I was reading Knowlson's biography of Samuel Beckett the other day when I came across this little nugget on page 129: (I should preface it by saying the scene was a party in honour of James Joyce, held in Paris in 1931. One of the guests, called McAlmon, was irritated by the extreme reverence shown to the chief guest and, catching the eye of a companion, arched his hands in a gesture of mock-prayer. Now read on . . . )
"At this point Edouard Dujardin, who thought that McAlmon had been looking at his wife's very thick ankles and was commenting by his gesture on their size, got up, walked across the room and slapped him sharply on the face.
"This sudden dramatic action caused an enormous buzz of excitement all around the room and, since Dujardin walked out immediately without explaining himself, the puzzlement . . . continued at a reception held afterwards in an apartment over the shop. It was not until the following day that the true explanation emerged."
This extraordinary episode - the highlight of the book for me so far - begs a number of questions. How exactly did the "true explanation" emerge? Was Mrs Dujardin as sensitive about her ankles as her husband? How did he explain the incident to her? And - probably the thing most people would want to know - how thick were those ankles?
Unfortunately, Knowlson has nothing more to say about the matter, though he keeps going on about Beckett for another 575 pages. (This is all too typical of literary biography: in the very next paragraph, he's discussing a Beckett poem called Casket Of Pralinen For A Daughter Of A Dissi- pated Mandarin. Which I think shows you the sort of people we're dealing with.)
Perhaps Mr and Mrs Dujardin stopped attending literary evenings as a result of the embarrassment. Perhaps they went into counselling. For all the casual reader knows, the "true explanation" may have emerged in conversation between the undertakers after Dujardin and McAlmon shot each other at dawn in the Bois de Boulogne.
We are simply not told - this in a biography which one of the critics quoted inside the cover says is "as complete and clinically intimate as we are ever likely to need". Speak for yourself, pal.
We do know from the book that Edouard Dujardin was "the venerable author of Les Lauriers Sont Coupes (literally: "The Ankles Are Enormous"). But if anybody has any more information about those events in Paris in 1931, I'm waiting to hear from you now at the Irish Times literary incident room.
The episode does at least illustrate a heartwarming truth about great writers. No matter how enormous their intellects, and how huge the esteem in which the world holds them, these people are just as frail and foolish as the rest of us - at least when there's a free bar.
This is true of another favourite literary anecdote of mine, which also involves James Joyce and Paris. As I recall it, the author of Ulysses was hosting a group of visiting writers in a restaurant, one of whom had brought a mystery present from the American poet and friend of Joyce, Ezra Pound.
At the climax of the evening, Joyce opened the present in full view of the assembly and revealed it to be a pair of second-hand boots, things which the kind-hearted Pound felt his friend could not afford to buy.
A proud man, Joyce was stung by his public humiliation. And though records show that his subscription to Parisian cafe society was several months overdue, he spent the rest of his guests' visit treating them to lavish hospitality, for which he would let none of them pay.
Since I first read this, I've tried the boots trick on several writer acquaintances and none of the cheapskates have put their hands in their pockets for so much as a drink. Which suggests either that standards of literary hospitality have dropped since the 1930s or - more likely perhaps - that the boots episode was embellished in the telling.
There's no doubt that the invention of stories about famous writers is a bit of a cottage industry. Of course, this was no help to me when I sought State grants for such a small enterprise back in the early 1980s. But then the local famous writer was Patrick Kavanagh, a man who left more colourful stories behind him than he did poems, and didn't need any new ones.
I discovered during research that Kavanagh and the Nobel Prize-winner Albert Camus had something in common, apart from their profession. They were both goalkeepers in their day - for Inniskeen and Algeria (in case of any confusion, it was Algeria Camus played for, though not in the version of events I prepared for IDA approval). Indeed, the only story about Kavanagh that I know is not exaggerated is that he was the worst goalie his club ever had.
It probably didn't help that he had size-12 feet. Not even Ezra Pound could have found a comfortable pair of boots for Kavanagh's big clods, flattened from pacing Inniskeen Road on July evenings. It wouldn't surprise me if he suffered from thick ankles as well.