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

5Judging by his library and the slighting things he says in the Essay about the poetic imagination. Locke did, though, own Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Congreve’s The Mourning Bride . (See Richard Ashcraft, “John Locke’s Library: Portrait of an Intellectual,” in A Locke Miscellany .)

6 The Essays of Montaigne , Oxford University Press, vol. 1, “Translator’s Preface.”

7And it is contemptible and wrong of Montaigne to have melted whole stolen crayons from Seneca into his paragraphs without announcing it, or for that matter for Georges Perec to work entire Frenched-over sentences from Joyce’s Ulysses into his Life: A User’s Manual without so much as a peep to his readers about it, or for Sterne to plagiarize paragraphs of Locke, or for Emerson to plagiarize a paragraph of Samuel Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare —it isn’t cute, it isn’t postmodern, it’s cheating, and always has been — and once we learn that a prose writer is capable of such silent filchery, we dismiss him, rightly, as a liar and a con-man, and no matter how good he is, we no longer completely trust anything he gives us.

8A sentence that (as I determined only after much incredulous scrolling and searching) you will not find anywhere on the Library of the Future’s Third Series CD-ROM (you will in Roy E. Leake’s Concordance des Essais de Montaigne , 1981) — since the Library of the Future’s version of the Essays leaves out more than four fifths of the original Cottonian translation. (Rather scandalously, given that World Library, Inc., repeats the claim that “All books are complete & unabridged” five times in its product catalog.) The CD-ROM includes, for example, only two of the first twenty-five essays, leaving out “Of Pedantry,” “Of Liars,” and “Of Fear,” nowhere warning us, onscreen or off, that any material is cut. If this Library of the Future really is a foretaste of the Library of the Future, I hope we won’t, overawed by its exquisite searchability (and I am deeply indebted to it at present myself — although I would like to go on record as saying that I had already found the use of lumber in Boswell’s Life of Johnson by reading an old Everyman Library edition on the T in Boston in 1987), compromise the university Library of the Present, which typically holds Hazlitt’s full annotated nineteenth-century edition of Cotton’s translation, as well as a convenient one-volume 1952 Great Books edition that prints every word. (The electronic text that Library of the Future uses looks to be a scanned version of Doubleday’s handsome, footnote-free distillation of 1947, edited by Salvador Dali — an edition that in its physical paper form is accompanied by some interestingly autopsy-esque Dali illustrations not included on the disk — and I wonder, in passing, if Doubleday’s permissions department is aware that their selection was scanned, and if Dali’s act of essay-selection constitutes sweat-of-the-brow intellectual value that exists on top of a work in the public domain.)

9I like to think that Samuel Johnson ate lumber pies, too — one of the best passages in Macaulay’s article about Johnson in the Encyclopaedia Britannica goes: “Even to the end of his life, and even at the tables of the great, the sight of food affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of prey. His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean ordinaries and à la mode beef shops, was far from delicate. Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled and the moisture broke out on his forehead.” But even Johnson might have had some difficulty with this gut-buster from the True Gentlewoman’s Delight (1676), quoted in Robert Nares’s Glossary , as supplemented by Halliwell and Wright (1867): “A lumber pie . — Take three or four sweet-breads of veal, parboil and mince them very small, then take the curd of a quart of milk, turned with three eggs, half a pound of almond-past, and a penny-loaf grated, mingle these together, then take a spoonful of sweet herbs minced very small, also six ounces of oringado, and mince it, then season all this with a quarter of sugar, and three nutmegs, then take five dates, and a quarter of a pint of cream, four yolks of eggs, three spoonfuls of rose-water, three or four marrow-bones, mingle all these together, except the marrow, then make it up in long boles, about the bigness of an egg, and in every bole put a good piece of marrow, put these into the pie; then put a quarter of a pound of butter, and half a sliced lemon, them make a caudle of white wine, sugar and verjuice, put it in when you take your pie out of the oven, you may use a grain of musk and ambergriece.”

10No lumber in Froude that I found, but I came across an interestingly indigestible equivalent: “To cram a lad’s mind with infinite names of things which he never handled, places he never saw or will see, statements of facts which he cannot possibly understand, and must remain merely words to him — this, in my opinion, is like loading his stomach with marbles.” (“Education: An Address Delivered to the Students at St Andrew’s, March 19, 1869,” in Short Studies on Great Subjects, Second Series , p. 455.)

11Emerson mentions Saint Augustine as one of the writers one must read in his “Books.” There is a helpful essay on Emerson’s fascination with Johnson by Stephen Swords called “Emerson and the Ghost of Doctor Johnson,” in The Age of Johnson , vol. 6, ed. Paul J. Korshin (New York: AMS Press, 1994). Swords does not mention one notable remaking of Johnson by Emerson. Johnson, in his “Life of Congreve,” says of a passage in Congreve’s The Mourning Bride : “He who reads those lines enjoys for a moment the powers of a poet: he feels what he remembers to have felt before, but he feels it with great increase of sensibility; he recognises a familiar image, but meets it again amplified and expanded, embellished with beauty, and enlarged with majesty.” Emerson condensed this into his famous line (which I am temporarily unable to locate) about recognizing, in works of genius, our own rejected thoughts: “They return with an alienated majesty.” The Mourning Bride (first produced in 1697) is the only one of Congreve’s plays (according to David Mann’s Concordance to the Plays of William Congreve ) that contains lumber . Zara says (II, ii),

what are Riches, Empire, Power,

But larger Means to gratifie the Will?

The Steps on which we tread, to rise and reach

Our Wish; and that obtain’d down with the Scaffolding

Of Sceptres, Crowns, and Thrones; they’ve serv’d their End,

And are like Lumber, to be left and scorn’d.

12 The Pilgrims of the Rhine , 1834, quoted approvingly by the sixteen-year-old Ruskin in 1836 in his “Essay on Literature,” in Three Letters and an Essay on Literature by John Ruskin, 1836–1841: Found in His Tutor’s Desk (George Allen, 1893), p. 36.

13The essay is in the Penguin Classics edition, Selected Short Fiction , ed. Deborah A. Thomas, p. 131. In Dickens’s “Seven Dials,” included in the Penguin collection, there are “shops for the purchase of rags, bones, old iron, and kitchen-stuff” but no lumber-rooms. This may be as good a place as any to point out, if nobody has, that one of Leigh Hunt’s essays from The Indicator , published in 1833, contains a sentence that was possibly the piece of old iron that Dickens hammered and alloyed into the entirety of The Old Curiosity Shop . In “Of the Sight of Shops,” Hunt writes: