Maxim Gorky was the grandson of a Volga boatman.
A last castrato could still be heard in the Sistine Chapel choir into the second decade of the twentieth century.
The world goeth fast from bad to worse, said John Gower. Ca. 1375.
Richard Wagner’s pink underwear.
William Blake, at thirty, witnessed the death from consumption of his younger brother Robert—
And insisted he had seen Robert’s soul rising through the ceiling and clapping its hands for joy.
Maurice Utrillo was in and out of insane asylums repeatedly, commencing as early as at eighteen.
A mass of soapsuds and whitewash, said a critic of a Turner painting of a storm at sea.
I wonder what they think the sea’s like, said Turner.
Shelley wrote most of Prometheus Unbound perched high up on the overgrown ruins of the Baths of Caracalla.
One hundred and seventy years too early to have found himself in an ideal seat for the first concert of the Three Tenors.
Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.
As is already more than self-evident.
I am I because my little dog knows me.
Said Gertrude Stein.
Dope makes me come out all over in spots.
Allen Ginsberg says Dame Edith Sitwell said.
The first two publishers to whom Anne Frank’s father submitted her diary — turned it down.
Bysshe, everyone knew him as.
Momentarily startled to note that Luther’s wife was an ex-nun.
Then again recollecting that Luther in turn was an ex-monk.
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were held in such esteem that in the century after their deaths Athens maintained official versions of their plays on file — and made it contrary to law to alter a single word in new productions.
Victor Hugo could never get past page four of Le Rouge et le Noir.
As he grew older, W. H. Auden was known for living in extraordinary filth. His own brother acknowledged that he frequently urinated in his kitchen sink.
He is the dirtiest man I have ever liked, Stravinsky said of him.
Was it Menander who announced that his new play was finished — all he had to do was write it?
A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel.
This presumably by now self-evident also.
The Egyptians appear never in their history to have enjoyed one day of freedom.
Said Josephus, ca. 95 AD.
Beguiled by the romance of Gauguin’s removal to Tahiti.
Until remembering that the man deserted a wife and four young children at home.
I suppose all my books are gone.
Some, Dilly said. We had to.
Boccaccio’s last years were spent in enervating poverty.
In his will, Petrarch left him his own best heavy coat with which to confront the Tuscan winters.
Bach was once involved in a brawl in which he precipitously drew his sword.
Handel, the same. Though in both instances sensibleness prevailed.
Thomas Gainsborough, while an art student in London:
Deeply read in petticoats I am.
Dissection of corpses was not only illegal in Renaissance Florence, but punishable by death.
Leonardo managed to cleave into some thirty-odd nonetheless.
In his youth, Michelangelo performed some of his with a kitchen knife and household scissors.
Leonardo was also assiduous in attending executions — presumably to study the muscular contortions of the hanged.
Christopher Marlowe died at twenty-nine, leaving behind four younger sisters in Canterbury. All four probably had to make their mark instead of writing their name when signing a document.
The Captain Thomas Hardy — a relative — who was in command of Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar.
The Marshal Ludwig Wittgenstein — not related — who was the youngest of the opposition commanders during Napoleon’s Russian campaign.
How many things there are in this world that I do not want.
Said Socrates, strolling through a marketplace in Athens.
There was no English translation of Oedipus Rex until a full century after the death of Shakespeare.
Sydney, Australia, Nellie Melba died in.
A mention of Henry David Thoreau in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s diary: Mr. Thorow.
Ugly as sin, the same entry calls him.
T. S. Eliot was afraid of cows.
Actually, in addition to not knowing where things might be headed, Author has to wonder whether his very typewriter will get there in the process. His less and less dependable forty-plus-year-old manual portable.
Particularly with the once ubiquitous neighborhood repair shop seeming no longer to exist.
Samuel Johnson was forced to drop out of Oxford because his family could not manage the costs.
And became Doctor Johnson only at sixty-four when he was granted an honorary degree.
Haydn’s Oxford Symphony.
After an honorary degree of his own.
Filippo Lippi’s reputation as a womanizer. To the extent that Cosimo de’ Medici once had him locked in, in an effort to keep him at his pigments.
The legend that Goya, at twenty-four, in Rome, broke into a convent and abducted a nun.
Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were schoolboys together.
In later years, as a government clerk, Lamb stole as many as two hundred steel pens for Coleridge’s use.
Donatello. Brunelleschi. Uccello. Michelozzo. Antonio Pollaiuolo.
All of whom at one time or another assisted Lorenzo Ghiberti in designing or casting his doors for the Florence Baptistery
One London newspaper ran an actual news-style obituary when John Galsworthy killed off Soames Forsyte late in The Forsyte Saga.
Hannah Pritchard, the finest tragic actress of the eighteenth century — who allegedly never read a book.
An inspired idiot, Johnson called her.
Mr. Eliot’s work is no doubt brilliant, but it is not exactly the kind of material we care to add to our list.
Said the British publisher John Lane of a submission—after Eliot had published Prufrock.
The publisher did not care to add brilliant material to his list.
Ingram Frizer, who stabbed Marlowe, pleaded self-defense and went unpunished.
Superb administrative talent, Kafka’s superiors at the insurance company said he possessed.
Brahms so respected Dvořák as a colleague that he several times willingly assumed the chore of reading proofs of his scores for him.
Typewriter ribbons, too, Author finds it harder and harder to locate.
And typing erasers.
Did El Greco use hashish?