Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes

by Clifton Fadiman

  BEAVERBROOK, William Maxwell Aitkin, 1st Baron (1879–1964), British newspaper publisher and politician, born in Canada.

  1 In the washroom of his London club, Beaver-brook happened to meet Edward Heath, then a young MP, about whom he had printed a rather insulting editorial a few days earlier. “My dear chap,” said Beaverbrook, embarrassed by the encounter, “I’ve been thinking it over, and I was wrong. Here and now, I wish to apologize.”

  “Very well,” grunted Heath. “But next time, I wish you’d insult me in the washroom and apologize in your newspaper.”

  BECKETT, Samuel (1906–89), Irish novelist, playwright, and poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

  1 Beckett was listening while his friend Walter Lowenfels expounded at length his views on the relationship of art and the desolate condition of society. Beckett nodded but said nothing, until his friend burst out, “You sit there saying nothing while the world is going to pieces. What do you want? What do you want to do?” Beckett crossed his long legs and drawled, “Walter, all I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante.”

  2 In 1962 Beckett married his longtime companion, Suzanne. Soon afterward their relationship became soured by her jealousy of his growing fame and success as a writer. One day in 1969 the telephone rang. Suzanne answered it. She listened for a moment, spoke briefly to the caller, and hung up. Then she turned to face Beckett, looking stricken, and whispered, “Quel catastrophe!” (What a catastrophe!) She had just been told that the Swedish Academy had awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  BECKFORD, William (1760–1844), British eccentric and collector.

  1 Beckford built a high wall around his estate at Fonthill to discourage visitors. One determined young man managed to slip unobserved through the main gate during a tradesman’s call. Heading across the park, he came to a walled vegetable garden. A man who had been digging potatoes came over and asked the intruder to identify himself. The young man explained that he had heard a great deal about the beauties of Fonthill and finding the gate open had taken the opportunity of having a look. The gardener seemed sympathetic, showed him around the greenhouses, and then said, “Would you like to see the house and its contents?”

  After a comprehensive tour of the house, the young man’s guide pressed him to stay and have some dinner, then revealed his true identity; he was, of course, William Beckford. The young man readily agreed to stay, and he and Beckford had a magnificent meal and thoroughly enjoyable conversation. On the stroke of eleven Beckford withdrew to bed. A footman showed the guest to the door. “Mr. Beckford ordered me to present his compliments to you, sir,” he told the young man, “and I am to say that as you found your way into Fonthill Abbey without assistance, you may find your way out again as best you can, and he hopes that you will take care to avoid the bloodhounds that are let loose in the gardens every night. I wish you good evening, sir.”

  With the door resolutely shut behind him, the young man ran as fast as he could to the nearest tree and climbed up out of reach of the hounds. There he spent a night of acute terror and discomfort until the day dawned and he was able to make his way in safety to the main gate and escape.

  2 Beckford’s vast and assorted collection did not win universal admiration. After financial constraints forced its owner to disperse it, the essayist William Hazlitt remarked, “The only proof of taste he has shown in this collection is his getting rid of it.”

  BEECHAM, Thomas (1820–1907), British industrialist; grandfather of the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham.

  1 Beecham’s fortunes were founded on his pills, which became a popular panacea and were sold with the slogan “Worth a guinea a box.” It is said that this phrase was suggested to Beecham by a satisfied customer who came up to him while he was peddling the pills in the marketplace at St. Helens, Lancashire. When Beecham became wealthy, he used to send samples of the pills to the old people of the Oxfordshire village in which he had once been a shepherd. In the bottom of each box he would put a guinea.

  BEECHAM, Sir Thomas (1879–1961), British conductor and impresario.

  1 As a young man Beecham was the subject of many stories relating to his dashing style. One tells how he was walking in London’s Piccadilly on a balmy summer evening when he began to feel that he was too warmly dressed. He hailed a cab, tossed his redundant topcoat into it, and ordered the driver, “Follow me.” He then completed his stroll unencumbered.

