Nicholson Baker - The Size of Thoughts - Essays and Other Lumber

1Mack loses restraint altogether when he writes: “I will make no secret of my belief that in his younger days Pope shows signs of the interest in word-catching that he scorned in others.” (“ ‘Books and the Man’: Pope’s Library,” in Collected in Himself , 1982, p. 318.)

2Compare Nabokov: “A book is like a trunk tightly packed with things. At the customs an official’s hand plunges perfunctorily into it, but he who seeks treasures examines every thread.” ( Lectures on Literature , “Charles Dickens,” p. 89.)

3As Harold Bloom points out in his thoughtful The Western Canon , 1994.

4There are fifty-five instances of lumber on Disk 3 (1800–1900, A-K) and forty-five on Disk 4 (1800–1900, L — Z): a total of one hundred lumber -uses for the nineteenth century. Compare this with the 129 lumbers on Disk 2, for the period 1660–1800, A — Z: much more poetry in the nineteenth century, less lumber. Yet lumber and lumber-room often feel overused in nineteenth-century contexts, and don’t in the eighteenth century. Word-frequency studies, then, can’t tell you whether something is more or less of a cliché.

5Thomas Hood includes a defense of puns in the prefatory matter to the second edition of his Whims and Oddities (first ed. 1826): “I am informed that certain monthly, weekly, and very every day critics have taken great offence at my puns, — and I can conceive how some Gentlemen with one idea must be perplexed by a double meaning. To my own notion a pun is an accommodating word, like a farmer’s horse, — with a pillion of an extra sense to ride behind;—it will carry single, however, if required.”

6From Traherne’s “In Making Bodies Lov could not Express.”

7Which makes no sense, since Mistress Masham’s Repose takes place in Malplaquet, where lumber -users congregated. The Professor (who is, in Fritz Eichenberg’s illustrations, longobarded) recalls that “Dr. Swift was at Malplaquet, as we know, in 1712. He came here straight from Twit-nam, with the poet Pope.” In White’s Malplaquet there are “larders, laundries, cupboards, closets, still rooms, coal cellars, outward rooms frequented in his early days by Dr. Johnson, servants’ halls, sculleries, harness rooms, pantries, dairies, cloakrooms, storerooms, and so forth,” but no lumber-room . Did I miss it? The word lumbago jumped out at me several pages from the end (p. 249), but then I realized my error. ( Lumbago makes you lumber because it hurts your back to walk normally.) When my mother read White’s book to me, I assumed that “bloaters” were large pale German hot-dogs, but the Concise Oxford Dictionary says, incredibly, that they are smoked herrings. Listening to her read, I aspired to be the Professor — to live in a small booky shack in an overgrown garden. And in fact my office at this moment bears some resemblance to the Professor’s Rumpelkammer: “As he was one of those unfortunate people who leave the book open at the quotation in some accessible place, all the window ledges, oven-shelves, mantelpieces, fenders, and other flat surfaces were stocked with verified quotations, which had long been forgotten.”

8 Old English Libraries , Ernest A. Savage, 1912, p. 200. Savage quotes (pp. 202–3) from Henry Anstey’s description (in his introduction to the Munimenta Academica ) of the “ponderous iron chests, eight or ten feet in length and about half that width” that were kept by the university stationer at Oxford in the late fifteenth century, holding “as many as a hundred or more large volumes, besides other valuables deposited as pledges by those who have borrowed from the chest.”

9 Lewis Theobald , Richard Foster Jones, 1919, p. 280.

10Jones points out (p. 14) that Johann Jacob Bodmer (1698–1783), translator of Paradise Lost into German prose and author of an influential pre-Romantic treatise on the wonderful in poetry, was a fervent enthusiast of The Cave of Poverty . Theobald and Bodmer (a professor of history at Zurich) corresponded. Thus Pope’s piddling arch-pedant, of all people, is a distinct English impulse behind German Romanticism, and German Romanticism in turn feeds back into English Romanticism. This pre-Romantic influence-laundering through a Swiss account makes more under-standable a tiny but odd resemblance between the “Ten thousand doors” that lead to Theobald’s gloomy cave and the “twice ten thousand caverns” reached by the tidal swell in Keats’s sea-sonnet.

11“It is hardly surprising that the phrase ‘learned lumber’ recurred to Pope’s mind when describing Theobald’s library in Dunciad , Book 1.” (Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life , p. 429.) Peter Seary’s superb Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1990) devotes an appendix to Theobald’s (vanished) library, which was auctioned over four evenings in 1744. Seary also shows that Theobald became increasingly sensitive to the Dunciad ’s charge of pedantry, and therefore, in his edition of Shakespeare, suppressed his inclination to give tiny textual questions their discursive due: “Theobald’s commentary established a new standard for editors of English texts and created new levels of expectation in the reading public, but a regrettable consequence of his fear of being considered a pedant is that often he fails to do himself justice in his accounts of his discoveries,” writes Seary (p. 178). And Seary compellingly argues that Samuel Johnson, not Pope or even the despicable Warburton, was responsible for the conclusive defamation of Theobald as a scholar by the end of the eighteenth century: Johnson took over Theobald’s methods and insights for his own edition of Shakespeare and for his Dictionary (“Theobald instituted the practice of citing parallels as a means of explicating obscure English words, and Johnson in the Dictionary followed his practice on an unprecedented scale,” p. 207), while making unfair jabs at Theobald and failing to give him proper credit. Still, it is Pope’s Dunciad that defames Theobald now — the fact that Johnson underappreciates him in his prefaces does no active harm to his reputation.

12Filelfo’s orations and epithalamials were, writes John Addington Symonds, “conceived in the lumbering and pedantic style that passed for eloquence at that period.” This is a lumber that mixes the sense of heavy footfalls and old vocabulary. ( Renaissance in Italy , Modern Library, p. 456.)

13See “Some poems specifically considered but rejected” in the notes to Christopher Ricks’s Penguin edition of The Golden Treasury , p. 511: “on whole too slight” was the final judgment in the manuscript of the anthology. In Edmund Gosse’s Critical Kit-Kats , p. 145, there is this about the poem: “Mr. Bailey’s Festus was really a power for evil, strong enough to be a momentary snare to the feet of Tennyson in writing Maud , and even of Browning.”

14One of the dark-red Cornell Concordances that lure the eye here and there in the stacks — some of the others in the series sort the words of Ben Jonson, Herbert, Yeats, Blake, Skelton, Pascal’s Pensées , Mandelstam, Racine, Beowulf , E. E. Cummings, and Swift. I can be sure I haven’t missed any lumber in Samuel Johnson’s poetry thanks to the Cornell Concordance to the Poems of Samuel Johnson . (A Latin epigram called “The Logical Warehouse: Occasioned by an Auctioneer’s having the Groundfloor of the Oratory in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields” was the closest I got to lumber-room: it is printed as a poem of doubtful authorship in the Oxford edition of Johnson’s poems.) One can easily become sentimental about these great series of concordances, since the more full-text material is available electronically, the less esteemed and understood they will be. They have magical as well as meaningful value, to use Larkin’s dichotomy. “This person is worth studying,” they affirm; “every word that this person wrote deserves its own private lanai of a line.”