Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes

by Clifton Fadiman

  2 When Spenser first showed portions of The Faerie Queen to the Earl of Southampton, that great connoisseur of literature was enchanted by what he read. “Go bear Master Spenser a gift of twenty pounds,” he commanded his attendants. He read on, and again the charms of the poetry encouraged him to further generosity: “Go bear Master Spenser another twenty pounds.” Still he went on reading, and then cried out a third time, “Go turn that fellow out of my house, for I shall be ruined if I read further.”

  SPILLANE, Mickey [Frank Morrison] (1918–98), US writer of detective stories featuring the character Mike Hammer.

  1 Authors become impatient with eager students of their work who find symbolism where none was intended. When the subject came up at a meeting of the Mystery Writers of America, Spillane dismissed any profound conclusions that might have been drawn from the drinking habits of his most famous character. “Mike Hammer drinks beer, not cognac, because I can’t spell cognac,” he declared.

  SPOONER, William Archibald (1844–1930), British scholar, Warden of New College, Oxford (1903–24). He gave his name to the verbal trick, accidental or otherwise, known as a spoonerism — the transposition of the initial letters of words, especially to give a comic effect; for instance, “a half-warmed fish” for “a half-formed wish.”

  1 Meeting a stranger in the New College quadrangle, Warden Spooner could recall only that the man was a recent addition to the college Fellows. “Come to tea tomorrow,” he said hospitably, “I’m giving a little party for the new mathematics Fellow.”

  “But Warden,” said the stranger. “I am the new mathematics Fellow.”

  “Never mind. Come all the same.”

  2 “Mr. Spooner was one evening found wandering disconsolately about the streets of Greenwich. ‘I’ve been here two hours,’ he said. ‘I had an important appointment to meet someone at “The Dull Man, Greenwich,” and I can’t find it anywhere; and the odd thing is no one seems to have heard of it.’ Late at night he went back to Oxford. ‘You idiot!’ exclaimed his wife; ‘why, it was the Green Man, Dulwich, you had to go to.’ ”

  3 (Sprinkling salt over wine spilled on a linen tablecloth is said to prevent a stain.)

  At dinner one day, Dr. Spooner accidentally upset the salt cellar on the clean white linen tablecloth. Without a moment’s hesitation, he reached for his wine glass and poured a few drops of claret over the spilled salt.

  4 He once stopped a student in the street, asking him, “Was it you or your dear brother who was killed in the war?”

  SPURGEON, Charles Haddon (1834–92), British Baptist minister.

  1 When Spurgeon was involved in one of the many controversies that marked his career, a friend remarked jocularly, “I hear you are in hot water again.”

  “I’m not the one in hot water,” retorted Spurgeon. “The other fellows are. I’m the man who makes the water boil.”

  2 “Oh, Mr. Spurgeon, that was wonderful!” cried an admirer after one of Spurgeon’s sermons.

  “Yes, madam — so the devil whispered into my ear as I came down the steps of the pulpit.”

  STAËL, Anne Louise Germaine, Baronne de (1766–1817), French writer.

  1 In 1797 Napoleon still seemed to Mme de Staël the epitome of the hero who would bring peace and sanity back to France. She pursued and flattered him, but he eluded her attentions whenever possible. On one occasion she called at his house, demanding to be admitted at once to Napoleon’s presence. The butler explained that that was impossible since the general was in his bathtub. “No matter!” Mme de Staël cried. “Genius has no sex!”

  2 In 1803 Mme de Staël published her feminist novel Delphine, in which she herself appears, flimsily concealed, as the heroine. The opinions and character of Talleyrand are embodied in the fictional figure of the book’s villainess, Mme de Vernon. When Talleyrand next saw Mme de Staël, he greeted her with the words: “They tell me we are both of us in your novel, in the disguise of women.”

  3 Mme de Staël’s officiousness could be a trial even to her friends. Talleyrand remarked that she was such a good friend that she would throw all her acquaintances into the water for the pleasure of fishing them out again.

  4 Mme de Staël told the story of how she and the beautiful Mme Récamier were seated at dinner on either side of a young fop, who announced, “Here I am between wit and beauty.”

