I recently came across this great coffee-table book: Secret Lives of Great Authors by Robert Schnakenberg.
It’s a quick survey of the lowlights from the personal lives of a few dozen famous authors. The book is full of illustrations and fact boxes that make reading (or browsing) through it a breeze. Of course I already knew a lot of this stuff, but there was still plenty I wasn’t aware of. And having it all collected in one volume makes a pretty powerful collective impression: To wit, authors’ lives really suck. Some of the info in here I’m pretty sure was wrong, but it was still a fun read. Anyway, here’s a sample:
“Gerard de Nerval, the French symbolist poet, had a pet lobster, which he often took for walks through the streets of Paris. Lobsters make great pets, he wrote, because they’re ‘peaceful, serious creatures who know the secrets of the sea, and don’t bark.’ Nerval went insane in 1841.”
“Today, we call them ‘little people,’ but even in Tolkien’s day his use of the term dwarves caused an uproar. After The Hobbit was published in 1937, grammarians assailed him for not using dwarfs, which is the preferred plural form according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Luckily for Tolkien, he had a persuasive defense: He had edited the dictionary.”
“One of the few jobs Faulkner did manage to hang onto was postmaster of the University of Mississippi post office, from 1921 to 1924. Not surprisingly, the effete, haughty genius proved to be the very model of a toxic employee. Faulkner was rude to customers (when he wasn’t ignoring them) and oblivious to his responsibilities. He spent most of his workday writing or playing bridge and mah-jongg with cronies he hired as clerks. He was often caught throwing people’s mail into the garbage. When a postal inspector was assigned to investigate him, Faulkner agreed to resign. He later summed up his experience: ‘I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.'”
“Gore Vidal vs. Norman Mailer: The long-simmering feud between the two egotistical novelists — both of whom wanted to be considered America’s preeminent wordsmith — came to a head one evening at a tony New York dinner party, where Mailer challenged Vidal to a fight and threw a drink in his face when Vidal ignored him. Unperturbed, Vidal remarked, ‘Once again words have failed Norman.'”
[…] “Some of the info in here I’m pretty sure was wrong, but it was still a fun read.”