Writers can be fun.(The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes)(Book review)

The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, edited by John Gross; OUP, 2006, $55.

I KNEW WE WERE IN TROUBLE here right from the introduction. Editor John Gross acknowledges that the anecdote "ideally" describes the unfolding of a short, self-contained incident. Recalling his early effort to assemble examples of this, he confides, "On the one hand I found I was depriving myself of valuable material. On the other, there was something faintly dispiriting about laying out one neat little drama after another." So he desisted. It's as if the editor of an anthology of sonnets had announced his decision to abandon the tyranny of fourteen lines.

What Gross, an English writer and reviewer best known for his excellent The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, has given us is a collection consisting largely of biographical observations. His range is authors writing in English, and he has stuck fairly closely to the major literary names, but gone for less familiar material. Here are fragments rather than incidents, comments rather than conversations. Consider the following two examples:

 
   Soon after Garrick's purchase at Hampton Court he 
   was showing Dr Johnson the grounds, the house, 
   Shakespeare's Temple etc.; and concluded by 
   asking him, "Well, Doctor, how do you like all 
   this? .... Why, it is pleasant enough," growled the 
   Doctor, "for the present; but all these things, David, 
   make death very terrible." 

And now this. Johnson said:

 
   that as he returned to his lodgings about one or 
   two o'clock in the morning, he often saw poor 
   children asleep in thresholds and stalls, and that he 
   used to put pennies into their hands to buy them a 
   breakfast. 

The first of these, from William Cooke, is an anecdote. The second, from Frances Reynolds, is a random piece of biographical information requiring a fair knowledge of the subject to make it interesting. Maybe Johnson is sufficiently well known for anything about him to appeal to a lot of readers; but the same can't be said of many of the subjects here.