Curiosities of Literature
Curiosities of Literature
John Sutherland has been a professor of literature for a long time and in many places. Currently he teaches untechnologically at the California Institute of Technology and is the emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor at UCL. He is the author of numerous books, including the puzzle-collection Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (probably, yes) and the encyclopaedic Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. In recent years, he has written voluminously on a variety of literary and non-literary topics in, principally, the Guardian and the Financial Times. His interest in literature has become more curious over the years.
Martin Rowson is an award-winning cartoonist whose work appears regularly in the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and many other publications. His books include a novel, Snatches; a memoir, Stuff; The Dog Allusion: Gods, Pets and How to Be Human; and comic book versions of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. He smokes and qualifies as the sharpest literary-pictorial satirist of his time.
Praise for Curiosities of Literature
‘Remarkably informative and quirky - a brilliant, enjoyable book which confirms Professor Sutherland as the Sherlock Holmes of literary criticism.’ Mark Lawson, Front Row
‘Clever, offbeat and funny; the ideal companion for those who take their literature far too seriously - and for those who don’t take it seriously enough.’ John Crace, Guardian
‘This literary miscellany is so rich it is best consumed at intervals . . . He is at his best when allowing an obstinate eye for the literal to turn interpretation on its head.’ Financial Times
‘The prose is punctuated by little asides, pert, personal and peppery, seasoning for a warmed-over olla podrida of literary anecdote and authorial arcane.’ The Times
‘It becomes curiouser and curiouser, as one wends one’s way pleasurably down one twisting literary path after another ... The scope and detail of Sutherland’s knowledge is enviable. But the important thing is that he wears it lightly and uses it to entice us to join him in appreciating that books are not only absorbing and rewarding but also tremendous fun.’ Spectator
‘A master sleuth, Sutherland is eclectic in his sources and wideranging in his narrative. Knowledgeable, often partisan and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, Curiosities deserves one of the highest compliments: it is a truly great loo book.’ Waterstone’s Books Quarterly
‘A gleefully mischievous look at the nooks, crannies and by-theways of authorial activity ... while this book packs in forty years of scholarly learning, it is, first and foremost, fun.’ Ham & High
‘A deliciously random selection of anecdotes and ponderings.’ Good Book Guide
‘An entertaining, unpretentious miscellany of literary anecdotes, trivia and digressions.’ Times Literary Supplement
Curiosities of Literature
A Feast for Book Lovers
John Sutherland
Copyright © 2011 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Martin rowson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
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Table of Contents
Curiosities of Literature
Praise for Curiosities of Literature
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Epigraph
1 - Literary Baked Meats
2 - The Body of Literature: Heads, Lungs, Hearts, and Bowels
3 - Tools of the Trade
4 - Sex and the Victorians
5 - Better Than Sex, Some Say
6 - Some Curious Literary Records: Best, Worst, and Most
7 - Literary Crimewatch (and Gunplay)
8 - Who? Who? Who?
9 - Name Games
10 - Readers: Distinguished and Less Distinguished
11 - Mammon and the Book Trade
12 - Wheels
13 - Morbid Curiosity
Curious Connections: a Terminal Quiz
Index
SOME INDICAL CURIOSITIES
INDEX
THE END OF THE BOOK
Introduction
HAMLET: To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till ’a find it stopping a bung-hole?
HORATIO: ’Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.
HAMLET: No, faith, not a jot.
This collection of Literary Curiosities is loosely inspired by Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature. Loose is the word. D’Israeli’s was the first such venture methodically to indulge the unmethodical pleasures of the literary miscellany. Flim-flams, he elsewhere called them. A perennial bestseller, his scholarly flimmery-flammery went through seven editions between 1791 and 1823. The Curiosities is a grab-bag of bibliophile and antiquarian anecdote and literary lore - witty, charming, erudite, and above all ‘curious’. D’Israeli serves up a pudding which is all plums.
Modern academic life seems to me more and more like a Japanese car factory - with scholarship that could as well be produced by robots. I suspect even the plum duff we eat at Christmas nowadays is factory produced, and its plums inserted by steely robotic fingers clicking un-merrily on their assembly line. The silver threepenny bits have long since gone, on health and safety grounds.
D’Israeli’s ‘old curiosity shop’ is a welcome antidote. In this contemporary Curiosities I have followed D’Israeli’s potpourri unmethodicality. Entries have clumped together into sections, by a kind of weak magnetism, but not so as to create any systematic order - which would, I think, work against the spirit of the thing. I like to think of the sections as little stewpots - with many ingredients, but a dominant flavour.
