THE COOLEST PEOPLE IN BOOKS: 250 ANECDOTES
By David Bruce
“There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers. … I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.”—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Dedicated with Love to Carla Evans and Carl Eugene Bruce
SMASHWORDS EDITION
Copyright 2010 by Bruce D. Bruce
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Cover Photograph
Photographer: Anatoly Tiplyashin
Located: Krasnoyarsk, Russian Federation
Agency: Dreamstime
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The Coolest People in Books: 250 Anecdotes
Alcohol
• At one time, newspaper reporters used to drink—a lot. During one drinking session, Paul Galloway, reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, became perturbed—make that very perturbed—about something that editor Jim Hoge had perpetrated. Mr. Galloway became so perturbed that he decided to do something about his perturbation, so he went back to the Sun-Times offices, picked up a chair, and threw it as hard as he could at the window of Mr. Hoge’s office. Big mistake. Mr. Galloway recounted later, “Something I had not foreseen was that the window was made of Plexiglas. The chair bounced back and almost hit me.” Mr. Hoge was not present at the time, and he need not ever have become aware of the event, but Mr. Galloway was still perturbed, so he insisted that the City Desk log the event, although the City Desk assistant advised him, “Forget it, Paul.” The next morning, Mr. Hoge was at his desk, and he perused the log, as was his custom. He also called Mr. Galloway, who now regretted having insisted that his action of the previous night be logged, into his office. Mr. Hoge said to Mr. Galloway, “So, Paul, I understand you have a problem with our interior decoration.” Mr. Galloway replied, “No, sir! I find it excellent! Nothing whatsoever wrong with it! Enviable, in fact!” Mr. Galloway was a very good writer, and Mr. Hoge was a very good editor, and very good editors realize that very good writers can occasionally disagree with very good editors, and so Mr. Hoge said, “I’m relieved. Now get back to work.” Another of Mr. Galloway’s stories is about the time—2 a.m.—he was standing guard in the Army. His Major sneaked up behind him and said to him, very clearly and loudly, “Sheep.” Mr. Galloway was puzzled by the word, but he stood at attention and said, “Yes, sir.” The major again said, very clearly and louder than before, “SHEEP!” Mr. Galloway realized that, of course, the Major must be under a great deal of pressure and therefore his mind had snapped, but he again said, “Yes, sir.” The Major, clearly angry, told him, “Don’t you ‘yes, sir’ me! Sheep! SHEEP!” Mr. Galloway said, “Would you like me to get you a sheep, sir? I will get you a sheep as soon as I’m off watch.” The Major shouted, “NO! YOU’RE A MORON! I DON’T WANT A SHEEP!” Mr. Galloway asked, “What would you like, sir?” The Major shouted, “I WOULD LIKE THE GODD*MNED PASSWORD!”
• Author G.K. Chesterton delivered some proofs to his editor one night. From his bag he pulled out his corrected proofs—and a bottle of port and two glasses. Unfortunately, his editor confessed that he did not drink alcohol. Shocked, Mr. Chesterton said, “Good heavens! Give me back my proofs!”
Animals
• When the pet cat of Naomi, the daughter of horror writer Stephen King, was run over, she was very upset, so the family held a funeral for the cat. Mr. King’s imagination began to work, and he wondered what would happen if a cat—or a human being—were to come back to life. The novel he wrote based on his speculations got its title from a sign his children had put up: “Pets Sematary.”
• Frequently, silence in the wilderness, whether on land or sea, is a sign of danger. Gary Paulsen, author of Hatchet, knows a man who survived an attack by a great white shark while he was diving. Immediately before the attack, the ocean grew silent. Today, the man says, “I should have listened to the silence. I’d still have my right leg.”
• Jerry Spinelli, the author of Maniac Magee and Stargirl, gets interesting letters. A boy once wrote to invite Mr. Spinelli to visit his school so he could meet the school’s pet duck. One year later, the boy again wrote Mr. Spinelli to visit his school so he could meet the school’s pet duck—but to hurry because the pet duck was getting old.
• One author who loved his cat was Edward Lear, writer of nonsense verse. His cat was named Foss, and Mr. Lear so loved Foss that in 1881 when he had a new villa built in San Remo, Italy, he had it built exactly like the old villa that he was moving away from. That way, Foss would feel right at home.
April Fools Day
• One day in 2010, Lulu, a Web site that allows authors to self-publish their own books in various print and electronic formats, announced a new way of publishing one’s work: “We recognize electronic books and the internet are a passing fad, so we are now offering the tried and true hand-written scroll.” Of course, this announcement was made on April Fools Day.
Authors
• Karen Cushman started writing books in her middle age, and she has certainly been successful. She spent a lot of time raising a family, which included reading children’s books to her daughter, Leah. When Leah started reading young-adult novels, Karen did, too, and she realized that she enjoyed this kind of reading. In 1989, at age 47, she told her husband about an idea that she had for a book, and her husband told her to write the book. (She had been talking about writing for a long time.) In a newspaper interview, she explained why she started writing when she did: “When Leah was in her last year of high school, I felt like this psychic space was opening up in my head. It’s that space that was filled with, ‘Does she have her lunch money? What is she doing this weekend? Who’s driving?’ All those questions were going out, and I had room for other questions, like ‘What if there were this girl…?’” Her first book, Catherine, Called Birdy, was published in 1994 and was named a Newbery Honor Book. Her second book, The Midwife’s Apprentice, was published in 1996 and won the Newbery Medal. The Newbery Medal is given to the best children’s book published in the United States each year. The Newbery Honor Books are the runners’-up.
• Authors sometimes have interesting experiences, possessions, and opinions. When he was a young boy, Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, was walking on a road when a man on a motorcycle passed him. Soon, the motorcyclist came back, stopped, and told Philip that just ahead on the road was a dead man. Then the motorcyclist left to call the proper authorities. Young Philip had to make a decision: go home by a different route or continue on and see the dead man. He continued on and saw the dead man, who was lying peacefully on the road as if he were taking a nap. Young Philip was a little disappointed in the sight. One of the places where Mr. Pullman has done his writing is a small potting shed, crowded with trash and remarkable objects, including a six-foot-long rat that was used in a Pullman theatrical adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes short story. What Mr. Pullman is most passionate about, he says, is this: “Silence. If I were a judge, and someone came to my court and was found guilty of killing their neighbors because they played loud music all day and night, I would let them go with my blessing. There is too much noise in the world, and little of it is welcome.”
• In the young-adult novels by Robert Cormier, the bad guys often win. For example, in his novel The Chocolate War, the good guy—Jerry Renault—is murdered. He isn’t murdered literally, but he is beaten—physically and mentally—so badly that he totally gives up and does not believe that there is any use in trying to fight the bad guys. Mr. Cormier’s bad guys are very vividly written, and one day his wife, Connie, looked up from one of his manuscripts that she had been typing and asked him, “Who are you? We’ve been together all these years, but sometimes I wonder.” By the way, the plot of The Chocolate War was suggested by a real-life event in which Peter, Mr. Cormier’s son, was asked to sell chocolate for his school, but he did not want to because he was busy with other activities such as schoolwork and football. In Peter’s case, his parents wrote a note saying that they agreed with his decision not to sell chocolate and Peter returned the 25 boxes of chocolate to the school. Like Jerry Renault, Peter was the only student not to sell chocolate, but unlike in Jerry’s case, nothing bad happened to Peter.
• S.E. Hinton practically invented young-adult literature with her first novel, The Outsiders, which depicts teenagers with gritty realism. “S.E.” are the initials for Susan Eloise, and she began the first draft of The Outsiders when she was 15. However, she says that no one ever believes that, so she usually says that she started the first draft when she was 16. And since her editors don’t think that anyone will believe that, they often say that she started the first draft when she was 17. At any rate, her first novel was accepted for publication on a day that was important to her: the day she graduated from high school. The novel, which has sold millions of copies, made readers of many boys; she often gets letters that say, “I didn’t like to read, but then I read this book.”
• Novelist Walter Tevis (author of The Hustler, The Color of Money, and The Man Who Fell to Earth) lived in many places in the United States, ending up in New York City. When people asked where he was from, he would give a different answer according to the day of the week. When asked on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he answered Kentucky. On Wednesdays and Fridays, he answered California. On the weekends, he answered Ohio. (Apparently, Mondays were a wild-card day.)
• Jean Shepherd created a hoax by telling his radio listeners to go into bookstores and ask for the novel I, Libertine by Frederick R. Ewing—neither the novel nor the author existed. So many people asked for the novel that bookstores wanted to carry it and therefore publishers wanted to publish it. Mr. Shepherd created a synopsis of the book, and science-fiction author Theodore Sturgeon wrote the book from that synopsis. Ballantine Books published it in 1956.
• In 1837, two law professors at the University of Paris waged a duel over punctuation. The disagreement was over the ending of a passage; one professor thought it should end with a semicolon, while the other professor thought it should end with a colon. According to the Times of London, “The one who contended that the passage in question ought to be concluded by a semicolon was wounded in the arm. His adversary maintained that it should be a colon.”
• Sholom Aleichem (1859-1916) was a Yiddish humorist. Among the characters he created in his stories were those that became the basis of Fiddler on the Roof. In 1906, he came to the United States, where he met Mark Twain, to whom he was introduced as the “Jewish Mark Twain.” Mr. Twain then said that he would like to be introduced in Yiddish to Mr. Aleichem as the “American Sholom Aleichem.”
• A friend of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick once read out loud a one-paragraph synopsis of Mr. Dick’s novel that was the basis of the movie Blade Runner, then asked, “That the end of it?” Mr. Dick confirmed that it was, then joked, “Book is longer.”
• People identify themselves with varying degrees of honesty. One very honest person is writer Carol Schwalberg, who says that her hobbies include traveling, “visiting art galleries, and spreading malicious gossip.”
Autographs and Inscriptions
• J.K. Rowling sent some sample chapters of her children’s book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to the Christopher Little Agency, which did not handle children’s books. Her manuscript was rejected immediately and almost did not get read. Fortunately, a 25-year-old manuscript screener named Bryony Evens looked over the sample chapters instead of mailing them back to Ms. Rowling. She was enthusiastic about what she read, and she impressed Mr. Little with her enthusiasm, and so he asked to read the entire manuscript. The rest, as they say, is history. Ms. Evens met Ms. Rowling later, in 1998, when she waited in line for Ms. Rowling to sign a Harry Potter book. Ms. Rowling was very happy to meet her, and she signed the book in this way: “To Bryony—who is the most important person I’ve ever met in a signing queue & the first person ever to see merit in Harry Potter. With huge thanks. J.K. Rowling.”
• Sid Fleischman started out writing books for adults, but he changed the audience he wrote for because of something his older daughter, Jane, said after she had gotten an autograph by children’s book author Leo Politi at the Santa Monica Public Library. Jane’s mother said, “Daddy writes books, too,” and Jane replied, “Yes, but no one reads his books.” Very quickly, he became very successful as a writer of books for children. In his first children’s book, Mr. Mysterious and Company, he named the child characters after his own children: Jane, Paul, and Anne. Like Mr. Politi, Mr. Fleischman signed autographs at the Santa Monica Public Library. Standing in line to get his autograph was his seven-year-old daughter, Anne. Mr. Fleischman says, “I knew I had arrived.”
