The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  11 Du Cange’s Glossary, “Langobardi,” cites “Guntherus lib. 2. ex Ottone Frising. lib. 2. cap. 18. de Gestis Friderici,” which proves to be a bearded-lady anecdote by Bishop Otto of Freising (c. 1110–1158): “For to increase their army [by the drafting of women] they twisted the women’s hair about the chin in such a way as to imitate a manly and bearded face, and for that reason they were called Lombards (Longobardi), from their long beards.” (Otto of Freising, Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, tr. by Charles Christopher Mierow, p. 127.) Eric Partridge, however, in his Origins (1958), under “Lombard,” cites a private letter to him in which Ernest Weekley speculates that Longobardus refers to long axes (barta in Old High German), and not long beards. Whatever it was that was long, beards or axes, their owners came to be called Lombards. Perhaps it was both: one thinks of Tolkien’s blade-wielding, ore-loving dwarves, with their beards tucked under their belts. (Tolkien himself does not seem to be interested in the dwarvish etymology of Lombardy, but he does use lumber. Pamela Blanpied, author of a book about dragons, has kindly called my attention to Gandalf’s description of Butterbur, the innkeeper, in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, ch. 10: “A worthy man, but his memory is like a lumber-room: thing wanted always buried.”)

  12 Pepys’s Diary, September 16, 1668; William Wycherley, The Country Wife, IV, iii., modernized as “Lombard Street” in some editions. The u-spelling was common: University Microfilms offers Aqua Genitalis, a sermon by Simon Patrick on baptism, which was preached “at Alhallows Lumbard-street,” October 4, 1658, and published in 1670, and a collection of Farewell Sermons by various hands (1663), including “Mr. Lyes summary rehearsal at the conclusion of the last morning exercise at All-hallows Lumber-street.” A True Narrative of the Proceedings at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bayley describes a “yound [young] lad” who was tried and convicted for stealing one hundred and forty pounds “out of a goldsmiths shop in Lumbard Street” in 1678.

  13 De Witt T. Starnes and Gertrude E. Noyes, The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, 1946, p. 107.

  14 “… such as pledging myself, for undertaking; line, for department, or branch, as, the civil line, the banking line.” (The Life of Samuel Johnson, Dent, II, 143, A.D. 1777.)

  15 Edward Henry Brooke Boulton, president of the Institute of Wood Science in Sussex, offers an interesting, although unsubstantiated, alternative theory in the article on “Lumbering” that he contributed to the new revised Chambers’s Encyclopaedia (1973): “A ‘Lombard’ was … a man who kept a pawnbroker’s shop, and the word ‘lumbering’ arose in the early days of the North American settlers when timber was used as a medium of exchange.” And the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (1911) notes, under “limber,” that limar (plural of lim) means “boughs” or “branches” in Icelandic. One is tempted to propose that Viking explorers left the Indians of North America with some lim-lumbery Icelandic wood-word, which then persisted for six centuries or so in one or more Indian languages, until the Indians passed it on to the tree-felling colonists. The difficulty with this theory is that I have been able to find only one such word in my hasty check of Native American dictionaries. Li·me- is a noun-stem meaning “woods,” “brush,” or “branch” in the tongue of the Northern Sierra Miwok people, who ate acorn meal, grizzly bears, and yellowjacket larvae in the mountains not far from Sacramento, California. Sacramento is a very long way from Leif Ericsson’s Vinland, wherever it was exactly. See Catherine A. Callaghan, Northern Sierra Miwok Dictionary, 1987, p. 132.

  16 The English seem for the most part to have been unaware of the competing sense. Dickens, describing a raft of logs on the St. Lawrence River near Montreal, felt obliged to introduce the novel word to his readers: “All the timber, or ‘lumber,’ as it is called in America, which is brought down the St. Lawrence, is floated down in this manner.” (American Notes, 1842, Vol. II, p. 198.) Similarly the OED cites Trollope’s observation in North America (1862) that “Timber in Canada is called Lumber.”

