Novelist Ernest Hemingway and poet Hart Crane were both born on July 21, 1899. Both struggled with alcoholism and depression, and both committed suicide.
A man was speeding down a highway at 110 mph when he struck the back of a car, immediately killing the two people inside. The victims? The man's mother and her elderly neighbor, whom she was taking on a leisurely drive to see the town's Christmas lights.
6. MORBID WRITERS AND TORTURED ARTISTS
FROM EDGAR ALLAN POE TO VINCENT VAN GOGH
“I BECAME INSANE, WITH LONG INTERVALS OF HORRIBLE SANITY.” —EDGAR ALLAN POE
WAKING DREAMS
G. H. Lewis, the companion of novelist George Eliot, told the following story of Charles Dickens:
Dickens dreamt that he was in a room where everyone was dressed in scarlet. He stumbled against a lady standing with her back towards him. As he apologized, she turned her head and said, quite unprovoked, “My name is Napier.”
He knew no one of the name Napier, and the face was unknown to him. Two days later, before he was to give a reading, a lady friend came into his waiting room accompanied by an unknown lady in a scarlet opera-cloak. The unknown woman, said his friend, “is very determined of being introduced.”
“Not Miss Napier?” he jokingly inquired.
“Yes, Miss Napier.”
Although the face of the woman Dickens had seen in his dream was not the face of the actual Miss Napier, the coincidence of the cloak and name was striking.
American author Norman Mailer once stabbed his wife and then wrote a novel about it (An American Dream).
THOU SHALT NOT STEAL?
The Bible is the number one book stolen in the United States, according to booksellers across America. Strange, seeing as people are giving out Bibles for free so often—and not to mention that the Bible's Ten Commandments forbid stealing.
“I DON'T USE DRUGS. MY DREAMS ARE FRIGHTENING ENOUGH.” —M. C. ESCHER
BAD SHOT
Despite being a self-avowed junkie and homosexual, William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) was a real lady-killer—literally. One long night in Mexico, filled with booze and drugs, he tried to shoot a martini glass off the head of his common-law wife, Joan, with a pistol. He missed, hitting her in the forehead and killing her. Charged with involuntary manslaughter, he fled Mexico.
Surrealist Salvador Dali owned an ocelot as a pet.
Author Isabelle Allende always begins writing her next novel on January 8.
FRAMING YOUR HUSBAND
Agatha Christie nearly pulled off a real-life hoax worthy of her mystery novels. Upset that her husband was leaving her for another woman, she set up an incriminating scene that almost got him arrested for her “murder.” Luckily for him, an employee at a distant seaside hotel saw news photos of Christie and recognized her as the woman who had slipped into the hotel under an assumed name. Although Christie claimed amnesia, the police were not amused after having wasted a week of searching rivers and bogs for her body.
EDGAR ALLAN POE MARRIED HIS THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD COUSIN.
STRANGER THAN FICTION
This hoax is still accepted by many as genuine: The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter was purported to be the genuine memoir of a Cherokee orphan learning the ways of his tribe and nature while struggling to live in a white world. The book, still in print, turns out to have been written by a white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan member named Asa Carter.
Misha Defonseca's 1997 holocaust memoir, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years, attracted media attention in 2007 when a genealogical researcher found that the author had fabricated details about her life during World War II. The book, which was sold to its publisher as non fiction, tells a fascinating story of the author's travels through Europe following the execution of her parents by Nazis. The author, who represents herself as a Jew, kills a German soldier, is taken in by a pack of wolves, and wanders into the Warsaw Ghetto and escapes. After it was discovered that Ms. Defonseca spent the war safely in Brussels (and that she was not even Jewish), she confessed: “There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world. The story in the book is mine. It is not actual reality—it was my reality.” The “memoir” had been a best seller in Europe and Canada, and was the basis for a French film.
San Francisco's literary community was shocked to discover in 2006 that JT LeRoy, the purported 25-year-old HIV-positive former male prostitute, was in fact a 40-year-old woman named Laura Albert. LeRoy's first novel, Sarah, was published in 2000 to much critical acclaim. Supposedly based on LeRoy's life story, it told of the young man's experiences as a cross-dressing male prostitute in the deep South, a position that his drug-addled mother allegedly forced him into.
LeRoy then escaped to San Francisco, where Laura Albert and her husband, Geoffrey Knoop, took him in. LeRoy's remarkable story attracted the attention of literary celebrities, film directors, and even rock stars. He was encouraged to publish his short story collection, and his next book, Labour, was due out that spring. LeRoy was pathologically shy and showed up heavily disguised in his rare public appearances, often wearing dark sunglasses and refusing to speak. It was said that he appeared incognito at his own readings, at which members of the literary community would read for him because of his supposed stage fright. LeRoy's elusive nature only fueled the public's obsession with him.