• Ernest Hemingway once visited Robert Benchley and discovered that Mr. Benchley had a first edition of every book that Hemingway had published, including his first book, In Our Time. He said, “So you were going to save this, and then sell it when it got to be worth a lot of money—all right, I’ll fix you.” He then wrote a filthy inscription in the book. Next he took Mr. Benchley’s copy of A Farewell to Arms and filled in the original dirty dialogue that the publisher had not seen fit to print and had represented by blanks. On its flyleaf, he wrote, “Corrected edition with filled-in blanks. Very valuable—sell quick.”
• William Faulkner once stayed for a few days at the New York apartment of writers Frank Sullivan and Corey Ford. When he left, he took a copy of The Sound and the Fury from Mr. Ford’s bookshelf, then inscribed it, “Corey Ford’s book is hereby presented to Frank Sullivan with the regards of Wm. Faulkner.” Mr. Sullivan declined to return the book to Mr. Ford.
• On June 26, 1997, J.K. Rowling’s first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published in the United Kingdom. She went to a bookstore to see her book, and she was tempted to sign all the copies, but she decided not to in case she got in trouble.
• Because he was so famous, humorous poet Ogden Nash was frequently asked to give his autograph. This didn’t bother him, except when young autograph hounds thrust a piece of paper and a pen at him and said, “Who are you? Sign here!”
Books
• Some writers are incredibly prolific. At age 73 in 2008, science-fiction writer Robert Silverberg had written approximately 300 novels, 600 short works of fiction, and 100 nonfiction books. Is that all, you ask? No. He has edited approximately 100 anthologies. (Let’s not mention all the Forewords and Introductions and other miscellaneous writings.) He writes so much that he has used more than 50 pseudonyms to keep from overwhelming readers. Of course, once in a while people ask him how he writes that much. He replies, “One word at a time.” As you would expect, he has many anecdotes about his years of writing. For example, when he was still a college student, a professional science-fiction writer named Randall Garrett moved into the apartment next door. Mr. Silverberg had already started writing and publishing science fiction, and Mr. Garrett told him, “I’m a professional writer with a lot of experience. I think we could work together. You are very disciplined; I am not.” Mr. Silverberg says, “It worked out beautifully for two or three years. When he would fall asleep at his typewriter because he’d been up all night drinking, I would pick up the manuscript and continue writing. Eventually I got married, and my wife said, ‘That man is not going to enter this house.’” By the way, a good writer nearing the end of his life ought to be able to think up a good epitaph, right? Right. Mr. Silverberg says, “A few years ago, I actually did come up with a mocking sort of epitaph for myself. It’s this: ‘Here lies Robert Silverberg. He spent most of his life in the future. Now he’s in the past.’”
• In 2008, Paul Constant, book critic for the Seattle newspaper The Stranger, attended BookExpo America (BEA), the annual book-industry convention. One thing he noticed was what he called “unscrupulous booksellers” who grabbed as many free advance reader’s copies as possible so that they could later sell them online—illegally. Of course, the publishers are aware that unscrupulous booksellers do this, and so they have a rule against bringing rolling luggage carts to the convention because the carts can be filled with many, many free advance reader’s copies. However, Mr. Constant writes that “some demented booksellers find ways around that: One woman wheels into the hall in a wheelchair and then stands up and wheels the empty chair around to stack books in the seat like a wheelbarrow.”
• Novelist Leif Enger got the writing bug from Lin, his brother, a writer of short stories whose first solo-written novel is Undiscovered Country, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but set in Minnesota. Their father read Lin’s novel, then watched Mel Gibson’s movie version of Hamlet. The father, who may be a little biased, says, “I think Lin’s a little better than Shakespeare.” Leif has written a Western titled So Brave, Young, and Handsome, for which he did research on the history of the Hundred and One ranch. Among other things, the managers had brought in Geronimo, who was then old, and had him shoot a buffalo. Leif says, “They billed it as ‘Geronimo’s Last Buffalo.’ Nobody knew it was really his first buffalo because the Apache didn’t hunt buffalo.”
• While in France, William Donaldson bought a pornographic novel and started reading it in public, first taking the precaution of putting a different book jacket on the novel. The book jacket was for a compilation of essays against the A-bomb, including essays by Bertrand Russell, Philip Toynbee, and other intellectuals. Peter Ustinov happened to be walking by, and seeing the book jacket, he asked Mr. Donaldson if he could look at the book. Mr. Donaldson readily gave him permission and handed the book to him. Mr. Ustinov read one filthy paragraph, and then looked at the book jacket. Then he read another filthy paragraph and again looked at the book jacket. Finally, speechless for once in his life, he handed the book back to Mr. Donaldson and exited.
• When Gary Paulsen was 14 years old, he felt cold on the street and so he went into a public library to warm up. The librarian gave him a library card and checked out a book for him. It took him a month to read that book, but soon each week he was reading two or three books. Mr. Paulsen says, “She saved me, she really did, by giving me that book. She turned me into a reader, made me love reading and books and stories.” As an adult, Mr. Paulsen has written over 100 books, including the very popular book Hatchet, starring a boy named Brian who has to survive alone in the Canadian wilderness with only a hatchet and the clothing he is wearing.
• Like so many of us, Brazilian author Paulo Coelho owned too many books. He put them on shelves, and when he returned home one day, he discovered that the shelves had collapsed. Reflecting that if he had been home he might have crushed to death by the books and shelves, he decided to greatly reduce the number of books he owned—to 400, which he says is still a high number if he intends to reread all those books.
• When she died, Agatha Christie left behind two gifts for the fans of her detective characters Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple—two mystery books. Curtain told about M. Poirot’s final case, and Sleeping Murder told about Miss Marple’s final case. Ms. Christie dedicated the mysteries to her daughter and her husband. After writing the mysteries in 1940, she left them in a vault to which only her husband had access. As Ms. Christie wished, the two mysteries were not published until after her death.
Children
• In 2008, author Barbara Kingsolver’s younger daughter, Lily, was 11 years old. According to Ms. Kingsolver, “The wisdom of each generation is necessarily new. This tends to dawn on us in revelatory moments, brought to us by our children.” As an example, she brings up her daughter, whom she walks to the school bus stop and talks to until the bus arrives. This is a good time, but a few weeks previously, Lily looked her over and then told her, “Mom, just so you know, the only reason I’m letting you wear that outfit is because of your age.” When the bus arrived, Ms. Kingsolver hid behind a building. That is an example of new knowledge. In Ms. Kingsolver’s words, “It’s okay […] to deck out and turn up as the village idiot” when you are old enough. What about the old knowledge? Ms. Kingsolver says, “Honestly, it is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is this: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.” According to Ms. Kingsolver, the books that are good are the books that are wise.
• Kathy Lette is an Australian author who says, “All I do in my books is write down the way women talk when there are no men around.” She lives with a human-rights lawyer with whom she has had children. Unfortunately, this means that she changes lots of diapers. According to Ms. Lette, this has an effect on her writing, just as having children has an effect on every female author: “For every baby she has, a female author loses out on writing about three books.” She has asked Geoffrey, the human-rights lawyer she lives with, to change diapers (nappies), but the first time she asked, he replied, “But I’ve got 250 people on death row in Trinidad.” She jokes that she did not say anything then, but “after another 4,000 nappies, I replied, ‘Oh let them die.’ After the second baby, I was like, ‘I’m going to go there and kill them myself. Human rights begin at home!’”
