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

The curiosity-shop is sometimes very amusing, with its mandarins, stuffed birds, odd old carved faces, and a variety of things as indescribable as bits of dreams.

Here is Dickens’s version in the first chapter of The Old Curiosity Shop :

There were suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour here and there, fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters, rusty weapons of various kinds, distorted figures in china and wood and iron and ivory: tapestry and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams.

14“But surely the one thing wanting to make Wordsworth an even greater poet than he is, — his thought richer, and his influence of wider application, — was that he should have read more books, among them, no doubt, those of that Goethe whom he disparaged without reading him.” (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.”)

15In his critical prose, that is. “Rugby Chapel” and the corded bales at the end of “The Scholar-Gypsy” are awfully good.

16Saintsbury seems to be half-remembering the aforequoted passages of Shelley here, or perhaps paraphrasing Horace, who had said some helpful things in his Art of Poetry about how difficult it is to treat in one’s own way what is common (line 128), and about the desirability of a poetry made of familiar things (line 240), and about the “beauty that may crown the commonplace” (line 243) — passages more helpful when pulled out of context, as they frequently were. (For instance, the “unutterably tedious” Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten writes in his Reflections on Poetry that a “confused recognition, if it occurs, represents in the most poetic way a mingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar,” and then he says, “Hence Horace, ‘I should look for my poetic fictions in familiar things.’ ”) In one of the early translations into English of Horace’s Ars Poetica , by Oldham (1683), a word leaps up:

For there’s no second Rate in Poetry

A dull insipid Writer none can bear,

In every place he is the publick jeer,

And Lumber of the Shops and Stationer.

17Some lines from G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy help explain Bishop’s choice of Crusoe. In the chapter called “The Ethics of Elfland” he says that Robinson Crusoe “celebrates the poetry of limits,” and then writes: “Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea.” I must thank my mother for reminding me of this passage. “ ‘Saved from the wreck,’ as Chesterton said, ‘saved from the wreck,’ ”she said, helping her grandchildren build a lean- to out of sticks on a beach.

18Michele Fagan said by phone that the “Mystery” in her title was an editorial addition — she had intended it simply to be “A Tour Through the Lumber Room.” The Beatles reference does confuse things a little. Her essay is a survey of the oddments that can be found in old census reports; I found it by searching the Wilson Library Literature CD-ROM.

19The WELL, Miscellaneous Conference, Topic 871, no. 8, September 22, 1993. The topic has since been retired and frozen and is no longer extractable unless you add an “-r” (for “retired”) to the command string; i.e., “!extract — f ‘lumber of my life’ — r misc.” If it is like most topics, it will eventually be deleted entirely, and my citation of it will be the only record of its existence. Electronic media have an underdeveloped sense of the value of their own history; all but a small fraction of what was actually posted on the WELL since 1985 has vanished.

20What got Bishop interested in lumber? Had she been reading Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who is her kind of writer in several ways, funny and observant and lesbian and mail-loving, and who has a passage in a letter of October 10, 1716 (partially quoted in the OED’s history of lumber ) about the cabinets of curiosities in the Emperor’s repository in Vienna? It sounds a lot like Bishop: “Two of the rooms were wholly filled with relics of all kinds, set in jewels, amongst which I was desired to observe a crucifix, that they assured me had spoken very wisely to the Emperor Leopold. I won’t trouble you with the catalogue of the rest of the lumber; but I must not forget to mention a small piece of loadstone that held up an anchor of steel too heavy for me to lift.” Horace Walpole, another letter-writer who would have appealed to Bishop, cattily dismisses Versailles (a symbol of civilization one could set in opposition to Crusoe’s island) as a “lumber of littleness,” which is an adaptation of a couplet in one of Pope’s Moral Essays , about a uselessly grand house:

Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!

The whole, a labour’d Quarry above ground.

(I found the Walpole reference in an endnote to Essays and Criticisms , Thomas Gray, ed. Clark Sutherland Northup, 1911. Gray, on May 22, 1739, says of Versailles, “What a huge heap of littleness!”) Or had Bishop been reading Anthony Powell’s Books Do Furnish a Room , which came out in 1971, about the time she may have been writing her poem: “In the dozen years or so since I had last been at Thrubworth more lumber than ever had collected in these back parts of the house, much of it no doubt brought there after requisitioning. There was an overwhelming accumulation: furniture: pictures: rolled-up carpets: packing cases.” Or had Bishop simply grown dissatisfied with “junk” and “stuff” in earlier drafts of her poem and looked in a thesaurus? It’s always a possibility.

21Moll Flanders, though, says of a stolen trunk, or “Portmanteua,” as Moll spells it, which she has safely gotten past the Custom-House officers: “I did not think the Lumber of it worth my concern.” (Oxford ed., p. 266.) Owens and Furbank’s A KWIC Concordance to Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1985) took me there. Woolf’s and Nabokov’s customs-inspection similes are traceable to this scene in Defoe’s proto-novel.

22Or I was reading it, anyway, until vol. III was stolen from the front seat of my car. The thief either was planning on pawning it, or possibly wanted to add to his book collection.

23I don’t resent the witty Anthony Lane, who, in The New Yorker of February 20–27,1995, beat me to an American review of the English Poetry Database . Lane pursues the word lard for a moment, and mentions “the old Housman principle that good verse should make the hair stand up on the back of your neck” (did Housman really shave the back of his neck?), and he makes an excellent point: “Yet I found myself stirred, not engulfed, by the flow of mediocrity. ‘English Poetry’ offers a way out of the crucial, and frankly tedious, impasse that has stiffened within the academy in recent years — the standoff, in broad terms, between the élitist and the democratic.”

Ah, and A. R. Ammons’s Garbage (1993), a book-length poem of paired run-on lines, is the latest attempt at the ultramundane. It announces its age-old transfigurative hope right up front, on its dedication page, which reads:

to the bacteria, tumblebugs, scavengers

,

wordsmiths — the transfigurers, restorers

Some of the poem, heavily metaled with lumps of arrhythmic Green-Party pulpitry, sounds surprisingly like Cardinal Newman’s little brother, quoted many pages ago. For example:

… the ditchwork of the deepest degradation

reflects waters brighter than common ground: