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Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes
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Copyright
Copyright ©1985, 2000 by Little, Brown and Company
Introduction copyright ©2000 by Clifton Fadiman and André Bernard
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
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FIRST REVISED EDITION
This book is an updated and revised edition of The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, edited by Clifton Fadiman.
First eBook Edition: September 2000
ISBN: 978-0-446-93126-7
Copyright acknowledgments may be found at the back of the book, following the indexes.
And once when saying his prayers, which he [Sydney Smith] always did out loud, he was overheard to say: “Now Lord, I’ll tell you an anecdote.”
— Patrick Mahony,
Introduction to Barbed Wit and Malicious Humor
CONTENTS
Copyright
Publisher’s Note
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Note to the Revised Edition
Anecdotes
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
Source List
Bibliography
Index of Names
Index of Subjects
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
THIS BOOK IS FOR THE MOST PART A COLLECTION OF ANECDOTES ABOUT READILY IDENTIFIABLE PEOPLE AND IS ORGANIZED ALPHABETICALLY BY PERSON. Where doubt exists as to whom an anecdote should be ascribed, we have usually chosen the more familiar name. In as many cases as possible, we have placed the anecdote with that person whose character is most revealed. Some anecdotes included here are connected with obscure or unfamiliar names or places. They were so interesting in their own right that we included them in no particular order. To distinguish them from the regular text, they are boxed.
We hope Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes has value as a work of reference as well as one of entertainment. It does not, however, claim to be a work of exact scholarship, and should not be used as an infallible encyclopedia. Anecdotes are by nature often well worn; while in circulation (and after decades or even centuries) attributions can be mixed up, dates can be changed, and the very point of the stories can be lost. But we have done our best to verify the historical accuracy of those anecdotes we have included in this volume. We hope it presents a lively mix of the hoary and the fresh, to give a full tour of the world of the anecdote.
The editors are especially grateful to a few exceptionally fine collections of anecdotes that are available to the general reader and that have provided us with source material. All collections like ours are in part the product of pilferage; we have tried to stop short of pillage. Foremost among our sources are the volumes prepared by Paul F. Boller, Jr., which include Presidential Anecdotes, Presidential Wives, Hollywood Anecdotes, and Presidential Campaigns, all published by Oxford University Press. While stories about presidents, their wives, and their campaigns can be found readily, Mr. Boller has collected, selected, and written the best, and his extensive listing of sources attests to his thorough and original research. The reader is urged to turn to his books for a more complete and definitive collection on his chosen subjects. The same recommendation can be made for the great poet Donald Hall’s work on The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes.
A complete bibliography lists all of our sources. In addition, the source for each anecdote is given, when known, in a Source List at the back of this book, preceding the bibliography. Every effort has been made to credit sources; where information is missing or incorrect (and with material as diverse as is included in this long volume, some gaps may be inevitable), the publisher regrets the omission and will print the correct information with full credit in subsequent printings.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes is a revised, edited version of The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, the last edition of which was published in 1985. For that version, Clifton Fadiman, as General Editor, contributed and wrote anecdotes, made the final selection, and edited the volume. He also was responsible for the translations from French and German sources. Among the contributors were Joe Bryan III, Annalee and Kim Fadiman, Albert Friendly, Leo Counce Hopkins, George Lang, Henry D. Smith II, and Don and Siu Zimmerman; Ann Sleeper and Betsy Pitha; Colleen Mohyde, Margaret Freudenthal, and Virginia Creeden; and Susanne McNatt and Mary George. For the 2000 edition the editors are grateful to our editor at Little, Brown, Chip Rossetti, and especially to our copy-editor, Pamela Marshall, who made valuable suggestions and heroic corrections; both were patient and good-natured beyond any reasonable expectation.
INTRODUCTION
ANCESTRY
HOW FAR BACK DO ANECDOTES GO?
As with so many other good things, what we now call anecdotes may have started in classical Greece. Joseph Epstein quotes the Italian scholar Arnaldo Momigliano, who, in his Development of Greek Biography, conjectures that the anecdote’s founding father may have been the musical theorist Aristoxenus of Tarentum (born c. 370 BC): “Perhaps [Aristoxenus] was … the first to make anecdotes an essential part of biography…. I suspect that we owe to Aristoxenus the notion that a good biography is full of good anecdotes.”
Though we borrowed the term from the French, anecdote ultimately derives from an almost identical Greek word meaning “things not given out,” or, as we would say, unpublished. It is in this sense that Cicero uses it to describe some of his own manuscripts, a usage followed later by Renaissance scholars to denote manuscripts discovered in libraries and afterward published.
