At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays

by Anne Fadiman

  We sold the Serendipity Museum of Nature. My brother and I were off to college, our parents were moving to a smaller house, we thought it was time to grow up, and… well, we just did it. We put an ad in the Los Angeles Times, and over the course of a weekend, a stream of strange people walked underneath the blow fish and took away the field guides and the fossil ammonites and the desiccated sand shark and the pickled human tapeworm. The things we prized most, because we had found them ourselves, were worthless. I remember jamming dozens of birds’ nests into plastic garbage bags. I was almost seventeen; it was the last day of my childhood.

  Thank heavens, we kept the shells, because they were small and easily stored. Today they rest inside a glass-fronted cabinet in the home of our elderly parents, who surprised us a few years ago by moving to the Florida island where we had collected the shells in the first place. When I visit, I still cannot resist picking up the odd murex or limpet when I walk along the beach. They do not have the same meaning they once did, but, as Swann said in Remembrance of Things Past, “even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have been attached to them.”

  Three years ago, I found a 1951 edition of A Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America, East of the Great Plains, by Alexander B. Klots, in a secondhand store in upstate New York. There was a stamp on the school library bookplate that said discarded. Discard Klots? How could anyone do that? I suppose for the same reason that I once discarded Klots myself: because there wasn’t room. When I was younger, I didn’t know what I wanted from life, so I wanted everything—new experiences, tiger swallowtails, egrets’ feet. Now that I have collected a family, a home, a vocation, and a few thousand books, my New York City apartment and my life are full. Before my husband’s last birthday, I sent for a copy of the Carolina Biological Supply Company catalog so I could buy him a flower press. I felt the old thirst when I read about the tarantula spiderling kit, $49.95; the owl pellets, “fumigated and individually wrapped,” $3.20; the live salamander larvae, $11.45 a dozen; the slime mold box, “preferred by professional slime mold collectors” (a lovely phrase; I had never thought of it as a profession), $5.80. I knew, however, that I would never order these things. There isn’t room.

  My favorite Nabokov story, “Christmas,” is about a man named Sleptsov who has recently lost his son, a butterfly collector. In an agony of suicidal grief, Sleptsov looks through his son’s belongings—spreading boards, specimen files, a net that still smells of summer and sun-warmed grass. Suddenly, from the biscuit tin in which it had been stored, the dormant cocoon of a great Attacus moth, stirred into life by the unaccustomed heat, bursts open. A wrinkled black creature the size of a mouse crawls out and slowly unfurls its wings. As soon as he witnesses this miracle, Sleptsov knows he must stay alive. “Christmas” is a story about lepidoptery, but it is also a story about parenthood. One reason we have children, I think, is to experience through them the miracle of the Attacus moth: to learn that parts of ourselves we had given up for dead are merely dormant, and that the old joys can re-emerge, fresh and new and in a completely different form.

  I have two children. Henry, who is three, owns three rubber caterpillars—a black swallowtail, a pipevine swallowtail, and a zebra heliconian. I know their species because he likes to match them up with the pictures in Klots, which now sits on a shelf in his bedroom. Henry is at an age when anything seems possible, and the other night, having just looked at a diagram of metamorphosis, he saw a housefly crawling across the ceiling and said, with dreamy excitement, “Maybe that fly will turn into a stag beetle!”

  Susannah is eight. When she was six, we gave her a kit containing five painted lady caterpillars. She watched them pupate. After they broke out of their chrysalises as fully formed butterflies, she carried them in a net enclosure from our cramped apartment to a nearby garden. Then she loosened the net and let them go.

  THE UNFUZZY LAMB

  is name is surely part of the problem. Had he been Charles Tiger, he might not have to drag behind him, like a tattered baby blanket, his undeserved reputation for being namby-pamby and fuddy-duddy. He didn’t think he was lamblike. After his best friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, referred to him as “my gentle hearted Charles” in the 1797 poem “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” Lamb wrote him:

  In the next edition… please to blot out gentle hearted, and substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-eye’d, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the Gentleman in question.

  When I first read that letter, I misinterpreted it as polite self-deprecation: Your poem is too kind; I do not merit such praise. Now I recognize in Lamb’s voice the same authentically aggrieved tone with which my three-year-old son casts off the constringent mantle of virtue: Don’t call me a good boy!

  Let me confess at the outset that I have a monumental crush on Charles Lamb. My fantasies are not precisely adulterous, but neither are they devoid of sensuality. Though never married and probably celibate, Lamb knew how to seize eros by the throat, give it a few sublimational shakes, and transform it into some of the most voluptuous prose ever written. In my mind’s eye, we walk his beloved London streets (“O! her lamps of a night! her rich goldsmiths, printshops, toyshops, mercers, hardware-men, pastry-cooks! St. Paul’s Churchyard! the Strand! Exeter Change! Charing Cross!”), stopping for a quick codfish dinner (“that manly firmness, combined with a sort of womanish coming-in-pieces”) and then a bookstall browse (“venturing tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment when [the owner] shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable to deny [our]selves the gratification”), while he—small-bodied, large-headed, skinny-legged, tailcoated, top-hatted—recounts to me, with the characteristic stammer that only tobacco could loosen, an evening’s worth of my favorite tales from The Essays of Elia.

