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

But still the offspring of your Brain shall prove

The Grocer’s care, and brave the Rage of Jove.

When Bonfires blaze, your vagrant Works shall rise

In Rockets, till they reach the wondring Skyes.

The lines sound so young , so ambitious (though ironic), and in their “you” address, so like the last four lines of the Rape —

When those fair Suns shall sett, as sett they must,

And all those Tresses shall be laid in Dust;

This Lock

, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame,

And mid’st the Stars inscribe

Belinda’s

Name!

Pope learned what he had in him to say by helping Garth say things he didn’t know he wanted to say, but was happy to be thought to have said. Surely Garth had help: the fact that there are four lumbers in The Dispensary’s final version is, I now see, an argument not for Garth’s uncontrollable enthusiasm for lumber as a word, but rather for the existence of multiple contributors to his poem (one of whom was Pope): helped by one or more hands, Garth lost track of what he had and was no longer able to suppress unwanted repetitions. 13

And there I’m going to have to stop. The long-overdue English Poetry disks, housed in their plastic jewel-boxes, must be returned to Chadwyck-Healey. One book after another I have sliced in half and jammed down on the juicing hub — at times my roistered brain-shaft has groaned like a tiny electric god in pain with the effort of noshing and filtering all this verbal pulp. No doubt there are other important early lumber -formations waiting to be found — I never got around to checking Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying (1651), and I was only cursory in my scan of The Compleat Angler (1653) — but I’m stopping anyway. I have poked through verbal burial mounds, I have overemphasized minor borrowings, I have placed myself deep in the debt of every accessible work of reference, and I have overquoted and overquibbled — of course I have: that is what always happens when you pay a visit to the longbeards’ dusty chamber. Lumber-room loans the short-sold world back to the reader, while storing all of poetry and prose within as a shrouded pledge. It contains the notion of containment; it keeps in mind how little we can successfully keep in mind. I will miss looking upon every author as the potential employer of a single perversely chosen unit of vocabulary. All the pages I have flipped and copied and underlined will turn gray again and pull back into the shadows, and have no bearing on one another. Lumber becomes treasure only temporarily, through study, and then it lapses into lumber again. Books open, and then they close.

(1995)

1Except for a use by John Ozell in 1708, to be footnoted shortly. Without artificial retrieval-tools, I also found this ante-Papal line from the Prologue to Book IV of the Urquhart-Motteux translation of Rabelais (1694): “Since tools without their hafts are useless lumber.” And in Book IV, chapter 59, Rabelais’s Gastrolators offer their god some “lumber pies with hot sauce,” a translation of “pastéz à la saulce chaulde.” But I saw no instance of the word in Book III, chapters 3–5, in which Panurge and Pantagruel debate the advantages of debt. In translating pastéz (Book II, chapter 5 and elsewhere) Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611–1660) seems generally to have employed “pasties”; Peter Motteux, his successor (and Wesley’s acquaintance), introduced the lumber into the pie. Pastissage , Montaigne’s curious word, does not appear anywhere in Rabelais, according to Dixon and Dawson’s Concordance des Oeuvres de François Rabelais (1992).

2De hammer dat John Henry swung,

It weighed over nine pound;

He broke a rib in his lef’-han’ side,

An’ his intrels fell on de groun’,

Lawd, Lawd, an’ his intrels fell on de groun’.

(“John Henry,” in Auden, The Oxford Book of Light Verse )

3But here the learned Lombard whom I trace

My forward Pen by slower Method stays …

Pope’s first published poem, a translation of Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale” that was published in 1709, begins in Lombardy, too:

There liv’d in Lombardy, as Authors write

In Days of old, a wise and worthy Knight…

4Denham’s parody, contained in Disk 1 of the English Poetry Database , is reprinted in an appendix to David Gladish’s edition of Gondibert , 1971, where there are also some lines about D’Avenant’s “sad mis-haps, / Of drinking, riming, and of claps.”

5Un Pědant enyvrě de sa vaine science,

Tout herissé de Grec, tout bouffi d’arrogance,

Et qui, de mille Auteurs retenus mot pour mot,

Dans sa teste entassez, n’a souvent fait qu’un Sot,

Croit qu’un livre fait tout …

Entasser des écus is a common phrase for hoarding money, according to the Concise Oxford French Dictionary —maybe the anonymous Englisher is trying to preserve the financial clink in “entassez” with “lumber-office.” The translation is from the Poems on Affairs of State (1697), vol. 1, p. 210, entitled “The Fourth Satyr of Boileau to W.K.”—it was left out of the modern edition of the Poems on Affairs of State , but it is on the EPFTD .

6Garth’s heavy use of lumber was infectious: Geoffrey Tillotson, in his introduction to the Twickenham edition of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1940, rev. ed, 1954, p. 113), writes: “Among the medical lumber of [Garth’s] poem are satiric references to the ‘beau monde’ (the phrase of the time) which provide Pope with hints and materials.”

7P — p’s = Sir John Philipps, who, according to Ellis’s note, introduced a bill in 1699 for the suppression of “all sorts of Debauchery .… Adultery was propos’d to be punished with Death.” The bill died in committee. Defoe, in “An Encomium Upon a Parliament” (1699) wrote:

’Twas voted once, that for the Sin

Of Whoring Men should die all;

But then ’twas wisely thought again,

The House would quickly grow so thin,

They durst not stand the Tryal.

(See Poems on Affairs of State , vol. 6, pp. 56, 121.) There is a “W—” attacked in Canto 5 of the 1699 edition of The Dispensary , who is none other than Samuel Wesley:

Had

W

— never aim’d in Verse to please,

We had not rank’d him with our

Ogilbys

.

To this unprovoked and stupid libel (John Ogilby, who died in 1676, was evidently a clunky translator of Homer and Virgil and the object of much ridicule- reçu ), Wesley responded a year later in his Epistle in a restrained passage about the pasteboard poetical machinery of the sort Garth used in The Dispensary :

And G — h, tho barren is his Theme and mean,

By this has reach’d at least the fam’d Lutrine.

Wesley alludes here to charges by Blackmore, Defoe, and others that Garth took his idea for The Dispensary from Boileau’s Le Lutrin (the story of a disputed reading-desk) — charges that Pope would later encounter in connection with his Rape of the Lock . The couplet is also, by virtue of the mispronunciation of lutrin forced by the rhyme-word mean , a pun on latrine , apt because of the internecine urinal-throwing in Garth’s poem.

8M— looks to be Luke Milbourne (1649–1720), who attacked Dryden’s Virgil in 1698, and attempted what Sir Walter Scott later called “a rickety translation of his own.” I made this tentative identification by looking through the two-syllable trochaic surnames under M in the index to Ellis’s Affairs of State volume; there is a note about Milbourne on p. 164, in explication of a passage in Daniel Defoe’s exuberant The Pacificator (1700), one of many poems by Defoe that aren’t included in the English Poetry Database . (Defoe devotes a whole page to the opposition between Wit and Sense in poetry; e.g., “ Wit is a King without a Parliament, / And Sense a Democratick Government.”)