Miscellany Extra!

Welcome to the Dance

Photo by British Library on Unsplash

Welcome to this week’s bonus free extra helping of my Marvellous Miscellany of Past Wit, Wisdom and Whimsical Curiosities.

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April 5

Today, the theory that good dancers make better writers; a matter of rhythm, of life.

Consider these:

T S Eliot didn’t look like much of a mover, did he, but he met his first wife, Vivienne, at a tea dance. And let’s not forget this, from ‘Four Quartets’:

Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Hemingway despised everything but the tango.

Trollope, apparently, was not keen.

Dickens was, naturally, highly enthusiastic, but you might well get knocked over if you got too close.

Burns risked his father’s wrath to go to dancing school.

George Eliot learnt to dance at school but didn’t really enjoy it.

Henry Miller played the piano but was a stumbling dancer.

Fitzgerald was pretty good.

Confucius: ‘Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.’

Nabokov famously hated music.

Norman Mailer, author of ‘Tough Guy’s Don’t Dance’, preferred bullfighting, wrestling, and (I promise you) Lego.

According to a partner, ‘There was never anyone on the floor who could dance those Latin rhythms’ the way Truman Capote could.

Voltaire: ‘Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.’ (Hmm.)

Martin Amis did a mean impersonation of Sir Mick Jagger; his father Kingsley saw it as a useful way of ‘getting your arms round a girl, that’s all’.

Molière: ‘All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.’

Anthony Powell once danced with Tallulah Bankhead.

Henry James didn’t dance.

Salman Rushdie was/is a keen frugger but doesn’t do ballroom, which he describes as joined-up dancing.

Elsewhere, Socrates learnt to dance at 70 because he felt a vital part of himself had been neglected, while Nietzsche felt ‘We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.’

Knees up!