/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.1144444]

Favourite anecdotes about writers

I'll start: on his deathbed, Alfred Jarry asked for a toothpick as a last request. Upon receiving it, he stared at it in amazement and died without saying another word.

[Anonymous No.1144449]

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was once bored, so he wrote to five of his friends "We have been discovered, flee immediately".
One of his friends vanished without a trace.

[Anonymous No.1144511]

Oscar Wilde was actually gay.

[Anonymous No.1144612]

>>1144444
haha I dig Jarry but didn't know this about him and that makes me like him even more. Another thing about Alfred Jarry:

When asked if he believed in God his response was, "I am God."

When Jean Cocteau was asked "If your home was burning down what would be the one thing you'd save?" His response, "The fire of course."

[Anonymous No.1144618]

>>1144449

Haha, I can't stop laughing.
Is it bullshit?

[Anonymous No.1144619]

>>1144511
I'M JUST ABOUT TO FINISH THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, AND THEN I'M GOING TO READ HALO: CONTACT HARVEST

FUCK YEAH,

[Anonymous No.1144622]

Borges once challenged a student to a duel after the student made an inappropriate comment about his mother.

[Anonymous No.1144628]

I like the one where a dying Aldous Huxley wrote a note asking his wife for a dose of LSD. After dropping it, he died that night. If there ever were truely a way to transend, he did it right there

[Anonymous No.1144629]

Gerard De Nerval (alledgedly) had a pet lobster he would take for walks using a silk ribbon as a leash around Paris gardens.

[Anonymous No.1144630]

Zack Braff once ate an entire platypus.

[Anonymous No.1144632]

>>1144628
I read about that last night and the story was a lot less interesting than I thought it would be. He kept denying he was giong to die, saying stuff like "when I get better we'll move to a new apartment" or something. Then telling his wife to move the bed and his leg and such. I thoguht he'd ramble on something celestial and what not. Nope.

[Parhelion !TlcCSWhzP. No.1144635]

Roald Dahl was too tall to fly a fighter in WW2, but he didn't want to be a bomber pilot, so he forced himself into those tiny cockpits all the same.

[Parhelion !TlcCSWhzP. No.1144638]

>>1144635
Dahl was also a certified fighter ace with at least 5 kills, and easily many more.

[Anonymous No.1144639]

>>1144635
I bet that's how he came up with those stories about giants.

George Orwell got sniped in the throat whilst standing in a trench during the Spanish Civil war and miraculously survived.

[Sir Ruban Allum No.1144641]

Mark Z. Danielewski spent ten years writing House of Leaves, some of them spent in France, where he stayed at a boarding house in the countryside, paying off for his stay by working all afternoon and evening chopping wood. At night and in the morning, he wrote like a maniac.

>alpha as fuck

[Anonymous No.1144645]

>>1144622

i heard about that. It was something like the student made a comment about his mother while they were in the cafeteria/common room of some university and Borges stood up, smacked his cane down on the table and challenged the student to a duel

[Anonymous No.1144648]

Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville were true bros (and possible butt buddies), and their friendship helped produce Moby Dick.

[Anonymous No.1144649]

>>1144645
Exactly, that's the one. And to be a bit more specific.
It was during some sort of student protest, and Borges was having dinner with the staff, when one of the protesters came in and said it.

[Anonymous No.1144651]

Dan Brown was a recording artist and has a pop album out.

YES, he is my favorite author, suck it.

[Anonymous No.1144652]

>>1144630

[Anonymous No.1144654]

BEAUTIFUL, JUST BEAUTIFUL...

I DON'T CARE IF YOU TAKE THIS AS HOMOSEXUAL, BUT I FUCKING LOVE THESE GUYS, I DO. I JUST WISH I WAS CAPABLE OF COMPREHENDING THEIR WORKS BETTER.

I CAN EASILY SEE ME SPENDING THE REST OF MY LIFE READING THEIR MASTERPIECES, WITH MY ONLY REGRET THAT I HAD NOT FULLY UNDERSTOOD WHAT I HAD READ, AND THAT I HAD SO MANY ENCHANTING AND EXQUISITE MASTERPIECES LEFT TO READ. :(

[Anonymous No.1144657]

Bro's

[Anonymous No.1144658]

Lord Byron was told that he wasn't allowed to bring his dog, Boatswain, to Cambridge (as per the university rules), so he brought a bear instead.

Oscar Wilde would tear corners from the pages of the books he was reading and eat them.

[Anonymous No.1144660]

>Lord Byron was told that he wasn't allowed to bring his dog, Boatswain, to Cambridge (as per the university rules), so he brought a bear instead.
Jesus Christ, are you serious?

[Anonymous No.1144661]

>>1144632
It's painful to think of it like that. As a babbling baby, blown on lsd.

Fuck, there is a romantic side of drugs and there is a reality to them. I often confuse the 2.

[Anonymous No.1144665]

>>1144660

Yeah, he even wrote a letter to a friend suggesting that the bear should "sit for a fellowship". He really did love animals, George Gordon - had a whole managerie in Venice.

[Anonymous No.1144676]

not just death anecdotes?

f scott fitzgerald somewhere after 1935 gave up on his writing career and decided he was a failure.
his wife was sent to an insane asylum. his books were garbage he realized. he only seemed to really believe in the work of his friend ernest and promoted him as a master; meanwhile he broke his soul harder and blacker trying to write sripts for hollywood and failing. then he decided drink was his problem and quit liquor. he died at 44 of a heart attack on the floor of a hollywood apartment with his doctor and girlfriend, presumably from the body's harsh reaction to no liquor after a lifetime of the stuff. that story always makes me cry -- imagining one of the greatest american writers dying thinking he was a failure.

[Anonymous No.1144701]

>>1144676

But Fitzgerald did suck ass...
In all seriousness though, this sort of bad end is alarmingly common among authors, so much so that if you wish to be one of the literary greats then you'd better be ready to die utterly broke, alone and defeated.

[Anonymous No.1144706]

Ginsberg and Kerouac gave each other handjobs by the Hudson River

[Anonymous No.1144719]

>Marquis de Sade
He was emprisoned a total of 37 years in his life.
On an Easter Sunday, he took a 30-year-old beggar woman to his house, tied her to his bed, whipped her, covered her sores with some ointment, whipped her again and again until he reaches orgasm, threatening to kill her if she didn't shut her mouth.
Later in his life (I think it was the third time he was in jail), he would write very long letters filled with secret meanings, codes and number associations to his wife whom didn't understand any of them.
After his last time in prison, they discovered a huge phallic object built out of wax which has excrements on it.
And there are a lot of other weird stories involving drugged girl, blasphemy, insane orgies, etc.

>Louis-Ferdinand Céline
He wrote Journey to the End of Night, one of the greatest French book of the 20th century, claiming that he only "wanted to have a little bit of money to pay his rent".
In the last years of his life, he had a parrot who was always in the same room where he wrote. Céline was saying so many cursed words that the animal would repeat them endlessly. His neighbors get tired of hearing the parrot constantly blaspheming that they played barking dogs sounds at a maximum volume all day.

>Antonin Artaud
He once had to keep an eye on the daughter of friends of him. When they came back, they found their little girl crying, huddled in the corner of the room. Artaud had taken drugs and passed out on the floor next to her.

>Emil Cioran
He was registred at the Sorbone university and took all of his meals there until the age of 40, when they told him he was too old and wasn't even frequenting the school.
When the Nazis entered in Paris, he was throwing packs of cigarettes to some prisonners right next to them.
He lived in hotels all his life.

>Charles Baudelaire
In the first period of his life, he was kind of effeminate and would wear nail polish, really took care of his hair, and had feminine manners.

[Anonymous No.1144720]

>>1144706
source?

not saying you're full of shit but I like to think I know the beats rather well and never heard this. Kerouac was always a straight up heterosexual that if anyone made any advancements toward him he'd totally shoot him down but be polite about it.

[Anonymous No.1144859]

>>Kerouac was always a straight up heterosexual that if anyone made any advancements toward him he'd totally shoot him down but be polite about it.

Uh, clearly you haven't read Gore Vidal's autobiography "Palimpsest", pages 217 and following.

Gore Vidal fucked Kerouac, during a drunken one-night-stand at the Chelsea Hotel. And Ginsberg says to Vidal that he used to blow Kerouac from time to time, and Kerouac once tried sucking Ginsberg's dick but didn't like it.

[Anonymous No.1144865]

>>1144859
ah nope, never read that guys autobiography. whoops fuck me right

[Anonymous No.1144872]

>>ah nope, never read that guys autobiography. whoops fuck me right

Oh, okay, I get it. You're one of those people who worships Kerouac and has never read anything else.

In that case, do you remember in The Subterraneans when Kerouac refers to “the famous young writer” named "Arial Lavalina"?

Well, Kerouac later admitted that the character was based on a famous writer named Gore Vidal. But I guess he's not as famous as Kerouac!

Kerouac wore khakis.

[Anonymous No.1144873]

>>1144720
>>1144859
Well, this proves the saying that it's not gay as long the balls aren't touching.

[sandwiches No.1144877]

>>1144622
>>1144645
>>1144649
BADASS!

>>1144720
You must be really ignorant or in denial.

[Anonymous No.1144878]

>>1144872
>Oh, okay, I get it. You're one of those people who worships Kerouac and has never read anything else

I'm not going to go any further with this but you're wrong about this. I was just saying I never read the goddamn autobiography. Freak out. Kerouac sucked a dick, I learned something.

[Anonymous No.1144887]

>>1144632
It's because LSD is bullshit man. The Grateful Dead are just the best drug front ever created. Believe me I have been in with some people who had their wings and I hope they never found me again. Gang rapes and mind control man, that's the kind of shit I saw.

[Anonymous No.1144894]

A shop worker once called the cops on Shel Silverstein because he looked like such a bum that the attendant thought he he must have stolen Silverstein's wallet.

Shel Silverstein wrote A Boy Named Sue for Johnny Cash

[Anonymous No.1144919]

Sartre got thrown in jail for 'civil disobedience', but the French President intervened and pardoned him saying 'You don't arrest a Voltaire' (or something like that).

[Anonymous No.1144979]

Stephen King got hit by a car. One of his fictional characters stopping him from dying.

[Anonymous No.1144984]

Stephen King got hit by a car. One of his fictional characters stopped him from dying.

[Anonymous No.1145154]

>>1144720
>i like to think i know the beats rather well

unless you read biographies, you can't know about the personal lives. of course you never heard of that happening, you only read his fiction.

btw, the source is 'Ginsberg' by Barry Miles.
seriously, read Beat non-fiction. pretty fucking interesting shit.

[Anonymous No.1145169]

Adam Smith (On the Wealth of Nations) once made himself a pot of tea, adding bread and butter to the mix (he was very absent minded). After drinking a cup he declared, "That was the worst cup of tea I've ever had!"

[Anonymous No.1145173]

>>1144622
Are you American? in the european upper class duels are not uncommon. People nowadays get a trip to Malta because there the law still allows lethal duels. Here you cannot fight without an armor and a medic at your side and we try to keep it from the media.

So, did he actually fight the student? It would be great honour to me to get a match with one of our professors but, alas, they'd never descend to the level of a student. It is more likely that their honour'll get defended by some random suckup like myself.

>>1144919
I believe he compared him to Rousseau.

[Anonymous No.1145180]

At a party that same year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson who was forcing himself upon the (then little-known) model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: "Do you know who the fuck I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world," to which Ayer replied: "And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men". Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out

[Anonymous No.1145184]

That's not really funny, but I lol'd.

[Anonymous No.1145207]

>>1145173
>So, did he actually fight the student?
I think not. He was -really- old when it happened, but it still showed lots of balls.
The student probably got scared shitless and apologized or something.

[Anonymous No.1145208]

>>1145180
Hah, I remember reading that and being amazed. Ayer's biography has a lot more crazy anecdotes, too. Half-autistic dorks with a harem of supermodel girlfriends ftw.

[Anonymous No.1145228]

Daniel Kharms, the Soviet Absurdist writer, was put for 5 years in a labour camp after having had loudly sand "God save the Tsar" in front of the NKVD headquarters in 1932.
In 1941 he was accused of high treason. Immediately after the war was declared on the radio he had visited the wife of Leningrad NKVD head inspector in person telling her personally the following thing:
"The USSR lost the war in the very first day, Leningrad will either be besieged and we will starve to death or we will get bombed, letting not a single brick on a brick… the whole proletariate must be exterminated, and if I will be given a enlistment order, I will give a blow into the commander's kisser. They can shot me, but I will not put on a uniform and I will not serve in the Soviet army. I don't want to be such crap."
Russian authors are about as open to suicide by proxy as american rock musicians are to the occasional drug overdose.
Kharms was proclaimed guilty but he survived. He was proclaimed unfit to be shot due to insanity and starved to death in an asylum for the criminally insane.

