We don’t think it’s so weird to do this stuff. But then, we’re writers.
• Poet John Donne (1572–1631) kept a coffin in the office where he wrote. Occasionally, he’d climb inside it to remind himself how fleeting life can be, a major theme in his poetry.
• Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), author of Gulliver’s Travels, always walked around his house while he ate because he believed that moving around while eating would cancel out the food and help him keep weight off.
• In 2009 Sotheby’s of London auctioned off a series of largely unpublished letters of the famous Romantic poet Lord Byron (1788–1824). In them, Byron criticizes the Portuguese, who he says have “few vices except lice and sodomy.” And, in a display of bathroom humor well ahead of his time, he calls his rival William Wordsworth “Turdsworth.”
• The Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) suffered from chronic sexual dysfunctions. After dealing with the problem for many years, he did something about it—he had the “Steinach operation,” a surgery that claimed to provide a “reactivation” of the male organs. It was basically just a vasectomy, but Yeats claimed that both his sex life and literary output greatly improved.
• American poet James Russell Lowell (1819–91), founding editor of The Atlantic Monthly, once attended a dinner party where he carefully removed each flower from a bouquet centerpiece and, with a knife and fork, ate every single one.
• Novelist John Cheever (1912–82) owned only one suit. He put it on each morning, then took an elevator down to the basement of his New York apartment building, where he rented an office. Once there, he took off the suit, hung it up, and wrote all day sitting in his underwear. At the end of the day, he’d put the suit back on and take the elevator home.
It is illegal to die in the U.K.’s Houses of Parliament, or to enter wearing a suit of armor.