  17 There are affinities (perhaps Updike reviewers have already pointed them out?) between the old men in their chairs on the porch of the Poor-house, in the beginning of Updike’s first novel The Poorhouse Fair, and those “venerable figures,” the Custom-House officers, in the entry of Hawthorne’s Custom-House, “sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall.” Conner, Updike’s young administrator, has an office in the cupola, up four flights, and his job is similar in flavor to Hawthorne’s narrator’s job (Custom-House Surveyor). Updike was, it appears, deliberately linking his book to The Scarlet Letter, as he did again later in Roger’s Version.

  18 The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics, Herbert C. Morton, 1994, p. 99.

  19 Who, like Poe, wanted to use lumber in the English sense as evidence of his unprovinciality.

  20 Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations gives just the lumber-line from this extraordinary passage, with spelling modernized, on the same page as it proffers a small falsehood by La Bruyère: “We come too late to say anything which has not been said already”—a sentiment imported, as Bartlett’s notes, from Terence. (Robert Burton, who quoted Terence’s thought in his Anatomy of Melancholy, was, unlike La Bruyère, careful to cite his source: “I make them pay tribute, to set out this my Macaronicon, the method only is mine own, I must usurp that of Wecker e Ter. nihil dictum quod non dictum prius, methodus sola artificem ostendit, we can say nothing but what hath been said, the composition and method is ours only, & shows a Scholar.”) When Charles Blount, a friend of Rochester’s, read the Senecan translation, he was understandably moved: “Indeed,” he wrote Rochester, who was by this time raving with neurosyphilis, “the hand that wrote it may become lumber, but sure the spirit that dictated it can never be so.” See Jeremy Treglown’s The Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, p. 234.

  21 E. M. Forster disagreed: “Passion and Scholarship may enhance each other’s effects. A. E. Housman.” (E. M. Forster, Commonplace Book, ed. Philip Gardner, p. 32.)

  22 “When a number of rolls had to be carried from one place to another, they were put into a box (scrinium or capsa). This receptacle was cylindrical in shape, not unlike a modern hat-box. It was carried by a flexible handle, attached to a ring on each side; and the lid was held down by what looks very like a modern lock. The eighteen rolls, found in a bundle at Herculaneum, had doubtless been kept in a similar receptacle.” John Willis Clark, The Care of Books. 1901, p. 30.

  (iii)

  The point was—getting back to T. D. Weldon—that Weldon had possessed the self-discipline (assuming of course that he was not “something of an impostor,” as Housman had called Wolf) to read a great deal of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica—enough to judge it unworthy of wider notice, which discrimination is one of the public services that scholars perpetually perform. I’m very glad I spent several hours with Weldon’s book (he contributed two pieces of mental furniture to my “empty room” or “overstuffed hatbox”—whichever it is), even though my time with it humblingly demonstrated my own inability to carry out the elementary postgraduate duty of checking it for a quotation. At times a feeling of inferiority does hide, as Rabbi Liebman suggests, something like self-hate, and it is true that many failed scholars, turning on the books that formerly absorbed them, rail at pedantry; Montaigne, De Quincey, and Hazlitt were guilty of this, as was Pope in The Dunciad: Maynard Mack, in his great study of Pope’s library, describes the quibbling annotations the poet made as he read, and describes him “as a young man too close for comfort to the literary pedant.”1 And Pope’s late collaborator, Bolingbroke, was “contemptuous in his language about men of learning,” writes Leslie Stephen, in his life of Pope: “He depreciated what he could not rival.”

  But sometimes, contra Liebman, a feeling of scholarly inferiority may hide nothing so dramatic and colorful as self-hate, and may simply betray a wish for heroes and heroines. Some of us, falling short of what De Quincey called “massy eruditi
on,” retreat for a period to cultivate light learning about learnedness. We satisfy our craving for the emotions of intense study at second hand, by consuming gee-whiz stories about the omnilegent and omnilingual. “A learned man is the most venerable of all,” Virginia Woolf wrote, in Jacob’s Room—

  a man like Huxtable of Trinity, who writes all his letters in Greek, they say, and could have kept his end up with Bentley.

