Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Read, Volume II

The private conduct of literature's great names, continued — the debtors, deserters, duelists, and one lobster-walker whose genius excused, in their own minds, absolutely everything.

When we published the first volume of this series, we worried the vein might be thin. We need not have. The archive of literary misbehavior is effectively bottomless, because the same imagination that produces a great novel is fully capable of producing a great excuse — and the men below wrote both, daily, for decades. Volume II is offered in the same raconteur's spirit as the first: the behavior is indefensible, and it is a pleasure to report. What follows is documented — from court records, memoirs, police files, and in one case the shot-through plumbing invoice of the Paris Ritz.

Six Rounds Into the Plumbing — The Paris Ritz, 1945

Ernest Hemingway wished to marry Mary Welsh, war correspondent. Mary Welsh was inconveniently married to Noel Monks, war correspondent, who was slow with the divorce. Hemingway's solution was editorial: he dropped Monks's photograph into the toilet of his room at the Ritz and fired six rounds from a German machine pistol into it, destroying the porcelain and flooding the floor below. The divorce came through that August; the Ritz, presumably, sent a bill.

The verdict: The author of the Iceberg Theory — seven-eighths of everything below the surface — chose, in his private grief, the one method guaranteed to put everything on it.

The Poverty of Others — Yasnaya Polyana, 1910

In old age, Leo Tolstoy resolved to renounce his estate, his copyrights, and his worldly goods, in accordance with his doctrine of holy poverty. His wife Sofia, who had borne him thirteen children and copied War and Peace by hand seven times, observed that the poverty being renounced was largely hers. After years of warfare over the will, the eighty-two-year-old apostle of non-resistance fled his own house by night train and died days later in the stationmaster's cottage at Astapovo, with Sofia kept from his bedside until nearly the end.

The verdict: He wanted to be poor the way rich men want to be thin: sincerely, totally, and at somebody else's table.

The Domestic Economy of Karl Marx — London, 1851

The author of Capital kept a servant, Helene Demuth, for some forty years, and solved the problem of her wages by not paying any. She cooked, cleaned, raised the children, and pawned her own possessions to float the household — an arrangement the master of the house might, in another man's home, have called something sharper than thrift. She also bore Marx a son, Freddy, whom he never acknowledged; the paternity was assigned to Engels, who confessed the truth only on his deathbed.

The verdict: History's greatest theorist of unpaid surplus labor ran the control experiment in his own kitchen, and the results confirmed the thesis.

The Back Door of Monsieur de Balzac — Paris, 1830s–1840s

Honoré de Balzac wrote perhaps ninety novels, chiefly because he owed money on all of them. He held debts most of his adult life, and dodged his creditors with the tradecraft of a spy: false names, borrowed apartments, and a private exit for slipping out the back as the dunners knocked at the front. The creditors, who could also read plots, eventually learned to knock at the back. He would sometimes take an advance on a book to pay the debts of the previous book, a financial instrument now used by entire governments.

The verdict: He invented the modern realist novel and could not make his own accounts balance in it — proof that he understood his subject completely.

The Poet Placed Under Adult Supervision — Paris, 1844

Charles Baudelaire inherited a comfortable fortune at twenty-one and spent roughly half of it in about two years, on clothes, art, opium, and the general project of being Baudelaire. His scandalized family obtained a conseil judiciaire — a legal guardian who controlled his money and issued him an allowance like a schoolboy's. He was twenty-three. The arrangement lasted the rest of his life, and the greatest French poet of the century spent four decades writing begging letters to his own trustee.

The verdict: France examined the author of Les Fleurs du mal and reached the correct verdict a full year before he wrote any of it.

Reading for His Life — Hoxton Fields, London, 1598

Ben Jonson — playwright, bricklayer's stepson, soldier, and standing argument against all four — killed the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel and was tried for murder. He escaped the gallows by an ancient loophole: benefit of clergy, which spared any man who could read a Latin verse from the Psalms. Jonson, being the most learned poet in England, read it. He was branded on the thumb so the trick could not be used twice, and returned to the theater, where his colleagues could inspect the mark nightly.

The verdict: The only man in history whose classical education saved his life at the literal, judicial level — and the lesson he drew from it was to keep dueling.

The Novel Written Against the Clock — St. Petersburg, 1866

To cover gambling debts, Dostoevsky signed a contract with the publisher Stellovsky that no character in Dostoevsky would have been stupid enough to sign: a new novel by November 1, or Stellovsky acquired the rights to everything he ever wrote, for nine years, for nothing. With twenty-six days left and no novel, he hired a young stenographer, Anna Snitkina, and dictated The Gambler — a novel about a man destroyed by roulette, composed at dictation speed by a man destroyed by roulette. He made the deadline and married the stenographer.

The verdict: He beat the house exactly once in his life, and the winnings were a wife and a masterpiece — a return the roulette table never offered.

Two Shots in Brussels — Brussels, 1873

The poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud conducted the most destructive love affair in French letters — absinthe, abandonment, flight across three countries, Verlaine's wife and infant son left behind. When Rimbaud finally moved to leave him, Verlaine, drunk since morning, bought a revolver and fired twice, hitting the nineteen-year-old in the wrist. He got two years in a Belgian prison, where he reread his Catholic catechism and wrote some of his best poems — a rehabilitation that lasted until approximately his release.