Everything from Stalin's archives, however, should be taken with a grain of salt. Many people for shot on basis of a quite inane indictment and today it's also known that one of his muses was constantly ratting on him.

[Anonymous No.1145241]

I love these stories, but I dislike how much they romanticize the crazed artist stereotype.

[Anonymous No.1145304]

>>1145241
When performing in Spain the then-avant-gardist Armenian ballet composer Aram Khartcheturian (you know him, it's that guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqg3l3r_DRI)) asked to visit Salvador Dalì. Dalì agreed (he even claimed he dreamt of proposing exactly that but was afraid of it) and once Aram arrived he asked him to come in alone since his wife, Gala, knew Russian as well as Aram and he wanted to keep the parley in secret. indeed they talked about music and art and Dalì and soon they'd be comparing Armenian and Spanish Vines and Cognacs. They have drank alot and Aram would ask to stop but Dalì insisted and soon he excused himself and left together with his wife.
Aram found himself alone in exquisitely decorated room with an artsy and expensive hand-made vase in the middle. And he had to pee. It was extremely urgend yet all the doors were closed.
After two hours he did what had to be done: he unzipped his zipper to pee into the vase and at that very instant Salvadore stormed in, naked, riding a broom waving a "golden" sabre of papier maché accompanied by the "sabre dance" from his guest's repertoire.
The next day Salvador told the press emphatically how he was terribly impressed by the sophistication and great manners demonstrated by the supposedly barbarious bolshevik artists, he has gone in extreme lengh praising Aram and his Muscowite peers, adding that he was bitterly disappointed about Aram leaving so early without pissing in anything but a lousy 13th century Almohad vase.

Crazed artist stereotype you say? It is enforced by the Artist himself.

Andy Warhol invited Salvador Dalì once to his "Factory" in New York. Warhol never met him. He had to wait for hours in front of a working camera which filmed his pointy moustache slumping while all that crazed fire in his eyes was being dimmed by mundane everyman annoyance. Ha!

[Anonymous No.1145320]

moar anecdotes

[Anonymous No.1145350]

Voltaire took on the habit of living next to borders so he could easily flee when he pissed off the bourgeoisie

[Anonymous No.1145361]

the Futurist Vvedensky managed to get a stamped attestation in a Stalin time hospital ensuring that he was, in fact, extraordinarily beautiful.

>>1145350
>when he pissed off the bourgeoisie
it's like the pope pissing off the whole catholic church.

[Anonymous No.1145386]

Burroughs landed a handshot on his wife while playing Wilhelm Tell. According to Khrushchev in Stalin's times the old bolsheviks would occasionally do exactly that along with other time-tested anti-bourgeois antics.
Burroughs was watched by Burroughs junior to whom the shot would kickstart his writing career.

[Anonymous No.1145399]

Nero burnt Rome for inspiration.

[Anonymous No.1145406]

>>1144706

Related: Burroughs unsuccessfully tried to get in Ginsbergs pants several times, even travelling from Morocco to the U.S. in one of his attempts (Ginsberg rejected him again by letter, and to save face Burroughs didn't even see him before returning to Tangier).

[Anonymous No.1145410]

Ernest Hemingway once entered himself into an Ernest Hemingway lookalike contest in Key West.

He came in 2nd place.

[Anonymous No.1145418]

Jean-Paul Sartre once tried mescaline, and hallucinated that he was being chased through the streets of Paris by a giant lobster.

Muriel Spark overdosed on dexedrine and believed that she was being stalked by TS Eliot and he was opening her mail and reading it.

Robert Lowell went mentally ill and was locked inside an asylum where he used to show people a piece of metal which he called "the Totentanz" and explained that it was what Hitler used to kill the Jews.

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were invited to dinner by TS Eliot and his wife Valerie. Sylvia excused herself to go to the bathroom and was gone an extremely long time. After they left, later that night, TS Eliot discovered that Sylvia Plath had left a used tampon underneath the pillow of his bed. Eliot put the tampon in an envelope and mailed it back to her.

[Anonymous No.1145438]

awesome thread

[Anonymous No.1145442]

>>1145386

Headshot, not handshot.

[Anonymous No.1145447]

Proust used to tip waiters 100 percent. He also had a string quartet on call, and would occasionally wake up at 3 in the morning and ask for them to come over to play a particular piece of music. He also liked to frequent all-male brothels where he would watch rent-boys torture a rat in a birdcage by sticking hat-pins into it.

James Joyce's favorite drink was a particuar white wine that he referred to as "the piss of the archduchess".

The Marquis de Sade was locked in the Bastille for sex crimes. When he was taken on his daily walk in the yard of the prison, he would scream over the walls to the people outside, telling them to tear down the Bastille. The authorities removed him to the insane asylum at Charenton. 3 days later, the people of Paris stormed the Bastille.

[Anonymous No.1145474]

Nietzsche had sex once in his life with a prostitute

from that one act of sex he contracted syphilis which later caused his insanity

[Anonymous No.1145484]

>>1145474
>from that one act of sex he contracted syphilis which later caused his insanity

Nope.

[Anonymous No.1145520]

>>1145418
sauce?

[Anonymous No.1145528]

>>sauce?

1. biography of Sartre
2. biography of Muriel Spark
3. article by Jonathan Raban about visiting Lowell in a mental hospital
4. actual gossip via Valerie Eliot's personal assistant in the late 90s, Cathy Brooks-Baker (wife of the late Harold Brooks-Baker)

[Anonymous No.1145532]

The marquis de Sade cried that prisoners were killed. There's no relation with the french revolution (given that the popular masses hate him as a pervert aristocrat)

[Anonymous No.1145535]

Sergei Diaghilev was an art critic, patron, ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes and from which many famous dancers and choreographers would later arise. He liked the young boy's arse as any other upper class twit of his time but the twist was that he'd talk to them about sodomy when they were in high society or dining with their families. If they played dumb or evaded him he would throw an enraged tanrum. His last such tantrum happened in a restaurant in Paris, shortly after the revolution had deprived him of his belongings. Hence he had to use a crutch.

[Anonymous No.1145546]

>>1145532
still he want to become a revolutionary judge having renamed himself to "Marquis Sade".

[Anonymous No.1145554]

>>The marquis de Sade cried that prisoners were killed. There's no relation with the french revolution (given that the popular masses hate him as a pervert aristocrat)

The point of the anecdote is that de Sade either (a) helped to encourage the storming of the Bastille but didn't benefit from it, or (b)

I think it highly unlikely that the popular masses had any clue who de Sade was, and in any case, his perversions were hardly any different from the lurid sexual depictions in the propaganda against Louis and Marie-Antoinette. See "The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France" by Robert Darnton or Lynn Hunt's "The Familly Romance of the French Revolution" for some really juicy examples.

[Anonymous No.1145556]

*went on

[Anonymous No.1145571]

Sorry, forgot to include second point

The point of the anecdote is that de Sade either (a) helped to encourage the storming of the Bastille but didn't benefit from it, or (b) was just crazy wherever he was. But if he was shouting over the walls to the common people, it's not likely that they knew he was a Marquis. The Bastille had a reputation for containing political prisoners, although when it was stormed, it turned out this reputation was overstated.

[Anonymous No.1145576]

Lenin died of Syphilis that he contracted in his student years. His older Brother was hanged but survived and was shot despite that by Russian nobody was ought to be executed twice. The drama around Stalin and his son deserves a thread of it's own.

[Anonymous No.1145581]

The tried to have Jean Genet put to death but alegedly satre and picasso marched into the court and had the judge descide that he may never be arrested.

[Anonymous No.1145585]

Percy Wyndham Lewis had a wife, but no one ever saw ever. Whenever he entertained food would come out of a slot from the kitchen.

Also, is Joseph Conrad had to travel with his family, he would pretend he didn't know them for the duration of the trip.

[Anonymous No.1145598]

Le Marquis de Sade has contributed to the French Revolution after the bastille incident, but he finally lost a lot of things (looting of his buildings, etc...) as an aristocrat ...

[Anonymous No.1145604]

Lou Salomé declined sex both to Rilke and to Nietzsche.

[Anonymous No.1145606]

This thread needs to be archived.

[Anonymous No.1145642]

>>1145571

>>1144719 here
de Sade's life is obviously full of crunchy anecdotes!

[Anonymous No.1145667]

Alexandre Dumas (fils) was 1/8 black and was still taunted by his French peers. He also wrote La Dame Aux Camelias, which constantly makes all men who read it look 100/100 gay.

[Anonymous No.1145682]

>>Alexandre Dumas (fils) was 1/8

The technical term is "octoroon".
If you're only 1/4, that's called a "quadroon".
And if you're 0/4, that's called a "macaroon".

[Anonymous No.1145696]

With rising age Tolstoy stopped writing slumping deeper and deeper into his pacifist flavour of christendom. He was found dead in a remote village wearing peasant clothing adorned with a plenty of tiny bells. He wore them to warn "God's beasts" so that he didn't squish anyone by accident.
While his great novels found an ear in Europe a great lot of Indians preferred his theological and political essays demanding strict celibacy, strictest vegetarianism and civil disobedience as the sole valid form of resistance to "the evil of violence".
What worked for Gandhi unfortunately didn't for his great many Russian fans. Lenin sent them all to his first labour camp, "Solovki", for re-education.
Bulgakov devoted him a character

[Anonymous No.1145713]

>>1145406
Ginsberg and Burroughs definitely had sex at least once in the early 1950's at Ginsberg's East Village apartment. I've read many accounts on this. You make it sound like they never did.

More of you need to read up on your Beat non-fiction

[Anonymous No.1145774]

Supposedly, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were on holiday with their wives in Italy. One night Fitzgerald snuck over to see Ernest and asked his advice.
"Ernest, old pal," said Fitz - I paraphrase - "It's Zelda. I don't know what to do about her."
"Well, what the hell is it?"
"She - well, she says I can't satisfy her. Sexually."
Hemingway bristled. "Women!" he roared. "She's just trying to fuck with you - that's what they always say!"

[Anonymous No.1145786]

I seem to remember something about HP Lovecraft being dressed as a girl when he was young? Can anyone give details or confirmation?

[Anonymous No.1145798]

I think this thread deserves archiving. Most entertaining damn thing I've read on /lit/ in weeks.

[Anonymous No.1145827]

>>1145786

All men of his generation were dressed like girls when they were young.

[Anonymous No.1145830]

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Russian Surrealist writer of the early 20th century, did not live with his wife. He insisted the two of them have separate apartments as far apart as possible, since he felt that living in separate abodes meant they would enjoy the time they did have together all the more.

Romantic bastard. God bless 'im.

[Anonymous No.1145835]

Someone once asked Gore Vidal on a radio program, "Was your first sexual experience with a man or a woman?"

Vidal replied, "I was too polite to ask."

[Anonymous No.1145840]

During satres mescaline phase and the period where he wrote la neausea, he would awake every day to hullucinations of crabs. He said he missed them when they finally went.

[annon No.1145856]

faulkner got a job writing scripts for M G M. sam goldwyn cam buy is office at the studio an told him he could write at home if he liked. so faulkner went back to Mississippy

[Anonymous No.1145871]

ITT: [citation needed]

[annon No.1145887]

doc Holiday had a love afair with one of Faulkner's aunts but she jilted him. he was so unset he went west and became a gunfighter. and the aunt became a nun.

[Anonymous No.1145902]

>>1145871
you might as well sod off to wikipedia. leave jokes and anecdotes to normal folks like us

[Anonymous No.1145917]

>1145576

Three of the five Decemberists survived being hung (the gallows broke) and were put to death a second time, breaking tradition

[Anonymous No.1145920]

>>1145917
hanged

[Anonymous No.1145922]

>>1145920

Thank you. 3 of the 5 Decembrists survived being hanged. Milton Berle survived being hung.

[Anonymous No.1145930]

Wow this thread really took off while I slept... here's some anecdotes more from those in the surrealist tradition:

Arthur Rimbaud jerked off into a friend's glass of milk while said friend was out of the room.

Artaud used to walk down the streets of Paris armed with his "magic" cane, striking it on the pavement causing sparks to fly.

The surrealists used to prank call Jean Cocteau's mother telling her that Cocteau had been run down by a car.

Raymond Roussel's parents forced him to take a mistress so his homosexuality would not be known to other well-to-do families in the area.

