Yesterday,
historical anecdotes, today, literary anecdotes. I’m really scratching for blog
topics. Most of the following are little-known but interesting.
1. Most
of us know that Ben Franklin was a really inventive man, first coming up with
the lightning rod, bifocals, the pot-bellied stove, a glass armonica, a
flexible catheter, and even a long wooden arm like a giant tweezers for getting
books down from high shelves. Now here’s one almost no one knows about.
Franklin suffered from painful bouts of kidney stones. So he would take long,
hot baths in a tub he devised. It was copper, shaped like a shoe, the heel to
accommodate his butt, his legs under the tongue, and a place on top of the
tongue for propping books.
2. Thomas
Jefferson, also a prolific inventor, wrote a letter to his eleven-year-old
daughter Martha suggesting how she should use the hours of her day. “From 8 to
10, practice music. From 10 to 1, dance one day and draw another. From 1 to 2, draw
on the day you dance, and write a letter next day. From 3 to 4, read French.
From 4 to 4, exercise yourself in music. From 5 till bedtime, read English,
write, etc.” He also told her never to spell a word wrong. Sounds like a little
girl’s work is never done, at least not in the 19th century and not in
the Jefferson household.
3. James
Fenimore Cooper hated to write, but when he complained about a book he was
reading, that he could write a better book than that one, his wife challenged
him to do it. So he accepted and wrote Precaution,
which was pretty much a stinker, but it led him to then write the five in the Leatherstocking Tales, which are
considered to be much better. Except for Mark Twain, who thought they were
pretty awful.
4. Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow is always shown in portraits wearing a beard, a custom
followed by many men of the day, but he wore a beard to hide severe facial burns
he suffered when his wife Fanny accidentally set her dress on fire. He tried unsuccessfully
to snuff out the flames. She died the next day, but he was permanently scarred
on face and hands.
5. Edgar
Allen Poe married his 13-year-old cousin. I guess he might have been considered
a sexual predator today but just a very strange man then.
6. Henry
David Thoreau, Concord’s “village odd fellow,” was described by Nathanial
Hawthorne as “a young man with much of wild original nature . . . as ugly as
sin, long-nosed, queer mouthed.” It was alleged that Thoreau could swallow his
nose. I would assume by this that he could lift his lips enough that he could
cover the end of his nose, not a pretty sight I’m guessing. When he was dying
his Aunt Louisa asked him if he had made his peace with God. He answered, “I
did not know we had ever quarreled.” His life was singular in many ways,
renouncing what others accepted as necessary. He wasn’t trained for any
profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never
voted; he refused to pay any taxes; he didn’t eat meat or drink wine; he didn’t
smoke; he never used a gun or trap. And he gave the 20th century
that useful tool, Civil Disobedience.
7. John
Steinbeck read an interview that William Faulkner gave after he won the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1950. He thought it showed Faulkner’s shallowness and
egotistical self-praise. He thought that if that was what winning a Nobel did
to the writer, he never wanted to win one. But when he won it in 1962, he sang
a slightly different tune. “I’ve always been afraid of it because of what it
does to people. For one thing, I don’t remember anyone doing any work after
getting it save maybe Shaw. The last book of Faulkner’s was written long ago. Hemingway
went into a kind of hysterical haze. Red Lewis just collapsed into alcoholism
and angers. It has in effect amounted to an epitaph. Maybe I’m being
over-optimistic but I wouldn’t have accepted it if I hadn’t thought I could
beat the rap.”
8. The
English poet W. H. Auden heard from his friend Christopher Isherwood that Erika
Mann, Thomas Mann’s daughter, when she was afraid that she would lose her
German citizenship, wanted to marry an Englishman so that she could become a
British subject. She had asked Isherwood, who declined, but Auden wrote back
that he would be “delighted.”
9. Most
of my students would remember Shirley Jackson for her memorable, spooky short
story, “The Lottery,” in which the “winner” each year was stoned to death, or
maybe for her novel, The Haunting of Hill
House. Somewhere along the way, she became obsessed with witchcraft and
believed that she possessed diabolical power. She was angry with her publisher,
Alfred Knopf, for some reason, and when she heard that he was going to Vermont
to ski, she made a wax impression of him, stuck a pin in one of the legs, and,
sure enough, he broke a leg in three places coming down a ski slope. Hmmm,
coincidence or diabolism?
10.
Apparently Robert Frost wasn’t a very likable man, openly jealous of his poetic
rivals. Most of us remember him as that lovable white-haired man who stood in
the winter breezes to read his poem “The Gift Outright” at JFK’s inauguration in
1960. But according to those who knew him best, he could be vindictive and
insulting to any and all. His poems, though, are what we should all know and
admire. If any American poet deserved win the Nobel Prize for Literature, it should
have been Frost and not that nincompoop Bob Dylan. “The Road Not Taken” may be
the most frequently alluded to poem in American literature, second only to almost
anything of Shakespeare’s for number of allusions.
11.
There are almost too many stories about Ernest Hemingway to choose from. He was
the writer who made popular the word machismo.
He may have been macho or he may have only wanted to look like he was macho. He
loved to box with some of his friends; he loved the ritual heroism of the bull
fighter; he hunted big game and fished for giant marlin; he drank like a fish;
he tried to seduce almost every woman he met; he perfected the “tough guy”
style of writing that too many others tried to copy and failed; and he killed
himself with a shotgun in the mouth. But, damn, his short stories are really
good.
Tomorrow I may have to dig around in well-known
sayings and find a dozen or so keepers.
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