At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays

by Anne Fadiman

  Derwent and the moth survived. Twenty-eight years earlier, so had the trooper with smallpox. Silas Tomkyn Comberbache was himself eventually saved by his brothers, who raised the money to bail him out of his regiment. He returned to Cambridge (late, because he went for a walk and missed the carriage), vowed to rise at six and abjure drunken parties, worked hard for a time, and dropped out.

  None of us knows anyone even remotely like Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But all of us know someone very much like Silas Tomkyn Comberbache, the fellow who makes scads of promises he can’t keep, ducks his responsibilities, never pays his bills, moves through life in a cyclone of disorganization, and yet—because he is generous, because he has so much charm, because he is his own worst critic, because we can’t help ourselves—commands and deserves our love.

  The Comberbache side was clearly in charge when, as a young student at Christ’s Hospital, Coleridge was walking through the Strand, oblivious to his surroundings, pretending to be Leander crossing the Hellespont. While making energetic swimming motions, he touched a stranger’s coat and was accused of being a pickpocket. (But when the tearful boy explained that he was en route from Abydos to Sestos, the gentleman was so amazed by his eloquence that, instead of reporting him to the police, he paid for his membership in a circulating library.) The boy grew into a man who overslept, missed his deadlines, was afraid to open letters lest they contain bad news, and, according to Holmes, during a period when he was living alone, “started with six shirts, lost three in the laundry, found he had been sleeping in the fourth, and had inadvertently used the fifth as a floormat while washing.” (But, wearing the sixth shirt, he gave a series of brilliant ex tempore lectures, the secret of whose success was their very lack of preparation.) He made plans for innumerable projects that were never realized: the Pantisocracy, a kibbutz-like commune on the Susquehanna River; a chemistry laboratory; a 1,400-page work of geography; a two-volume history of English prose; a monograph on poetry; a critique of Chaucer; a translation of Faust; a musical play about Adam and Eve; a history of logic; a history of German metaphysics; a treatise on witchcraft; an epic on the fall of Jerusalem; an encyclopedia. At the end of one poetic fragment, he jotted, “ Meant to have been finished, but somebody came in, or something fell out—& tomorrow—alas! Tomorrow!” (But he wrote poems, plays, essays, reviews, letters, journals, lectures, sermons, pamphlets, translations, newspaper articles, position papers, and civil decrees: enough to make Virginia Woolf call him “not a man, but a swarm.”)

  In 1797, Coleridge walked fifty miles to pay his first visit to Wordsworth, beginning a thirty-seven-year friendship broken by lovers’ quarrels as tragic and passionate as if they had been romantic and not merely Romantic. Wordsworth recalled that as Coleridge approached the house, he “did not keep to the high road, but leaped over a gate and bounded down a pathless field by which he cut off an angle.” Some years later, Hazlitt noted that both men liked to compose poetry while walking, but Coleridge preferred “uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel-walk.” Wordsworth did what was expected, and it was always correct and on time. According to Southey, Coleridge “does nothing that he ought to do, and everything which he ought not,” and that is why his path was always more difficult and usually more interesting.

  Even though Wordsworth expelled “Christabel” from the Lyrical Ballads, their collaborative collection, and demoted “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” from the front to the back of volume 1; even though he accused Coleridge of “a derangement in his intellectual and moral constitution”; even though, speaking from years of exhausted experience as Coleridge’s host, he warned a hospitable barrister not to take their mutual friend into his household, and thereby precipitated “a compressing and strangling Anguish” that brought Coleridge to the brink of suicide—still, no one can deny that each man bored irretrievably to the center of the other’s heart. Coleridge had a habit of getting close to his male friends by falling in love with the women in their orbits. His first love, Mary Evans, was the sister of a Christ’s Hospital chum. The woman he married, Sara Fricker, was the sister of women who married two fellow Pantisocrats. And the object of years of unconsummated extramarital fantasies (“my whole Being wrapt up in one Desire, all the Hopes & Fears, Joys & Sorrows, all the Powers, Vigour & Faculties of my Spirit abridged into one perpetual Inclination”), and of many fine poems, was Sara Hutchinson, the sister of the woman who married William Wordsworth. One cannot help thinking that much of Coleridge’s emotional attachment to Wordsworth was channeled into his yearning for the woman he anagrammed into “Asra,” in order to distinguish her from the Sara he wished he had never married.