[Anonymous No.1145940]

>>1145930

Somebody knows who Raymond Roussel is?!

There's LOTS of good anecdotes about Roussel. My favorite is that he invented a special hat with a built-in heating device to keep his hair from turning grey. Somehow, it actually worked.

[Anonymous No.1145952]

>>1145930
did his friend drink the milk? god i love Rimbaud

[Anonymous No.1145959]

>>1145940
You bet I do!
We should be pals!

Didn't he also travel by cruise ship around the world, never actually leaving his room?

[Anonymous No.1145960]

William Burroughs' grandfather (also named William Burroughs) invented the "calculating machine," the first version of the cash register. As a result, he earned a lot of fame and money for the time period (~1880s I believe)

[Anonymous No.1145988]

James Joyce was known to be a writer who wrote very few words in a day. When asked by a friend to comment on his progress Joyce said, "Oh it's awful, I only wrote seven words today!"
The friend replied: "But James, thats good progress for you!"
Joyce then said:"I know but they're not even in the right order!"

[Anonymous No.1145993]

>>1145930
Wasn't this cane given to him by some Cuban sorcerer? It must be this. He traveled to Ireland in 1937 to give "Saint Patrick's cane back to the Irish people".

[Anonymous No.1146009]

>>Didn't he also travel by cruise ship around the world, never actually leaving his room?

I think so. But he also had a special "travelling vehicle" built for himself, and travelled around Europe in it without getting out.

And yes we should be pals!

[Anonymous No.1146019]

>>1145993
I think he had a variety of canes, they represented fire to him or something of that ilk? The stick he returned to Ireland had belonged to St. Patrick and Jesus or so he believed.

[Anonymous No.1146032]

Baudelaire was very jalous of the man (Aupick) her mother married after his father's death. One night, he was mad drunk and went outside with a pistol shouting "general Aupick must be shot!"

Rimbaud was a brilliant student. One day, he arrived an hour late to his exam. He came in the classroom and said "I'm hungry. Give me something to eat". The professor responded "We're no restaurant here! Don't make fun of me". He said "I really want to eat something". They gave him a piece of bread and paper for the dissertation he had to make. It was 9:00. He ate. At 11:00 he handed back his paper. The teacher said "Are you kidding me?" and then Rimbaud said "and I give you this one, too". The second one was in Latin.

[Anonymous No.1146050]

William S. Burrough's uncle, Ivy Lee, is one of the founders of modern advertising and public relations.

[Anonymous No.1146078]

John Maynard Keynes (the economist) was obsessed with hands to a disturbing degree.
whenever he met someone, he would entirely focus on their hands and judge their character by them.
In his diary, he wrote up intricate hand-analyses of nearly everyone he met.
when he was a british delegate sent to debate the terms of the treaty of versaille, he took an intense disliking to the french delegate because he was wearing gloves, and thus immune to Keynes' examination.

[Anonymous No.1146104]

>>1145304
That's amazing.

I know it's a thread about writers, but Dali's entire life could be here. So I'll share some anecdotes.

Dali couldn't remember names, so he would give people a nickname (always a masculine one) to them. For instance, there was this beautiful Chinese woman whom he called "the red guard", or that woman with long curly hair and lots of jewelery was "Louis XIV".

He used a lot of make-up, particularly for his moustache.

He was telling every female nude model that he was sexually impotent to convince them and assure them he won't try to fuck her.

He once tried homosex with the Spanish poet and painter García Lorca but he didn't like it, claiming that "it hurt".

He had a foot fetish.

He was never washing his glasses, they were very dirty. Often he didn't want to wear them because he thought he looked better without. As a result he couldn't see much, so he gave 300$ at a New York taxi driver when he should have given 3$.

When his knitwear horn was dirty, he put a new one but kept the dirty one under it because he liked to watch the coffee spots and dirt on it.

He was fascinated by excrements and rottenness. At a dinner one night, he spent hours in the bathroom looking at the "residues" on the toilet. Once in the summer he was walking and saw this giant horse shit covered with flies. He was ecstatic.

He liked Alice Cooper because of the all the gore side.

[Anonymous No.1146131]

It was widely known that George Bernard Shaw would have long conversations with his own beard. He believed that his beard actually wrote his work, and he merely took dictation. After winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first thing Shaw did with the money was to purchase a special luxury shampoo.

Jules Verne invented the grapefruit (or "pamplemousse" as he called it) but due to a failure to register his patent, he was cheated out of the royalties for the rest of his life.

Iris Murdoch had a morbid fear of walnuts, and on numerous occasions expressed her distrust of squirrels for the simple reason that they liked walnuts. She once slapped Elias Canetti across the face when he presented her with a bowl of granola that she thought contained them, although later Canetti demonstrated that they were actually pecans.

[Anonymous No.1146170]

bumping for more awesome anecdotes

[Anonymous No.1146236]

>>1145774
Heh, you're leaving out a big part of this anecdote. Hemingway first said, well, let me take a look at it; they went to the bathroom where Fitzgerald took it out, let Hemingway look, then H. delivered his opinion. If those guys weren't so fucking old-fashioned they could have had some epic fucking sex.

[Anonymous No.1146241]

Tolstoy's wife, Sonya, was during some of their fights post A.K. obsessively taunting Tolstoy for being queer. This was based on one of his diary entries he had let her read, where he described being on a trip with a friend who he felt very close to. Paraphrase: "As we lay down to go to sleep ... I couldn't help but imagine covering his face with kisses."

Sofya Andreevna also was so sick of having T.'s kids that during her 8th or 9th pregnancy she would stand on top of her dresser and jump off it with her feet tight together to try and cause a miscarriage.

Her insanity was only matched by his.

[Anonymous No.1146249]

>>1146131
Win

I've read similar jokes in Woody Allen's "Without Feathers"

[Anonymous No.1146277]

>>1146249
"Fogarty, incidentally, was a firend of Bernard Shaw's and was once permitted to touch Shaw's beard, provided he would leave the country."

[brndn !0OJxVgniDo No.1146286]

>>1144444
bikes back in the day used to be fixed, the freewheeled verisons were for women and fucking pussys.

[Anonymous No.1146303]

Thomas Pynchon smokes weed and has people help with research for his novels.

[Anonymous No.1146318]

Mencken was said to never have washed his hands after using the bathroom, even though he had running water. "It's the cleanest part of me," he explained.

