The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  That shot a-thwart the Dusk, and seem’d a-kin:

  Pale as the Fire that on Night’s Visage glows,

  Serving alone her Horrors to disclose.

  There are many stricken poets down in the cave—“Clusters of Bards” that lie in penury in “small silent Dormitories,” trying to subsist:

  With wild Profusion these consume their Store,

  And rack Invention, lab’ring to be poor.10

  And Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored is an impressively rich work of textual criticism, too; the first of its kind on an English poet (as Theobald himself can’t resist pointing out on the second-to-last page): its tone has some of Bentley’s joshing roughness and show-offy annotative exuberance. As with many tractatuses, the supplemental material is more interesting than the main text—the sixty-one dense pages of Theobald’s Appendix are full of insights and connections, some of them damaging to Pope. For instance, Pope had endorsed a change from “Aristotle thought” to “graver sages think” in a passage from Troilus and Cressida. In scandalized response, Theobald heaps up Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Iamblichus, Strabo, Aullus Gellius, King Lear, Coriolanus, Beaumont and Fletcher’s Humorous Lieutenant, Dryden and Lee’s Oedipus, Sophocles, Anaxandrides, Alexis, Diphilus, Athenaeus, and others on the quarto page—invoking all these authors merely to prove that Shakespeare’s anachronistic mention of Aristotle, in a play set in Troy, was “the Effect of Poetick Licence in him, rather than Ignorance” and that Pope’s meddling was unwarranted, literal-minded, and indeed pedantic, which it was. Embarrassed, embittered by the exposure of his scholarly shortcomings, Pope adapted the premise of Theobald’s Cave of Poverty, swapping the Queen of Dulness for the Queen of Poverty and making Theobald himself the Queen’s supplicant, and in this way came up with the first version of The Dunciad, which, over time, irreparably and wrongfully damaged Theobald’s reputation. Theobald was without question a pedant11—but his is the good kind of pedantry, the kind in which playful fierceness and a motley flutter of cognate or merely ornamental references (“a Rhapsody of Rags,” Burton or Donne would call it) colorfully and contentiously and self-parodically coexist. The Cave of Poverty is not dull, it’s almost Dickensian, and Shakespeare Restored isn’t dull, either, as Pope knew: the entertaining war between Bentley and Boyle over the authenticity of the letters of Phalaris had shown would-be pamphleteers that few things will get the readerly pulse racing like the spectacle of well-read scholars going after each other in the vernacular. (The Poggio v. Filelfo12 and Milton v. Salmasius bouts were fought in Latin.) There was a market for learned strife in racy English. The same morning I read Theobald fume (rightly) at Pope’s gratuitous “graver sages,” I read this “Note upon the note” to an Englished version of Dr. Bentley’s Horace, published by Lintot in 1712:

  In this Ode the Dr. makes a horrid Pother about the spelling of some proper Names; much Ink is spilt, many Pages consum’d, several old Parchments and Copies dusted, Commentators and Criticks quoted and confuted, various Lections settled, Indexes and Lexicons turn’d over, and a great deal of Latin and Greek squander’d away; and all to prove whether we must read, Thyas, or Thias, or Thuas, or Thyias; as also, whether we must say, Rhacus, or Raecus, or Recus, or Runcus, or Rhucus, or Rhaetus, or Raetus.…

  But horrid Pothers over tiny cruces are exactly what we need from commentators: for they (the Pothers, I mean—and what an impossibly Anglican teacake of a word that is!) are hard evidence that someone has really grunted and sweated over this single lump of poetry. Some spelunker has stopped here, of all places, and sat down, and made this clammy side-grotto the temporary center of learning, toward which all else written impends; he has roamed as many of the “Ranks of subterranean Rooms” in the Cave of Poverty and poetry as he could, single-mindedly looking for antecedents; he has memorized, dated, compared and contrasted, triple-parsed, even dreamed about what he is elucidating—dreamed about it as Heinrich Heine’s professor, in “The Harz Journey,” dreams about

  walking in a beautiful garden where the flower-beds produced nothing but slips of white paper with quotations written on them, gleaming delightfully in the sunshine; and now and then he would pull up a handful and laboriously transplant them to a new bed, while the nightingales rejoiced his old heart with their sweetest notes.

  So must have dreamed, I imagine, the far-darting commentator to Virginia Woolf’s essays (vols. I–IV), Andrew McNeillie, who does not let go of one of Woolf’s unattributed quotations until he has successfully located the unique floral attribution for its buttonhole; and on those rare occasions when he can’t come up with a previous carnation, he sounds genuinely chagrined. Thus in her essay on Sir Walter Raleigh, Virginia Woolf mentions in passing the “vast and devouring space” of the centuries, and puts the phrase in quotation marks, without troubling to tell us where she got it. McNeillie searches everywhere, but for once he is stumped:

  The origin of this phrase, which VW also quotes in ‘Papers on Pepys’ below, has resisted all attempts at discovery.

  Naturally I had to do a quick ROM-search for “vast and devouring space” in the English Poetry Database; I came up with half of it on Disk 3. In a verse drama called Festus (1877) by Spasmodic poet Philip James Bailey, a space-devouring work of 688 pages and over 31,000 lines that barely missed being excerpted in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury13 —a creation so vast, in fact, that the very word “vast” appears in it 130 separate times (e.g., “Alp-blebs of fire, vast, vagrant”)—you will find the phrase-fragment “devouring space” on line 15,772. Obviously this isn’t Woolf’s source—but since Bailey’s Festus is a Faustian reworking, I felt some anticipatory giddiness at the possibility that the reference which had resisted McNeillie’s researches might yield to my own, and that it would be waiting for me in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus; but when I hurried to the library to wash my hands in the milk of the excellent Marlowe concordance (Robert J. Fehrenbach, Lea Ann Boone, and Mario A. Di Cesare, 1982),14 I determined that “vast and devouring space” wasn’t to be found there (as lumber wasn’t)—and how very presumptuous of me, anyway, to think that I could have divined the elusive source when McNeillie, who has devoted years of his life to this sort of maddening pursuit, could not. But someone someday, probably very soon (Chadwyck-Healey’s English Verse Drama Database is out now),15 will track it down. (The Library of the Future CD-ROM offers this from halfway through Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov: “The horses galloped on, ‘devouring space,’ and as he drew near his goal, again the thought of her, of her alone, took more and more complete possession of his soul.…”) McNeillie is not alone; I am not alone: it is worth remembering that each lonely plodding footnoter is also an honorary citizen of the intergenerational federation of commentators. Virginia Woolf writes (in her essay called “Hours in a Library”) that “a learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart”; but he can draw comfort from the knowledge that other sedentary enthusiasts preceded him, and others will follow him—he can, if he wishes to wax eschatological, think of these as friends and colleagues of a sort, as Housman seems to have regarded Scaliger and Bentley, and “the next Bentley or Scaliger.” Peter Lombard in his Book of Sentences built a useful central warehouse of theological quotation and analysis that developed, in the centuries after his death, a whole walled city and surrounding shantytown of secondary disputation and explication, as each hard-reading schoolman brought his trifles and trumpery to the great memorial Peter Lombard-room, to see what they were worth.16 “A commentary must arise from the fortuitous discoveries of many men in devious walks of literature,” wrote Samuel Johnson: I haven’t read this quotation in its original context; I have plucked it from a paragraph by Pope’s fussy Charles Kinbote of a commentator, the Reverend Whitwell Elwin, who includes it in his introduction to Pope’s Works, on the same page that he announces his plan to cart off most of the “pedantic lumber” of previous commentators to appendixes
.

  And—to glance back at Lewis Theobald for a minute—one of the bits of pedantic lumber that Shakespeare Restored offers us is this note on Hamlet’s “bare bodkin” speech, which might have attracted Vladimir Nabokov’s attention as he was imagining Pale Fire, since it supplies a missing connection (in the person of Theobald himself, Shakespeare’s pedantic, moony worshipper, and Pope’s antagonist) between Shakespeare, Pope, and the Kinbote-anagram, botkin:

  I can scarce suppose that he [Shakespeare] intended to descend to a Thought, that a Man might dispatch himself with a Bodkin, or little Implement with which Women separate, and twist over their Hair. I rather believe, the Poet designed the Word here to signify, according to the old Usage of it, a Dagger.

  But Pale Fire’s Charles Kinbote—the Zemblan émigré who explicates an uneven neo-Augustan poem in rhymed couplets by John Shade—isn’t only a stand-in for Pope’s minor bodkin-toting foe, Lewis Theobald: he is all of Pope’s eulogistic or crabby commentators superimposed. Here is how the Reverend Elwin describes an early editor, Warburton:

  He employed his sagacity less to discover than to distort the ideas of his author, and seems to have thought that the more he deviated from the obvious sense the greater would be his fame for inventive power.… The exuberant self-sufficiency of Warburton deluded him into the belief that [Pope’s] text derived its principal lustre from the commentary. He selected for the frontispiece to his edition a monument on which were hung medallions of himself and the poet, and Blakey, the draughtsman, told Burke that ‘it was by Warburton’s particular desire that he made him the principal figure, and Pope only secondary, and that the light, contrary to the rules of art, goes upwards from Warburton to Pope.’ (xx-xxi)

  The lighting is very Pale Fiery indeed. But then another Pope editor, Mark Pattison, says this of Reverend Elwin:

  Mr. Elwin has adopted an opinion that Pope was engaged in a conspiracy with Bolingbroke for the writing down of the Christian religion, and the substitution of Bolingbroke’s irreligious meta-physics in its place.… To what Mr. Elwin has said of Warburton’s commentary, we can make no objection. But he has sadly laid himself open to a tu quoque retort, by reproducing against Pope the same strained interpretation, the same imputation of meaning never meant, and the same inconclusive prosing on moral problems, which he objects to in Warburton.

  Elwin reminds Pattison, in fact, of Richard Bentley’s editing of Paradise Lost:

  Bentley first created a fictitious editor, who had corrected the poem for the blind author. Having set up this imaginary personage, he could attribute to his forgery every word or line which he wished to correct. Mr. Elwin sets up the hypothesis of an antichristian conspiracy, and deduces from it the meaning of particular passages.17

  This is not so very far from Kinbote’s paranoid pother over John Shade’s wife’s suppression of the Zemblan dimension of Shade’s poem in its final version:

  [W]e may conclude that the final text of Pale Fire has been deliberately and drastically drained of every trace of the material I contributed; but we also find that despite the control exercised upon my poet by a domestic censor and God knows whom else, he has given the royal fugitive a refuge in the vaults of the variants he has preserved.… (Pale Fire, Vintage ed., p. 81)

  And A. E. Housman—whose poems are referred to by Charles Kinbote as the “highest achievement in English poetry in the past hundred years”—is a fussing presence behind Nabokov’s novel, too. There is one passage in particular from Housman’s Selected Prose that could have opened an injector valve in Nabokov’s Russian-gauge locomotive, if he saw it. It is from a snide review of a book of Lucilian fragments edited by Friedrich Marx:

  Mr Marx should write a novel. Nay, he may almost be said to have written one; for his notes on book iii (Lucilius’ journey to Sicily) are not so much a commentary on the surviving fragments as an original narrative of travel and adventure.18

  The twenty-year-old Nabokov, in the words of his biographer Brian Boyd, encountered, while at Cambridge, Housman’s “glum features and drooping-thatch mustache … at Trinity’s high table almost every night”;19 and Boyd quotes helpfully from Speak, Memory, where Nabokov admits

  the direct influence upon my Russian structures of various contemporaneous (“Georgian”) English verse patterns that were running about my room and all over me like tame mice.

  Mice are in their element in poetry’s l.-room, by the way. Robert Louis Stevenson has a line in his Child’s Garden of Verses about “mice among the lumber” (although he may well be talking about outdoor lumber—hay or stubble or brush, or even possibly wood—here);20 and there are ten other nineteenth-century poems in the English Poetry Database that contain lumber and mice or mouse in them, including a read-aloud piece of sentimentalism by Mary Montgomerie Lamb (1843–1905), also known as Violet Fane. (She would not want to be confused with Mary Ann Lamb, Charles Lamb’s matricidal sister.) It is called “The Old Rocking-Horse (In the Lumber-Room)”:

  The mice, in their frolicsome revels,

  Sport over him night and day,

  And the burrowing moth

  In his saddle-cloth

  Has never been flick’d away.…

  What a medley of eloquent lumber

  Do his proud eyes lighten upon,

  From those drums and flutes

  To the high snow boots

  And the mouldering stuff’d wild swan …

  Yeats got the stuff’d wild swan of rhymed poetry to fly again at Coole a few decades later.21

  It wasn’t Housman’s tame Georgian verse-mice, however, that swayed Nabokov in later years. Housman the critic (captious, haughty, ferulean) left his permanent mark on Nabokov’s nonfictional style, just as Francis Jeffrey’s harsh intelligence marked Housman. Here, for example, is Housman sounding sneeringly Nabokovian on the subject of translation:

  “Scholars [Housman quotes] will pardon an attempt, however bald, to render into English these exquisite love-poems.” Why?

