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

if he troubles to study [

The Dispensary

], is often haunted by a vague suspicion that he has met a line or couplet elsewhere, in a very different, much more spacious context; and it soon occurs to him that, although Pope may not have borrowed from Garth … his old friend’s poem may have lingered in the background of his mind, and that, while he was imagining and writing, he was also unconsciously remembering.

On the evidence, “may not have borrowed” is much too charitable, as is “unconsciously remembering”: throughout his life, Pope’s mimicry and mosaicry has every sign of being entirely conscious — brilliant and beautiful, but at the same time contemptible.

Why, though, an untutored twentieth-century reader might ask, wouldn’t Garth put up some sort of minor fuss about Pope’s many petty thefts? Because he was good-natured? Bolingbroke said Garth was “the best-natured ingenious wild man I ever knew,” and Pope in “The Epistle to Arbuthnot” calls him “well-natur’d Garth,” and he is quoted in Spence’s Anecdotes as saying that Garth was “one of the best natured men in the world.” In an age of wig-wearers, Garth wore one of unusual magnitude and copiousness (his portrait was painted in it) — and it could be that Pope, whose praise always came at the end of a long series of calculations, thought so highly of Garth’s character because Garth didn’t get angry and shriek, as Belinda did in The Rape of the Lock (a poem about plagiarism), upon seeing his flowing curls so expertly forfexed. Reverend Wesley’s phrase about overdressed style-wigs “Like Hairy Meteors glimm’ring through a Cloud” may supply a hint as to what Pope is doing: he’s snipping Garth’s locks in The Rape of the Lock , but because he is writing a better poem than The Dispensary , Pope’s appropriations will immortalize and meteorize the wiggy victim (Garth), who would otherwise be forgotten:

But trust the Muse — she saw it upward rise,

Tho’ mark’d by none but quick Poetic Eyes:…

A sudden Star, it shot thro’ liquid Air,

And drew behind a radiant

Trail of Hair

.

( Rape of the Lock , Canto V)

I may have come up with this theory (Pope as hairdresser) because not far from where I live is a hair-styling salon called simply Alexander Pope. I haven’t had a haircut there yet.

Maybe all this talk of Pope’s theft is unfair to him. Yet even Maynard Mack, who is sympathetic to his lifelong poet, brings himself to say that “there remains a reserve in him that in some circumstances can edge over into evasiveness, deceit, or chicanery.” 10Professor Mack tentatively attributes the chicanery to Pope’s being a Catholic in a Catholic-hating age, an only child, and a hunchback, which doesn’t seem fair to all the good-hearted siblingless Catholic hunchbacks who have ever lived. Pope was bad because it helped him to write to be bad — he snuck things from other writers without thanking them, and then, having wronged them that way, he took offense at them publicly, too. One after another, he unjustly attacked the figures in or at the periphery of his circle, from John Dennis to Lewis Theobald to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, not because he cared to right wrongs and expose incom-petencies, but because the glove-flinging, spittle-spraying indignation that accompanied an autochthonous squabble was his best muse. He hated being hated, but he found he liked being angry, and he loved versifying his revenge.

In the early case of “learned lumber,” though, there is another way the derivation might have worked. Say a seventeen-year-old, vastly talented but still byline-shy Pope, encouraged by his reception at Will’s, offered to comment on some of the less successful passages in Garth’s gift to him, The Dispensary . Say that Pope, in the course of going over the poem, came up with some fine alternative lines and outright interpolations and showed them to Garth, who, very impressed (and confusing self-interest with generosity toward lyric youth), stuck them in his poem . Under this supposition, the reason why Pope said that each edition of The Dispensary was an improvement over the last was that Pope had himself supplied some of the improvements. Here is the whole “learned lumber” passage from the Essay on Criticism , italics included this time for variety. Notice that it goes on to mention Samuel Garth by name:

The Bookful Blockhead, ignorantly read,

With

Loads of Learned Lumber

in his Head,

With his own Tongue still edifies his Ears,

And always

List’ning to Himself

appears.

All Books he reads, and all he reads assails,

From

Dryden’s Fables

down to

Durfey’s Tales

.

With

him

, most Authors steal their Works, or buy;

Garth

did not write his own

Dispensary

.

Near the end of his life, Pope added a self-congratulating footnote to this last line:

A common slander at that time in prejudice of that deserving author. Our poet [i.e., Pope] did him this justice, when that slander most prevail’d; and it is now (perhaps the sooner for this very verse) dead and forgotten.

Perhaps the “justice” Pope is doing Garth with that line is rather a trickier kind of betrayal. Pope is pretending to be holding a false charge up to ridicule — the charge that Garth stole or bought his creation — while actually saying what he in fact literally says: that Garth did not write his own Dispensary . He is spreading gossip without spreading it — hiding his true confession behind a pretend-sneer at a blockhead critic. One can speculate that Pope got paid, either in amazed respect or in actual cash, for his contributions to Garth’s poem, just as, later on, Pope paid (underpaid) the poets who quietly helped him translate The Odyssey . I haven’t seen the marked-up Yale copy, 1703A , in which those 414 added and 82 revised lines are included “in a hand not Garth’s”—but even if the modifications aren’t in Pope’s handwriting, and they probably aren’t, it is entirely possible that Pope was responsible for some of the added couplets, including the Tennysonian moment that G. Birkbeck Hill and Peter Quennell choose to quote:

To Die, is landing on some silent Shoar,

Where Billows never break, nor Tempests roar.

11

The sparkling line in The Dispensary about the healing Pine that will “Lament your Fate in tears of Turpentine” is a post-1703 addition, too. Both of these passages sound to me like Pope at his precocious best — and if Pope was capable of introducing these improvements into Garth’s cantos, he could also have thought up “To these dark Realms much learned Lumber creeps / There copious M[ilbourne] safe in Silence sleeps” and given it to Garth as well. 12

What we can earnestly strive to believe, then (although it may well not be true), is that Pope, who is after all the greater poet, slipped Garth the “learned lumber” under the tabula rasa around 1705, and then found he liked it so much that he wished he hadn’t, and used it in his own poem in 1711, reclaiming it from Ozell’s Lutrin . Garth didn’t protest these and other later borrowings, because Pope was a friend and Garth was good-natured, and because if he did, he would then have had to admit that some number of lines in the revised and amplified poem were not from his own pen. I don’t know whether to subscribe to this sequence of events or not. Either the young Pope stole his learned lumber outright from Garth (and Ozell), which would diminish him forever in my eyes, since I thought of him, when I began my lumberjahr, as being at the center of the metaphor of study that I had chosen to study, or the young Pope first loaned it to Garth and then repossessed it, which adds to the picture of his tiresome sneakiness, but leaves his original talents unim-peached. At the moment, I can’t help reading the following additions in the 1706 Dispensary as being the stealthy work of a teenage Pope, a warm up for his Rape of the Lock , rather than the work of a secure and successful forty-five-year-old Garth: