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

These lumber pies of common-places, wherewith so many furnish their studies, are of little use but to common subjects, and serve but to show us, and not to direct us.…

Lumber pies ? What are these succulent-sounding baked goods that Cotton serves us, in his version of Montaigne’s unusual phrase “pastissages de lieux communs”? Florio’s translation kneejerks here with “rapsodies of common places,” a cliché; modern versions by J. M. Cohen and Donald Frame offer the relatively vague “concoctions of commonplaces.” Yet a pastissage is, according to Godefroy’s Dictionnaire de l’Ancienne Langue Française , a “making, or baking of pies, or pastmeats,” or figuratively, a mélange. Possibly Donald Frame would object that Cotton erred on the side of overspecificity. But Cotton seems to be aware of the range of metaphorical meaning that pastissage can have, since he translates the only other use of the word in the Essays , in “Of the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers,” less colorfully: “we call the piling up [ pastissage ] of the first laws that fall into our hands, justice.” 8Trechmann translates pastissage as “pasties” and M. A. Screech, most recently, substitutes “meat pies.” But to my nose, Cotton’s translation retains more of the steamy savoriness of the original, a lumber pie being, depending on the dictionary you consult, a “highly seasoned meat-pie, made either of veal or lamb” ( lumbard-pie in Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs, and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century , 10th ed., 1881), or “A pie in which balls of minced meat or fish are baked with butter and eggs” ( Webster’s Second; definition omitted in Webster’s Third ), or even possibly an uncle or nephew of the numble, umble , or humble pie, a pie made from the lombles (cf. loins and lumbar -organs) or “certain inward parts” of the deer, according to Dr. Ernest Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Elsevier, 1966–67), whose dedication pages made me cry furtively and without warning at the copying machine of the Berkeley Public Library. Volume I of Klein’s dictionary is

DEDICATED TO THE SACRED MEMORY OF THE BEST PARENTS

MY DEAR

MOTHER

WHO AFTER A LIFE OF SELF-SACRIFICE DIED IN SZATMAR IN 1940

AND MY DEAR

FATHER

,

THE WORLD-RENOWNED RABBI AND SCHOLAR

RABBI IGNAZ (ISAAC) KLEIN OF SZATMAR

,

WHO DIED A MARTYR OF HIS FAITH IN AUSCHWITZ IN 1944;

AND TO THE SACRED MEMORY OF MY

WIFE

AND OF MY ONLY

CHILD JOSEPH (HAYYIM ISRAEL)

WHO ALSO FELL VICTIMS TO NAZISM IN AUSCHWITZ IN 1944

And Volume II is

DEDICATED TO THE BLESSED MEMORY OF

ARTHUR MINDEN, Q.C

.

THE DEAREST FRIEND I EVER HAD,

THE NOBLEST MAN THAT EVER LIVED,

WHO DIED IN TORONTO IN 1966

MAY HIS SOUL BE BOUND IN THE BOND OF LIFE

Dr. Klein: a quiet and disciplined scholar who, after these awful deaths, was left with an extended etymological word-family to keep him company. I would like to thank him, if he is still with us, and even if he is not, for his help with the numbles and umbles and other inward parts that I hereby bake in this lumber pie — a pie that is, regardless of which fishes or meats may have participated in its recipe at various times, above all a mixed dish: Montaigne intended us to think of his “pastissage de lieux communs” as a shepherd’s pie, a calzone, a frittata, a scrapple, a haggis, a pizza ai quattro formaggi , of commonplaces. Frame’s “Concoction” sounds water-based and medicinal and unchewable — it is a non-nutritive pestle-product that Homais the apothecary would formulate in his capharnaüm. The English Poetry Database offers further elucidation: a lumber pie is a “compound paste” in a poem called “A Farewel to Wine, by a Quondam Friend to the Bottle” (1693 is the date of the edition used by the database), by one Richard Ames. Several screens in, Ames samples one vintage and rejects it:

I’ve tasted it—’tis spiritless and flat,

And has as many different tastes,

As can be found in Compound pastes,

In Lumber Pye, or soporifrous Methridate.

The lumber pie also appears to be made, at least at some periods, without benefit of milk or butter or beef, and possibly with ox-heel — or so I nervously conclude (feeling in matters of culinary and bovine history more than a little out of my depth) from a 1717 poem by Edward (“Ned”) Ward entitled “British Wonders: Or, A Poetical Description of the Several Prodigies and Most Remarkable Accidents That have happen’d in Britain since the Death of Queen Anne,” another finding from the Poetry Database . Ward sings of the “hornplague” that “like a fatal Rot or Murrain,/Turn’d all our Bulls and Cows to Carrion,” leaving a queasy populace unwilling to touch beef or anything made with dairy products, such as “custard,” for instance — an “open pie” (according to the OED ) often containing meat in an egg and cream sauce:

Custard, that noble cooling Food,

So toothsome, wholsome, and so good,

That Dainty so approv’d of old,

Whose yellow surface shines like Gold …

That crusty Fort, whose Walls of Wheat,

Contain such tender lusheous Meat,

And us’d so often to be storm’d

By hungry Gownmen sharply arm’d,

Was now, alas, despis’d as nought,

And slighted wheresoe’er ’twas brought;

Whilst Lumber-Pies came more in play,

And bore, at Feasts, the Bell away.

So in wet Seasons, when our Mutton

Is e’ery where cry’d down as rotten

,

Cow-heel becomes a Dish of State

,

And climbs the Tables of the Great

.

The OED also informs us that “cow-heel” can mean “ox-heel.” So a lumber pie was at one time a non-dairy ox-product. Or not: I may be misapplying the last four lines, which possibly do not refer specifically to the pie that precedes them. 9

Another and (to be honest) incompatible explanation for the appearance in the Essais of the rare phrase “pastissage de lieux communs” is that Montaigne was quietly adapting, as was his way, and not quite understanding, a pie -figure from a text that was originally in English, or English mediated by Latin. Pie is — as I happened to discover while looking for lumber in Froude’s Short Studies on Great Subjects, Second Series , vol. II 10—a printer’s term. In “On Progress,” Froude writes:

When a block of type from which a book has been printed is broken up into its constituent letters the letters so disintegrated are called “pie.” The pie, a mere chaos, is afterwards sorted and distributed, preparatory to being built up into fresh combinations. A distinguished American friend describes Democracy as “making pie.”

(I take it the distinguished American friend was Emerson? Or Oliver Wendell Holmes?) The OED doesn’t include Froude’s passage, but the quotations there establish that, at least from the mid-seventeenth century, pie could mean “A mass of type mingled indiscriminately or in confusion, such as results from the breaking down of a forme of type.” Quoting from a writer, too, is the breaking of his work down to constituent pieces, with an eye to an alternative typeset reassembly. And a few inches above the OED entry for the typographical pie is the information that, in the fifteenth century and after, Pyes were the English church’s name for certain elaborate ordinals, or books of commemorational scheduling; and the secular pye book became, perhaps relatedly but probably later, “an alphabetical index to rolls and records.” So even in Montaigne’s own time, pies or pyes were, unfiguratively, books, and maybe were, as well, the hashed dark-matter of type — the Drydo-Ovidian “rude and indigested mass”—from which books were formed. Perhaps Montaigne encountered this more specialized use of pie somewhere and mistakenly concretized it as a pasty, causing the scrupulously flour-powdered Cotton to liven it up further as a lumber pie .