Author’s Note, December, 2007: For a while, I was writing quirky Top Ten articles for Mystery Scene Magazine [www.mysteryscene.net [or whatever]]. Many of the articles I’ll put in this column will be out of date. This one really isn’t. It’s an “evergreen” column: with a few tweaks, I could make it appear as if I wrote it this month.

Here are the things that are out of date: 1. John Gregory Dunne died a few years ago. His wife, Joan Didion, wrote about his death in The Year of Magical Thinking, one of the best books on grieving that I’ve ever read.

The Top Ten Literary Anecdotes
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Okay. So here’s the thing:

In July, when Kate Stine suggested the title of this article, I said, “Sure.” I mean, how hard can it be? I’m opinionated: I can find 10 literary anecdotes. I can find a hundred. I can pick the best, and voilà!, an article.

Yeah, right.

You see, there’s a reason writers are considered colorful, and I actually think that reason is not because we’re artists or quirky or because strangeness is a requirement for the job. It’s because the job is so ill-defined.
Seriously. As Patricia Highsmith notes in her Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, “[Writers] can fly over to Majorca for a few weeks in the sun, off-season, when are friends are stuck in the city. Or we can join a friend who is sailing in a ramshackle boat from Acapulco to Tahiti and not worry about how long the voyage will take—and possibly we will get a book out of the voyage too. A writer’s life is a very untrammeled and free life….”
Untrammeled and free are romantic ways of looking at the writing life. Because it is ill-defined — because writers are in charge of their day-to-day destinies — writers get themselves into all sorts of scrapes.

Some of them are interesting: In 1906, for instance, Jack London built a ship called the Snark and decided to sail around the world. Being a business-minded writer, he found a publisher for the adventure before he took off; being a bad businessman, he didn’t call off the trip when it became clear that he couldn’t afford to build the ship, let alone pay for the trip. Yet he went, suffered malaria, came face-to-face with cannibals, visited a leper colony, and saw parts of the world he couldn’t even imagine. Money and illness brought him back to San Francisco; boredom and an insatiable writer’s curiosity set him on a new scheme the very next year.

Yet you can take the same man, Jack London—one of America’s most colorful writers—and find a dozen anecdotes that are similar to every other writer’s experience: He started out poor; he married badly (the first time); he lost some friends to his success; he got rich off his writing—and spent all the money; he worried that he wouldn’t sell anything else; he worried that he wouldn’t be remembered; he fought with critics; he fought with his friends; he fought with his wife. The upshot is that he spent too many hours alone, trapped inside his own imagination, without outside forces to determine his schedule, his behavior or his lifestyle—and as a result, picked fights, drank too much, and angered a lot of people around him.

A writer’s career doesn’t come with a set of instructions. And you, dear reader, think, “No one else’s does either,” but that’s not exactly true. If you want to be a doctor, you know the path: get good grades, be pre-med in college, get accepted to a medical school, pick a specialty, yadda, yadda, yadda, down to the regularity of office hours and surgical schedules, the hiring of staff, the day-to-day regime of business hours and planned vacations.
I can take a vacation tomorrow if I want to. Or I’ll work on Saturday if I have to. I just worked for two months straight — almost no days off — for a deadline. But I can also be like the writer William Holden played in Paris as It Sizzles if I want to: I could spend 5 days a year working to pay for the play that I do 360 days a year, provided I earn enough. (His character did; I, unfortunately, do not.)

Because writers have no defined lifestyle and no set schedule, they tend to make mayhem. Think unsupervised children; think a pride of housecats; think of intelligent, immature, and insecure people with too much time on their hands.

In researching this article, I found myself faced with not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of anecdotes—and no real way to boil them down. Funny anecdotes? Here’s one: Simon and Schuster was so happy to get rid of author Jacqueline Susann because of all the trouble she caused behind the scene that when her next book Once Is Not Enough came out (published by another company, of course), S&S sent her a single rose with a note that read, “For us, once was enough.”