From the outset there seems also to have been attached to the word a connotation of secrecy or perhaps merely gossip. As a biographical device it was and remains anti-official, anti-panegyrical. It surprises the human being in question en pantoufles.
The anecdote’s shady reputation probably derives from the sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius, who called his posthumously published, scandalous account of the Emperor Justinian Anecdota or Historia Arcana (Secret History).
It is during the Renaissance, with the rise of cities, royal courts, a true leisure class, and the cult of the individual that the anecdote, a form of condensed gossip, begins clearly to show its face. It begins to shake off its association with the merely scandalous.
In his Dissertation on Anecdotes Isaac D’Israeli (1766–1848) tells us that the French broadened the term to make it apply to “any interesting circumstance.” In the eighteenth century Samuel Johnson defined it as “a biographical incident; a minute passage of private life.” The suggestion of amusing triviality now begins to emerge, so that two centuries later Winston Churchill could call anecdotes “the gleaming toys of history.” In the transactions of biographers they function as petty cash.
The eighteenth century also marked the beginning of the association of anecdotes
with the wit of old men. You can trace it in the French aphorist Rivarol (1753–1801). The frayed pejorative pun “anecdotage” may have been invented by John Wilkes (1727–1797) or perhaps by Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859). It was made fashionable by Benjamin Disraeli in Lothair (1870): “When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.” But in 1835, thirty-five years earlier, an anonymous scribbler in Blackwood’s Magazine had already made fierce play with the word: “The disgusting perversions of their anile anecdotage.” It would seem that in youth we sow our wild oats, in old age our tame anecdotes.
We may conjecture that by the beginning of the eighteenth century the form had come of age in Western Europe. Continuing to develop, it becomes more and more luxuriant as we approach our own time. Hence this anthology’s decided slant toward the modern.
ANATOMY OF THE ANECDOTE
An anecdote, so Merriam-Webster’s Tenth Collegiate Dictionary informs us, is “a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident.” This collection confines itself to “biographical incidents.” We admit, however, that on occasion we have stretched the notion of incident so as to accommodate a reasonable number of origin stories, traditional tales, or wisecracks of the Groucho Marx–Dorothy Parker stripe.
Such witticisms gain in interest when placed in a setting, but it has not always been possible to provide one. We are, for example, ignorant of the circumstances in which the composer Mascagni stated that the Italian language has three degrees of comparison: stupido, stupidissimo, and tenore. Ditto for a learned mathematics professor, Badke by name, who once defined a point as an angle from which the two sides have been removed. These noncontextual examples failing to qualify as anecdotes, I have dishonestly smuggled them into this paragraph so that they may not be forever lost. But they really belong in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, with which this book is not in competition.
Webster’s says: “a usually short narrative.” We have in general obeyed this requirement but in a few instances violated it in order to illustrate what entertained men and women of generations long past. Our predecessors, at least to the mid-ninetenth century, valued prolixy as we do terseness. They had more time. And it was worth less money.
Furthermore, Webster’s adjectives “interesting” and “amusing” may not seem to us to apply to many anecdotes that apparently gave them pleasure. A dusty collection called The Percy Anecdotes offers items like this: When the late Marquis of Cornwallis was leaving a nobleman’s house and stepping into his carriage, a servant offered to hold an umbrella over him. “Take that thing away,” said his lordship. “I am neither sugar nor salt, to suffer by a shower of rain.” To us this seems flat. It is too reasonable. The metaphor is one you and I might have thought of without any notion that it might pass for wit. Still, our forefathers prized such conversational junk jewelry, giving it the name of anecdote.
We must keep in mind that the author of the foregoing was a marquis. That helped. The undeservedly forgotton essayist Frank Moore Colby once remarked, “Never destroy an uninteresting letter is the first rule of the British aristocracy.” Second rule: Always remember to record an uninteresting action or remark. This rule has generated a revered tradition, featuring the peerage at its dullest. Horace Walpole felt the need to record for posterity that the contemporary dowager Duchess of Devonshire stayed up “every evening, till it was dark, in the skittle-ground keeping the score. …” Though we have salvaged a few of these antiquities — see THOMAS HERBERT PEMBROKE 1 — we must for the most part think of them as ana rather than anecdotes.
Our dictionary defines ana: “collected items of information, esp. anecdotal or bibliographical
A representative collection such as The Lounger’s Commonplace Book; or, Alphabetical Anecdotes, the work of Jeremiah Whitaker Newman (1759–1839), tends to conceive the anecdote as an extended short biography, often of an obscure person whose life is in some respect striking or unusual. Moralizing is a feature of the genre. The notion of point or humor hardly enters. It was not until almost the twentieth century that the anecdote became sparser, more isolated from a larger narrative context, achieving an economical effect with corresponding economy of means (see HENRY JAMES 2).
