C H A P T E R 1
09
Literary Eccentricities,
a.k.a. Portrait of the Artist as a Lunatic
James Joyce was nearly always seen wearing an eye patch,
which was
not
mere accessorizing: He suff ered from glau-
coma throughout adulthood and eventually went completely
blind. In fact, he dictated much of his last book,
Finnegan’s
Wake,
to his research assistant, Samuel
Waiting for Godot
Beckett.
✖ ✖ ✖
But Joyce sometimes wore fi ve wristwatches on one arm,
which
was
mere eccentric accessorizing. He also asked his
wife, Nora Barnacle, to sleep with another man so he could
understand the feeling of being cuckolded, which seems a bit
odd. (Nora declined.)
✖ ✖ ✖
Nineteenth-century French poet Charles-Pierre Baudelaire,
who besides being quirky was addicted to opium, once fa-
mously wrote, “If you would not be the martyred slave of
time, / Get drunk! . . .” He wasn’t kidding about making the
most of his time: In his house he kept a clock with no hands
that bore the inscription “It’s later than you think.” Inci-
dentally, the positively batty Baudelaire also happened
to own a pet bat, which he’d captured at (where else?) a
graveyard.
✖ ✖ ✖
Charles Dickens could not sleep unless his bed was aligned in
a north–south position. Also, he habitually touched certain
objects three times “for luck.”
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S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
✖ ✖ ✖
When he was 29, George Bernard Shaw lost his virginity to a
widow 15 years his senior. Apparently, it wasn’t all that good,
because thereafter Shaw rarely, if ever, had intimate physical
relationships—not even with his wife, to whom he was mar-
ried for 45 years.
✖ ✖ ✖
Although
Peter Pan
author J. M. Barrie did not like the taste of
brussels sprouts (as would befi t a boy who never grew up), he
often ordered them at restaurants. Why? “I cannot resist or-
dering them. Th
e words are so lovely to say.”
✖ ✖ ✖
“Little Mermaid” and “Th
umbelina” author Hans Christian
Andersen was so intensely afraid of being buried alive that
he left a note by his bed each night that read, “I only
appear
to
be dead.” Andersen was right
to feel anxiety around sleep-
ing, incidentally: In 1875, he
died as a result of injuries
sustained falling out of bed.
✖ ✖ ✖
Although Emily Dickinson was not quite the utter recluse that
she is often made out to be, she was unquestionably eccentric:
She wore white from head to toe, exclusively, for the last sev-
eral years of her life.
For much of his career, Graham
Greene wrote 500 words a day.
Exactly. No matter if he was in the
middle of
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