Oops. Maybe that should go into the mean anecdote category. But most funny writing anecdotes are mean, like Dorothy Parker’s review of The House at Pooh Corner. Parker, writing as the Constant Reader in The New Yorker, objected to the book’s whimsy, especially when it lead A.A. Milne to make up words. She particularly disliked “hummy,” writing, “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.”

Parker and her buddies at the Algonquin Round Table are one of the richest sources of literary anecdotes. From their insults (duly reported in the magazines and newspapers of the day) to their own writings (in those self-same magazines and newspapers) to their later work (mostly in Hollywood), this group of writers cornered the market on nasty witty drunken writer stories—and most of those stories had their beginning at a round table in the back of the Algonquin Hotel’s dining room.

Beneath those stories, though, are other tales, told less often, tales of sadness. The Round Table started as a luncheon held at the Algonquin Hotel by two theatrical agents to welcome The New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott back from World War I. The very idea that the obese and overly sensitive Mr. Woollcott actually served in such a nasty war adds a depth to his character few ever write about—and it wasn’t in evidence that afternoon in 1919. Woollcott actually tried to discuss his experiences with the 35 members of New York’s theater community who attended the lunch, but they laughed him off, figuring nothing serious could have happened to the man. (Imagine how that must have felt.)

Eventually, he got into the spirit of the thing. Laughter and insults became the luncheon’s centerpiece and at the end, someone suggested that the group meet every day for lunch — and the Roundtable was born.
Like any other writers’ group, this bunch had its heyday and then started to consume each other alive. Writers always tend to do that — partly because they get jealous of each other’s successes, partly because some take themselves more seriously than others, and partly because they are, at heart, immature children who can only enjoy someone else’s company for so long.

The members of the Roundtable continued to let their myth grow over the decades, using each other’s lives as the grist for various mills: from novels to television shows to movies (Mrs. Parker and The Vicious Circle) to plays, including one of my favorites, The Man Who Came to Dinner by Kaufman and Hart. The Man Who Came to Dinner is about Alexander Woollcott—the central character in the show is supposed to be him. The play has been revived several times, the most recent version featuring Nathan Lane in the Woollcott role.

The sadness, though, comes not in the tales of break-up and fighting and wars over various novels, poems, and screenplays (Our Constant Reader, Ms. Parker, called The Man Who Came to Dinner “a nasty little play”—not seeing the humor because of her affection for Woollcott), but in that last, impromptu meeting of the roundtable.
In 1943, Woollcott died of a heart attack. His friends (and former friends) had scattered across the globe, but most flew back for his funeral. Afterwards, they all ended up at the Algonquin. They sat around in uneasy silence, unwilling (unable?) to make conversation, and finally fled each other’s company. Harpo Marx, a member of the Roundtable almost from the beginning, called it “the last gathering of the Woollcott crowd, and it was our strangest gathering.”

Of course, it wasn’t just the famous literary communities whose anecdotes were sad. The last days of many of our best writers are horror stories in and of themselves. Stephen King stole the last days of Cornell Woolrich’s life for a short story, but couldn’t find the same horror in it that Woolrich’s last days truly had. Woolrich died alone in a New York hotel; suffering from gangrene, drinking too much, he had given away most of his books and stories to the hotel staff.

King isn’t the only writer who stole details of another person’s life to make a story: as noted above, the Roundtable did it to each other all the time. Graham Greene once said that a good writer has a chip of ice in his heart, which P.D. James expanded on quite clearly in A Certain Justice, describing that writerly ability to feel sadness, pity, anger or happiness while viewing an event –and, simultaneously, to be looking at that same event as grist for the mill.

There is no better grist for the mill, however, than a writer’s own life. And the biggest problem I’ve had with finding the top ten literary anecdotes is simply this: I’m not sure which ones are true.

My favorite, often repeated by my screenwriter friends, is a story about William Faulkner. Faulkner, famously unhappy while he was in California working for Warner Brothers, told Jack Warner that he’d “rather work at home.” After some wrangling, Warner finally told Faulkner that it was okay not to come into the office, that indeed, Faulkner could work at home.

