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

supplied all the natural tenderness, all the lavish sweetness which they demanded to sentences which seemed to have been composed for her voice and which were all, so to speak, within the compass of her sensibility

— the thing worth noting is that Proust may be not only remembering George Sand’s novels at bedtime, which in their quaint way supplied him with a stock of “narrative devices” that are “common to a great many novels,” but also privately cherishing his mother’s more recent literal renderings in French of Ruskin and (perhaps) other English masters of the longer-handled ladle. And it is just possible that Proust owes something of his feeling for his grandmother’s linguistic furniture to Henry James’s Spoils of Poynton , a novel about (to be crude) the sale of old furniture. Proust’s grandmothery passage about the metaphors effaced by the usure of the modern tongue recalls James’s lovely “She hated the effacement to which English usage reduced the widowed mother.…” from chapter 5. I don’t know enough about Proust to say with any certainty that he had read James’s Spoils , but it is his kind of book, 12and Proust did after all write (in 1910), as quoted by Ronald Hayman:

It is curious that in all the contrasted kinds of writing from George Eliot to Hardy, from Stevenson to Emerson, there is no literature which exerts on me a power comparable to that of English and American literature.

On Proust’s own authority, then, let’s politely take leave of him and George Sand and of Flaubert, especially Flaubert: for if it is this fraught an undertaking to arrive at a full-bellied understanding of a plain English pork-chop of a word like lumber-room , as I am finding it to be, then it will be next to impossible to make sense of Flaubert’s untranslatable chutes and laideurs . Let’s return, instead, to the green and pleasant Samuel Johnson.

1Eleanor Marx Aveling, who was responsible for the version of Bovary that Nabokov assigned, did use an umlaut. She, we learn from Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot , was the first English translator of the work, and, sunk in a cafard -naum of her own, she later killed herself with prussic acid.

2See the Steegmuller-Bray translation of the Flaubert-Sand correspondence (1993), p. 18, and Anne Chevereau’s edition of Sand’s Agendas , vol. III (1992), p. 384.

3 Proust: A Biography , Ronald Hayman, p. 139. Either Proust or Hayman leaves off the terminal “e” in “Brooke.”

4For some of the details of the link, see John Sparrow’s Mark Pattison and the Idea of University . Gordon Haight strongly disagrees that Mr. Casaubon was inspired by Mark Pattison, and devotes Appendix II of his biography to the “canard.” But he isn’t convincing.

5 English Classical Scholarship , 1985, p. 132. To be mesmerized by a tiny subject can be a dilettante feature and a recipe for disaster, too. Brink goes on to quote from a letter of A. E. Housman to Lord Asquith asserting that Pattison was “a spectator of all time and all existence, and the contemplation of that repulsive scene is fatal to accurate learning.”

6Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon , 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892, Section X, p. 434.

7 Isaac Casaubon , p. 430. There are rhythms in this exciting sentence-fragment that remind one of Gibbon’s translation of Poggio’s description of fifteenth-century Rome: “The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws and elect their magistrates, is now enclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes. The public and private edifices, that were founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is the more visible, from the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of time and fortune.” ( Decline and Fall , vol. VIII, ch. 71.) The incoherent notes that survive a great classical scholar who has failed to complete his great work have, then, some of the sublimity and grandeur of Poggio’s broken Forum. Still, I did not succeed in finding any lumber in Gibbon’s descriptions of fallen Rome or sacked Constantinople.

8Latter-day Romans made cement by burning marble ruins for lime. A footnote by Dean Milman in the 1855 Milman, Guizot, and Smith edition of Gibbon, published by John Murray, says (vol. VIII, p. 277): “Ancient Rome was considered a quarry from which the church, the castle of the baron, or even the hovel of the peasant, might be repaired.” Gordon Haight reports that George Eliot read Decline and Fall in 1855 and again in 1864; Middlemarch was written c. 1870.

9 Isaac Casaubon , pp. 448–9.

10In his treatment of Pope’s Essay on Man , however, De Quincey pre-sciently describes Mr. Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies . The Essay on Man is a work, writes De Quincey, “which, when finished, was not even begun; whose arches wanted their key-stones; whose parts had no coherency; and whose pillars, in the very moment of being thrown open to public view, were already crumbling into ruins.” ( Essays on the Poets , “Alexander Pope,” Ticknor & Fields, 1856, p. 193.)

11My French isn’t nearly as bad as my Latin, which would have made Virginia Woolf cough discreetly behind her hand.

12As is Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66), a Poynton precursor in which some beloved old furniture of a dead mother is stored away by a tasteless stepmother: “Most girls would be glad to get rid of furniture only fit for the lumber-room,” says Mrs. Kirkpatrick, on p. 189 of the Oxford Classics edition. I’m grateful to my wife for pointing out this reference. While I was reading Wives and Daughters (just to p. 189, where I stopped, off to lumber-pastures new), I came across some passages about a certain Lord and Lady Cumnor and heard in their names the minuet-music of country gentry, and was reminded of Alexander Pope’s game of ombre in the second version of The Rape of the Lock . It occurred to me that if one didn’t know anything about the etymology of lumber , one might guess that it was from l’ombre , “shade” or “shadow”—and one would imagine that lumbery things were stored away in the shadows of l’umbra-rooms, overseen by Pope’s melancholy gnome, Umbriel, whose name is just lumber with the l displaced. The Concise Oxford French Dictionary has mettre un homme à l’ombre meaning (colloquially) to put a man in prison, and this is also one of lumber’s slang senses in English: to be in lumber can signify imprisonment (as can to be in limber and to be in limbo ), per Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang .

In his seventy-eighth Rambler essay, for Saturday, December 15, 1750, Johnson wrote:

The most important events, when they become familiar, are no longer considered with wonder or solicitude, and that which at first filled up our whole attention, and left no place for any other thought, is soon thrust aside into some remote repository of the mind, and lies among other lumber of the memory, over-looked and neglected.

When I first read this sentence, in 1982, I had no notion of the long-bearded and — barded history of lumber . The phrase “lumber of the memory” appealed to me because it brought to mind dim palletized piles of pressure-treated two-by-fours, their end-grain sprayed bright nonwooden colors to distinguish grades and brands, laid out in a huge, fragrant mind-hangar — a place like the Home Depot, or Grossman’s, or Chase Pitkin, where new sawdust, and not the dust of ages, covers the floor, and where unfinished ten-foot pieces of molding (quarter-rounds, coves, and coronado caps) are stored upright in allées of sequential pens; lengths that when you bring them up to the register, intending to Make Something New with them, spring in sympathy with your steps, like the rhythmic slow-motion warp of the sprinting vaulter’s resilient prop: a forward-looking, American lumber of imminence, then, of unrolled plans and dormer punch-throughs and vest-pocket solariums, not a backward-looking European lumber of decrepitude and decay. 1Remote repositories of the mind were just the sort of places you would need to store a heavy, dentable, sandable percept like lumber: the roundedness of the word implies the shearing scream of the tablesaw in some distant neighbor’s yard on summer afternoons, which is always followed by a reassuringly melodic mallet-plink as the shorn end falls into the pile of angled scrap.