Among the Lions
Yoder, Edwin M. Jr.
Among the Lions Writers don't necessarily make the best stories. by Edwin M. Yqder Jr. Some books, as Bacon might have put it, are to be nibbled. This is one of them, the third gathering of...
...The story is plausible...
...For instance, no two contemporaneous poets were ever more distinct in subject or style than Tennyson and Browning...
...Tennyson was once asked whether Browning's "writing at large [his dramatic monologues?] is poetry or no...
...Dyed-in-the-wool Trollopeans relish, in Trollope's otherwise dry and businesslike autobiography, the story of how he killed off Mrs...
...What happened to Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," for instance, shouldn't happen to an Eddie Guest rhymelet...
...According to the poet, he fell into a drugged sleep after reading an exotic book "during which he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than two or three hundred lines...
...Gross arranges his gathering chronologically, by birth dates, and doesn't otherwise categorize...
...Poor soul,' he said, 'very sad...
...Writing is solitary work...
...Has there ever been a greater literary vandal than that (unidentified) visitor from Porlock...
...Perhaps the trouble is that they are not dead—or dead enough...
...He who said in one of his prefaces that his aim was "above all, to make you see," was sitting one evening in a London cafe with his friend Edward Garnett: "I asked him after a painted lady had brushed haughtily past our table, what he had specially noticed about her...
...In fact, the impression after a week's snacking is that it is personalities, not the events, that make for savor...
...Here are some highlights, at random: The imprisoned Marie Antoinette shed tears over Burke's noble lament for her fate, but the writer of those words so feared that his remains would be desecrated if the French revolutionists conquered England that he arranged their transfer from wooden to lead coffin and the latter's concealment...
...Seriously...
...Does anyone care, for instance, that Dickens once lost his balance and fell, fully clothed, into a tub of water...
...The understanding of some stories demands some historical context...
...While writing one day at the Athenaeum Club, he heard two clergymen complaining of some of his characters, especially Mrs...
...He did not identify the reference to his mystified companion...
...No Oxford anthology would be complete without a Spooner story...
...Proudie...
...Poe regarded his "Raven" as "the greatest poem" ever written...
...Moreover, one's distinct impression is that interest fades as one nears the present...
...Finally, an alert reader may find to his pleasant surprise, as this reviewer did, that he can improve upon authorized recollection...
...The great Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins could not bring himself to use the word "cocksucker...
...He asked for a week to consider...
...Proudie's exit (of a stroke) | does seem abrupt and unforeshadowed...
...The reviewer must proceed accordingly, for the most part in space-saving snippets...
...Walking with the same companion a week later he suddenly declared, "I have thought and it is...
...I was at a seminar table in the English Department in Chapel Hill fifty years ago when Robert Frost, who seems to have been present at Pound's unusual salad dish, told the same story more vividly: "Ezra ate the tulips leaf by leaf," said Frost in his inimitable Down East growl, adding: "Ezra always was a kind of pretty boy...
...1 But we who love the story tend to for-J get Trollope's ensuing confession that x he still lives "much in company with her ghost...
...With striking exceptions, of course...
...The dirt in her nostril,' he replied instantly...
...He said this to Boswell, who protested that spirits take up no space...
...But was Hume ribbing his perhaps-gullible fellow young Scot...
...These are among the exceptional anecdotes, for not even the literary immortals can render a mere humdrum event interesting...
...But when he awoke and began to transcribe the dream visions, a meddlesome visitor from Porlock took an hour of his time, after which, "to his no small surprise and mortification," he could recall only eight or ten lines...
...Whistler wanted to paint Disraeli, but Disraeli refused to sit for fear that he would look like the famous picture of Whistler's mother...
...Perhaps a dozen or so of the recent figures represented here (it would be rude to name them) would be unremarkable if they walked on water...
...Pound sought attention by eating two red tulips...
...He approached and "acknowledged myself to be the culprit...
...Small world...
...Spooner, of the reversed consonants and other verbal mixups, and warden of New College, was "walking with a friend in North Oxford and meeting a lady dressed in black, to whom he lifted his hat...
...Gibbon's plump cheek was mistaken by a French lady for a baby's bottom...
...her late husband, you know, a very sad death—eaten by missionaries.'" And there is the matter of Conrad's eye...
...Or that Gray of the churchyard elegy was afraid of fire...
...Proudie, the officious evangelical bishop's wife in The Last Chronicle of Barset...
...George III gave his mixed review of Shakespeare to Fanny Burney, then laughed and said: "One should be stoned for saying so...
...since Mrs...
...A group went to the Old Cheshire Cheese," writes William Van O'Connor in his biography of Ezra Pound, "where Yeats held forth . . . on the ways of bringing music and poetry together...
...In any case, this, like all collections of the sort, suggests that really good stories about really important writers are less plentiful than one might hope...
...Swinburne, who seems to have been tone-deaf, was fooled into believing that the "Three Blind Mice" tune was "a very ancient Florentine retournelle...
...Johnson, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde, the vein is not so rich as it ought to be...
...Edwin M. Yoder Jr., a former editor and columnist in Washington, has invented a number of literary anecdotes in his forthcoming novel about Freud and HenryJames...
...and while one can count on the usual plenitude concerning such sociable souls as Dr...
...As to | Mrs...
...Proudie,' I said, 'I will go home " and kill her before the week is over.'| And so I did...
...This is one of them, the third gathering of literary anecdotes to bear the Oxford imprint—an excess, one might fear, except that the editor explains that the overlap with the last is only just over 20 percent...
...The philosopher-historian Hume believed there could be no afterlife because it would be so crowded with spirits as to require the creation of new worlds...
Vol. 12 • May 2007 • No. 36
