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

So, also, we play with the words of the dead that would teach us, and strike them far from us with our bitter, reckless will; little thinking that those leaves which the wind scatters had been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but upon the seal of an enchanted vault — nay, the gate of a great city of sleeping kings, who would awake for us, and walk with us, if we knew but how to call them by their names.

New lamps for old — that’s what the novelist gives us: he beats the rugs, and with a bit of torn T-shirt he works the Old English petroleum distillate into the starved fleurette of the doubtful fauteil , and suddenly those huddled movables we always vaguely knew we owned and yet never gave their due seem worth hauling out into sunlit living rooms: the city of sleeping things and kings starts up, staggers in, and begins raving like Vault Whitman, who in 1855, ten years before Ruskin had imagined saying “Open Sesame” to the enchanted and encrypted city of the dead, in his thereafter suppressed Introduction to the first edition of Leaves of Grass (an edition that Malcolm Cowley calls, in his Penguin introduction, “the buried masterpiece of American writing”), wrote:

The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet … he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you.

Whitman, though, only uses lumber to mean timber .

Or, less hysterically, Proust could be remembering Middlemarch . During his tussles with the writing of Jean Santeuil he said in a letter: “There are moments when I wonder whether I do not resemble the husband of Dorothea Brook in Middlemarch , and whether I am not collecting ruins.” 3Of Middle-march ’s pasty and cold-fingered Mr. Casaubon — the collector of dead mythologies, whose promised Key to them all turns out to open nothing more than a cabinet of dry and worthless salvages from a lifetime of severe study — the impassioned Will Ladislaw says to Dorothea:

“Do you not see that it is no use now to be crawling a little way after men of the last century — men like Bryant — and correcting their mistakes? — living in a lumber-room and furbishing up broken-legged theories about Chus and Mizraim?”

(I skimmed 165 pages of the Riverside edition before I found this; the fact that it was embedded in dialogue made it harder to spot.) Some pages earlier George Eliot lays out another lumber-room or curiosity-shop image. “The idea of this dried-up pedant,” thinks Ladislaw as he falls in love with Dorothea,

this elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor’s back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole) — this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust … (Riverside edition, p. 152.)

Eliot probably was thinking of Faust’s line to Wagner about the spirit of the age being a Rumpelkammer when she had Will talk scornfully of living in a lumber-room. She translated Goethe and “read probably every word” by him, according to Gordon Haight, one of her biographers; and she helped G. H. Lewes with his once well-known biography, The Life and Works of Goethe (1855).

Mark Pattison, editor of Pope and biographer of Isaac Casaubon, was George Eliot’s primary model for the character of Mr. Casaubon, 4though Pattison is a more likable and (on paper, at least) a more complicated figure than the Middlemarch dry goods merchant. “To be mesmerized by a vast subject is a dilettante feature and a recipe for disaster,” writes C. O. Brink, in his English Classical Scholarship . “It devitalizes activity and tends to cause such creative powers as there are to wither. I wonder,” he adds, “if not something like it happened to Pattison.” 5And yet the last chapter of Pattison’s best book, his biography Isaac Casaubon , is a frightening but inspiring portrait of a compulsive reader, a Greek-citation-hoarder, an urn-burier, who was (like all scholars, but especially those who spend a lifetime preparing themselves to write something that is too big for one brain to encompass) “greater than his books.” 6Books Isaac Casaubon did write, as Mark Pattison himself did, but they were never the Big Book, and instead he took Alp-blebs of notes. Unfortunately, the notes are useless without the mind they served:

What he jots down is not a remark of his own on what he reads, nor is it even the words he has read; it is a mark, a key, a catchword, by which the point of what he has read may be recovered in memory.

“To this vast mass of material,” writes Pattison of the real Casaubon, “his own memory was the only key.” A sympathetic scrutineer, looking over Isaac Casaubon’s shoulder with Pattison’s help at his literary remains, sees only what Dorothea Brooke finally worked up the courage to examine in her fictional Mr. Casaubon’s cabinet — he sees (again in Pattison’s surprisingly lyrical and heartfelt words)

disjointed fragments, lying there massive and helpless, like the boulders of some abraded stratification.

7

But the observer must nonetheless acknowledge, Pattison urges, that in the posthumous rubble of Isaac Casaubon (as in that of Mark Pattison, who abandoned his huge history of Renaissance scholarship) he is witnessing “the remains of a stupendous learning,” which is something valuable and admirable, after all. Eliot called her Middlemarch notebook “Quarry,” and this Ozymandian final chapter by Pattison, uninsistently autobiographical, was certainly one of the marmoreal desolations from which she prised chunks and cooked them for lime. 8

Nor should we be surprised that Mark Pattison resorts to the word “lumber” himself, as he prepares to defend Isaac Casaubon’s old-fashioned scholarship from the attacks of anti-pedants like Thomas De Quincey:

De Quincey has endorsed the complaint that “the great scholars were poor as thinkers.” De Quincey wrote at a time when “original thinking” was much in repute, and was indeed himself one of the genial race to whom all is revealed in a moment, in visions of the night.… A freshness and a vigour characterise the english and german literature of the fifty years 1780–1830, which are due to this effect [?effort] to discard the lumber of “unenlightened” ages.

9

Looking up from this passage, which indirectly puts De Quincey and Pattison at antipodes, one can almost envision George Eliot conjuring up the figure of De Quincey as she worked out the character of Will Ladislaw — De Quincey being, like Ladislaw, a Lake-poet enthusiast, though not actually a poet, a follower of German esthetic philosophy, though not quite a philosopher himself, and above all, an extremely chatty and intelligent journalist. Why De Quincey himself resisted the temptation to use the word lumber in recounting his opium dreams or in writing about Pope I do not know. 10

But to return to Proust momentarily, before we take leave for the time being of the confusingly crowded French tabernacle and return to the safe haven of Augustan English prose (since my French is sorrier than Proust’s English, and Proust, says Hayman, “would have found it hard to order a chop in an English restaurant” 11) — the thing worth pointing out is that in Swann’s Way , in the paragraph that follows Marcel’s comparison of George Sand’s figures of speech to an old and exiled armchair, when he speaks of the “beauty and sweetness” of his mother’s reading voice, and of how she