First Impressions of Authors
Lyle Larsen
First impressions are important, but the first impression one author has of another author can also be quite entertaining.
Having first met Charles Dickens in 1843, William Wordsworth was asked how he had liked the famous novelist. "Why, I am not much given to turn critic on people I meet," said Wordsworth, "but, as you ask me, I will candidly avow that I thought him a very talkative, vulgar young person,--but I dare say he may be very clever. Mind, I don't want to say a word against him, for I have never read a line he has written."
When asked in turn how he had liked Wordsworth, Dickens replied, "Like him? Not at all. He is a dreadful Old Ass."
Thomas Carlyle was not impressed on first meeting the essayist Charles Lamb. "Charles Lamb," he said, "is a ricketty creature in body and mind, sprawls about and walks as if his body consisted of four ill-conditioned flails, and talks as if he were quarter drunk with ale and half with laudanum."
The dispeptic Carlyle thought little better of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "Figure a fat flabby incurvated personage," said Carlyle, "at once short, rotund and relaxed, with a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange brown timid yet earnest looking eyes, a high tapering brow, and great bush of grey hair--you will have some faint idea of Coleridge."
Carlyle later added, "Coleridge is a steam-engine of a hundred horses power--with the boiler burst." Later still he said, "Coleridge is a mass of richest spices, putrified into a dunghill: I never hear him tawlk, without feeling ready to worship him and toss him in a blanket."
Coleridge, not always attentive to those around him, may not have formed an initial impression of the Scottish historian, but he clearly remembered first meeting the poet John Keats: "A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him, and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back, and said, 'Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!' 'There is death in that hand,' I said to Green, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly."
Horace Greeley, the legendary editor of the New York Daily Tribune, the man who said, "Go west, young man, go west," did not form a favorable impression of Mark Twain when he first encountered him in 1871. But then he didn't take much time to learn who the stranger was who barged in on him.
Mark Twain had come to the offices of the Tribune looking for a friend. He
rushed upstairs and accidentally burst into the wrong room. There sat Greeley with his
coat off and his back to him. "It was not a pleasant situation," recalled Mark
Twain, "for he had the reputation of being pretty plain with strangers who
interrupted his train of thought. The interview was brief. Before I could pull myself
together and back out, he whirled around and glared at me through his great spectacles and
said:
'Well, what in hell do you want!'
'I was looking for a gentlem---'
'Don't keep them in stock--clear out!'"
Mark Twain said that he could have made "a very neat retort but didn't, for I was flurried and didn't think of it till I was downstairs."
As a young journalist, Rudyard Kipling came to Elmira, New York, to interview Mark Twain. Later he wrote in a letter to India, "You are a contemptible lot over yonder. Some of you are Commissioners and some are Lieutenant-Governors, . . . and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall arm in arm with the Viceroy; but I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand and smoked a cigar--no, two cigars--with him, and talked with him for more than two hours! Understand clearly that I do not despise you; indeed, I don't. I am only very sorry for you, from the Viceroy downward."
Mark Twain was equally impressed by Kipling. The young man seemed to know more than any person Twain had ever met. When Kipling was gone, someone asked who the visitor had been. Twain replied, "He is a stranger to me but he is a most remarkable man--and I am the other. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest."
Mark Twain met the young Winston Churchill at a New York dinner party in 1900. Churchill is best remembered now as Britain's Prime Minister during World War II--the scourge of Adolf Hitler. But Churchill was also an accomplished writer of biography and history, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 for his volumes The Second World War.
Churchill was also a great talker, and so was Mark Twain. So when they met in 1900 and retired upstairs for a smoke and some conversation, the people below wondered what the result would be. They speculated that whichever got the floor first would keep it to the end and not give the other a chance. Some said that Twain, being older and more expeienced, would take the lead and give Churchill's lungs a rest for the first time in years.
When the two finally came down, Churchill was asked if he had had a good time, to which he eagerly answered, "Yes." When Twain was asked the same question, he hesitated, then answered without enthusiasm, "I have had a smoke."
Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio, convinced the young Ernest Hemingway to move to Paris if he wanted to become a serious writer. Anderson also furnished Hemingway with letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein and others to help give him a start. But Hemingway felt no obligation to speak well of the man who had assisted him so much.
"Sherwood Anderson was a slob," Hemingway said. "Also he was wet and sort of mushy. He had very beautiful bastard Italian eyes and if you had been brought up in Italy (with very beautiful Italian eyes) you always knew when he was lying. From the first time I met him I thought he was a sort of retarded character."
Young F. Scott Fitzgerald first met James Joyce, recent author of Ulysses, at a dinner party in Paris. Rushing up to Joyce, he fell on one knee, and kissed Joyce's hand. During dinner, Fitzgerald called to Joyce from across the table, "How does it feel to be a great genius, Sir?" Later he called out again, "I am so excited at seeing you, Sir, that I could weep."
After dinner, Fitzgerald climbed out a window, stood on the narrow ledge, and threatened to jump to the cobblestone street below unless Joyce's wife, Nora, said she loved him. Joyce, who was afraid of heights, nearly fainted. "I think he must be mad," said Joyce. "He'll do himself some injury some day."