  Poor Sara Fricker Coleridge! Coleridge had expected to live with her in America, demonstrating the perfectibility of Man in the great communal Pantisocracy. Instead, they shared an isolated cottage near Bristol and rapidly discovered that they had nothing in common. Sara was an honorable woman, a good mother, far from stupid, and beautiful in her youth; but she cared little for literature and was repelled by Coleridge’s wild vagaries of mood. In 1798, after three years of marriage, Coleridge escaped her by traveling with Wordsworth to Germany, where he planned to stay three months and stayed ten. In 1804, he set off for six or eight months in Malta and Italy and stayed for two and a half years. After his return, Wordsworth observed that “he dare not go home, he recoils so much from the thought of domesticating with Mrs Coleridge.” For the rest of his life, Coleridge lived apart from his wife and rarely saw his children. In one of the most sweeping rants ever uttered by a disappointed husband, he blamed his marriage’s “endless heart-wasting” for his “irresolution, procrastination, [and] languor,” as well as for his opium addiction and the loss of his poetic muse.

  “No one on earth has ever loved me,” he later wrote. I am sure that thousands of his readers, especially young women, have come upon that sentence and mentally piped up, “I have!” No attractive runaway—the more vulnerable, the better—will ever be in want of rescuers of a certain type. When I was in college, I was among the multitudes who wanted to sit at Coleridge’s feet while he recited “The Eolian Harp,” soothe his fevered brow, discuss metaphysics (even though I didn’t know what they were), and create a domestic paradise from which he would never wish to flee. Didn’t I think Asra might pose a bit of a threat? Not at all; Coleridge’s daughter had called her “dumpy.” I recently corresponded with the critic Evelyn Toynton about our favorite scapegrace, and was not surprised when she wrote, “I developed my crush on him in my first year of college and decided that if only he had been married to me instead of his unsympathetic wife, all his genius would have been realized.” Back then, Evelyn kept a framed portrait of Coleridge at her bedside. It has since been retired, but her computer screen saver consists of three red words that scroll endlessly across a black background: “Silas Tomkyn Comberbache.”

  I asked Evelyn what she thought Coleridge was running away from, beyond the obvious—unhappy marriage, adult responsibilities, money problems, broken friendships, physical pain, unrealized ambitions, England’s imaginative constraints. She responded:

  Could one say he was escaping from pain and self-loathing and the pain of self-loathing? Yet it seems to me that his escapism was extraordinary in that it was fueled (at least sometimes) by such a tremendous sense of what he was fleeing toward—feelings of transcendence, a state of oneness with the deity, a non-material reality far finer than the gross corporeality of the body, etc. etc. That’s why there is always something reductive about those studies of S.T.C. that present him as, in effect, a typical junkie. Maybe, like every junkie, he just wanted to get high, but what got him high was of a higher order than with any other junkie one can think of.

  The junkie label is from the opium, of course—and from “Kubla Khan,” which, because it was composed under the influence, I once used as ammunition in an adolescent debate with my parents over
the benefits of hallucinogenic drugs. It would be easy enough to romanticize their effects if you read only the first three or four hundred of Holmes’s 1,031 pages. Coleridge savors the “beauteous spectra of two colours, orange and violet” in his tumbler of laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol, available from any corner chemist). When he writes a friend, “Do bring down some of the Hyoscyamine Pills & I will give a fair Trial of opium, Hensbane, & Nepenthe,” he sounds as cheery as Timothy Leary inviting Richard Alpert over for a few tabs of acid with a chaser of psilocybin. But in volume 2, opium becomes the stuff of the very nightmares he hoped it would suppress, “an indefinite indescribable Terror as with a scourge of ever restless, ever coiling and uncoiling Serpents.” This is not the kind of escape I had in mind at sixteen. Nor did I have in mind the blocked bowels—a side effect of opium addiction—that made him “weep & sweat & moan & scream.”

