Witty banter for the bookish in ‘Anecdotes’

NO doubt Oxford University Press will never issue a volume of collected military anecdotes. Or anecdotes by engineers. Those straight-talking professions don’t lend themselves to the jab and thrust of witty observations and the all-too-often malicious put-down of a rival.

This sort of thing is what you expect of writers, though, a jealous clan, deeply unsure of themselves. So the reader opens “The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes,” edited by writer and critic John Gross, with a sense of hope. That anticipation is fully realized because Gross has collected some very good things for readers. Here is one of them:

James Joyce’s American friends Harry and Caresse Crosby published a book of excerpts of what was to become “Finnegans Wake.” They asked Constantin Brancusi to draw a portrait for the book’s frontispiece, but then they rejected it as not modernist enough. They asked for something more abstract, so Brancusi substituted a portrait that showed several lines and a spiral. Someone sent a copy of the book to Joyce’s father, who studied the image for a while and then remarked, “Jim has changed more than I thought.”

Gross also includes the long and glorious account of Winston Churchill’s confusion during the war over the identity of the writer “I. Berlin.” This referred to the brilliant Oxford don Isaiah Berlin, who was stationed in the British embassy in Washington, D.C., to report on the American wartime mood. Churchill much admired his dispatches, so the prime minister’s staff arranged for the two to meet at lunch when Berlin had returned to England. From the outset, it was a shaky occasion that reached its nadir when Churchill asked his guest what he was proudest of having written. “White Christmas,” Irving Berlin replied.

Evelyn Waugh appears disagreeably in character. During the war, the British government managed to get enough rare bananas for each child in the kingdom to have one. At lunch, Waugh’s three children watched as their father ate the family’s allotment. Of this, his son Auberon wrote: “It would be absurd to say that I never forgave him, but he was permanently marked down in my estimation from that moment, in ways which no amount of sexual transgression would have achieved.”

Some anecdotes hint at the man behind the mask. A.E. Housman, the Oxford professor of Latin a century ago, set young hearts afire with the verses from his “A Shropshire Lad.” Gross’ book gives us this subversive quotation from Percy Withers’ “A Buried Life”:

“He had written six of the poems before he set foot in Shropshire, but having decided on the title he felt he should pay the county a visit -- ‘to gain local color,’ he added with a laugh and a look of derision.”

Well-acquainted with the literary worlds of London and New York, Gross begins with Chaucer and takes readers up to the present, ending with J.K. Rowling. He has given us an agreeable and sometimes quite funny bookish companion.

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Anthony Day is a former editor of The Times editorial pages.