• George Orwell (the author of Animal Farm and 1984) and his wife, Eileen, adopted a three-week-old boy in June of 1944. Mr. Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair, so they named the boy Richard Horatio Blair. After his wife died, Mr. Orwell raised the boy on the island of Jura so he would be away from the city. There, Mr. Orwell let the boy learn from his mistakes. For example, young Richard found a tobacco pipe in the garden and filled it with cigarette butts that he took from the fireplace. Mr. Orwell saw him do this, and he handed young Richard his lighter. In a letter, Mr. Orwell reported on the result of young Richard’s attempt at smoking: “I’m sorry to say that Richard took to smoking recently, but he made himself horribly sick and that has put him off it.”
• Karen Hesse, Newbery Award-winning author of Out of the Dust, was a sickly and whiny child. Her mother even gave her gold stars on the days that Karen did not cry, but Karen earned very few gold stars. Still, Karen was eager to try new things. At around age eight, she tried to fly, launching herself into space from the top of some stairs leading to the second floor of her house. She made it almost all the way down the stairs before hitting the floor. Encouraged by this seeming success, she wanted to try flying out of a second-floor window, but fortunately a neighbor saw her sitting on the window ledge. The neighbor telephoned Karen’s mother, who stopped the flying attempt.
• Children are interested in and remember the details of exciting stories. For example, J.R.R. Tolkien used to tell the stories that eventually became his fantasy novel The Hobbit to his young son, Christopher, who would listen to a story, then say, “Last time, you said Bilbo’s front door was blue, and you said Thorin had a silver tassel on his hood, but you’ve just said that Bilbo’s front door was green, and the tassel on Thorin’s hood was gold.” When this happened, Mr. Tolkien would say, “D*mn the boy,” but he would also take notes on what Christopher had said so that he could make the stories consistent.
• When author George Plimpton was a kid, he admired New York Giants’ ace pitcher Carl Hubbell, who had thrown so many screwballs that he was deformed—his palm turned to the outside. Young George used to walk with his palm turned to the outside, hoping that people would think that he threw screwballs, but his father made him stop. Mr. Plimpton says, “He said it looked as if I had tumbled out a window and my parents didn’t have enough money to set the broken arm properly.
• When Fay Kanin was about 12 years old, she discovered that people could get paid for writing. A newspaper called the Elmira Star Gazette paid $1 for anecdotes about readers’ most embarrassing moments. One dollar was a lot of money back then, so Fay invented a most embarrassing moment, wrote it up, and earned $1. She then asked a friend if she could use her name, and she earned another dollar. A little later, all three most embarrassing moments in the newspaper column were ghostwritten by Fay.
• Katherine Anne Porter, author of Ship of Fools, started writing early. When she was six years old, she wrote a “novel,” which she titled A Nobbel—The Hermit of Halifax Cave.
• James Russell Lowell once saw a building with this sign in front: “Home for Incurable Children.” He pointed out the sign to a friend, then said, “They’ll get me in there some day.”
Clothing
• Thomas Butts once called on Mr. and Mrs. William Blake, only to find that they were sitting naked in a summerhouse. Nudity didn’t bother either of the Blakes, so Mr. Blake called to Mr. Butts, “Come in. It’s only Adam and Eve, you know.”
• When Gary Paulsen, the popular children’s author of Hatchet, speaks before groups of young readers, he often wears a cap that bears the message, “Read Like a Wolf Eats.”
Critics
• In his old age, author Gore Vidal moved from his villa (La Rondinaia) in Italy back to the United States because his being in a wheelchair made it impossible for him to live in the Italian villa, situated as it was on a cliff. In his United States abode is a set of chairs, which he bought in Rome from a dealer who tried to convince him that the chairs were created for a maharaja. Mr. Gore told the dealer, “No, they’re not. They come from the set of the movie Ben-Hur. I wrote it.” Mr. Gore is one of the uncredited writers of the movie, and he claims to have been forced to write for the movies and popular culture because The New York Times had started to ignore him as a writer of books. He says, “If you didn't appear in the daily New York Times, you were non-existent. Every other journal, including Time and Newsweek, followed its lead. And that is what drove me into television, Broadway, and the movies.” Mr. Gore found a way to get close to even with The New York Times. He wrote three mystery novels using the pseudonym Edgar Box. These mysteries, he says, “were glowingly reviewed in the Times.”