  In 1816, when Coleridge was forty-three, his physician wrote a letter to James Gillman, a newly elected member of the Royal College of Surgeons, about an unnamed “unfortunate gentleman” who “wishes to fix himself in the house of some medical gentleman, who will have courage to refuse him any laudanum.” Gillman had no intention of welcoming a drug addict into his house, but, like the man who thought Coleridge was picking his pocket and ended up paying for his library membership, he rapidly changed his mind, finding himself, on meeting the unfortunate gentleman, “spell-bound, without desire of release.” And a good thing, too, since Coleridge, who asked to move in for a few weeks, stayed until his death eighteen years later.

  Gillman never entirely weaned him off laudanum, but managed, by a combination of sympathy and guile, to control the doses. For the first time in his life, Coleridge felt no need to escape. He called Gillman and his wife “my most dear Friends,” accompanied them on seaside vacations, and even, to show his gratitude, collaborated with Gillman on An Essay on Scrofula. During his years with the Gillmans, he wrote a few good poems and some memorable prose. He also gave a well-attended last lecture, which he described in a sardonic letter as being delivered by “a rare Subject—rather fat indeed—but remarkable as a fine specimen of a broken Heart.”

  His heart had been broken, he told a friend, by “four griping and grasping Sorrows”: his failed marriage, his quarrels with Wordsworth, his thwarted love for Asra, and the ruin of his son Hartley. The last of these sorrows colored Coleridge’s last years with an excruciating sense of déjà vu, as if Silas Tomkyn Comberbache had been revived in a drama whose tragedy had intensified and whose comedy had been entirely lost. Hartley was Coleridge’s oldest and most brilliant child. Like his father, he was a prodigious scholar, a captivating talker, a daydreamer, and a drunk. In 1819, when Hartley was elected a fellow at Oxford, Coleridge was beside himself with joy. In 1820, when Hartley was dismissed for “sottishness, a love of low company, and general inattention to college rules,” Coleridge was, in Mrs. Gillman’s words, “convulsed with agony.” During the week that followed, Dr. Gillman stood watch by his bed in order to awaken him from screaming nightmares.

  On a Saturday afternoon two years later, when Coleridge and Hartley were walking in London together, Hartley asked for some money to repay a debt. He pocketed the bills and agreed to rejoin his father no later than 6:00 p.m. Coleridge, filled with a terrible foreboding, cried, “Hartley! — Six!” As his son vanished wordlessly into the crowd, Coleridge found himself weeping so hard he could barely see. He later recalled the hours between six and midnight, during which he waited and Hartley never came, as “a Suffering which, do what I will, I cannot helping thinking of & being affrightened by, as a terror of itself, a self-subsisting separate Something.… O my God!” Coleridge lived twelve years beyond “THAT SATURDAY EVENING,” but the two runaways, one overwhelmed by his disgrace and the other overwhelmed by his loss, never saw each other again.

  Hartley Coleridge—who went on to be a failed schoolmaster, a failed journalist, and the author of a small body of melancholy sonnets—is the “Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side” in “Frost at Midnight,” the first Coleridge poem I ever read. At sixteen, I knew nothing of either man’s life. I could not guess that Coleridge, the tender father who vowed to show his firstborn son the “lovely shapes and sounds intelligible” of the natural world, would flee his wife and children; I could not guess that the “babe so beautiful” would grow up to flee his father. Now I know that domestic happiness was just another of Coleridge’s misfired schemes. But biography can be false even when it is true. When I lose myself in the poem—the one form of escapism that never made its author feel guilty—the window of the little cottage, overhung with “silent icicles,” still opens to a vista of infinite possibility.