A few weeks later, Warner needed something from Faulkner and asked his secretary to get the writer on the phone. “You know, sir, that’s a long distance call,” the secretary said. “Long distance?” Warner sputtered. A few minutes later, he got on the line and barked at Faulkner, “Where the hell are you?”

“Oxford, Mississippi,” Faulkner said. “My home.”

Generations of people have used this tale to show how novelists don’t belong in Hollywood. But this version of the Faulkner story is just a myth. The real story—at least the first version of it that Faulkner told—is just a tale of typical Hollywood incompetence.

Apparently, the actual story occurred in 1932 during Faulkner’s first foray into Hollywood and long before he worked for Jack Warner. Faulkner was writing a screenplay for his friend Howard Hawkes, and Hawkes gave Faulkner permission to return to Oxford for his father’s funeral. During the writing of the screenplay, Faulkner commuted between Mississippi and California.

MGM lost track of him in those few months and actually sent him a telegram in Oxford which read:

To: William Faulkner
Oxford, Mississippi

Where Are You?

MGM Studio

Typical Hollywood mismanagement and confusion. Faulkner was under contract, but when the Hawkes script was completed, no one gave him another assignment. Then, months later, Faulkner received a demand to return to the studio for a new job. Faulkner, whose wife was pregnant, refused, and MGM terminated his contract so long as he remained in Mississippi. If he wanted work, he could come to California—and later, he did.

By 1956, Faulkner modified the story to suggest he had been fired. A few years after that, the “work at home” myth first appeared in a biography of Darryl Zanuck, with Zanuck in the producer’s role not Jack Warner. But Warner appropriated the story for his own autobiography, which showed up years after that, making himself the central character (and victim) of Faulkner’s seeming restlessness.

The truth? I assume the earlier story (which I got from Ian Hamilton’s Writers in Hollywood), but I don’t know. I’ve never met Faulkner or anyone else involved and only heard the tale from people who have never met them.
In fact, I can barely remember the writerly anecdotes of my own life. If I were to pick my own personal top ten, the only thing I can agree with myself on is that they would all revolve around food. (The vice of my generation of writers is not drink, as it was with the Algonquin Roundtable or the Lost Generation, but dining out—at someone else’s great expense.) The stories are only funny if you know the writers involved, and some of the stories are so embarrassing that as I sit here in my office, I find that I can’t write about them.

However, if you and I ever find ourselves at dinner together, ask me about science fiction’s famous knob dinner—which nearly got the editors of two rival magazines, several screenwriters, and twenty novelists (all of whom were completely sober) kicked out of a restaurant in New Orleans. The management decided not to make us leave, which angered the waiters and made them quit. Of course, I won’t be able to tell you the entire tale in a restaurant, because the last time that I did (in Chicago), the maitre d’ informed us that we’d better behave or he would kick us out—Chicago being the tougher town, I guess.

So you’ve read 2000 words purportedly on the Top Ten Literary Anecdotes and have discovered that I’m just a big tease. I have no top ten literary anecdotes. I don’t even have a top one hundred.

But I do have some favorites, listed below:

First, A Tale of Courage:

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay, “The Crack-up,” later sited as the beginning of a career resurgence, may actually have caused him to lose work. Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” is an unflinching self-portrait of his mental, emotional, and financial breakdown in the late 1920s. Beautifully done and heartbreaking, it’s considered a classic today.
But in the late 1930s, when Fitzgerald was trying to support his daughter and find enough money to keep his wife Zelda institutionalized, his honest essay made real employers consider him unstable. Hollywood studios, one of the few places which provided steady work for writers in the Depression, wouldn’t hire him without many guarantees, fearing him unstable.