Like D’Israeli, I occasionally wander outside the strict confines of literature - although I try to start or finish there. Some of the pieces may be considered too unserious for even unserious readers; some boring; some already stale; some codswallop. Most, I hope, will divert. Driving the enterprise is less the intention to instruct, or inform, than to communicate the random pleasures which may be found in reading literature, and reading about literature. Why else read?
I am grateful to Nigel Wilcockson for sanctioning this project (at Random House’s expense), Victoria Hobbs for arranging things, and Messrs Google and Xerox for their help throughout. A few of the entries have been published, in different form, in the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Sunday Telegraph. ‘Thrift’ - as Hamlet says to Horatio, apropos of the funeral baked meats. On, then, to literary baked meats.
‘Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you
tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the
cat died nobly.’
Arnold Edinborough
1
Literary Baked Meats
‘Erst fressen’ - ‘Grub first’
Bertolt Brecht
OMELETTE LITTÉRAIRE
Many writers have their idiosyncratic gastronomic preferences. Jack London, for example, was devoted to duck, plucked but very lightly seared. ‘Raw’, others thought. His nickname among those close to him was ‘Wolf ’. One would probably not have wanted to be too close to Jack at lunch time, while wolfing his canard Londres.
Only one novelist, as far as I know, has given his name to a dish which has taken its place in classic cuisine. Arnold Bennett, the bestselling middlebrow novelist, about whom highbrow Virginia Woolf was frequently rude, dined - when not on his yacht or in the south of France - at the Savoy, off the Strand, in London. He could afford to; Bennett sold a lot more books than Mrs Woolf. Almost as much as fellow south-of-Francers E. Phillips Oppenheim and Somerset Maugham.
Bennett was a big man at the Savoy. The waiters were circulated with his photograph, so that they would recognise him, and treat him as the honoured guest he was. And, as the highest mark of that honour, the Savoy master chef, Jean Baptist Virlogeux, created a dish in the master novelist’s name: omelette Arnold Bennett. It’s a rather gooey thing in which a baveuse (‘runny’) mess of eggs is artfully mixed with haddock, cheese and herbs.
The dish is still proudly on the Savoy menu, along with such concoctions as M. Stroganoff ’s beef and M. Benedict’s eggs. It is also on the menu of other top hotels and restaurants in London’s West End, such as the Wolseley in Piccadilly, where the waiters jestingly call it Omelette Gordon Bennett, or Omelette Alan Bennett.
Alas, although his dish remains in print among metropolitan bills of fare, Bennett’s novels have fallen out of print - even his return compliment to the Savoy, Imperial Palace (in which Virlogeux figures as ‘Rocco’). For those curious to taste omelette Arnold Bennett, and short of the fifty quid or so they’ll charge you in its home base, the recipe for the dish can be found on the
food recipes section of the BBC cookery website. As for le roman Arnold Bennett? Try eBay, or the nearest Oxfam bookstore.
Curious Literary Grub
Those seeking colourful taste thrills in literature might start with J.K. Huysmans’ À rebours (roughly translates into rough Anglo-Saxon as ‘arse about face’) in which the dandy hero, Des Esseintes, creates a dinner party comprising all black food, served by negresses, on black china. A change of tone could be introduced with the ‘white soup’ which is served up by Charles Bingley’s servant in Pride and Prejudice. The whole thing to be finished with the chocolate-coated lemon-flavoured latrine disinfectant tablet, Patrick Bateman playfully serves up, as a postprandial sweetmeat, to his girlfriend, in American Psycho (‘it tastes “minty”’, she merely observes, innocently). The heroic literary eater must, however, go thyestean. Thyestes is the luckless prince in ancient Greek mythology, unwittingly served up a pudding made of his own sons for supper. It has become a favourite theme in literature. Seneca wrote a revenge play on the subject, much translated and imitated in the English Renaissance. Shakespeare introduces a thyestean feast into Titus Andronicus. So gothic are the horrors in that play, that it ranks as among the least blood-curdling the audience is made to endure. Swift, mockingly, argues in his ‘Modest Proposal’ that Ireland’s perennial famine can be solved by Hibernian parents consuming their too-many offspring, ‘stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassée or a ragout.’ In modern literature, the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief discovers, the night after a drunken revel with savages, that he has unknowingly feasted on his girlfriend, in what he took to be a peculiarly savoury stew. He handles the news without so much as a regretful belch. The ne plus ultra is in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal, where the monster of the title induces a drugged victim to consume slices of his own brain, lightly sautéd in a wok: ‘Hey, that tastes pretty good,’ says the auto-thyestean.
