SECRET LIVES OF THE GREAT AUTHORS

If you know someone who's in the hospital, or who's about to take a long flight somewhere, you could do worse than give them one of the books you see here. Nothing relieves boredom like gossip, and no gossip is more satisfying than gossip about the writers and artists who are held up as good examples to the rest of us.

I'm in a funk right now...no special reason, it just happens once in a while...and I'm reading "Secret Lives of Great Writers" to cheer myself up. I'm happy to report that it's working. Knowing that J.D. Salinger drank his own urine, and that Sylvia Plath had bi-polar disorder somehow makes me feel better, why I don't know.

Plath sounds like a monster. Her father was vilified in her famous poem "Daddy," but there's no evidence that he was anything worse than a little distant. He was a respected professor and etymologist, and author of a book called "Bumblebees and Their Ways." He died when Sylvia was only eight. She was so broken up over it at the time that she vowed never to speak to God again.

The story of how she met her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, is hilarious. Plath says she met him at a student party. Ted was a swaggering, macho-kind of guy and after only a few minutes of conversation he kissed her on the mouth and ripped off her hair band in a savage display of desire. Poor Ted was probably feeling good about himself at that point, but little did he know that he had one of the world's foremost man-haters in his arms.  She liked him well enough, but not to be outdone, she "bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face." Their stormy marriage miraculously lasted seven years.

T. S. Elliot is described as a prankster who made liberal use of whoopee cushions and exploding cigars. Tolkien was a famously bad driver who frequently drove in the wrong direction on one-way streets. He'd attempt to ram other vehicles and believed that you could "Charge 'em and they scatter."

Toward the end of his life Sartre recanted virtually the entire foundation of his philosophy.  He said, " I talked about it [despair] because it was being talked about; it was fashionable.....I've never experienced despair, nor seen it as a quality that could be mine." De Beauvoir disavowed her old lover's admission, calling it "the senile act of a turncoat."

Emily Dickinson was so reclusive that she forced doctors to examine her from behind a closed door. William Burroughs shot his wife while playing a game of William Tell.

Is all this true? I don't know, but these stories are making me well again.