  I do not understand why so few other readers are clamoring for his company. It is a bad sign when a writer can be found more easily in secondhand bookstores— which, as I need hardly point out, are filled with books that people have gotten rid of—than in Barnes & Noble. I own seventeen volumes by and about Lamb, most of them out of print and, despite their engraved frontispieces and deckle-edged pages and grosgrain bookmarks, all of them ignominiously cheap. In England, the Charles Lamb Society still toasts “The Immortal Memory” at dinners held annually to commemorate his birthday (February 10, 1775). But in the United States, where he was once more widely read than in his own country, Lamb is kept alive largely through the tenuous resuscitations of university English departments: the ICUs of literature.

  I cannot say I loved him the instant I laid eyes on him. Like many people, I encountered Tales from Shakespeare (coauthored with Mary Lamb, who I assumed was his wife) at age ten or thereabouts, and thought it a snore. In high school, “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” was served up as a model of the essay form, but I was of the age that hungers for descriptions of madness and violence, not of “crisp, tawny, well-watched, not overroasted, crackling.” Then, in my late twenties, I read “Readers Against the Grain”:

  Rather than follow in the train of this insatiable monster of modern reading, I would forswear my spectacles, play at put, mend pens, kill fleas, stand on one leg, shell peas, or do whatsoever ignoble diversion you shall put me to. Alas! I am hurried on in the vortex. I die of new books, or the everlasting talk about them.… I will go and relieve myself with a page of honest John Bunyan, or Tom Brown. Tom anybody will do, so long as they are not of this whiffling century.

  I suppose my own century seemed pretty whiffling too, and in a mood of reactionary nostalgia—and also because I found the essay hilarious and lovely—I decided that anyone who used the word whiffling deserved further investigation. A biographical note on Lamb referred, as if it were common knowledge, to “the family tragedy.” What family tragedy? I looked it up. Ah. There was the central event of Lamb’s life, the hideous irritant around which the nacre of his genius coalesced, the staggering evidence that the dissertator on pork and p
ea-shelling was in fact (if only I had known this at sixteen!) no stranger to madness and violence. In 1796, when Lamb was twenty-one, his sister lost her mind and murdered their mother.

  I could hardly believe it. Lamb? I did not yet know his work—did not know how weird and dark it was, did not know of the screeds on drunkenness and lost love and bad dreams. I had no idea what his friend William Hazlitt meant when he said, “His jests scald like tears.” I was stuck in the “gentle-hearted Charles” rut and could not reconcile the passages I had read, all surface-skating, with any intimate knowledge of “mangling, choking, stifling, scorching demons.”

  Now I know that he and those demons, which he described in an essay called “Witches and Other Night Fears,” were on familiar terms throughout his life. His earliest memories were of nocturnal visitations from hobgoblins, incubi, Chimeras, and Harpies. He insisted— a century before Jung—that these apparitions were not planted in his consciousness by scary stories, but already resident: “The archetypes are in us, and eternal.” I feel certain, from two painfully recollective sentences he wrote in his forties, that his mother did not comfort him:

  Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm—the hoping for a familiar voice—when they wake screaming—and find none to soothe them— what a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves!

  The son of an impoverished scrivener, Lamb was the last of seven children, four of whom died in infancy. His mother favored her more conventional elder son, John. Charles was raised largely by his sister, Mary, ten years his senior, who taught him the alphabet before he could speak and shared with him her fondness for Pilgrim’s Progress and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Mary was plain, bookish, and shy: like Charles, a mystery to their mother, who, he later observed, “ never understood her right. She loved her, as she loved us all with a Mother’s love, but in opinion, in feeling, & sentiment, & disposition, bore so distant a resemblance to her daughter, that she never understood her right.” But Charles understood Mary, and she him, with an empathy so fine-tuned that she once burst into tears because she had (accurately) detected a tone of false cheer in his voice. “She is all his Comfort— he her’s,” Coleridge wrote Robert Southey when Lamb was in his late teens. Theirs was to be one of the strangest, strongest, and most inextricably entwined sibling relationships in history.

  When Lamb was seven, he was packed off as a charity pupil to Christ’s Hospital, a school founded in 1552 “to take out of the streets all the fatherless and other poor men’s children that were not able to keep them.” The best among the Christ’s Hospital “Bluecoat Boys” received an incomparable education in English and Latin, accompanied by regular whacks on the palm with a ferule, occasional whippings with a scourge, and, if they attempted to run away, imprisonment in “little, square, Bedlam cells, where a boy could just lie at his length upon straw and a blanket… out of the reach of any sound, to suffer whatever horrors the weak nerves, and superstition incident to his time of life, might subject him to.” Lamb feared the school, but he also loved it, not so much for its masters as for its students. “The Christ’s Hospital boy’s friends at school,” he was to write, “are commonly his intimates through life.”

  That was assuredly true for him. For it was there that he met Coleridge, of whom he was to say, on his old schoolmate’s death in 1834, “He was my fifty years old friend without a dissension.” (Well, almost. They had a spat or two but never a permanent rift.) When they met, Lamb was seven and Coleridge nine: two homesick little boys who instantly recognized in each other an affinitive amalgam of intelligence, imagination, oddity, and misery. Though Coleridge’s family stood higher on the social ladder—his father, who had died the year before Coleridge met Lamb, was a vicar—there were some remarkable congruences. Both were the youngest children in their families; both were misunderstood and ignored by their mothers; neither had a brother to whom he was close. (Coleridge would later describe his brothers as “good men as times go—very good men; but alas! we have neither Tastes or Feelings in common.”) To the beloved sister he had in Mary, Lamb added the beloved brother—as he put it, “more than a brother!”—he found in Coleridge.

  When one looks back on the pair of them—Lamb small and delicate, Coleridge tall and commanding—it would seem at first glance that Coleridge had all the luck. Coleridge went up to Cambridge; Lamb, despite a glorious academic record, was forced to leave Christ’s Hospital at fourteen because of his stammer, which disqualified him from the career of clergyman that all top Bluecoat graduates were expected to pursue. Coleridge became a poet and a radical; Lamb, while writing poetry on the side, worked at a countinghouse and then, starting at seventeen, as a low-level clerk in the accountant’s office of the East India House. Coleridge married; Lamb did not. Over the long run, however, the comparison becomes muddier. Coleridge abandoned his wife and became an opium addict; Lamb’s life was, if nothing else (and against all odds), stable.

  Before that stability was achieved, however, Lamb was ruled and nearly destroyed by demons. As we move into the bitter heart of his life, there is a clear paper trail for us to follow, for he recorded it all in a series of letters to his “more than a brother.” On May 27, 1796, he wrote:

  My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The 6 weeks that finished last year & began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a mad house at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, & don’t bite anyone.

  Insanity ran in the family, on his father’s side, so Lamb was not altogether surprised when overwork, financial problems, and rejection by a fair-haired country girl named Ann Simmons combined to bring on a “temporary frenzy.” It also did not help that Coleridge, with whom he had been meeting nightly in a local alehouse to drink egghot and talk about metaphysics and poetry, had recently decamped from London to Bristol. All we know of the episode is that Lamb was indisputably irrational (“many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume if all told”) and that the experience was not altogether unpleasant (“I had many many hours of pure happiness. Dream not Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur & wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad”). The self-mocking levity was characteristic, as was the bizarrely incongruous postscript: “My civic and poetic compliments to Southey if at Bristol. Why, he is a very Leviathan of Bards!—the small minnow, I!” Went mad. Oh, by the way, my best to Robert.

  Over the next four months, six long letters followed, filled mostly with close and useful criticism of Coleridge’s works in progress, but occasionally breaking into paroxysms of loneliness:

  Thank you for your frequent letters: you are the only correspondent, and I might add, the only friend I have in the world. I go nowhere, and have no acquaintance. Slow of speech, and reserved of manners, no one seeks or cares for my society; and I am left alone.

  Alone, that is, except for his family—invalid mother, senile father, elderly aunt, anxious sister—whose constant proximity, in their cramped lodgings on Little Queen Street, must have seemed more suffocation than comfort. Mary, who for several years had had periods of prostrating depression, supplemented her brother’s clerking salary with long hours of needlework and also bore the brunt of her mother’s care, waiting on her during the day and sharing her restless bed at night.

  On September 27, Lamb wrote Coleridge:

  My dearest friend—

  White or some of my friends or the public papers by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines. My poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a mad house, from whence I fear she must be moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses,—I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgment I believe very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt.… Write,—as religious a letter a
s possible—but no mention of what is gone and done with.—With me “the former things are passed away,” and I have something more to do than to feel. God Almighty have us all in His keeping.—

  C. Lamb

  Five days before he wrote those words, Lamb had arrived home from work to find his mother pierced to the heart with a carving knife, his father wounded in the head with a fork, and his sister still gripping the bloody murder weapon. Mary had apparently become enraged at her young dressmaking apprentice, picked up the knife, and chased the girl around the dining room. Her mother begged her to stop, the girl escaped, and Mary stabbed her mother. A jury that was convened the next day swiftly returned a verdict of lunacy.

  I doubt that anyone has ever read this letter without noticing the adjectives that Lamb lavished on his “poor dear dearest sister” but withheld from his murdered mother. Matricide has never inspired less sympathy for the victim and more for the perpetrator. The letters that Lamb poured out to Coleridge over the next month constitute a most peculiar psychological record. About Mary, who was kindly tended by “the good Lady of the Mad house, & her daughter… [who] love her & are taken with her amazingly,” he wrote:

  Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister was most and thoroughly devoid of the least tincture of selfishness. I will enlarge upon her qualities, poor dear, dearest soul, in a future letter, for my own comfort, for I understand her thoroughly; and if I mistake not, in the most trying situation that a human being can be found in, she will be found—(I speak not with sufficient humility, I fear,) but, humanly and foolishly speaking, she will be found, I trust, uniformly great and amiable.