He also had a conversation with F. Scott Fitzgerald about a new story which the latter wrote. Fitzgerald went on to describe how a main character's obsession over a woman breaks down and ruins him. Mencken said, "Sounds a lot like Zelda, Frank." Fitzgerald wept right there. Mencken, sensing the awkwardness, left the room.

[Anonymous No.1146333]

>>1146131
>Jules Verne invented the grapefruit
Pretty positive grapefruits existed before he did.

[Anonymous No.1146364]

>>1146318

[Implying !!OwMMiDsuHLo No.1146368]

>Despite having never written any good poetry, many people refer to Charles Bukowski as a "poet."

[Anonymous No.1146375]

>>1146333
>in /lit/
>Doesn't know what "humor" is
>mfw

[Anonymous No.1146397]

>>1146375
that poster knows better than you do imo

[Anonymous No.1146404]

>>1146375
I need more silly pictures and greentext, your /lit/ humor is clearly too subtle for me.

[Anonymous No.1146406]

Oscar Wilde walked through the streets around Oxford University with a lobster on a leash.

[Anonymous No.1146413]

>>1146333

Interestingly, the grapefruit is a hybrid of plants from the Old and New Worlds, so it's quite possible that it did have an inventor.

[Anonymous No.1146420]

>>1146406
And let's not forget the fact that he was GAY.

[oblimo !DSzvku.lzI No.1146422]

>>1145922 Milton Berle survived being hung.
...

I fuckin' love you.

[oblimo !DSzvku.lzI No.1146487]

>>1146104
This is the truth, I swear to God. I swear on my Grandmother's grave.

In the late 1920s, my grandfather was a young businessman in Paris; he was not very rich, but he acted like it by adopting a Dandy persona -- including frequenting the scene of Montparnasse. (Do you see where I'm going?)

Anyway, so it's near the end of the 20s, and this wacky artist fellow asks for my grandfather's patronage. The wacky artist offers to put up paintings for collateral.

My grandfather refuses, knowing the guy would never pay him back in cash, and that he'd seen this guys paintings and thought them the foulest things he had ever seen.

To the day she died, my grandmother would occasionally buy Dali posters and hang them on conspicuous walls of their apartment.

When my father would tell me the story (it was repeated every few visits), my grandfather would always say, "I still think they're ugly."

[Anonymous No.1146499]

>My grandfather refuses, knowing the guy would never pay him back in cash, and that he'd seen this guys paintings and thought them the foulest things he had ever seen.

Considering that Dali in the 20s was painting canvases with titles like "Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized By Her Own Chastity", I can't say I blame your grandfather.

[Anonymous No.1146507]

>>Oscar Wilde walked through the streets around Oxford University with a lobster on a leash.

I'm pretty sure that was Gerard de Nerval in the Bois du Boulogne.

Nerval said that his lobster was the ideal pet because he did not bark and he knew the secrets of the sea.

When Wilde was at Magdalen College, Oxford, he was too busy telling people that he was trying to live up to his blue and white china, and going out with a wheelbarrow to build a road under John Ruskin's direction.

[Anonymous No.1146591]

>>1146507

[Anonymous No.1146593]

Swear to God this story is true, at least how my step-mother told it.

She was on a business trip to NYC when she got right out of college. Some presentation, or something unimportant. Anyway, after doing her sell, she went to a bar in mid-town Manhattan. My step-mother used to be something of a catch, but was surprised when a bucktoothed, obviously drunk older gentleman began harassing her. He told her that he would take her up to his high-rise and fuck her brains out. The man also claimed to have "a plethora of drugs" (her quote, not mine) and that he was famous but no one knew him except in this bar. My step-mom basically told him to fuck off, thinking he was full of hot air or a local drunk, and that she would never sleep with a man that had a face like his (she's kind of shallow). Despite the insults he tried to buy her a couple of drinks which she refused. After a while the guy left frustrated into the street, screaming about how stupid women are. After a few minutes the bartender leaned over and asked her if she had any idea who she just turned down...

When she told me this story she said, "he wrote some book called Gravity's something." I blurted out, "Thomas Pynchon! No fucking way." She said that was the guy. When he had left, she said she didn't give a fuck who the guy was and that any man that smelled like a homeless guy was not getting into her pants.

I wanted to slap her. Not gay, but I would give myself up to Pynchon.

[Anonymous No.1146605]

Surely we all know the one about Shakespeare, right? Shakespeare has just written 'Richard III', and it's being performed in London. Richard Burbage, a tall, handsome and charismatic star of the Elizabethan stage, has been playing Richard and enchanting everyone with his presence. After one performance, a female fan arranged with Burbage that he should come and pay her a sexy visit; in addition, he should come upon her in the guise of 'Richard III'. Shakespeare overheard this. Stealing to the woman's house well in advance of his lead actor, he introduced himself as Richard III, and reaped the benefits. When Burbage himself turned up, saying that Richard III had arrived, Shakespeare caused the answer to be returned: "William the Conquerer came before RIchard III!"

Sounds a bit fake, doesn't it? Except that this story is related in Burbage's own diary. So it's likely to be true! Oh, Shakey Bill, you old rogue.

[None !UyhAEqbnp. No.1146610]

>>1146591
Fucking saved

[Anonymous No.1146704]

H.P. Lovecraft hated fish, shrimp, and just about any animal that came from the ocean.

[Anonymous No.1146784]

bump

[Anonymous No.1147173]

>>1146605
Fucking brilliant

[Anonymous No.1147174]

>>1146704
hated to eat them or just hated them?

[Anonymous No.1147177]

this thread is a fine read. archive this!

[Anonymous No.1147189]

Sartre was an amphetamine addict. It's how he managed to be productive--until the drugs wore out his heart and he died.

[Mooselord No.1147192]

Stephen King's first stories involved a rabbit that wore a tophat and drove around in a weird ass little car with the rest of his animal friends...they were called "Mr. Rabbit Trick" stories, he was three.

[Anonymous No.1147198]

Mishima staged a coup, held an opposing commandant hostage, finished his last book, then committed seppuku, all within a week.
after he sliced his gut open, one of his freinds was supposed to cut his head off, but failed after a few tries. then someone else had to do it.

[Anonymous No.1147200]

>>1147198
Yeah, but the more interesting fact about him is, he was gay!

[Anonymous No.1147201]

>>1144444
Nice thread.
And nice quints.

