The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  the art of using his mind; a certain continual power of seizing the useful substance of all that he knew, and exhibiting it in a clear and forcible manner; so that knowledge, which we often see to be no better than lumber in men of dull understanding, was, in him, true, evident, and actual wisdom.

  Logan Pearsall Smith, in an essay on the sermons of John Donne, asserts that the seventeenth-century divines, “with all the lumber they inherited from the past, inherited much also that gives an enduring splendour to their works.” Michael Sadleir, in his The Northanger Novels: A Footnote to Jane Austen (1927), writes: “There are probably no items in the lumber-rooms of forgotten literature more difficult to trace than the minor novels of the late eighteenth century.” One of those minor novels was Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal (1760–65), in which a bookseller named Mr. Vellum stores surplus copies of books by a dead self-published author for seven years in the “lumber garret” so that he can pass them off as new creations. Laurence Sterne mentions “the lumber-rooms of learning” in Book IV of Tristram Shandy (1761).

  Goethe revered Sterne, and he might have read Chrysal (which was translated into German in 1775); and Goethe’s learned yearner, Faust, calls the spirit of the past, as it is reflected in the minds who study it, a Kehrichtfaβ and a Rumpelkammer, in a line that has been variously Englished as a “mouldy dustbin, or a lumber attic” (Philip Wayne), “a junk heap,/A lumber room” (Randall Jarrell), “Mere scraps of odds and ends, old crazy lumber, / In dust-bins only fit to rot and slumber” (Theodore Martin, revised by W. H. Bruford), “A very lumber-room, a rubbish-hole” (Anna Swanwick), “A heap of rubbish, and a lumber room” (John Stuart Blackie), “A rubbish-bin, a lumber-garret” (George Madison Priest), “A trash bin and a lumber-garret” (Stuart Atkins), “An offal-barrel and a lumber-garret” (Bayard Taylor), “a trash barrel and a junk room” (Bayard Quincy Morgan), “A lumber-room and a rubbish heap” (Louis MacNeice and E. L. Stahl), and “A mass of things confusedly heaped together;/A lumber-room of dusty documents” (John Anster). Lord Francis Leveson Gower’s early translation (John Murray, 1823) may be, for this particular passage, the best:

  Read but a paragraph, and you shall find

  The litter and the lumber of the mind.1

  Master Humphrey has lumber dreams in the first chapter of Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop:

  But all that night, waking or in my sleep, the same thoughts recurred and the same images retained possession of my brain. I had ever before me the old dark murky rooms—the gaunt suits of mail with their ghostly silent air—the faces all awry, grinning from wood and stone—the dust and rust, the worm that lives in wood—and alone in the midst of all this lumber and decay, and ugly age, the beautiful child in her gentle slumber, smiling through her light and sunny dreams.

  Hazlitt does not refer to the lumber of scholarship where you would expect him to, in his Montaignesque “On the Ignorance of the Learned,” but he does so, affectionately, in “On Pedantry,” an essay that also contains his helpful circular definition of learning as “the knowledge of that which is not generally known.” Of a character named Keith in South Wind, Norman Douglas writes, “He had an encyclopaedic turn of mind; his head, as somebody once remarked, was a lumber-room of useless information.”

  Norman Douglas’s “somebody” was probably Lord Chesterfield, who in 1748 advised his son that “Many great readers load their memories without exercising their judgments, and make lumber-rooms of their heads, instead of furnishing them usefully.” Sir Thomas Browne, though he was one of the greatest of readers, and of indexers, claimed to have avoided this pitfall: “I make not therefore my head a grave, but a treasure, of knowledge,” he writes, in Religio Medici (1642), finding no use here for the word “lumber,”2 but getting some mileage instead out of the Greek root of thesaurus—“treasure-house”—a word associated with dictionaries long before Roget,3 and employed in passing in an eighteenth-century Latin oration written by Johann Mencke (and edited by a collateral descendant, H. L. Mencken) called The Charlatanry of the Learned:

  The bookshops are full of Thesauruses of Latin Antiquities which, when examined, turned out to be far less treasuries than fuel for the fire.

