The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories (39 page)

Novelist Edgar Allen Poe, painter James Whistler, and mind traveler Timothy Leary were all once students at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Not surprisingly, none of them made it through to graduation or to an officership in the military. Poe flunked out in a particularly spectacular way. An order came for cadets to show up for a full-dress parade wearing “white belt and gloves, under arms.” He followed the order all too literally, appearing wearing nothing but a belt and carrying his gloves under his naked arms.

DA VINCI CODE

Leonardo Da Vinci was a notoriously secretive man. He kept clandestine notes to himself in a distinct style: he wrote backwards, from right to left. Turns out Da Vinci's code wasn't too hard to crack: it was easily legible when held up to a mirror.

German composer Richard Wagner planned to be buried in a grave in his garden and was known to divulge this fact willingly to dinner party guests. He would take them to view the garden and then delight in the reactions of his guests as they sat back down to finish the meal. Wagner and his wife, Cosima, were indeed buried in the Bayreuth, Germany garden.

Poet Ezra Pound wrote
The Pisan Cantos
while imprisoned at a U.S. Army camp in Pisa, Italy. He had been arrested for treason because he had broadcast Fascist propaganda from Italy during World War II. Eventually judged insane, Pound spent twelve years in a Washington, D.C., mental hospital before returning to Italy.

STOP AND SMELL (OR DON'T)

Voltaire always fainted whenever he smelled roses. He also drank seventy cups of coffee a day. Are the two facts related?

“I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible—and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does.” —VINCENT VAN GOGH

POETIC CALENDAR

If you want to be poet laureate of the United States, it might help if you were born on March 1. Three previous laureates were born on that date—Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Hass.

WORKS BEST UNDER THE INFLUENCE

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) wrote
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
, a tome of 60,000 words, during a six-day cocaine binge. He was also reported to have been suffering from tuberculosis at the time.

ART WAS HIS FALLBACK