• The Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard is highly rated by critics, yet little known by readers. In addition to writing novels, she also has memorized much, much poetry. In fact, her knowledge of poetry led to her and her husband, Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller, meeting the novelist Graham Greene. In a restaurant at Capri, they overheard him trying to remember a line of poetry. Ms. Hazzard knew the line and recited it, and the three became friends. Critics do appreciate her. At the end of an interview with Ms. Hazzard, journalist Bryan Appleyard told her, “Thank you. You have written some beautiful novels.” She replied, “Pardon, what did you say?” Mr. Appleyard repeated his statement, and she admitted, “I heard you. I just wanted to hear you say it again.”
• People do make mistakes. While Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., author of Slaughterhouse-Five, was on a panel at City College, a woman asked him this question: “Why did you put exactly one hundred ‘So it goes’s’ in Slaughterhouse-Five?” Mr. Vonnegut replied that he was not aware that he had used that exact number. Also on the panel was critic John Simon, who disappeared while everyone had coffee, and then reappeared and said to Mr. Vonnegut, “One hundred and three.” Some critics have been very happy to place Mr. Vonnegut in a category in which he may or may not belong. At a party, he was introduced to cultural commissar Jason Epstein, who thought for a moment, said “Science fiction,” and then walked away. Mr. Vonnegut says, “He just had to place me, that’s all.”
• Occasionally, novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., taught creative writing, and of course he critiqued the writing of other people. A Smith undergraduate asked him to critique a short story that she described as “a heartwarming account” of the death of her grandmother. Despite its frequent humor, Mr. Vonnegut’s work is often dark, and he thought that the short story was “too gushy” and therefore suggested, “Have you ever thought about making your grandmother insane?” Most likely, the Smith undergraduate was made uncomfortable by the suggestion, just as Mr. Vonnegut felt uncomfortable because of a comment that was made after he told someone that the name “Vonnegut” was German: “Germans killed six million of my cousins.” (Of course, during World War II Mr. Vonnegut fought on the side of the Allies.)
• Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks write a blog called GoFugYourself in which they criticize celebrities who demonstrate poor fashion sense. In 2008 they came out with a book titled Go Fug Yourself Presents: The Fug Awards. Of course, their experiences are interesting, and they have learned from them. Ms. Morgan says, “I have learned that people who write hate mail tend to have considerably worse spelling and grammar than people who write non-hate mail.” So what is in the future for the celebrity-criticizing duo? Ms. Cocks says, “I would like to say the future looks like a closet full of Louboutin shoes and designer dresses, but I keep forgetting to buy lottery tickets, so I’m guessing that will never come to pass.”
• World-class author Isaac Bashevis Singer once read a story in front of a group of 12 Jews who were too poor to pay him anything. After he had read the story, a man stood up and said that the story was not a good story because it was not a Zionist story. Therefore, the man said, “I spit on your story.” Each of the other members of the audience stood up in turn and said that the story was not good for various reasons, and each of them said that they spit on the story. One man even said he spit on the story twice—once because it was not Orthodox, and once because it was not Zionist. So, Mr. Singer says, “From 12 people I collected 13 spits.”
• Readers can impact an author. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., wrote an ending for his novel Breakfast of Champions and sent it to his publisher. He lived near his publisher and a lot of mail and messages went back and forth, and a couple of young employees in the production department met him and told him that they didn’t like the ending: “That’s not the way we thought it should end.” Mr. Vonnegut thanked them, looked at the ending, realized that they were right, and wrote another ending— the one that appeared in the published book.
• The person who discovered author Anita Loos in England and helped make her comic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes popular there was poet A.E. Housman. He read the novel, then told all his friends and fellow professors at Cambridge University about it. Soon everyone in Cambridge was reading it and thereafter the novel became popular throughout England.