On January 9, 2006, The New York Times revealed that JT LeRoy didn't exist—he was the grand creation of Albert, Knoop, and Knoop's half-sister Savannah, who had made his public appearances in heavy disguise. Albert had written the novels and stories and had conducted LeRoy's first phone interviews using a West Virginia accent. What's more, the couple had fabricated the identities of LeRoy's supposed street friend, Speedie, and Emily Frasier, another woman he had lived with. The elaborate hoax was reportedly a way for Knoop and Albert, whose rock band Thistle was marginally popular in the San Francisco music scene, to gain access to rich and famous circles and promote their band.
“The lightning flashes through my skull; mine eyeballs ache and ache; my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground.”
—HERMAN MELVILE
DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ:
“PETRIFIED MAN FOUND IN NEVADA CAVE”
FROM THE VIRGINIA CITY TERRITORIAL ENTERPRISE, 1862
The story: According to the article, a petrified man with a wooden leg was found in a cave in a remote part of Nevada. The man was found in a seated position, with “the right thumb resting against the side of his nose, the left thumb partially supported the chin, the forefinger pressing the inner corner of the left eye and drawing it partially open; the right eye was closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread apart.” The article claimed the man had been dead for at least 300 years.
The reaction: The story spread to other newspapers in Nevada, then to the rest of the country, and then around the world. The archaeological “find” was even reported in the London scientific journal Lancet.
The truth: The story was the work of the Territorial Enterprise's local editor, Samuel Clemens (later known by his pen name, Mark Twain). Clemens figured people would know it was a hoax by the description of the petrified man's hand positions. (Try doing it yourself.) But he was wrong.
BUNNY LOVER
American children's author Margaret Wise Brown (1910–1952), who wrote many a tender kitty-and-bunny tale, including Goodnight Moon and The Bunny's Birthday, loved to hunt rabbits. She collected their severed feet as trophies.
“WRITING IS EASY: ALL YOU DO IS SIT STARING AT A BLANK SHEET OF PAPER UNTIL DROPS OF BLOOD FORM ON YOUR FOREHEAD.” —GENE FOWLER
OBSESSED WITH WHITMAN
When American poet Walt Whitman died in 1892, his brain was put in a jar and donated to the University of Pennsylvania. The university doesn't have it any more—a lab technician dropped the jar on the floor and damaged the brain. The university quietly discarded it, and Whitman's “Specimen Days” were over.
Mark Twain was born in 1835, a year when Haley's comet could be seen from earth, and, fulfilling his own prophecy, he died in 1910, the next time the comet cycled near the earth, seventy-six years later.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York City hung Henri Matisse's Le Bateau upside down for forty-seven days before an art student noticed the error.
FLUNKIES
Novelist Edgar Allen Poe, painter James Whistler, and mind traveler Timothy Leary were all once students at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Not surprisingly, none of them made it through to graduation or to an officership in the military. Poe flunked out in a particularly spectacular way. An order came for cadets to show up for a full-dress parade wearing “white belt and gloves, under arms.” He followed the order all too literally, appearing wearing nothing but a belt and carrying his gloves under his naked arms.
DA VINCI CODE
Leonardo Da Vinci was a notoriously secretive man. He kept clandestine notes to himself in a distinct style: he wrote backwards, from right to left. Turns out Da Vinci's code wasn't too hard to crack: it was easily legible when held up to a mirror.
German composer Richard Wagner planned to be buried in a grave in his garden and was known to divulge this fact willingly to dinner party guests. He would take them to view the garden and then delight in the reactions of his guests as they sat back down to finish the meal. Wagner and his wife, Cosima, were indeed buried in the Bayreuth, Germany garden.
Poet Ezra Pound wrote The Pisan Cantos while imprisoned at a U.S. Army camp in Pisa, Italy. He had been arrested for treason because he had broadcast Fascist propaganda from Italy during World War II. Eventually judged insane, Pound spent twelve years in a Washington, D.C., mental hospital before returning to Italy.
STOP AND SMELL (OR DON'T)
Voltaire always fainted whenever he smelled roses. He also drank seventy cups of coffee a day. Are the two facts related?
“I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible—and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does.” —VINCENT VAN GOGH
POETIC CALENDAR
If you want to be poet laureate of the United States, it might help if you were born on March 1. Three previous laureates were born on that date—Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Hass.
WORKS BEST UNDER THE INFLUENCE
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a tome of 60,000 words, during a six-day cocaine binge. He was also reported to have been suffering from tuberculosis at the time.
LEO TOLSTOY'S LIBRARY AND MANUSCRIPTS WERE DESTROYED BY A MOB OF PEASANTS IN 1917.
ART WAS HIS FALLBACK
Besides being a master stonecutter and painter, Michelangelo was an up-and-coming author. He carved his statue of David whilst waiting for his editor to approve his novel, a thriller called Chislers in Florence.
English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) suffered from recurring hallucinations of a deranged gunman stalking him.
French playwright Moliere (1622–1673) was playing the lead role in his play The Hypochondriac when he collapsed into fits of coughing and hemorrhaging onstage. He was suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis and died hours later, at home.
American playwright Tennessee Williams died when he choked to death on the plastic top of his nasal spray while alone in a hotel room in 1983.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, romantic poet and husband of Mary Shelley, drowned in 1822 while sailing in his schooner, Don Juan, during a sudden storm. Days before, he had claimed to have met his doppelganger, who foretold his death. Mary, devastated, snatched her husband's heart from the funeral pyre and kept it for the rest of her life.
THE DEVIL MADE ME WRITE IT
Among the notable literary figures who counted themselves members of the Order of the Golden Dawn are Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stoker, and William Butler Yeats. Yeats's magical name was Daemon est Deus Inversus, which is Latin for “the devil is God backwards.”
BIZARRE LITERARY DEATHS
Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), author of Winesburg, Ohio, died from complications from peritonitis, which he contracted after choking on a toothpick.
British writers Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis both died on November 22, 1963, the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination.
German poet Rainer Maria Rilke died of leukemia in 1926. Refusing to acknowledge the nature of his illness, Rilke believed he would die of blood poisoning after being pricked by a rose thorn. He even wrote his epitaph to that effect:
Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one's sleep,
under so many lids.
“GERTRUDE STEIN WAS A MASTER AT MAKING NOTHING HAPPEN VERY SLOWLY.” —CLIFTON FADIMAN
WHERE'S VOLTAIRE?
Voltaire, author of countless satires—especially concerning the religious sector—was not well liked among people of faith. When he died in 1778, he was denied burial in church ground until 1791, when the abbey in Champagne relented and moved his remains to the Pantheon in Paris. But the late author did not rest in peace there, either. In 1814 a group of right-wing religious extremists broke into the Pantheon, exhumed his remains, and dumped them in a garbage heap somewhere. The heist was not discovered until fifty years later, when authorities found his sarcophagus empty.
THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF BITTER BIERCE
Ambrose Bierce was a prolific journalist and author whose biting cynicism earned him the nickname of Bitter Bierce. Perhaps the most interesting part of this literary dynamo's biography is his death—or, more accurately, his disappearance. Nobody knows exactly how or when Bierce died.
In October of 1913, Bierce departed his native Washington, D.C., to tour old Civil War battlefields in the Deep South, a trip he had been planning for some time. He passed through Louisiana and Texas, and by December he was in Mexico, at which point he promptly disappeared. The Mexican Revolution was in full swing, and according to some theories, Bierce met up with rebel leader Pancho Villa, who later executed him. Others place him on the front lines of the war, killed in battle. Bierce's daughter, alarmed by her elderly father's disappearance, petitioned the U.S. government to send out a search party for him, but the group found no conclusive evidence about what happened to him.
LITERARY DEATHMATCH
TURGENEV VS. DOSTOYEVSKY
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–1883) once called fellow Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) a “pimple on the face of literature.”
When writer, anthropologist, and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston died in 1960, she was buried in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida—a cemetery designated for “Negros only.” In 1973, author Alice Walker found her grave and had a gravestone erected in Hurston's honor.
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945) requested that upon her death her two dogs be removed from their graves in her garden and be buried with her. They were.
Poet Emily Dickinson's (1830–1886) final requests were that she would be buried in a white casket; that heliotropes be placed inside, along with a posy of blue violets placed at her throat; and that a wreath of blue violets be placed on top of the casket.
Carson McCullers (1917–1967) suffered a series of debilitating strokes when she was in her twenties, which caused her to lose sight in her right eye. This malady seriously affected her productivity—she had to reduce her writing output to one page a day.
PARKER VS. LUCE
Twentieth-century American writers Dorothy Parker and Clare Boothe Luce never got along. Once, when Luce encountered Parker in a doorway, she stepped aside and remarked, “Age before beauty.” Always quick with a comeback, Parker countered, “Pearls before swine,” as she elegantly passed through.
After meeting Lord Byron at a ball
, Lady Caroline Lamb wrote in her diary that the English poet was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” But that didn't prevent the married Lady Lamb from entering into a scandalous and well-publicized affair with him.
7. DIA DE LOS MUERTOS
CORPSES ON CAMP US, VOICES FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE,
STRANGE CEMETERY FACTS, SPOOKY SPECTERS,
AND OTHER GHOSTLY, GHASTLY, AND GOTHIC GOINGS ON
PREMATURE BURIAL
Lurid stories from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were spread in the popular press about premature burial. Some of these tales were spread by well-meaning doctors; for example, postmortem reports described corpses with their fingers chewed off—a sign, some doctors said, that the corpse awoke and was panicked and hungry enough to chew its own extremities. In reality, most or all of the cases were actually the result of rodent infestation.
The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories Page 10