The verdict: French poetry's great lesson in symbolism: the man who shot the future in the wrist, and merely winged it.

The Philosopher and the Seamstress — Berlin, 1821

Arthur Schopenhauer, philosophy's great authority on the misery of existence, was disturbed by three women chatting on the landing outside his rooms. He responded by hurling one of them, a forty-seven-year-old seamstress named Caroline Marquet, down the stairs. The courts, unmoved by pessimism as a defense, ordered him to pay her sixty thalers a year for the rest of her life. She lived another twenty years. On receiving her death certificate, he wrote across it: 'Obit anus, abit onus' — the old woman dies, the burden lifts.

The verdict: He spent two decades funding the empirical proof of his own philosophy: that other people are, in fact, a recurring cost.

The Lobster of the Palais-Royal — Paris, 1830s

The poet Gérard de Nerval, as his friend Théophile Gautier told it, kept a pet lobster named Thibault and walked it through the gardens of the Palais-Royal on a blue silk ribbon. Challenged, Nerval is said to have asked why a lobster should be more ridiculous than a dog or a cat, noting that lobsters are peaceable, serious creatures who know the secrets of the sea and do not bark. The story may be embroidered — Gautier was a professional embroiderer — but Nerval later hanged himself from a Paris grating with what he called the Queen of Sheba's garter, so the baseline was never sanity.

The verdict: The one entry in this collection where the behavior harmed nobody, cost nothing, and improved a public park — which may be why it is the one everyone calls mad.

The Conscience of Victorian England — London, 1858

Charles Dickens spent a career flogging Victorian society for its hypocrisy and heartlessness, then produced the century's finest specimen of both. At forty-five he took up with the eighteen-year-old actress Ellen Ternan and kept her, in guarded houses under guarded names, until his death. His wife Catherine — twenty-two years and ten children into the marriage — was separated from her children and publicly disparaged: Dickens printed a statement about the separation in his own magazine, let a crueler letter reach the press, insinuated to their friends that she was an unfit and unloved mother, and, recent scholarship suggests, sounded out having her declared mad. Whether Ternan bore him a child remains disputed; the cruelty to Catherine is documented in his own hand.

The verdict: He asked a nation to weep for Little Nell while teaching it, by personal example, precisely how the workhouse board thought.

The Enemy Above the Desk — Grimstad and Kristiania, 1846–1906

Henrik Ibsen, the great anatomist of respectable families with buried secrets, was at eighteen an apothecary's apprentice who fathered a son on the household maid, Else Sophie Jensdatter, ten years his senior. He paid the legally required support, at a distance, and never once in his life met the boy. The dramatist of domestic reckonings declined, for sixty years, to attend his own. In old age, famous and impenetrably vain, he hung a portrait of August Strindberg — a man he detested and who detested him — over his writing desk, explaining that he could not write except under the eyes of his mortal enemy.

The verdict: Every Ibsen play is a locked room where the past comes to collect; he wrote them all with his own creditor staring down from the wall, and the door at Grimstad still shut.

The Most Charming Monster in Europe — London and Missolonghi, 1812–1824

Lord Byron is the collection's great puzzle: a man of documented and omnivorous sexual dangerousness — the wreckage of Caroline Lamb, the ruin of his marriage in a single year, and the scandal London wholly believed, that his half-sister Augusta's daughter Medora was his own — who was nonetheless, by every account including his enemies', the most likeable man in any room he entered. When England finally closed its doors, he took the performance abroad, and ended it at thirty-six at Missolonghi, having poured his fortune and finally his life into Greek independence. His enemies said he did even that for the theater of it. The Greeks, who got the money and the corpse, declined to quibble.

The verdict: Mad, bad, and dangerous to know — the one entry whose epitaph was written in advance, by a woman who knew, and who came back anyway.

The Necessity of Percy Shelley — Oxford and the Serpentine, 1811–1816

At Oxford, the nineteen-year-old Shelley circulated a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism, mailing copies to every bishop; offered the chance to quietly disavow it, he refused on principle and was expelled, to his family's lasting horror — a genius too proud to withdraw a pamphlet, though not too principled to accept his father's allowance afterward. At twenty-one, already married to a pregnant nineteen-year-old, he ran off with sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin; his abandoned wife Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine two years later, and Shelley married Mary within the month — then pressed the doctrine of free love upon her, urging her toward his friend Hogg, while their infant children died on the itinerant road behind him.

The verdict: He believed property was theft, marriage was tyranny, and consequences were for other people — and on the third point, at least, the biography confirms the philosophy.

Turned Back by the Jellyfish — The Welsh coast, 1925

A young Evelyn Waugh, wretched after a failed teaching post and a rejected manuscript, resolved on suicide and swam out to sea to drown — leaving his clothes on the beach with a farewell note in Greek. Some distance out, he swam into a shoal of jellyfish. Stung repeatedly, the future master of English satire reconsidered the whole enterprise, turned around, swam back, dressed, and tore up the note. He reported the episode himself, decades later, with the dryness it deserved.

The verdict: Despair composed the note in Greek; a jellyfish delivered the rebuttal in the vernacular, and won.