Archives for February 8, 2011

In 1822, Leigh Hunt, his pregnant wife and their six children moved into the ground floor of Lord Byron’s house in Pisa. As one scholar notes, “the [Hunt] children were encouraged to express their personalities rather than to submit to discipline.” Byron put it more colorfully, referring to the kids as “six little blackguards.”
But it’s Marianne Hunt’s own record of the stay that makes me laugh. From an 1822 diary entry:

Mr. Hunt was much annoyed by Lord Byron behaving so meanly about the Children disfiguring his house, which his nobleship chose to very severe upon. How much I wish I could esteem him more! It is so painful, to be under any obligation to a person you cannot esteem! Can anything be more absurd than a peer of the realm–and a poet–making such a fuss about three or four children disfiguring the walls of a few rooms. The very children would blush for him, fye Lord B.–fye.

Such a fuss about the disfigurement of only a few rooms! Fye!

Instead of sheets–dirty tablecloths.
The dog walked in the street and was ashamed of its crooked legs.
They were mineral water bottles with preserved cherries in them.
In the bill preserved by the hotel-keeper was, among other things: “Bugs–fifteen kopecks.”
He picked his teeth and put the toothpick back into the glass.
A private room in a restaurant. A rich man, tying his napkin round his neck, touching the sturgeon with his fork: “At least I’ll have a snack before I die”–and he has been saying this for a long time, daily.
If you wish women to love you, be original, I know a man who used to wear felt boots summer and winter, and women fell in love with him.

Entries quoted by James Wood in his essay “What Chekhov Meant By Life,” from The Broken Estate.

“It had always been a notion of mine that sanity is like a clearing in the jungle where the humans agree to meet from time to time and behave in certain fixed ways that even a baboon could master, like Englishmen dressing for dinner in the tropics.”
Wilfrid Sheed, In Love with Daylight