Which author ate two red tulips?
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If you know which author was driven to eat two red tulips to break up a pontification on poetry and music by Yeats, you’ll do well in this literary anecdote quiz from the Oxford University Press blog.
The questions were pulled from The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, now out in paperback. It may not improve literary scholarship to know that Chaucer was fined two shillings for striking a Franciscan friar, but it is kind of amusing to picture the author brawling with a man in a long brown robe. Or to think of Dylan Thomas (who was described, in ‘The Life of Dylan Thomas,’ as having ‘a reputation as a thief’) getting caught trying to leave a friend’s house with her sewing machine under his arm. Or to imagine that you were in Rome in 1948, as a young Gore Vidal bragged that in summer his hair went ‘straw blond,’ adding, ‘my body gets the color of old mahogany: It’s sensational.’
Much of the book’s dish is on classic British authors. And many of the juicy bits about 20th century authors come from interviews in the Paris Review, which you can find complete versions of in three anthologies. The books are the Paris Review Interviews I, II and III; the newest one hit shelves last month. In those interviews, writers may share gossip about other writers; they also display, in varying measure, vulnerability and bluster, and are worth reading in full.
As for who ate the tulips? The answer is after the jump.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Ezra Pound was the tulip-eater: ‘A group went to the Old Cheshire Cheese, where Yeats held forth at length on the ways of bringing music and poetry together. Pound sought attention by eating two red tulips.’ From William Van O’Connor’s ‘Ezra Pound,’ 1963.