  2 Beecham was not a great admirer of the music of the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. During a rehearsal of a Vaughan Williams symphony he seemed to be doing no more than listlessly beating time — indeed, he was still beating time after the orchestra had stopped. “Why aren’t you playing?” Beecham mildly asked the first violinist. “It’s finished, Sir Thomas,” came the reply. Beecham looked down at his score, turned the page, and found it empty. “So it is, thank God!” he said.

  3 Sir Thomas Beecham was traveling in a nosmoking compartment on a train belonging to the Great Western Railway. A lady entered the compartment and lit a cigarette, saying, “I’m sure you won’t object if I smoke.”

  “Not at all,” replied Beecham, “provided that you don’t object if I’m sick.”

  “I don’t think you know who I am,” the lady haughtily pointed out. “I am one of the directors’ wives.”

  “Madam,” said Beecham, “if you were the director’s only wife, I should still be sick.”

  4 When rehearsing Handel’s Messiah Beecham said to the choir, “When we sing ‘All we, like sheep, have gone astray,’ might we please have a little more regret and a little less satisfaction?”

  5 Riding in a New York cab, Beecham irritated his companion by repeatedly whistling a passage from Mozart. Eventually the man exclaimed, “Must you do that?” Beecham replied, “You may be able to hear only my whistling; I can hear the full orchestra.”

  6 In the foyer of a Manchester hotel Beecham saw a distinguished-looking woman whom he believed he knew, though he could not remember her name. He paused to talk to her and as he did so vaguely recollected that she had a brother. Hoping for a clue, he asked how her brother was and whether he was still working at the same job. “Oh, he’s very well,” she answered, “and still king.”

  7 The rehearsal had not been going well, with some players apparently unable to keep time. Beecham addressed one of the main offenders: “We cannot expect you to be with us the whole time, but maybe you would be kind enough to keep in touch now and again?”

  8 In the first half of a concert Beecham was conducting a Mozart concerto. He and the pianist did not get on together; his conducting lacked luster and the pianist’s playing was mediocre. During the intermission some adjustments to the stage became necessary. The person in charge asked Beecham, “Should we take the piano off or leave it on?” Beecham mentally ran over the second half of the program, for which a piano was not required. “You might as well leave it on,” he said. “It will probably slink off by itself.”

  9 Beecham and violinist Jean Pougnet were appearing with an orchestra that seemed overawed at rehearsal. The start of the main piece was disastrous. Sir Thomas kept going, and after a while the players began to settle down. He leaned forward to Pougnet and said: “Don’t look now, Mr. Pougnet, but I believe we’re being followed.”

  10 A lady asked Sir Thomas’s advice on an instrument for her son, concerned about the misery his first efforts on the violin or trombone might inflict upon the household. What instrument would Sir Thomas recommend? Beecham replied, “The bagpipes; they sound exactly the same when you have mastered them as when you first begin learning them.”

  11 When Beecham conducted the opening night of Richard Strauss’s Elektra at Covent Garden in 1910, he judged the singing not up to standard. He urged the orchestra to play louder and louder: “The singers think they are going to be heard, and I’m going to make jolly well certain that they aren’t.”

  12 Beecham was once asked why he always chose such generously built ladie
s for the leading soprano roles in his productions, rejecting the more shapely and attractive candidates. “Unfortunately,” replied the conductor with a wistful sigh, “those sopranos who sing like birds eat like horses — and vice versa.”

  BEECHER, Henry Ward (1813–87), US Congregational minister and author.

  1 In the middle of one of Henry Ward Beecher’s most eloquent political speeches, a member of the crowd gave a perfect imitation of a cock crow. The audience roared with laughter, but the speaker gave no sign of annoyance, simply pulling out his watch and studying it until the noise had died down. Then he said, “That’s odd. My watch says it’s ten o’clock. But there can’t be any mistake. It must be morning, for the instincts of the lower animals are absolutely infallible.”

  2 Arriving at Plymouth church one Sunday, Beecher found in his mail a letter containing just one word: “Fool.” During the service that morning, he related the incident to his congregation, adding the remark: “I have known many an instance of a man writing a letter and forgetting to sign his name, but this is the only instance I have ever known of a man signing his name and forgetting to write the letter.”