[Anonymous No.1147221]

When Kierkegaard was particular busy writing, he would sneak into a theatre near the end of the show and pretend to have watched the entire thing in order to disguise from the public how much time went into his work. Moreover, when he wanted to critique his public position he would public the critiques using a pseudonym. Most citizens of Copenhagen just saw him as a kook.

Oh, and worst of all, he annulled his engagement and in his journals convinces himself that he did so because his melancholy demeanor would have ruined his fiance. Despite this remained absolutely obsessed with her for the rest of his life.

[Anonymous No.1147239]

By 1895 Henry James had published eleven full-length novels and numerous novellas and short stories, but in an effort to reach a larger audience (and make more money) he decided to try writing a play....the equivalent of writing a screenplay nowadays.

On opening night of his play ("Guy Domville"), James was so nervous that he couldn't stay and watch his own play, so he went instead to see "An Ideal Husband" by Oscar Wilde, which he thought was vulgar.

Meanwhile the opening night of his own play went disastrously: the audience hated it.

James returned to the theatre to find out how the premiere had gone, but the stage manager misunderstood and escorted him directly to the stage to take his author's bow. Although the front rows greeted him with tepid polite applause, the rest of the audience loudly booed, hissed, and catcalled at him.

James had a complete nervous breakdown and went into seclusion for several weeks.

Meanwhile the star of James' play quickly closed the production, and chose for his next vehicle the new play by Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest".

[Anonymous No.1147263]

>>1147221
>>When Kierkegaard was particular busy writing, he would sneak into a theatre near the end of the show and pretend to have watched the entire thing in order to disguise from the public how much time went into his work. Moreover, when he wanted to critique his public position he would public the critiques using a pseudonym.
tl;dr "Good Luck, I'm Behind 7 Proxxies"

[Joe Quesada No.1147298]

Nice >>1144444

[Anonymous No.1147301]

RL Stein was a Kindergarten teacher before he started making money from his books. He would tell stories to his class. One of his students was KA Applegate.

While John Steinbeck was writing East of Eden he took what was supposed to be a weekend getaway to Florida. On his last day there, he tried some crab or clams or some kind of seafood that is famously good in Florida, and decided they were so good that he needed to stay another day to eat them again. he did this for almost a month. his family left him there, going back to their home in NY.

When Tolkein was a baby he hated the feel of having things around his waist, so until he was like 4 years old, he never wore pants.

Earnest Hemmingway once passed out drunk in the bathroom, and slept for most of the following day. his family, not finding him around, called the police. he finally woke is drunk ass up out of the bathroom to an empty house (his family was at the police station) so he put on some clothes and took himself to dinner, where he decided to pickup the drinking where he left off, and did not arrive home until everyone was asleep. not wanting to wake anyone up, he decided to spend the night at some apartment or something, where the maid infomed him that he was missing. During this time, his youngest son, Peter, in a bit of a panic was running around the city, and was hit by a car, breaking his arm, and giving him a concussion.

[Anonymous No.1147316]

>>1147301

are any of those actually true? doesn't seem like it. but if you're trolling, you could be more amusing.

[Mooselord No.1147317]

i know for a fact that mine was true. i don't see why anyone would post fake anecdotes though *shrug

[Anonymous No.1147320]

>>1147317

No, I know yours was true.

But Hemingway didn't have a son named Peter. His youngest son was Gregory Hemingway, who later had a sex change and became Gloria Hemingway. (That is NOT made up.)

Also KA Applegate could never have been RL Stine's student in kindergarten, because RL Stine is only 12 years older than her. He would have been in high school when she was in Kindergarten.

[Anonymous No.1147504]

>>1145576
There's really not enough evidence to support that, complications from the series of strokes he suffered just before dying are a far more likely cause of death.

[Anonymous No.1147509]

On Alfred Jarry had shot a critic. With blunts. Knowing that Jarry used to shoot random stuffs with live bullets his victim was truly scared shitless.

[Anonymous No.1147514]

>>1145406
Burroughs and Ginsberg were lovers with 3 months in Ginsberg's New York apartment

[Anonymous No.1147523]

>>1146593
I don't blame your step mom. That story makes Pynchon sound like an asshole. Who cares who he is. If I went to a bar saying to a random woman, "I'm going to fuck you so hard and I have a shit load of drugs." I'd be a fucking asshole. Then throw a hissy fit when she says, "No, I will not fuck you random stranger with lots of drugs." There's being an artist or writer, and then there's just being a douche.

[Anonymous No.1147524]

not sure if true, but everyone in my uni's eng. dept. "knew" that Yeats had surgically implanted gorilla balls. some sort of victorian pseudo-science.

can any c/lit/s confirm?

[Reliable Expert !!6EHiCX0xCLV No.1147525]

>>1147524
confirmed as true.

[Anonymous No.1147530]

When his wife died from a laudanum overdose after giving birth to a stillborn child, 19th century English poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti was so distraught that he buried the bulk of his poems with her. This sweepingly romantic gesture could only be undone by Rossetti's subsequent ass-hattery, when about a decade later, he exhumed her corpse to retrieve the poems that he had decided he wanted back after all. That's a great one for Valentine's day, folks.

[Anonymous No.1147531]

>>1147524
He must've been some sort of rough beast.

[Anonymous No.1147541]

Reliable: any idea why?

[Anonymous No.1147561]

>>1146593
Wasn't Pynchon a recluse? so this doesn't make much sense, going around telling the bar keeper and everyone else who he is? There is also not allot of photographs of him on the net, so I call this false.Probably was a bum impersonating Pynchon.

[Anonymous No.1147563]

Meyer is a mormon.

[Anonymous No.1147584]

Homer was a homo

[Anonymous No.1147586]

Marginally related:

Charlie Chaplin once took Albert Einstein to the opening of one of his flims. As they pulled up in their limousine, the fans surged around to gape at Einstein just as much as they did Chaplin. Bewildered, Einstein asked Chaplin:
"What does it mean?"
To which Chaplin replied:
"Nothing."

[Anonymous No.1147610]

My all-time favorite: Growing up in Paris, Andre the Giant was driven to school by the kindly middle-aged man next door, Samuel Beckett.

Speaking of guys who regarded literary prizes as "catastrophes"...

>>1147561

Pynchon mostly eschewed critical attention and self-promotion. He's written auto-biographical stuff, has appeared on the Simpsons in at least two episodes I can think of (Marge as a novelist and Moe as a poet, respectively), and voice a promotional video for Inherent Vice. It's mostly fame and attention he hate, not people. He was something of a presence around Manhattan in the '60s and '70s, so considering it's an anon's stepmother getting out of college it's possible.

