Futility Closet

In his 1968 novel Enderby Outside, Anthony Burgess contrived to use the word onions four times in a row:

Then, instead of expensive mouthwash, he had breathed on Hogg-Enderby, bafflingly (for no banquet would serve, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions. ‘Onions,’ said Hogg.

Burgess could take playfulness to excess — the first volume of the Enderby quartet got him into a bit of trouble.

For their investiture as poet laureate, Wordsworth and Tennyson both borrowed the same suit from Samuel Rogers.

Unfortunately, Rogers was a small man. When Tennyson had trouble fitting into the suit, he asked a servant how Wordsworth had fared. “They had great difficulty in getting him into them,” the man replied.

Thackeray was at a St. Louis dinner, when one waiter said to another: ‘That is the celebrated Mr. Thackeray.’ ‘What’s he done?’ said the other. ‘Blessed if I know,’ was the answer.

– James Baird McClure, ed., Entertaining Anecdotes From Every Available Source, 1879

Read the first letter of each sentence of the preface of Transport Phenomena, a 1960 chemical engineering textbook by Robert Bird, Warren Stewart, and Edwin Lightfoot, and you’ll discover the message THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO O.A. HOUGEN.

In the second edition, the initial letters of successive paragraphs spell the word WELCOME.

In the afterword, they spell ON WISCONSIN.

In 1917, William George Jordan grew weary of Gustave Simonson, a fellow member of the Authors Club of New York. Apparently Simonson was overbearing and pedantic, convinced that he knew everything worth knowing about Russian literature. Exasperated, Jordan one day asked his opinion of Vyodne, a nonexistent 1868 novel by the nonexistent Russian author Feodor Larrovitch. Simonson said he had never heard of them.

This was all Jordan needed. He enlisted another club member to lecture on Larrovitch and to host a dinner in his honor, complete with eulogies and poetry readings. (Above are a portrait of Larrovitch and the club’s memorial, which includes a page from “Crasny Baba” and pressed flowers from the author’s grave at Yalta.)

All this was reported in the press, where Jordan also arranged for literary journalists to laud Larrovitch vaguely. In 1918 the conspirators even published a book, Feodor Vladimir Larrovitch: An Appreciation of His Life and Works, which included literary assessments, letters, poems, and an essay by Titus Munson Coan recalling conversations with the great man. Apparently Simonson was convinced, for Larrovitch received an entry in the club’s annals.

In 1932 a Swedish sportswriter noticed that Larrovitch’s name had been spelled inconsistently in the faked documents. He published his doubts, word got back to New York, and the whole hoax came to light 15 years after Jordan had hatched it. How many similar hoaxes lie unexposed in our histories, when the perpetrators and their motives have been forgotten?

L. Frank Baum was 41 years old when he published his first book. In giving a copy to his sister, he included a personal inscription:

“When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children. For aside from my evident inability to do anything ‘great,’ I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-the-wisp which, when caught, is not worth the possession; but to please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one’s heart and brings its own reward.”

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz appeared three years later.

The book that Montgomery Carmichael published in 1902 seemed at first to be a straightforward biography:

The will of my friend Philip Walshe has put me in possession of a large and extraordinary collection of valuable MSS., and has at the same time laid upon me a task of no little delicacy and difficulty. These MSS. are the voluminous works of his father, the late Mr. John William Walshe, F.S.A., who died on the 2nd July 1900, aged sixty-three, at Assisi, in Umbria, where he had passed the latter half of his life. Mr. Walshe was well known to scholars as perhaps the greatest living authority on matters Franciscan: otherwise he had practically no fame. The busy world, at all events, knew him not.

“It takes some time to realize that this is all an elaborate piece of mystification,” wrote a Dial reviewer, “and to recall the fact that the name of Walshe does not figure in any actual list of Franciscan scholars, living or dead.”

The Life of John William Walshe is the detailed portrait of a man who never existed. Librarian Edmund Lester Pearson calls it “one of the most inexplicable examples of the literary hoax. … It contained not one atom of satire, it was not a parody, and so far as I, at least, could have discovered by internal evidence, it was what it purported to be: a sober and reverent biography of an Englishman dwelling in Italy, a devout member of the Church of Rome, and in particular an enthusiastic student and pious follower of St. Francis of Assisi.”

Carmichael was a member of the British consular service in Italy and the author of a number of European travel books. So far as I can tell, he never explained this work — he called it only “the story of a hidden life.”

• Dorothy Parker named Alexander Woollcott’s apartment “Wit’s End.”
• Can you look at something and imagine it at the same time?
• 36850 = (3⁶ + 8) × 50
• AGNOSTIC is an anagram of COASTING.
• “The errors of a man are what make him really lovable.” — Goethe

‘Twas gilbert. The kchesterton
Did locke and bennett in the reed.
All meredith was the nicholson,
And harrison outqueed.

Beware the see-enn-william, son,
The londonjack with call that’s wild.
Beware the gertroo datherton
And richardwashburnchild.

He took his brady blade in hand;
Long time the partridge foe he sought.
Then stood a time by the oppenheim
In deep mcnaughton thought.

In warwick deeping thought he stood–
He poised on edithwharton brink;
He cried, “Ohbernardshaw! I could
If basilking would kink.”

Rexbeach! rexbeach!–and each on each
O. Henry’s mantles ferber fell.
It was the same’s if henryjames
Had wally eaton well.

“And hast thou writ the greatest book!
Come to thy birmingham, my boy!
Oh, beresford way! Oh, holman day!”
He kiplinged in his joy.

‘Twas gilbert. The kchesterton
Did locke and bennett in the reed.
All meredith was the nicholson,
And harrison outqueed.

– Harry Persons Taber, in Carolyn Wells, The Book of Humorous Verse, 1920

‘The very worst line in Latin poetry’ was, according to Professor Tyrrell, achieved by Statius when he apostrophised the condition of childlessness as ‘to be avoided by every effort’ (Orbitas omni fugienda nisu).

– “A Study in Superlatives,” in Sir Edward Tyas Cook, Literary Recreations, 1918