  And in her essay on Bentley, she wrote: “Of all men, great scholars are the most mysterious, the most august”:

  Since it is unlikely that we shall ever be admitted to their intimacy, or see much more of them than a black gown crossing a court at dusk, the best we can do is to read their lives—for example, the Life of Dr. Bentley by Bishop Monk.

  What Woolf really meant here, though she was too proud, or perhaps too subtle, to say it, was: Since we will never have the evergreen knowledge of ancient texts they had, since their inner-espaliers are off limits to us, we must content ourselves with the vicarious flutter that comes from reading their heroic, or (in the case of Bentley) shameful, life-exploits.

  So naturally Woolf was interested in the notion of a mental lumber-room. She entitled her essay on Hakluyt’s Voyages “The Elizabethan Lumber Room”; she closes it with a sentence of appreciation for the prose of Sir Thomas Browne, whom she regarded as Hakluyt’s noble broker:

  Now we are in the presence of sublime imagination; now rambling through one of the finest lumber rooms in the world—a chamber stuffed from floor to ceiling with ivory, old iron, broken pots, urns, unicorns’ horns, and magic glasses full of emerald lights and blue mystery.

  Browne may be responsible for one of the finest lumber-rooms in the world, but I have yet to find one lumber in Browne’s own prose—not even in Urne Buriall, where I was certain it was waiting for me; nor any lumber for that matter in Donne’s sermons or meditations, which were important wells of metaphor for Browne. And, though I badly wanted to come across some learned lumber in Orlando, I only spotted (besides the irrelevant “lurching and lumbering traffic”) lumber-substitutes: “plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other movables,” “a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us,” “old iron,” a starling “on the brink of the dust bin,” a mind like a traveler’s suitcase containing “something contraband for which she would have had to pay the full fine,”2 the mind “a meeting-place for dissemblables,” and a modern bookshop in which “the works of every writer she had known or heard of and many more stretched from end to end of the long shelves” or were “piled and tumbled” on tables and chairs. I wasn’t too disappointed, though: Orlando as a whole is Woolf’s lumber-Room of One’s Own: in it she imagines an anthropomorphized anthology of the literary tradition that leads up to her. With touching, almost American naivete, her preface to the novel politely thanks Defoe, Browne, Emily Brontë, De Quincey, and Walter Pater for their help,3 as well as nearer-and-dearers like Roger Fry and Julian Bell. It doesn’t mention the Rev. George Croly (1780–1860)—author of a two-hundred-some page Byronesquerie called The Modern Orlando, published in 1846, which one wants to imagine the young Virginia Stephen reading in her father’s library, and even copying bits of into one of her early commonplace books—a poem I found on Disk 3 of the English Poetry Database.4 In it you will find the story of Isidore, a count who runs out of money and who applies for relief to a pawnbroker of sorts in the Roman ghetto. He and his companion enter the “Hebrew’s ancient Store,” a chamber rather like Woolf’s Elizabethan lumber-room:

  The room was piled with all strange kinds of lumber;

  ………………………

  Huge folios, by the world long sent to slumber;

  Arms on the walls, and pictures on the ground;

  Cracked china; lutes, long guiltless of a sound;

  Furred mantles, missals, tarnished antique plate;

  ………………………

  A sepulchre of things—dim reliques of the great.

  But, speaking of dim relics of the great, the greatest of Orlando’s “favourite heroes” never used the word “lumber.” He came close. In Henry IV, Part II, Shakespeare has Mistress Quickly say that Falstaff is “indited to dinner to the Lubber’s Head in Lumbert Street, to Master Smooth’s the silkman.” Who Master Smooth is, and what is the precise social tone of the “Lubber’s Head,” or “Leopard’s Head,” no glossator will divulge, but financial transactions are not far off, since moments later Mistress Quickly laments that she has loaned so much money to Falstaff that she may be forced to pawn her plate and even her gown.