  3 During the Civil War, Beecher traveled to England with the aim of arousing British support for the Northern cause. Addressing a turbulent crowd of rebel sympathizers in Manchester, he was asked: “Why didn’t you whip the Confederates in sixty days, as you said you would?”

  “Because,” retorted Beecher, “we found we had Americans to fight instead of Englishmen.”

  4 Beecher possessed a beautiful globe depicting the various constellations and stars of the heavens. Robert Ingersoll, visiting Beecher one day, admired the globe and asked who had made it. “Who made it?” said Beecher, seizing the opportunity to attack his guest’s well-known agnosticism. “Why, nobody made it; it just happened.”

  BEERBOHM, Sir Max (1872–1956), British writer, caricaturist, and wit.

  1 (Sir James Barrie, although a Scot, was frequently to be seen as a pallbearer at the funerals of major figures of the English literary establishment. Beerbohm recounted an incident at the funeral in 1909 of George Meredith.)

  “As I left … a young woman rushed up to me, crying, ‘Mr. Barrie, Mr. Barrie — you are Mr. Barrie, aren’t you? — will you write something for me in my autograph book. Here it is!’ … I know it was in poor taste; I said nothing, but when I took the volume my pen ran away with me, and I wrote, ‘Ay, Lassie! It’s a sad day the noo. J. M. Barrie.’”

  2 Max had no time for the new psychological theories that pervaded literature in his latter years. Reflecting on his own happy family life, he wondered aloud to a friend what the psychologists would make of him. “I adored my father and mother and I adored my brothers and sisters. What kind of complex would they find me a victim of? Oedipus and what else?” He paused for a moment and then went on, “They were a tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, weren’t they?”

  3 Max’s eccentricities may in part have been inherited from his father, Julius Beerbohm. On one occasion, at a party he was not enjoying, one of Julius’s daughters-in-law came across him groping his way around the room. She asked if he was looking for something. “The door,” exclaimed Mr. Beerbohm.

  4 Elisabeth Jungmann, reading about Newton, observed to Max that she would have liked to have met the great scientist. Max, to whom scientific matters were a closed book, said that he would not have understood him. “He would have liked you,” persevered Elisabeth. Max was amused: “I would have taught him the law of levity,” he said.

  BEETHOVEN, Ludwig van (1770–1827), German composer.

  1 At a reception, Beethoven, who was then still known only as a pianist, mentioned his desire to have an arrangement with a publisher similar to that enjoyed by Goethe and Handel. That is, anything he wrote would belong to the publisher in perpetuity in return for a guaranteed lifetime income. “My dear young man, you must not complain,” sneered his interlocutor, “for you are neither a Goethe nor a Handel, and it is not to be expected that you will ever be, for such masters will not be born again.”

  2 On one occasion when Beethoven was walking with Goethe, Goethe expressed his annoyance at the incessant greetings from passersby. Beethoven replied, “Do not let that trouble Your Excellency; perhaps the greetings are intended for me.”

  3 When Beethoven composed, he considered himself at one with the Creator and took endless pains to perfect his compositions. On one occasion a violinist complained to him that a passage was so awkwardly written as to be virtually unplayable. Beethoven replied, “When I composed that, I was conscious of being inspired by God Almighty. Do you think I can consider your puny little fiddle when He speaks to me?”

  4 Beethoven’s Third Symphony, Eroica, composed in 1803, was originally entitled “Bonaparte.” This was intended as a tribute to the hero of revolutionary France, then First Consul and almost exactly the same age as Beethoven. But Beethoven’s admiration soon gave way to disillusionment when Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor in May 1804. Beethoven was in Vienna when he heard of this; in a rage he went to the table where the score lay and tore the title page in two. On publication the symphony was given its present title, Eroica (Heroic), and it was described as having been composed “to celebrate the memory of a great man.”