Continuing on Pynchon, surprised this one hasn't come down yet. When Pynchon was at Cornell in the late '50s he attended a literature class taught by Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov claims to have no memory of him, but his wife remembers Pynchon because he would hand write his assignments randomly switching between cursive and printed letters, and never the same letters or pattern, just completely randomly.

Pynchon churned out The Crying of Lot 49 as a crappy short story and told his editor to "unload it on some poor sucker" so he could get more money to continue his research for Gravity's Rainbow/Vineland/Mason & Dixon all of which he was supposedly writing at the same time.

[Anonymous No.1147630]

Being asked about Sartre Heidegger was first stupefied then remembered he met once a one-eyed Frenchman who talked a lot being, apparently, completely sure that Martin Heidegger was Husserl.

[Anonymous No.1147649]

hey literates, i don't share your kinks and seeing a couples of threads i the faint feeling that writers for you are like Gods and "literature" is a kind of mythology.
You have gayburg full of Beats, the messianic figure of Sartre and the French decadents and whatnot all neatly related like Grecoroman gods, each with his heroisms and myths and each with his holy message.
Is literature more of a religion than anything else?

[Handstandard !eZurQiPamQ No.1147661]

>>1147649
I have travelled many a board in my time and oh how i have longed to see a naked handstand posted by someone else...

I love you.

<3

[Anonymous No.1147678]

Anyone got any interesting facts about William Blake?

[Anonymous No.1147713]

>>1147678
He would stroll around the countryside talking to angels, and died ecstatic, singing psalms with his wife.

[Anonymous No.1147715]

>>1147678
This might be obvious, but Blake was most likely insane. His self-avowed gifts of prophecy and mystic visions aside, he believed he witnessed God looking into his bedroom window at age four and that he was John Milton reincarnated for a new era.

[Anonymous No.1147794]

>>1147678

Well, the government tried him for seditious libel, pretty much a groundless excuse to get at him. The contention was that he'd been seriously challenging public authority in a seditious and treasonous manner when a drunken soldier wandered into his garden at night, pissing and singing, whereupon Blake came out of his house and chased him away screaming and shouting. The soldier seems to have been coaxed into alleging that he shouted "Damn the king!" instead of, more likely, "get fucked, you drunken fucking lout!" This image of Blake - as angry old man - is one I can get behind.

>>1147715

I have to presume you are the same poster who keeps saying this in various threads. The way you say it makes it sound as if you think the mere fact of his insanity should count against his estimation as a poet, but I don't see how (although if you're the same person who also uses 'reactionary' or 'conservative' views in the same way, as self-evident stains on an author, I have to at least half agree with you there)

>>1147649

We may busy ourselves as much about the rituals of writers as the religious do of saints. We may be always reading and writing, inscripting and re-inscripting. And you can call that worship if you want. But we hold nothing sacred. At least I hope none of us do.

[Anonymous No.1147803]

>>1147794
believing that nothing can be sacred is one thing, but holding nothing sacred, is another. i hold things sacred, in a profane way, inspite of nothing being sacred. i make my shit into gifts and my gifts into shit. obsessional, mystic neurotics--or else, what would i do?

[Anonymous No.1147821]

>>1147561

Pynchon was famously recluse, however he did have an "inside group," so to speak, of people in the Manhattan area during the 1960s where he would frequent. They generally made sure not to mention his presence and never invited the press.

Pynchon himself has said, through his biographer, that he has the opposite of agoraphobia. He lives in NY because he likes the fact that he's drowned out in a sea of weirdos and no one bothers him. It was also rumored that he had a select number of bars that he would drink at and that the staff generally knew of him but didn't regard him much to protect his wishes of not being interviewed/photographed. Most of these bars were rumored to be in the Mid-town area.

TBH, anon's story sounds legit

[Anonymous No.1147929]

Wtf is with all this referring to Pynchon in the past tense?

[Anonymous No.1148068]

>>1147929
He's really a ghost.

[Anonymous No.1148089]

>>1147523

If a woman came up to me in a bar and told me she had ridiculous amounts of drugs and would fuck me hard, I doubt I'd resist.

[Anonymous No.1148093]

>>1148089
ergo you are not a bar hopper. that, or women do not frequent bars where you live. i'd been hit on several times as teen my monstrous over-25 lower class broad types. they almost raped me and i had to puke. move to a scandinavian country for a change. english is a warped dialect of ours anyways

[Anonymous No.1148102]

>>1147630

Related: Dreyfuss went to see Heidegger and noticed Being and Nothingness on his table. He remarked that he was reading Sartre now, to which Heidegger replied "How can I even begin to read this muck?

[Anonymous No.1148111]

>>1148093
>move to a scandinavian country for a change.

I actually live in Stockholm. It's the drugs part of the deal that isn't fulfilled around here...

[Anonymous No.1148119]

Kielfag would buy it if you talked about booze

[Anonymous No.1148124]

Archive this motherfucker.

[Anonymous No.1148166]

>>not sure if true, but everyone in my uni's eng. dept. "knew" that Yeats had surgically implanted gorilla balls

It's true. Richard Ellmann didn't put it in his biography of Yeats (which was written while Yeats' widow was still alive) but he wrote an article about it after she died.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serge_Voronoff

Here's the doctor who invented the monkey-gland procedure, and the Wikipedia article has lots of pop culture references to it: there's a late Sherlock Holmes story, a poem by e.e. cummings, and a song by Irving Berlin ("if you're too old for dancing / get yourself a monkey gland!")

Yeats apparently read Voronoff's book "Rejuvenation by Grafting" and believed getting the monkey-gland operation could restore his vigor / potency / strength / creativity. If you're wondering *why*, try looking at the depiction of old age in his late poetry: "that is no country for old men" / "an aged man is but a paltry thing" etc. According to Ellmann, Yeats felt that it worked, although (as the article notes) it was probably just the placebo effect.

Anyway, it would be like if Philip Roth got a prescription for Viagra because he felt like he needed it to write.

[Anonymous No.1148489]

>>1147174
He hated to eat them. Which was ironic seeing as he grew up in a small fishing town. He also had a rare disease that made his body temperature 96 instead of 98.6, making him look pale all the time and when you shook his hand, it was always cold.