CURIOUS AILMENTS OF FAMOUS PEOPLE.

No. 1.—In 1948, Erle Stanley Gardner was hit with an attack of writer’s block so severe that he had to type out the same Perry Mason novel thirty-four times just to get over it. William Morrow & Co., Gardner’s publishers, called in six of the best physicians in the publishing industry to consult, but they could not agree on a diagnosis. The publishers also brought in four Freudian psychologists, two Adlerians, one Jungian, and a woman named Mrs. Culver who was full of good advice, but after their conferences with Mrs. Culver three of the Freudians required extensive therapy. Fortunately, by changing the names of the victim and murderer, Gardner’s publishers were able to sell the duplicate manuscripts as thirty-four different Perry Mason novels, and Gardner’s career was unaffected by his ailment.

Comments

  1. tom says:

    Proving that the more things change the more they stay the same. Or was it the opposite of that? French sayings re pretty tricky to translate.

  2. Occasional Correspondent says:

    Did Gardner type?  I have read that Gardner had stenographer-typists who attended him — he wrote his novels by dictating them.  How exactly the stenos tag-teamed to always have one in attendance, how drafts and revisions were handled, etc., unknown to me.  In Robert Heinlein’s novel Strangler In A Strangled Land, Gardner — that is, Gardner’s patterns and habits of work — was said to be the basis of the modus operandi of Heinlein’s writer/lawyer character Jubal Harshaw, who also lay about the pool with three stenographers at hand, dictating stories as the fit seized him.  In the Huell Howser series California’s Gold, one episode featured a tour of Gardner’s house and pool and an interview with one of his surviving steno-typists — to my regret, I never did chance to see that one.

    Be all that as it may, writer’s block might seize the dictator-writer as well as the keypounder-writer and the said metathesis an effective gambit for either.

    • Dr. Boli says:

      When Gardner was not dictating, he typed with two fingers. Our sources do not tell us which two.

      • Occasional Correspondent says:

        It did later occur to me that if Gardner attempted to recapitulate his prior corpus via dictation, laryngitis would loom large.  Perhaps he came to suffer, not from writer’s block, but larynx’s block — as devastating to a dictationist as broken fingers to a typist.

  3. Mike says:

    I suspect Mrs. Culver was actually Gracie Allen.

  4. John Salmon says:

    Yeah, ESG is pretty formulaic, but not bad.

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