His honesty ruined what was left of his reputation, and even though he eventually found a few jobs, he and Hollywood discovered that they didn’t get along. Unfortunately, the last half of Fitzgerald’s life wasn’t charmed—just when it seemed that he was regaining his voice, he had a heart attack and died, his last novel unfinished. He never did live to see the acclaim he now enjoys. His obituaries were stories of failure, and not success—the tone of most of them taking their cue from, of all things, “The Crack-Up.”

And A Second Tale of Courage:

Laura Hillenbrand’s essay, “A Sudden Illness,” in the July 7, 2003 issue of The New Yorker explains her deep interest in the against-all-odds tale that became the non-fiction bestseller, Seabiscuit. Ill for most of her adult life with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Hillenbrand wrote the book while in bed, suffering from extreme vertigo and exhaustion.

She wrote a bestseller against all odds, identifying with real-life characters who were struggling as mightily as she was—only in a very different way. Such courage—on all counts.

Then, A Tale of Filial Devotion:

Emily Dickinson is one of my favorite poets despite the attempt of my freshman English class to knock her off her pedestal. So, yes, I’ll say it now before anyone else brings up this awful fact: you can sing all of Dickinson’s poems to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”—I tried to disprove it at the age of 18 and failed. But that doesn’t diminish the poems’ beauty or their power.

However, Dickinson only marketed a few poems in her lifetime, got rejected, and never tried to get published again. The only reason we read her work at all is because of her brother who decided, after she had died, that her poems should be read and wouldn’t quit until he found a publisher for them.

(This is why, I tell new writers, you must mail your work. Unless you have a brother who loves you beyond reason and who will outlive you, you must take responsibility for your own career.)

The Nightmare Come True:

We’ve all read the stories, seen the movies, and heard our English teacher tell the tale, but that doesn’t diminish its impact. I love the origin story of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein more than I love the book itself. Imagine her sitting across from the most famous poet of his day, Lord Byron, and next to her husband—another famous poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. She’s the daughter of a famous feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, a famous political reformer. Both her parents, of course, made their names by writing as well.

So no pressure on that windswept Italian night when the group she’s with decides to tell horror stories by candlelight. Like any underdog, she thinks she’ll opt out. Instead, she goes to bed and has a horrible nightmare, which she refines, and finally tells the following night—outshining everyone in the room.

Thus Frankenstein’s monster is born. So, by the way, is science fiction, and the triumph of genre literature. Because even though we study the romantic poets in school, we watch the Frankenstein movies voluntarily. Mary Shelley’s book is still in print. I know that I read it one lazy summer because I wanted to, not because I had to. And so did all of my friends.

(I also like the feminist overtones to this entire tale—which some of my male friends would also call A Nightmare Come True—genre literature [female genre literature—because what is this story, after all, but a tale of childbirth gone bad?] triumphing over Real Ahhhhrt.)

And finally….

A Story of True Love:

Elizabeth Barrett lived the life of a chronic invalid. She rarely left her room, existing only in her poems and her letters. Unlike Emily Dickinson, however, Barrett mailed her letters and had her poems published.
The poems attracted the attention of another poet, Robert Browning, who began a correspondence with her. Through words, Barrett and Browning fell in love.

They finally decided to meet secretly, realized that they truly did love each other, and eloped. Barrett-Browning’s strict father never forgave her, but ultimately that didn’t matter. Life in Italy with Robert Browning brought her renewed health, a child, and gave the world one of the most beautiful collections of love poems ever written, Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Perhaps that’s what I love the most about writer anecdotes: they all lead to published works—be those works poems like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s or nightmares like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s or satires like The Man Who Came to Dinner.

Writers embellish the small lives they’ve lived. They also make up stories—about themselves, about others, and about the world around them. I read essays by writers mostly for the entertainment value—professional storytellers can’t help but organize their lives into a story and over time will improve the telling of the tale at the expense of the truth.

Top ten literary anecdotes? I could spend my entire life searching for them. In fact, I think I am—and not just because Kate asked me to. I tend to collect stories.

It’s an occupational hazard—one of many in a profession unfettered, and ill-defined.

—Copyright © 2004 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Originally published in Mystery Scene Magazine.