnson used to quote with approbation a saying of Richardson's, "that the virtues of Fielding's heroes were the vices of a truly good man," I will venture to add, that the moral tendency of Fielding's writings, though it does not encourage a strained and rarely possible virtue, is ever favourable to honour and honesty, and cherishes the benevolent and generous affections. He who is as good as Fielding would make him, is an amiable member of society, and may be led on by more regulated instructors, to a higher state of ethical perfection.

Clarissa is of course doomed to die for sensibility; for my part, long live Tom Jones.

"Mr. Hardy was of medium height and figure . . . his expression placid rather than sad."

{Photo of Thomas Hardy's boyhood home by rocketlass.}

Earlier this week I raved about the many pleasures to be found in The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (2007), offering a couple of examples from the entry for Lord Byron, whose life spun off enough rich anecdotes to fill a personal Decameron.

It would seem wrong, however, to close discussion of the book without also turning to another of this blog's favorite preoccupations, Thomas Hardy; fortunately, the volume doesn't disappoint when it comes to Dorchester's greatest export. First, we learn that Hardy had something unexpected in common with Vladimir Nabokov: both were synesthetes, as Elliot Felkin's "Days with Thomas Hardy" (published in Encounter in 1962) reveals:

He went on to talk about days of the week and colours and associations. Monday was colourless, and Tuesday a little less colourless, and Wednesday was blue--"this sort of blue" pointing to an imitation Sevres plate--and Thursday is darker blue, and Friday is dark blue, and Saturday is yellow, and Sunday is always red.

And Tess fans can't help but marvel at this story, told by Hardy's second wife, Florence, in her The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (1930), of a hospital visit to Hardy's friend Lord Pembroke:

He [Pembroke] was now ill at a nursing home in London, and an amusing incident occurred while his visitor was sitting by his bedside one afternoon, thinking what havoc of good material it was that such a fine and handsome man should be prostrated. He whispered to Hardy that there was a "Tess" in the establishment, who always came if he rang at that time of day, and that he would do so then that Hardy might see her. He accordingly rang, whereupon Tess's chronicler was much disappointed at the result; but endeavoured to discern beauty in the very indifferent figure who responded, and at last persuaded himself that he could do so. When she had gone the patient apologized, saying that for the first time since he had lain there a stranger had attended to his summons.

The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes includes a handful of additional Hardy stories, all good--but really nothing can touch the trove that is Thomas Hardy Remembered (2007), edited by Martin Ray. A compilation of firsthand accounts of Hardy by both the well- and the little-known, it offers page after fascinating page of sheer pleasure for the Hardy fan. Sure, it costs £55 (which, until John McCain unsuspends the suspension of the suspension of his campaign and flat-out superheros this economic crisis, is something like $1,000,000,000.34), but where else are you going to find such a collection of Hardy anecdotes?

Hell, I would argue that this one from Augustus John's Chiaroscuro: Fragments of Autobiography (1952) is worth nearly £55 on its own, if for no other reason than the vehemence of Hardy's protest:

Thomas Hardy had good reason to view with anxiety the demonstrations of some of his admirers. One of these, hailing from the USA, on the strength of a few minutes interview, produced a book entitled Thomas Hardy's Universe [Ernest Brennecke, 1952--ed.], in which the poet was described as soliloquizing before the fire, while smoking a succession of cigarettes. "But," said Hardy, with a gesture of despair, "I have never smoked a cigarette in my life!"

Or this nuanced appraisal from Edmund Gosse's obituary of Hardy in the Sunday Times of January 15, 1928:

[Hardy] needed all the natural magic of his genius to prevent his work, interpenetrated as it was by this resigned and hopeless melancholy, from becoming sterile, but joy streamed into it from other sources--the joy of observation, of sympathy, of humour. Yet, after all, the core of Hardy's genius was austere and tragical, and this has to be taken into consideration, and weighed in every estimation of his writings. It was a curious fact, and difficult to explain, that this obvious aspect of his temperament was the one which he firmly refused to contemplate. The author of Tess of the d'Urbervilles conceived himself to be an optimist.

Or, returning to Tess, this account of authorial travails from Frank A. Hedgcock's "Reminiscences of Thomas Hardy" (published in the National and English Review of October 1951):

He thought that public opinion was probably right in regarding it as his best novel; but he had put too much feeling into it to recall it with pleasure.

However, my favorite of Hardy's references to Tess (aside, that is, from this one) comes from Desmond MacCarthy's "Thomas Hardy: The Writer" (published in the BBC magazine The Listener on June 6, 1940). For its sheer disingenuousness, this anecdote alone is definitely worth £55, exchange rates be damned:

Once when we were passing some spot in Tess he said to me, "If I had thought that story was going to be such a success, I'd have made it a really good book."

Methinks a re-read of Tess may be on my autumn calendar.


{Photo by rocketlass.}

"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.

A brief sojourn in lit-nerd heaven . . . with Edgar Allan Poe

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Being someone who fully admits to (oh, let's be honest--revels in) being about as lit-nerdy as you can get without assuming the stifling purposefulness of academia . . . how on earth did I not know that The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (2007) existed until I saw its forthcoming paperback edition listed in Oxford University Press's Fall catalog?

Seriously, can you think of anything that would be more up my alley, aside perhaps from The Anthony Powell Guide to Anthony Powell and Friends, with Digressions on Proust and Richard Stark? Gossip, biography, literary opinions, goofiness, gossip--what more could I want? Unwilling to wait for the paperback to be published, I ordered a copy of the hardcover posthaste; the first entry I happened to turn to, on Edgar Allan Poe, did not disappoint.

The Poe section is drawn largely from Jeffrey Meyers's Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy (1992), and anyone who, like me, spent significant portions of their childhood terrified by Poe's dark visions can surely take a grim pleasure from this first selection:

The superstitious skeptic, who could be terrified by his own imagination, later confessed to the editor George Graham that "he disliked the dark, and was rarely out at night. On one occasion he said to me, 'I believe that demons take advantage of the night to mislead the unwary--although, you know,' he added, 'I don't believe in them.'"

Even more fun is this entry, which presents a dialogue recalled by Joel Benton between Poe and poet William Ross Wallace on the streets of New York, shortly after Poe had completed "The Raven":

"Wallace," said Poe, "I have just written the greatest poem that ever was written."

"Have you?" said Wallace. "That is a fine achievement."

"Would you like to hear it?" said Poe.

"Most certainly," said Wallace.

Thereupon Poe began to read the soon-to-be famous verses in his best way--which . . . was always an impressive and captivating way. When he had finished it he turned to Wallace for his approval of them--when Wallace said:

"Poe--they are fine; uncommonly fine."

"Fine?" said Poe, contemptuously. "Is that all you can say for this poem? I tell you it's the greatest poem that was ever written."

I don't know what strikes me more in this exchange, the thought of Poe reading "The Raven" aloud in his "impressive and captivating way"--what that must have been like!--or the circumspect calm of Wallace's "Have you? That is a fine achievement." I deeply admire that degree of unflappability.

My favorite of the entries on Poe, however, is this one, also taken from Meyers, if for no other reason than that it inescapably calls to mind one of Poe's most prominent fans, Jorge Luis Borges:

It was extremely ironic that the author of the article on "Whirlpool" in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica gave Poe credit for information that Poe had lifted from an earlier edition of the same Encyclopedia [for his story "A Descent into the Maelstrom"], and then quoted as facts the parts of the story that Poe himself had invented.

Having invoked Borges, I can't help but end with the unforgettable epitaph to Poe that he offered up, relatively casually, at the close of an introduction he wrote for an edition of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener":

Vast populations, towering cities, erroneous and clamorous publicity, have conspired to make unknown great men one of America's traditions. Edgar Allan Poe was one of these; so was Melville.

Clamorous my support of The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes may be; erroneous I promise you it is not. I'll have more to share from it in the coming months, I'm sure.