It is not always easy to distinguish between anecdote and episode. The seventh-century BC Greek poet Archilochus composed satires against his prospective father-in-law, Lycam-ber, so powerful that the poor man and his daughter both hanged themselves. This is beyond a doubt brief (I have told you all I know), it needs no larger context, it is far from prosy. Yet one thinks of it as an episode rather than an anecdote. If we are to admit all the striking episodes to be discovered in any eventful life (say Napoleon’s), we would come up with a book quite different from the one you are now reading. Thus the story of van Gogh’s ear composes a fascinating chapter in his biography, but is too complex, in a sense too important, to qualify as an anecdote. Many unforgettable episodes of history fall into this nonanecdotal category. In 1347 Edward III, having starved Calais into submission, required six men to deliver the keys of the town and castle dressed “in their shirts and with halters about their necks.” They sacrificed themselves for their town. Though a moving story, is this an anecdote? I think not.
What makes rules interesting, however, are the exceptions. Therefore in this repository we have included a number of such anecdote-episodes whenever they seemed to us effective in brief form and diverting or striking or, as with EDITH CAVELL 1, a treasured item of our folk memory.
A career may be crowded, it may be a model of high achievement and yet in our sense produce few real anecdotes. Goethe, a titan, did not generate titanecdotes. His countrymen preserve as anecdotes his sayings, which range from the magnificent to the magnificently banal. Within this range you may place according to your taste this typical example: To a friend who regretted that he had never seen Italy, Goethe said, “Good, for if you had, our own sky would never seem blue enough.”
However, so that certain supremely great names may be at least represented, we have on occasion smuggled in an anecdote or two that may be only moderately striking (see J. S. BACH 1). But not all greats are linked to trivia; the reader will note the absence of many famous figures.
Just as a first-rate anecdote should be more than merely a good saying, so it should be more than an odd biographical fact. It is well known, for instance, that Schiller worked better when inhaling the odor of overripe apples kept in his desk drawer. And we learn from Gordon Rattray Taylor’s The Great Evolution Mystery that the world’s leading authority on giant clams, Professor Sir Maurice Yonge, is the only man who has read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from cover to cover while sitting on the Great Barrier Reef. Such eccentric particulars make for delightful reading but in the strict sense they are not anecdotal and few will be found in these pages.
Oddity alone, then, will not quite do. King Frederick Augustus of Saxony was in the course of his career elected king of Poland and became known as Augustus the Strong. He would astonish his dinner guests by picking up two of his state trumpeters, one in each hand. For five minutes he would keep them dangling while they played a fanfare. It is not clear just what earned Augustus his epithet — this kind of thing or his fathering of 354 bastards. The latter achievement recommends him to Guinness, but he doesn’t quite
fit into this book.
Similarly, we have generally ignored practical jokes, except when they are not only amusing but have some kind of narrative form and are connected with a famous personage (JOHN PARTRIDGE 1).
Finally, a book of biographical anecdotes must be just that, whether the individual created or provoked the anecdote. We have pinned each item to a single person (on occasion we were compelled to use a straight rather than a safety pin). But in the past less restrictive views obtained. Isaac D’Israeli thought “there are anecdotes of the art as well as the Artist; of the war as well as the General; of the nation as well as the Monarch.” Such anecdotes we prefer to leave to the history books. It is true, however, that a biographical anecdote can throw light on an important aspect of an entire nation (see PABLO PICASSO 5).
The preceding comments underline the obvious: that the definition of anecdote shifts with the centuries. For our purposes anecdotes remain what D’Israeli called them — “minute notices of human nature and of human learning,” even if today we are less interested in the latter than in the former. The witty, the humorous, those crackling with the whiplash of a tagline, tend to circulate most widely, to conform more closely to the modern sensibility. But there is plenty of room for the quieter anecdote whose value lies in the illumination of character or the inculcation of a moral lesson.
We prefer our anecdotes to be short, free-standing, with a nub or point or center. This book, nevertheless, contains many of which this cannot be said. EDWARD GIBBON 1 has no identifiable “point.” But it continues to interest us as a famous statement made by a famous person about a critical event in his life. Some anecdotes are really mini-dramas appealing to our tenderest emotions (BRONSON ALCOTT 1; CHARLES DE GAULLE 4). Others — indeed, many — strip us of our dignity. Some depend on mere word-play and do not rate a second reading, while others (ALBERT EINSTEIN 13) set the mind pondering. Some may not even depend on words at all (GEORGE ANTHEIL 1).
Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes