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

I regarded myself as one of those vile things that Nature designed should be thrown by into her

lumber room

, there to perish in obscurity.

Selina Gaye (also the author of The Maiden of the Iceberg: A Tale in Verse , published in 1867 and not included in the English Poetry Database , though it is available on microfilm) has left out an adjective: Goldsmith’s sentence actually reads (I flipped through the Vicar three times before I found it), “… there to perish in unpitied obscurity.” The World’s Lumber Room is an interdisciplinary study of “dust” and its sources and users — it occupies itself with decomposition, the recycling of Victorian household refuse, the social hierarchy of Parisian ragpickers (or chiffonniers ), kitchen middeners, ants, flies, coral reefs, volcanoes, beetles, the medicinal jelly made from ivory dust, brewers’ refuse (“draff”) pressed into cakes and fed to horses, and old rugs:

A carpet which covered the floor of one of the rooms in the mint of San Francisco for five years was, when taken up, cut in small pieces, and burnt in pans, with the result that its ashes yielded gold and silver to the value of 2,500 dollars.

The following passage in particular, from Gaye’s preface, is oddly inspiring:

The World’s Lumber Room, comprising the three great departments of Earth, Air, and Water, is in fact co-extensive with the World itself, and, so far from being the sort of place which the worthy Vicar’s son seems to have pictured to himself, is rather a workshop or laboratory, where nothing is left to “perish,” in his sense of the word, but the old becomes new, and the vile and refuse, instead of being “thrown by” in their vileness, are taken in hand and turned to good account.

Perhaps I am not so very misguided, then, in deliberately making a lumber-room of my head with the present study, so long as that room is, as Gaye contends, coextensive with the world itself. No decomposing quotation is so vile that it can’t be taken in hand and turned to good account. Still, if I’m going to quote from the long and illustrious line of lumber-into-treasure commonplaceholders, if I’m going to cite Horace and Wordsworth and Emerson and W. E. Henley and Saki and A. R. Ammons, there is no excuse for my having left out of this series the most adept and amazing commonplace-transfigurer there ever was, or will be. “He unfortunately worked up the rubbish as well as the gems,” Leslie Stephen writes, in an essay called “Pope as a Moralist,” but in another passage Stephen grants, as we all must, that Alexander Pope has “a probably unequalled power of coining aphorisms out of common-place.” Of Pope’s Essay on Criticism the harsh Reverend Elwin says that all the classical doctrines of criticism in it “might have been picked up from his French manuals in a single morning,” and he concurs with De Quincey’s dismissal of it as “mere versification, like a metrical multiplication table, of common-places the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps.” And yet what an extraordinary multiplication table it is, and what lucky sewer rats we readers are! Tiny known quantities of sense, operated upon in accordance with known metrical law, yield in Pope’s arithmetic hands infinitely long and unrepeating decimals of truth:

True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest

What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.

Not much has been more oft thought over the centuries than the notion that the writer writes what oft was thought but ne’er so well exprest; nobody, though, has exprest it with such politely imploded conviction as Pope exhibits here. 6At twenty-five, Pope possessed (this is Leslie Stephen again) “the rare art of composing proverbs in verse, which have become part of the intellectual furniture of all decently educated men.” Even De Quincey, in spite of the ornate scorn he reserves for the Essay , seems to have come into a few Queen Anne tea-tables from Pope’s estate. In the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater , he denounces certain works of political economy as being “the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect.” Compare Pope:

Still run on Poets in a raging Vein,

Ev’n to the Dregs and Squeezings of the Brain.

Not that Pope’s “dregs and squeezings” isn’t itself a second pressing: a footnote in the Twickenham edition calls our attention to a line in Oldham’s Satyrs upon the Jesuits that goes, “With all the dregs , and squeesings of his rage.” Mark Pattison writes that Pope was

very industrious, and had read a vast number of books, yet he was very ignorant, — ignorant, that is, of everything but the one thing which he laboured with all his might to acquire, the art of happy expression. He read books to find ready-made images, and to feel for the best collocations of words. His memory was a magazine of epithets and synonymes, and pretty turns of language. Whenever he found anything to his purpose, he booked it for use, and some time or other, often more than once, it made its appearance in his verse.

7

We pardon Pope, most of the time, because he rehabilitates nearly every second-hand phrase that comes through his shop. He unscrews a line he likes, sorts and cleans its pieces, stores them, finds matches, does some seemingly casual beveling, drills a narrow caesural ventilation-hole, squirts the Krazy Glue of genius into several chinks, gives the prototypical whole a sudden uniting twist, and hands the world a tiny two-cylinder perpetual-motion machine — a heroic couplet. Even when we know his sources phrase by phrase, we must still remain in awe (following a week in a darkened room devoted to adjusting to the horrifying extent and specificity of the thefts) of his divine clockmaker’s gift. Dryden (in his “Preface to the Fables”) explains that “the genius of our countrymen in general [is] rather to improve an invention, than to invent themselves; as is evident not only in our poetry, but in many of our manufactures.” And Samuel Wesley (a poet too minor to receive an entry of his own in Drabble’s Oxford Companion , though Swift gives him the honor of being the fourth fatality in The Battle of the Books) , 8in a passage from his Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) defends Dryden’s own frequent raids on the already articulated:

If from the modern or the antient Store

He borrows ought, he always pays ’em more:

So much improv’d, each Thought, so fine appears,

Waller or Ovid scarce durst own ’em theirs.

The Learned Goth has scowr’d all Europe’s Plains,

France, Spain, and fruitful Italy he drains,

From every Realm and every Language gains:

His Gains a Conquest are, and not a Theft;

He wishes still new Worlds of Wit were left…

This is a sort of versification of Dryden’s own praise of Boileau, in the essay “On the Origin and Progress of Satire”:

What he [Boileau] borrows from the ancients he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good and almost as universally valuable.

Samuel Butler, a few decades earlier, came up with one of the tripier casings for this old trope:

Our moderne Authors write Playes as they feed hogs in Westphalia, where but one eate’s peas, or akornes, and all the rest feed upon his and one anothers excrement.

9

I happened on Wesley’s Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry in the English Poetry Database simply because it mentions the “lumber-thoughts” of a poetical first draft. (Some you should keep, and some “the sponge should strike.”) But I liked the poem and paused over it, for it looked to be something Pope had read carefully:

Draw the Main Strokes at first, ’twill shew your Skill,