  5 Performing a new piano concerto at the Theater An der Wien, Beethoven forgot that he was the soloist and began to conduct. At the first sforzando, he threw out his arms with such force that he knocked down the lights on the piano. He began the concerto again, this time with two choir boys holding the lights. On reaching the same sforzando, Beethoven repeated his dramatic gesture. He hit one of the boys, who was so frightened that he dropped his light. The other boy anticipated what would happen and dodged the blow. Enraged by the audience’s laughter, Beethoven struck the piano with such force that at the first chord six strings broke.

  6 His Ninth Symphony (the Choral) completed, Beethoven was urged to conduct his latest work at a Vienna concert. After a particular passage, unaware of the thunderous ovation, the composer stood still turning the leaves of his score. Finally one of the singers pulled at his sleeve and pointed to the audience. Beethoven turned, and bowed.

  7 Beethoven fired his housekeeper, who had taken excellent care of him, because she once shielded him from an unpleasantness by fibbing about it. “Anyone who tells a lie has not a pure heart,” he said, “and cannot make pure soup.”

  8 Beethoven once happened to hear someone playing his Variations in C minor. After a short time he asked who had written the piece. When told he was its author, he exclaimed, “Such nonsense by me! Oh, Beethoven, what an ass you were!”

  9 Beethoven failed quickly at the end of his life, suffering from rheumatism, kidney disease, and the general effects of a lifetime of bad health. In the winter of 1826–27 jaundice and a severe cold finally felled him. At 6:00 on the evening of March 26, as he lay in a stupor in his bed, a loud thunderclap roused him. He sat up, shook his fist at the sky, and fell back dead on his pillow.

  BEGIN, Menachem (1913–92), Israeli statesman and prime minister (1977–83) who together with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt was awarded the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize.

  1 In September 1940 Begin was playing chess with his wife when Russian soldiers burst into his home to arrest him. As they dragged him away, he shouted to Mrs. Begin that he conceded the game.

  BEHAN, Brendan (1923–64), Irish playwright.

  1 (During one of his alcoholic periods, Behan arrived at his publisher’s office en route for Euston station, wearing his pajamas under his suit. The publicity director, a friend of the family, was to accompany Behan to the station to meet his parents. She had the task of making him a little more presentable.)

  “On our way to the station we stopped at an outfitter’s in a side street off the Euston Road, and although the clothes in the window had little in common with Brendan, we went in. As I busied myself informing the immaculately dressed assistant that we wanted an overcoat, shirt, and a tie, I did not notic
e that Brendan was preparing himself enthusiastically for the fitting until, too late, he stood in front of us with not a stitch between himself and his Maker, his suit and his pajamas bunched in a pile by his tiny bare feet. With a dignity that is essentially the mark of a perfect English gentleman, the assistant did not raise an eyebrow as he helped Brendan into his new shirt and back into his trousers as though the sight of a naked customer in his shop was an everyday occurrence.”

  2 Behan was originally a housepainter by trade, and while in Paris was asked to paint a sign on the window of a café to attract English tourists. He painted, “Come in, you Anglo-Saxon swine / And drink of my Algerian wine. / ’Twill turn your eyeballs black and blue, / And damn well good enough for you.” After receiving payment for the job, Behan fled before the café proprietor had time to have the rhyme translated.

  3 Behan was asked what he thought of drama critics. “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem,” he replied. “They’re there every night, they see it done every night, they see how it should be done every night, but they can’t do it themselves.”

  4 Just before he died, Behan looked up at the nursing nun who was taking his pulse. “Bless you, Sister,” he said with a weak smile. “May all your sons be bishops!”

  BELL, Alexander Graham (1847–1922), Scottish inventor most noted for his invention of the telephone.

  1 On March 10, 1876, Bell made the first telephone communication over a line set up between two rooms in a building in Boston. The epoch-making words recorded by Mr. Watson, Bell’s assistant, were simply: “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.”

  2 As professor of vocal physiology at Boston University, Bell had many deaf pupils, including Mabel Hubbard, who later became his wife. They lived happily together for forty-five years. As Bell lay dying after a long illness, Mabel whispered to him, “Don’t leave me.” Unable to speak, Bell traced with his fingers the sign “No.” With this last silent message, the inventor of the telephone took his final leave of his wife.