  MAIL

  ome years ago, my parents lived at the top of a steep hill. In his study, my father kept a pair of binoculars with which, like a pirate captain hoisting his spyglass to scan the horizon for treasure ships, he periodically inspected the mailbox to check the position of the flag. When the mail finally arrived, he trudged down the driveway and opened the extra-large black metal box, purchased by my mother in the same accommodating spirit with which some wives buy their husbands extra-large trousers. The day’s load—a mountain of letters and about twenty pounds of review books packed in Jiffy bags, a few of which had been pierced by their angular contents and were leaking what my father called “mouse dirt”—was always tightly wedged. But he was a persistent man, and after a brief show of resistance the mail would surrender, to be carried up the hill in a tight clinch and dumped onto a gigantic desk. Until that moment, my father’s day had not truly begun.

  His desk was made of steel, weighed more than a refrigerator, and bristled with bookshelves and secret drawers and sliding panels and a niche for a cedar-lined humidor. (He believed that cigar-smoking and mail-reading were natural partners, like oysters and Mus-cadet.) Several books were written on that desk, but its finest hours were devoted to sorting the mail. My father hated Sundays and holidays because there was nothing new to spread on it. Vacations were taxing, the equivalent of forced relocations to places without food. His homecomings were always followed by daylong orgies of mailopening—feast after famine—at the end of which all the letters were answered; all the bills were paid; the outgoing envelopes were affixed with stamps from a brass dispenser heavy enough to break your toe; the books and manuscripts were neatly stacked; and the empty Jiffy bags were stuffed into an enormous copper wastebasket, cheering confirmation that the process of postal digestion was complete.

  “One of my unfailing minor pleasures may seem dull to more energetic souls: opening the mail,” he once wrote.

  Living in an advanced industrial civilization is a kind of near-conquest over the unexpected.… Such efficiency is of course admirable. It does not, however, by its very nature afford scope to that perverse human trait, still not quite eliminated, which is pleased by the accidental. Thus to many tame citizens like me the morning mail functions as the voice of the unpredictable and keeps alive for a few minutes a day the keen sense of the unplanned and the unplannable.

  What unplanned and unplannable windfalls might the day’s yield contain? My brother asked him, when he was in his nineties, what kinds of mail he liked best. “In my youth,” he replied, “a love letter. In middle age, a job offer. Today, a check.” (That was false cynicism, I think. His favorite letters were from his friends.) Whatever it was, it never came soon enough. Why were deliveries so few and so late (he frequently grumbled), when, had he lived in central London in the late seventeenth century, he could have received his mail ten or twelve times a day?

  We get what we need. In 1680, London had mail service nearly every hour because there were no telephones. If you wished to invite someone to tea in the afternoon, you could send him a letter in the morning and receive his reply before he showed up at your doorstep. Postage was one penny.

  If you wished to send a letter to another town, however, delivery was less reliable and postage was gauged on a scale of staggering comple
xity. By the mid-1830s,

  the postage on a single letter delivered within eight miles of the office where it was posted was… twopence, the lowest rate beyond that limit being fourpence. Beyond fifteen miles it became fivepence; after which it rose a penny at a time, but by irregular augmentation, to one shilling, the charge for three hundred miles.… There was as a general rule an additional charge of a half-penny on a letter crossing the Scotch border; while letters to or from Ireland had to bear, in addition, packet rates, and rates for crossing the bridges over the Conway and the Menai.

  So wrote Rowland Hill, the greatest postal reformer in history, who in 1837 devised a scheme to reduce and standardize postal rates and to shift the burden of payment from the addressee to the sender.

  Until a few years ago, I had no idea that if you sent a letter out of town—and if you weren’t a nobleman, a member of Parliament, or some other VIP who had been granted the privilege of free postal franking—the postage was paid by the recipient. This dawned on me when I was reading a biography of Charles Lamb, whose employer, the East India House, allowed clerks to receive letters gratis until 1817: a substantial perk, sort of like being able to receive your friends’ calls on your office’s 800 number. (Lamb, who practiced stringent economies, also wrote much of his personal correspondence on company stationery. His most famous letter to Wordsworth—the one in which he refers to Coleridge as “an Archangel a little damaged”—is inscribed on a page whose heading reads “Please to state the Weights and Amounts of the following Lots.”)