'Mistaken by Strangers for Ill-Nature'

I’ve only just learned that Dr. Johnson in his great Dictionary defined “anecdote,” this blog’s foundational word, as “something yet unpublished; secret history.” Johnson confirms my hunch that anecdotes – the stories we tell each other, whether artful or artless – are more than time-wasters. They entertain us, serve to bring us together, and relate the private histories that otherwise go unrecorded. In a fractured age, with division valued over commonality, anecdotes remain a basic human hunger. They are in practice what Johnson’s friend Edmund Burke described in the abstract: “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.” Those who exchange anecdotes are little platoons.

I’ve also just discovered a work first published in England in 1820 and assembled by the clergyman Joseph Spence (1699-1768): Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men: Collected from Conversation, informally referred to as Spence’s Anecdotes. In the eighteenth century, the book’s contents were widely known and cited by, among others, Dr. Johnson, but only published as a book posthumously. I’m browsing in the two-volume edition Oxford University Press brought out in 1966.

Spence was a friend of Alexander Pope, and the first section of the book is devoted to him. That Pope and Swift, two of the supreme poets in the language, should be friends, is odds-defyingly remarkable. Here’s an anecdote from 1735 attributed by Spence to Pope: “That picture of Dr. Swift is very like him. Though his face has a look of dullness in it, he has very particular eyes: they are quite azure as the heavens, and there’s a very uncommon archness in them.”

That confirms, anecdotally, what we already knew about Swift, as does this: “Dr. Swift has an odd, blunt way that is mistaken by strangers for ill-nature. ’Tis so odd that’s there’s no describing it but by facts.” And this, which will not surprise readers of Gulliver’s Travels and A Tale of a Tub, and serves to distinguish Pope’s sensibilities from Swift’s: “Dr. Swift was a great reader and admirer of Rabelais, and used sometimes to scold me [Pope] for not liking him enough. Indeed there were so many things in his works in which I could not see any manner of meaning driven at, that I could never read him over with patience.”  

One of my favorite poems is Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower,” written in 1710. Here’s a little insight into its composition: “Among the imitations in Pope’s and Swift’s Miscellanies [1727], that of the ‘City Shower’ was designed by Swift to imitate Virgil’s Georgic style. ‘The Alley,’ in imitation of Spenser, was written by Mr. Pope, with a line or two of Mr. [John] Gay’s in it, and the imitation of Chaucer was wholly by Mr. Pope.”

   

To modify Gertrude Stein’s self-evident diktat, anecdotes may not be literature but they are interesting, amusing and often revealing. In The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell writes: “Clearly, there are some intersections of literature with life that we have taken too little notice of.” That’s where anecdotes come in.