  “Quite so,” said Mme de Staël, “and without possessing either.”

  5 Told by Napoleon that it was not fitting for a woman to take an interest in politics, Madame de Staël retorted, “In a country where women have been decapitated, it is only natural for other women to ask ‘Why?’”

  STAFFORD, Jean (1915–79), US writer.

  1 An old cowhand in Colorado, learning that Jean Stafford was a writer, observed, “That’s real nice work, Jean. It’s something you can do in the shade.”

  STALIN, Joseph [Iosif Dzhugashvili] (1879–1953), Russian leader.

  1 Lady Astor was one of a group of eminent English visitors to Russia in 1931. Never one to mince her words, she asked Stalin, “How long are you going to go on killing people?”

  “As long as it’s necessary,” replied Stalin.

  2 At the Teheran conference Churchill had argued that opening a second front in France would result in the unnecessary death of tens of thousands of soldiers. Replied Stalin, “When one man dies it is a tragedy. When thousands die it is a statistic.”

  3 During the 1945 conference at Yalta in the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill and the British delegation were housed in the Alubka palace. On the grounds was a marble statue of a dozing lion, its head resting on its front paws, to which Churchill took a great liking. As he explained to Stalin, “It’s so like me.” He added that he understood there was a Russian tradition of presenting the best things in the country to important visitors. “Yes, indeed,” responded Stalin. “The best thing we have in Russia now is socialism.” The lion stayed where it was.

  STANLEY, Sir Henry Morton (1841–1904), British explorer and journalist.

  1 (Stanley, encouraged by rumors of a white man on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, reached Ujiji on November 10, 1871.)

  “As I advanced slowly towards him, I noticed he was pale, looked wearied, had a gray beard, wore a bluish cap with a faded gold band round it, had on a red-sleeved waistcoat and a pair of gray tweed trousers. I would have run to him, only I was a coward in the presence of the mob — would have embraced him, only, he being an Englishman, I did not know how he would receive me. So I did what cowardice and false pride suggested was the best thing — walked deliberately up to him, took off my hat and said, ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’ ‘Yes,’ said he with a kind smile, lifting his cap slightly. I replaced my hat on my head, and he puts on his cap, and we both grasp hands, and I then say aloud — ‘I thank God, Doctor, I have been permitted to see you.’ He answered, ‘I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you.’”

  STANTON, Charles E. (1859–1933), US colonel.

  1 On the Fourth of July 1917 the American Expeditionary Forces, newly arrived in Europe to fight in World War I, sent a contingent to visit the grave of Lafayette in Paris. General Pershing asked Colonel Stanton to make a speech on behalf of the A. E. F. Stanton made the memorably simple announcement: “Lafayette, we are here!”

  STANTON, Elizabeth Cady (1815–1902), US reformer and campaigner for women’s rights.

  1 At a women’s rights convention in Rochester, a married clergyman rebuked Mrs. Stanton for speaking in public. “The apostle Paul enjoined silence upon women,” he said. “Why don’t you mind him?” “The apostle Paul also enjoined celibacy upon the clergy,” retorted Mrs. Stanton. “Why don’t you mind him?”

  STARK, John (1728–1822), US general.

  1 On August 16, 1777, Stark’s men faced two detachments of Burgoyne’s troops at Bennington, Vermont. Before the battle Stark made an impassioned appeal to his men’s pride and courage. “Yonder are the Hessians. They were bought for seven pounds and ten-pence a man. Are you wor
th more? Prove it. Tonight the American flag floats from yonder hill or Molly Stark sleeps a widow!”

  STEELE, Sir Richard (1672–1729), British dramatist and essay writer.

  1 Steele was frequently in debt. A group of friends invited to dine at his house one day were therefore astonished to see the number of servants who attended them at dinner. After dinner a guest inquired how it was that Steele could afford such a lavish establishment. Steele explained that the attendants were in fact bailiffs, who were in the house on their official business. As he could not get rid of them, he had made the best of the situation by dressing them up in servants’ liveries, and stationing them around his dining room. His guests were so amused that they pooled their money to pay Steele’s debts and rid him of the bailiffs.

  STEFFENS, Lincoln (1866–1936), US journalist.

  1 When Steffens visited Russia in 1919, he was able to observe the Bolshevik revolution at first hand. On his return he made the famous statement: “I have seen the future, and it works.”

  STEIN, Gertrude (1874–1946), US expatriate writer of experimental prose.

  1 Stein appeared on a nationwide radio show, arranged by her publisher Bennett Cerf to introduce her writing to a wider audience. In welcoming her, Cerf announced that he was proud to be her publisher but, in truth, he had never really understood her work at all. Stein responded instantly, “I’ve always told you, Bennett, you’re a nice boy but you’re rather stupid.”

  2 In 1929 Gertrude Stein was invited to lecture at Oxford. She delivered a well-argued address in her customary style. Her lucidity and platform presence confounded those who had mainly come to jeer, although there was some laughter when she said in the course of her lecture, “Everything is the same and everything is different.” At the end two hecklers jumped to their feet in different parts of the lecture hall and fired the same question at her: “Miss Stein, if everything is the same, how can everything be different?” Miss Stein replied, “Consider, the two of you, you jump up one after the other, that is the same thing and surely you admit that the two of you are always different.”

  3 (Ernest Hemingway describes the probable origin of a famous phrase.)

  “She had some ignition trouble with the old Model T Ford she then drove and the young man who worked in the garage and had served in the last year of the war had not been adept, or perhaps had not broken the priority of other vehicles, in repairing Miss Stein’s Ford. Anyway, he had not been sérieux and had been corrected severely by the patron of the garage after Miss Stein’s protest. The patron had said to him, ‘You are all a génération perdue.‘

  “ ‘That’s what you are. That’s what you all are,’ Miss Stein said. ‘All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.’ ”

  4 Stein once remarked to Ernest Hemingway that his soul was 90 percent Rotarian. “Couldn’t you make it eighty percent?” asked Hemingway. “No,” said Stein, “I can’t.”

  5 A friend asked Gertrude Stein what it was that writers most wanted. “Praise, praise, praise,” she replied, laughing.

  6 Gertrude Stein had a good opinion of herself, which gave rise to a number of pronouncements recorded by her contemporaries. She told the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz that he knew very little about English literature. “Besides Shakespeare and me, who do you think there is?” she said.

  7 One of the few people who refused to be overawed by Miss Stein’s astounding flow of rhetoric was Mortimer Adler, the philosopher, educator, and author of How to Read a Book. He and Gertrude got into a violent argument one evening. Alice B. Toklas, trembling on the outskirts of the battlefield, was heard to remark, “Dear me! Gertrude is saying some things tonight that she won’t understand herself for six months.”

  8 The poet William Carlos Williams visited her one day, upon which she showed him a huge cabinet full of her unpublished manuscripts. She described each one, reading aloud its title, then asked him what he would do if all of the manuscripts were his. “I should probably select what I thought were the best and throw the rest into the fire,” responded Williams. After a brief and shocked silence, Stein said stiffly, “No doubt. But then writing is not, of course, your métier.”

  9 Picasso once read a poem he had written aloud at a gathering at Stein’s house, saying that if he applied his energies to writing as he did to painting, he could become a great poet. After he had finished reading, he awaited Stein’s response. After a pause, she said, “Pablo, go home and paint.”

  10 When Gertrude Stein was dying of cancer, she turned to Alice B. Toklas and murmured, “What is the answer?” Miss Toklas made no reply. Miss Stein nodded and went on, “In that case, what is the question?”

  11 The American composer and writer Ned Rorem made his first visit to Alice B. Toklas’s home after Gertrude Stein’s death. He noticed on the wall two remarkable Picassos with which he was not familiar. He expressed his admiration. Miss Toklas said thoughtfully, “Yes, Gertrude always used to say: if the house were on fire and I could only take one picture, it would be those two.”

  STEINBECK, John (1902–68), US novelist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

  1 Steinbeck in his earlier days genuinely disliked personal publicity. After years of penury and unrewarded labor, he finally achieved success with Tortilla Flat and so could not entirely escape interviewers. He was enraged when the journalist Ella Winter, in a profile of him, did not abide by his request that he be judged by his work, not his personality. “What did I say that was so personal?” asked Miss Winter. “You mentioned that I had blue eyes,” he replied.

  2 Five thousand copies of Steinbeck’s novel The Wayward Bus were destroyed by fire when the truck carrying them from the bindery was involved in a collision. The cause of the accident was a wayward bus, traveling on the wrong side of the road.

  3 In 1965 Steinbeck passed through San Francisco on an automobile journey with his poodle, Charlie. He sat at a sidewalk café with advertising executive Howard Gossage and remarked, “Yesterday in Muir Woods Charlie lifted his leg on a tree that was fifty feet across, a hundred feet high, and a thousand years old. What’s left in life for that dog after that supreme moment?” Gossage reflected a moment and then said, with his slight stammer, “W-w-well, he could always t-t-teach.”

  4 During a conversation about women, a conceited young man remarked derisively, “Women? They’re a dime a dozen.”

  “Sure, women are a dime a dozen,” agreed Steinbeck. “It’s when you cut the number down to one that it gets expensive.”

  5 During his later years, when he was famous, his wife, Elaine, brought home a paperback book entitled John Steinbeck, by Frank William Watt. Steinbeck, who often felt he had been misinterpreted by many of the commentators on his life and work, read it with great interest. Finished, he remarked, “This book doesn’t seem to be about me, but it’s pretty interesting about somebody.”

  STEINBERG, William (1899–1978), US conductor, born in Germany.

  1 With time William Steinberg became totally bald. Relating an episode in his musical career, he once told his audience, “And there I was tearing my hair.” Then he paused, gripped his bare skull, and added, “What am I saying?”

  STEINBRENNER, George (1930–), US baseball executive.

  1 The owner of the New York Yankees since 1973, when he bought the team from CBS for $10 million, Steinbrenner was the ultimate hands-on boss, firing at will and often causing havoc in the clubhouse. At one point in the early 1980s the Yankees were losing game after game, and Steinbrenner flew from city to city in a panic, watching them play and trying to devise new strategies for victory. One player noted, “The more we lose, the more often Steinbrenner will fly in. And the more he flies, the better chance there is of a plane crashing.”

  2 One year Steinbrenner released star player Reggie Jackson, “Mr. October,” from the team. In 1982 Jackson returned to Yankee Stadium as a member of the Angels. After he hit a huge home run the crowd went wild, hurling abuse at Steinbrenner. After the ga
me Jackson was in the ground-floor lobby of the clubhouse when the elevator doors opened, revealing Steinbrenner standing inside. They looked at each other, and the doors closed. After a moment the doors opened again, and again they looked at each other. As Steinbrenner mumbled something about a malfunctioning elevator, Jackson quietly walked away, not wishing to further embarrass his former boss.

  3 At the Fiftieth Anniversary All-Star game in Chicago, which had been the site of the first All-Star game, White Sox president Jerry Reinsdorf was fined $500 for saying of his fellow owner Steinbrenner, “How do you know when he’s lying? His lips are moving.”

  4 Discussing the personalities of Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson while drinking in a bar with some journalists, Billy Martin — who had been fired three times by the tempestuous Yankees owner — said, “They deserve each other. One’s a born liar and the other’s convicted.”

  STEINMETZ, Charles Proteus (1865–1923), US electrical engineer.

  1 When “the Electrical Wizard” was working at General Electric, he was annoyed to find in his office a sign reading NO SMOKING. Steinmetz left a note reading NO SMOKING — NO STEINMETZ. After that it was decided that the rule should not be applied to him.

  2 After retiring, Steinmetz was recalled by General Electric to try to locate a breakdown in a complex system of machines. The cause of the breakdown baffled all GE’s experts. Steinmetz spent some time walking around and testing the various parts of the machine complex. Finally, he took out of his pocket a piece of chalk and marked an X on a particular part of one machine. The GE people disassembled the machine, discovering to their amazement that the defect lay precisely where Steinmetz’s chalk mark was located.