  Shylock’s pound of flesh in The Merchant of Venice is probably not an equivoque on lumber, though. Never mind that one of the word’s submeanings, aside from “money loaned,” is, in the words of Webster’s Second, “sometimes, specif., superfluous flesh”—the phrase “pound of flesh” predates Shakespeare in English, and Shakespeare, a punculsive, probably wouldn’t have passed up the chance of making some sort of outright Lombard-lumber-lump-of-lard association if he had seen it.5 The first example in the OED of this sense is from 1806–7, in Beresford’s Miseries of Human Life (“With all my fleshy lumber about me”); Thomas Traherne contributes an apposite seventeenth-century line found in the English Poetry Database:

  A Body like a Mountain is but Cumber.

  An Endless Body is but idle Lumber.6

  William Trevor’s Reading Turgenev (1991) has another example: “It seemed to her that her own flesh and bones were so much lumber, real but without real interest.” (My wife is the source of this quotation.) Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang has “live lumber,” meaning “soldiers or passengers on board ship … ca. 1780–1910.” But later fleshy meanings seem most often to refer to horses and dogs, not people, as in this instance from the OED:

  1891 H. S. CONSTABLE Horses, Sport & War 15 Good thoroughbred horses have also lost what goes by the name of ‘lumber’—such as lumps of flesh and fat … on the top of the neck.

  And this from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia:

  A fine slashing dog, of good size, possessing plenty of bone without lumber, and excellent legs and feet.

  Dogs of Great Britain and America, p. 104.

  Despite Shakespeare’s disappointingly low keyword turnout, we shouldn’t forget that his folios were themselves esteemed as pawnable lumber. In T. H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose, the underfed and word-hungry Professor, having misplaced his copy of Du Cange’s Glossary, wonders for a salivary moment whether he should trade in one of his first-folio Shakespeares so he can buy a fishhook and snag some perch in one of the lakes of Malplaquet. Happily, Cook brings a packet of bloaters and the Professor can keep his Shakespeare. At the end of the novel, he receives The Medieval Latin Word-List, a gift that the Lilliputians have financed by “pawning their sprugs” (their gold coins), and he can finally look up the word that has been troubling his thoughts, the ambiguous Tripharium. (Though learned, T. H. White’s book lacks lumber.)7 Isaac D’Israeli, in his essay on the recovery of manuscripts in Curiosities of Literature, tells how a lawyer in the papal court gave Petrarch two books by Cicero on Glory. Petrarch in turn

  lent them to a poor aged man of letters, formerly his preceptor. Urged by extreme want, the old man pawned them, and returning home died suddenly without having revealed where he had left them. They have never been recovered.

  “Usurers,” D’Israeli recounts, considered manuscripts

  as precious objects for pawn. A student of Pavia, who was reduced, raised a new fortune by leaving in pawn a manuscript of a body of law; and a grammarian, who was ruined by a fire, rebuilt his house with two small volumes of Cicero.

  Medieval monastic libraries frequently demanded the deposit of a pledge before they loaned out books, and booksellers, or stationers, in university towns “had transcripts made, bought, sold and hired out books and received them in pawn.”8So Pope’s unmannerly crack about Theobald’s plagiarizable library, “Where yet unpawn’d, much learned lumber lay,” had an important literal meaning, too:
Pope made a small fortune from his Homeric translations (jobbing out pieces of The Odyssey to junior poets and selling it all under his name), but Lewis Theobald was poor, clerkish, “supper-less” (so Pope cruelly calls him in The Dunciad), and in a pinch he would have relied on the possibility of pledging some of his sizable book collection as his bond. As late as 1731 Theobald was in serious financial distress: he wrote Warburton (who would later edit Pope) that “at present, when I should set down with a Mind & Head at ease & dis-embarrass’d, the Severity of a rich Creditor (& therefore the more unmercifull) has strip’d me so bare, that I never was acquainted with such Wants, since I knew the Use of Money.”9

  Poor in purse Theobald may have been; but he was not invariably a poor poet. The Cave of Poverty (1715) is a Gothic surprise—it describes the wicked Queen of Poverty in her cave, gloating over the misery she has wrought:

  Ten Thousand Doors, like Flaws in mouldring Earth,

  Led to the Center of the Gloomy Den;

  And each to streaky Gleams of Light gave Birth,