  Mencken himself, in his autobiographical “Larval Stage of a Bookworm,” said that

  At eight or nine, I suppose, intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.

  This is Mencken’s elegantly spare version of John Locke’s dark room, from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which is illuminated by shafts of external and internal sensation:

  These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this dark room. For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without.… [Locke’s italics.]

  And Locke’s unlit closet may be an irreligious revision of the room of despair, “a very dark room, where there sat a man in an iron cage,” in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).4 Practicing architects had tired, by the 1890s, of dark seventeenth-century rooms of the soul, and had developed as a result an antipathy to the closet. Russell Sturgis, in an article on “The Equipment of the Modern City House,” appearing in Harper’s Magazine in April 1899, mentions one architect who wanted to rid domestic life of closets altogether, arguing that they were

  extremely wasteful of space, and in every way to be shunned; that they were places where old lumber was stored and forgotten, dust-catchers, nests for vermin, fire-traps.

  But one has to store things somewhere; and Sherlock Holmes in 1887 compared the brain in its untutored state to a “little empty attic,” which should be properly stocked:

  A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. (A Study in Scarlet.)

  Holmes warns Watson that “it is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent.” Montaigne, however, disagrees: when considering the question whether (in Florio’s translation, “Of Pedantisme”) “a mans owne wit, force, droope, and as it were diminish it selfe, to make roome for others,” he at first appears to hold that it does, and then he decides that, no, on the contrary, “our mind stretcheth the more by how much more it is replenished.”

  These preliminary examples and semirelevant corollaries, having stretched the elastic walls of the preceding paragraphs nearly to the point of tissue damage, must now draw back to reveal, in a kind of establishing quotational shot, the one really famous piece of lumber we have. It was published in 1711, the work of the twenty-three-year-old Alexander Pope. (Youth is often a time of lumber: “An ever increasing volume of dimensional lumber is juvenile wood,” as Timothy D. Larson pointed out in 1992, in his “The Mechano-Sorptive Response of Juvenile Wood to Hygrothermal Gradients,” indexed in the Dissertation Abstracts CD-ROM.5) Pope’s An Essay on Criticism describes a bad critic:

  The Bookful Blockhead, ignorantly read

  With Loads of Learned Lumber in his Head.

  This is a very good couplet: ignorantly fills its alloted verse-hole with a lumpy tumultuousness, like a rudely twisted paper clip, and the three capital Ls on the next line halt in their places one after another as remuneratively as a triplet of twirling Lemons in a slot machine just before the quarters start spraying out. Pope’s jingle has stayed with us: it is included under the heading “Reading: Its Dangers” in The Home Book of Quotations; it appears in Bartlett’s and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Even in extrapoetical contexts it continues to find advocates: as recently as 1989 (so the Wilson Library Literature CD-ROM index points out), Peter A. Hoare contributed a chapter to The Modern Academic Library: Essays in Memory of Philip Larkin that was called “Loads of Learned Lumber: Special Collections in the Smaller University Library.”
Hoare writes that specialized collections, regardless of whether they are directly related to any “immediate academic programme,” nonetheless “contribute, not always in an easily definable way, to the quality of the whole institution”; and he mentions Larkin’s useful distinction between the “magical value” and the “meaningful value” of literary manuscripts.

  Where in his library, though, one wants to ask, did Pope find his lumber? Pope was an artful borrower, a mechano-sorptive wonder, as generations of often testy commentators have shown; many of his finest metrical sub-units have an isolable source. (E.g., Pope’s “Windsor Forest” mentions a “sullen Mole, that hides his diving Flood,” which rodent is, says commentator Wakefield, a borrowing, or burrowing, from Milton’s “Vacation Exercise,” where there is a “sullen Mole that runneth underneath.”) Is learned lumber from Milton, too, then?

  No, it isn’t. Milton didn’t use lumber in any poem, and you will find it (with the aid of Sterne and Kollmeier’s Concordance to the English Prose of John Milton, 1985) only once in all his prose works: “When Ministers came to have Lands, Houses, Farmes, Coaches, Horses, and the like Lumber,” he says in Eikonklastes (1649), “then Religion brought forth riches in the Church, and the Daughter devour’d the Mother.” Is Pope’s lumber from Shakespeare, then, or Spenser, or Marlowe, or Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais? Can it really be that he coined the phrase himself? The critical editions of Pope—even the great Twickenham series that came out piecemeal while Nabokov was working on Pale Fire (1962) and his Pushkin commentary—suggest no specific sources in this case; E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, the Twickenham editors of An Essay on Criticism, confine themselves to a footnote citing the Oxford English Dictionary: “Lumber] ‘useless or cumbrous material’ (OED).” Is it from Horace or Quintilian, in the original or in translation? (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: “I admired Mr. Pope’s Essay on Criticism at first, very much, because I had not then read any of the antient critics, and did not know that it was all stolen.”) Is it from Jonathan Swift?

  Swift does indeed have a passage in his early “Ode to Sir William Temple” that goes

  Let us (for shame) no more be fed

  With antique Reliques of the Dead,

  The Gleanings of Philosophy,

  Philosophy! the Lumber of the Schools

  The Roguery of Alchymy,

  And we the bubbled Fools

  Spend all our present Stock in hopes of golden Rules.

  This was written around 1692—the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations quotes just its fourth line—but the ode remained unprinted until 1745, when it was included in one of Dodsley’s Miscellanies; it isn’t likely that Pope read it until after he had published An Essay on Criticism (1711, 1711—I must try to remember that date) and had befriended Swift. Swift’s first published poem, his “Ode to the Athenian Society” (1692), is a potential influence; it praises the efforts on the part of the Athenian Society6 to strip Philosophy, that “beauteous Queen,” of her old lumber:

  Her Face patch’d o’er with Modern Pedantry,

  With a long sweeping Train

  Of Comments and Disputes, ridiculous and vain,

  All of old Cut with a new Dye,

  How soon have You restor’d her Charms!

  And rid her of her Lumber and Her Books,

  Drest her again Genteel and Neat,

  And rather Tite than Great,

  How fond we are to court Her to our Arms!

  How much of Heav’n is in her naked looks.

  Despite the naked looks, this setting of lumber (which I found using the Concordance to the Poems of Jonathan Swift, edited by Michael Shinagel, 1972) is also comparatively humdrum—not capable on its own of inspiring Pope’s magnificently punched-up lumber-couplet. And Swift’s early prose is no help, either. In Tale of a Tub (1704) there is the interesting brain-recipe for distilling calfbound books in an alchemical solution of balneo Mariae, poppy, and Lethe and then “snuffing it strongly up your nose” while setting to work on your critical treatise, whereupon (in another variation on the notion of the brain as a treasure-house and thesaurus)

  you immediately perceive in your head an infinite number of abstracts, summaries, compendiums, extracts, collections, medulas, excerpta quaedams, florilegias and the like, all disposed into great order, and reducible upon paper.

  Amid these rudenesses about modern erudition, however, not one lumbered disparagement, perplexingly, appears. We can be sure of the absence, since there is nothing listed between ludicrously and lungs in Kelling and Preston’s computer-generated KWIC Concordance to Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books, and A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1984). (KWIC stands for Key Word In Context.) It could be that Swift felt less inclined to use the word “lumber” after he showed Dryden his Athenian “Ode” and Dryden said to him (as Johnson tells it), “Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.” Dryden, after all, had himself been a lumberer of some prominence in his day: “We bring you none of our old lumber hither,” the Poet Laureate promised the King and Queen, on behalf of a newly consolidated dramatic company, in 1682; and in his prologue to Mr. Limberham (1680) he complains that

  True wit has seen its best days long ago;

  It ne’er looked up, since we were dipt in show;

  When sense in doggrel rhymes and clouds was lost,

  And dulness flourished at the actor’s cost.

  Nor stopt it here; when tragedy was done,

  Satire and humour the same fate have run,

  And comedy is sunk to trick and pun.

  Now our machining lumber will not sell,

  And you no longer care for heaven or hell;

  What stuff will please you next, the Lord can tell.

