THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LITERARY ANECDOTES. John Gross, editor. 385pp. Oxford University Press. Pounds 16.99. (US $29.95). - 0 19 280468 5.
In 1860, William Lee, who was writing a biography of Daniel Defoe, paid a visit to Tilbury. He wanted to see whether the excavations being made for the construction of the railways had uncovered any evidence of the factory Defoe had set up there to make bricks and tiles in the 1690s. Large quantities of these items had indeed been dug up and thrown into heaps.
I asked several (labourers) how they thought these things came there and was answered by an ignorant shake of the head. But when I said, "These bricks and tiles were made 160 years since by the same man that made "Robinson Crusoe!" I touched a chord that connected these railway "navvies" with the shipwrecked mariner, and that bounded over the intervening period in a single moment. Every eye brightened, every tongue was ready to ask or give information, and every fragment became interesting.
As with bricks and tiles, so with those little shards of information we call anecdotes: at their best, they link us with the past in a very direct way, and they acquire additional lustre by association.
It is for these reasons that books of anecdotes tend to concentrate on the famous, although early examples such as James Granger's A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution (1769) gave equal space to the well known and the obscure, so that Sir William Davenant ("a man of great natural and improved talents, which he unfortunately misapplied") appears in the same volume as Mother Louse ("probably the last woman in England that wore a ruff"). Granger's book, ostensibly a "methodical catalogue of engraved British heads", was also "intended as an Essay towards reducing our Biography to System", and was enticingly advertised as "interspersed with Variety of Anecdotes, and Memoirs of a great Number of Persons, not to be found in any other Biographical Works". John Gross notes that the word "anecdote" originally meant "something unpublished .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". A distinctive whiff of confidentiality and scandal still hangs around the anecdote. We like to think that such stories throw a useful sidelight on people, revealing aspects of their character that might not feature in the more strait-laced or scholarly biographical portrait. It is probably also true to say that, human nature being what it is, the more disobliging the story, the more likely we are to enjoy it.
"The sins of writers are a recurrent weakness in this book", Gross acknowledges.
"So are their weaknesses and misfortunes . . . . I must admit there were times when I was tempted to add little notes at the end of the less heroic or less edifying items I had chosen, reminders of how much more there was to the authors in question." He decided to put his trust in his readers, whom he flatteringly considers "far too wise not to recognize that an anecdote isn't the whole story".
Many people will nevertheless relish fragmentary accounts of literary vanity (passim, but in particular Samuel Richardson, in the guise of "editor", prefacing Pamela with his own "minutely laboured panegyric"), the snubbing of admiring fellow writers (Wordsworth dismissing Keats's Endymion to his face), hysterical prudishness (Henry David Thoreau confronted by a specimen of the aptly named fungus Phallus impudicus), and flagrant rudeness to social inferiors (Abraham Lincoln demonstrating what the anecdotalist calls the "hardy and contentious school of humor").
Other anecdotes about bad behaviour make one warm to writers: James Hogg in a herdsman's smock, his hands bearing "most legible marks of recent sheep smearing", sprawling on Sir Walter Scott's sofa and drunkenly addressing his host as "Wattie"; Ernest Dowson, discovered in the company of a "particularly common harlot", assuring a passing acquaintance: "She writes poetry -it is like Browning and Mrs Browning"; and (admittedly while an undergraduate) Matthew Arnold capering naked on a riverbank and waving his towel at an interfering clergyman, demanding "Is it possible you see anything indelicate in the human form divine?". And good behaviour too: one thinks even more highly of John Masefield on learning that during his long stint as Laureate all the poems he dutifully wrote for publication in The Times to mark significant events were submitted with a stamped addressed envelope, "so that they could be returned if not acceptable".
Sometimes an anecdote will confirm our impressions of a great man or woman, at others it will confound them. One of the nicest examples of the former is E.
M.
Forster's marvellous account of Thomas Hardy conducting a guided tour of the pets' cemetery at Max Gate, itemizing the appalling fates of each animal. "But of course we have only buried here those pets whose bodies were recovered", Hardy concludes. "Many were never seen again." As Forster comments: "I could scarcely keep grave -it was so like a caricature of his own novels or poems".
Rather less expectedly, Hardy suffered from synaesthesia, though being Hardy he saw the days of the week in rather less Technicolor hues than others with the same condition: "Monday was colourless, and Tuesday a little less colourless", while Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were slightly differing shades of blue.
Other surprises include Gerard Manley Hopkins discovered "blowing pepper through a keyhole to interrupt a meeting within the room by making the occupants sneeze".
The source of this story is a Fr Joseph Darlington, "whose reliability as a witness has been called in question", but Gross has sensibly decided not to exclude such anecdotes on niggling scholarly grounds. It is also surprising that Hopkins should be so well represented in this volume, but as a fellow seminarian who had seen the poet-priest intently studying wet sand commented:
"A fair natural 'e seemed to us, that Mr 'Opkins".
Somerset Maugham's tiresome daughter once remonstrated with her father about a story he frequently told in which he had refused to turn over to her a portion of his estate in order to avoid death duties "because, my dear, I have . . . read King Lear". Admitting he made the whole thing up, Maugham added "Never mind, dear, it makes a good story". Other writers have worried that stories falsely attributed to them would be insufficiently good.
Compton Mackenzie recalls Max Beerbohm -still only forty-one -worrying about his obituaries. "'Mr Max Beerbohm, whose regrettable demise is chronicled this morning, will perhaps be best remembered for the following story . . .' he antequoted with an urbane shudder. And then he would set down, for ever indisputable, some horribly pointless anecdote for which the wretched author was never responsible and could never have been responsible."
Whatever their source or reliability, the anecdotes in Gross's volume are never pointless and are of an almost universally high standard. Gross describes the book as a "successor" to earlier Oxford volumes edited by James Sutherland
(1975) and Donald Hall (1981), and calculates the overlap at a mere 10 per cent. Sutherland's started earlier, with Caedmon, but stopped with Dylan Thomas, whereas Gross's much better laid-out book runs from Chaucer to J. K.
Rowling. He has quite rightly included a fair number of old favourites -Dr Johnson rolling down the hill; Coleridge interrupted by the person from Porlock; Jeanette Winterson's parents burning books -but these are vastly outnumbered by less familiar ones. Even the anecdotes garnered from our own more celebrity-conscious and information-overloaded era contain a lot of fresh material. Equally important, the quality of the writing and storytelling is very high. The standard is set from the very first entry in which Thomas Fuller, a seventeenth-century church historian, records that Chaucer "lies buried in the south aisle of St Peter's, Westminster; and since hath got the company of Spenser and Drayton, a pair of royal poets, enough almost to make passengers' feet to move metrically, who go over the place where so much poetical dust is interred". John Gross's enlightening and hugely enjoyable anthology revivifies the literary dust of many centuries with both wit and grace, not least in such editorial glosses as the one explaining that a Gonk (in an anecdote about Carol Ann Duffy) is "a blob-like toy with rudimentary features".