Death
• Some people find unusual ways to die. William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, married a woman to help her escape from the Nazis. She worked for a playwright named Ernst Toller, and she always returned promptly from lunch at 1 p.m. However, one day she met and spoke to a fellow refugee she knew and so she arrived back from lunch 10 minutes late and discovered that Mr. Toller had hung himself. It turned out that he had attempted suicide at other times, but he had always been careful to do so at a time and place where he knew that someone would rescue him. Because Mrs. Burroughs arrived 10 minutes late from her lunch, he succeeded this time in killing himself. OK, that is morbid, but this is cool (and it’s about life): Mr. Burroughs is well aware that children find it easy to pick up languages. When he was living in Mexico, he would speak to a shopkeeper, who would then ask Mr. Burroughs’ four-year-old son, “What did he say?” And his four-year-old son would tell the shopkeeper, in Spanish, what his father had said.
• Studs Terkel remembers that when he met his wife, Ida, she was wearing a maroon dress. He also remembers that she made a lot more money than he did: “It was like dating a CEO. I borrowed 20 bucks from her for our first date. I never paid her back.” Unfortunately for Studs, his wife died first: “She was seven days older than me, and I would always joke that I married an older woman. That’s the thing: Who’s gonna laugh at my jokes? At those jokes I’ve told a million times? […] Who’s gonna be there to laugh?” When Studs died, he had planned for his cremated ashes to be mixed with his wife’s ashes and then to be scattered on Bughouse Square, a park. He said, laughing, “Scatter us there. It’s against the law. Let ’em sue us.”
• When John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, 11-year-old Karen Hess, a future author of young readers’ books, watched his funeral on television. She was so affected by the assassination that she started folding everything—towels, clothing, etc.—into a tight triangle like the American flag that was given to President Kennedy’s widow, Jackie.
Editors
• Cynthia Ozick labored long over her first first novel, writing 300,000 words over seven years before abandoning the too-ambitious project. She then labored long over her second first novel, writing more than 800 pages over seven years before sending it to an editor who marked the first 100 pages before sending it back to her with this note: “If you do everything my red pencil suggests, and of course there will be more in this vein, we will accept your novel for publication. But if you decline to follow my red pencil’s indispensable advice, then we will decline to publish.” Ms. Ozick declined to make the changes and she says that she sent back this note: “Seven years have I labored for these words, and yet another seven years; so I say unto you, Nay, not one jot or tittle will I alter or undo.” To which the editor—she calls him “blessed editor”—responded, “OK, we’ll take it anyway.” Good choice. Ms. Ozick outlived the editor by decades, but he accepted her first novel that was published, and in 2008 she won the 2008 PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement Award.
• Comic writer Robert Benchley was frequently late in delivering his writing, but he always took the time to make up some excuse for why it was late. Once, he used the excuse that his mother was ill and he had to leave town to stay with her. Unfortunately, Art Shields, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, found out that Mr. Benchley was still in town. Mr. Benchley then swung into action, sending telegrams to his friends around the country and asking them to send telegrams in his name to Mr. Shields. Telegrams arrived saying that Mr. Benchley was in Hollywood making a movie with Greta Garbo, in Sante Fe becoming a member of the Navajo Indian tribe, in Maine working as a guide for a group of hunters, etc. Eventually, Mr. Shields sent Mr. Benchley a telegram: “I GATHER YOU HAVEN’T DONE THE PIECE.”
• As editor of the Emporia Gazette, William Allen White read and rejected many stories. A woman wrote him after one of her stories was rejected, “You sent back last week a story of mine. I know that you did not read the story, for as a test I pasted together pages 18, 19, and 20. The story came back with these pages still pasted. So I know that you are a fraud and turn down stories without reading them.” Mr. White wrote her in reply, “At breakfast when I open an egg I don’t have to eat it all to determine if it is bad.”