  (“Machining lumber” means clunky theatrical supernaturalism and personification, deus ex machinery.) To Swift the word would have felt like a piece of Dryden’s proprietary vocabulary, and, wounded by Dryden’s brutal assessment of his literary future, he purged it from his speech for over twenty years.7 Or maybe not.

  Either way, Swift and Dryden don’t look to be convincing sources for Pope’s durable phrase. Is it from Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, which Swift had by heart, or did Pope get it from Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, or from a sermon by Donne or Jeremy Taylor, or from John Locke? (“Locke’s reasoning may indeed be said to pervade every part of the Essay on Criticism,” writes Courthope, another nineteenth-century Pope commentator.) And, more elementarily—before we get too carried away in our snuffing for sources—what exactly does the word “lumber” mean in Pope’s poetry, and in poetry generally? Do we really understand what Pope has in mind, metaphorically, when he refers to “Loads of Learned Lumber”? What might these loads look like? Edwin Abbott’s Concordance to the Works of Alexander Pope (1875) helpfully gives, in addition to the “learned” line, three later settings for “lumber,” all from The Dunciad, two of which employ the word nominatively, in the relevant anti-pedantic sense:

  Lumber.

  Dropt the dull l. of the Latin store D. iv. 319

  With loads of learned l. in his head E. C. 613

  Thy giddy Dulness still shall l. on D. iii. 294

  A l.-house of books in ev’ry head D. iii. 193

  Edwin A. Abbott writes, in his introduction to the concordance his father compiled, “I venture to commend the following pages to all those who wish to be able to know at any moment how Pope used any English word in his Original Poems.” And who would not want to know at any moment how Pope, of all poets—one of the most skilled word-pickers and word-packers in literary history—used any English word? Who does not feel an inarticulate burble of gratitude toward the senior Mr. Abbott (1808–1882; headmaster of the Philological School, Marylebone) for the enormous manual labor he expended in copying and sorting Pope’s lines, creating a book that, though few will read it cover to cover, selflessly paves the sophomore’s strait path to pedantry? Concordances are true triumphs of what Michael Gruber, a pseudonymous thrille
r writer and marine biologist, recently called “siftware”8—they are quote verifiers and search engines that in an ardent inquirer’s hands sometimes turn up poetical secrets that the closest of close readings would not likely uncover.9

  But grateful though we must always be to Edwin Abbott, the truth is that in the case of lumber, at least, his grand Victorian concordance fails us—fails us because it indexes only from the revised, final version of The Dunciad (1743). It does not include a more revealing use of lumber that appears in the first, and at times superior, Dunciad of 1728.

  The searcher will find this particular couplet, though, in the beautiful, blue Concordance to the Poems of Alexander Pope, in two volumes, by Emmett Bedford and Robert Dilligan, produced in 1974 with the help of a Univac 1108 and an IBM 370 computer, using optically scanned microfilm images of the Twickenham edition.10 Alternatively, you can find the couplet that Abbott omitted as I first found it, by peering into the greatest lumber-room, or lumber-ROM, ever constructed: the all-powerful, manually keyed English Poetry Full-Text Database, released in June of 1994 on four silver disks the size of Skilsaw blades by the prodigious Eel of Science himself, Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey.

  Chadwyck-Healey’s forces are responsible for a variety of CD-ROM power-tools: they have brought us the National Security Archive Index of previously classified documents; the catalog of the British Library to 1975; full texts of The Economist, The Times, The Guardian, Il Sole 24 Ore, and works of African-American literature; indexes of periodicals, films, music, and French theses; the full text of the nine-volume Grand Robert de la Langue Française; United Nations records indexed or in full text, auction records, Hansard’s record of the House of Commons, a world climate disk, and British census data; all 221 volumes of Migne’s Patrologia Latina; on and on. But nothing can remotely compare, in range and depth and tantric power, with their English Poetry Database, which promises, and moreover delivers, something like 4,500 volumes of liquidly, intimately friskable poetry by 1,350 poets who wrote between A.D. 600 and 1900.