DR JOHNSON’S GULOSITY
‘Gulosity’ is not a word in current use even at the high tables of Oxford, where the best words are usually to be found. It has a fine Johnsonian ring to it - appropriately so, since Dr Johnson invented it. Gulosity is defined in the Great Dictionary as a noun indicating ‘greediness, voracity, gluttony’.
These words, alas, attach adhesively to the word-maker himself. He had a lust for food which, if contemporary accounts are to be credited, offended those of delicate disposition who happened to be in the Great Cham’s fallout area. This is Macaulay’s description (writing, it should be said, from historical accounts, fifty years after Johnson’s death):
The old philosopher is still among us in the brown coat with the metal buttons and the shirt which ought to be at the wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in oceans.
Boswell, on his first meeting with Johnson, was immediately impressed with the great man’s appetite. ‘Some people,’ Johnson informed the (then) slim young Scot, ‘have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.’
He was, Boswell reverently thought, in the presence of ‘Jean Bull philosophe’. At least, when talking. When actually guzzling, our philosophical John Bull was something else:
When at table ... his looks seemed riveted to his plate; nor would he, unless when in very high company, say one word, or even pay the least attention to what was said by others, till he had satisfied his appetite, which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating, the veins of his forehead swelled, and generally a strong perspiration was visible.
Plates, one must assume, were lucky to survive Samuel Johnson’s table-time assault unbroken.
Otherwise an uncritical admirer, Boswell confessed to an un-Boswellian disgust at his idol’s table manners. And total amazement. Was not Johnson a ‘philosopher’ and a ‘moralist’? Weren’t these roles normally associated with moderation? Moreover, Boswell had heard the great man, ‘upon other occasions, talk with great contempt of people who were anxious to gratify their palates; and the 206th number of his Rambler is a masterly essay against gulosity.’
If one turns to that piece (published in the Rambler on 7 March 1752) one is minded to concur with the faithful biographer. The essay is a meditation on one Gulosulus - a character invented for the occasion by Johnson. For thirty years, this fictional parasitic gourmand has managed to eat magnificently at the expense of others:
Gulosulus entered the world without any eminent degree of merit; but was careful to frequent houses where persons of rank resorted. By being often seen, he became in time known; and ... he was sometimes taken away to dinner ... when he had been met at a few tables, he with less difficulty found the way to more, till at last he was regularly expected to appear wherever preparations are made for a feast ... When he was thus by accident initiated in luxury, he felt in himself no inclination to retire from a life of so much pleasure.
By artful sycophancy, Gulosulus feeds on twenty dishes a day, every day, and dies rich. And very plump.
‘Gulosity’ is a fine neologism, and the character is an amusing moral invention. But it is clear that when the great lexicographer looked into his mirror he did not see Dr Samuel Gulosulus. He was the least parasitic of food gobblers. He filled the Johnson belly with his own tucker: or, if entertained, he entertained back with the currency of the best table talk in history. But he did like his grub.
KNORR AND A NICE JELLY
The first three-course fast-food meal in literature is introduced (with dripping contempt) by E.M. Forster, in chapter 6 of Howards End (1910). The square meal (all too literally) is served up by Len Bast, to his lady-love, Jacky:
They began with a soup square, which Leonard had just dissolved in some hot water. It was followed by the tongue - a freckled cylinder of meat, with a little jelly at the top, and a great deal of yellow fat at the bottom - ending with another square dissolved in water (jelly: pineapple), which Leonard had prepared earlier in the day. Jacky ate contentedly enough . . . And Leonard managed to convince his stomach that it was having a nourishing meal.
The novelist, one gathers, would not be so persuaded.
The soup is, one may assume, a ‘Knorr Cube’. The brainchild of the German culinary inventor Carl Heinrich Knorr in the early nineteenth century it was originally, and rather unhappily, called ‘soup sausage’. ‘Bouillon cube’, a term which came into use at the time Forster was writing, rolls more easily off the tongue and down the throat. Conceivably, of course, Leonard may prefer the rival brand Maggi (introduced, with great fanfare, in 1908). Oxo cubes did not come onto the market until 1910, the year of Howards End ’s publication and are unlikely.
The canned tongue, or ‘luncheon meat’, with its layer of jelly at the top and yellow fat at the bottom is, in all likelihood, from a Fray Bentos tin, the Argentinian firm which, in the midnineteenth century discovered so profitable a sideline for the cattle they were slaughtering for their hides that by the time Leonard and Jacky sat down to supper, processed meat was their principal product.
The jelly square, with which the feast is crowned, is, indubitably, one of Mr Rowntree’s cubed ‘table jellies’, launched with huge success into the marketplace in 1901. All the products mentioned above are still to be found on your local supermarket shelves.