  Those who have no Latin may pardon such an attempt, if they like bad verses better than silence; but I do not know why bald renderings of exquisite love-poems should be pardoned by those who want no renderings at all.… Misrepresentation of Propertius is indeed the capital defect of this performance; good or bad, in movement, in diction, in spirit, it is unlike the original.22

  Nabokov and Housman both used huge critical projects (Pushkin, Manilius) as ways of rationing self-expression—as counterweights to the trebuchet-flights of their lyricism.23

  Naturally I looked semi-diligently in Housman’s writing for the 1. word, since any appearance of it would help me in my passing attempt to yoke him and Nabokov by violence to the same limber-load. But Housman, more power to him, prefers a quiet, beautiful word like marl, which collapses all the travertines of St. Peter’s into its earthen fold, and yet escapes any charge of pedantry because no word so short was ever crabbed:

  In gross marl, in blowing dust,

  In the drowned ooze of the sea,

  Where you would not, lie you must,

  Lie you must, and not with me.

  (XXXIII, Last Poems)

  In prose he uses lumber-nyms like dross-heap: “Thinly scattered on that huge dross-heap, the Caroline Parnassus, there were tiny gems of purer ray.” Where another writer might more gently speak of the lumber-room of Dryden’s diction, Housman brutally calls it a “dungeon.” The only real lumber I turned up in my hours with Housman was contained in a sentence by Francis Jeffrey, which Housman quotes disapprovingly in his review of The Cambridge History of English Literature:

  The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber:—and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley,—and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth,—and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our vision.

  “Little better than lumber” is a telling metaphorical choice for Jeffrey to have made, from the present vantage, since if you search “Southey, R. OR Wordsworth, W. OR Crabbe, G. OR Keats, J. O
R Shelley, P.B.” for lumber in the English Poetry Database you will discover that none of them were lumberjacks, except for George Crabbe, once. (In a poem called “The Birth of Flattery,” Flattery, the offspring of Poverty and Cunning, is able to revive the bloom of graceless forms, and “bid the lumber live.”)24

  Housman’s and the Romantic poets’ neglect didn’t deter Nabokov, who, surprisingly enough, gives our chosen keyword a prominent setting in Pale Fire. The deposed Zemblan king, Charles, is imprisoned in a “dismal lumber room” (p. 121) in the royal palace. This “old hole of a room” contains a closet, and in the closet is a Zemblan translation of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, as well as some “old sport clothes and gymnasium shoes,” which will, for the ~-obsessed, recall Samuel Butler’s lines (in “Religion”) about the Sanctum of the Jews containing nothing but “lumber and old shoos,” and will perhaps also bring to mind Dickens’s mention of the old shoes and fish baskets in Ebenezer Scrooge’s lumber room.25 A sliding door in the Zemblan lumber-room closet leads to a long secret passageway through which the King escapes; stumbling over “an accumulation of loose boards” (p. 133), he enters a second “dimly lit, dimly cluttered” lumber room, or lumbarkamer (this time Kinbote is good enough to supply us with the actual Zemblan-language equivalent),26 a retreat that was once, as it happens, a dressing room in the Royal Theater, where Iris Acht, paramour of the King’s grandfather, puffed and patched herself in preparation for her role in The Merman. All this is complicated and full of quadrupal playful para-meanings with short half-lives that I don’t really follow, but it seems safe to say that the loose boards that block the door are Nabokov’s nod to the preferred American meaning of lumber, which causes us pedestrians to stumble and misstep in our comprehension of Anglicisms like lumber-room; and both ~-rooms, linked by so “angular and cryptic” a passageway, could without too much symbolic tussling be taken to represent the two received linguistic traditions, the two dictionaries filled with ready-made verbal scenery, that the commentator king, and by inference Nabokov himself, must unite through painful acts of verbal and physical translation. Nabokov escapes one Russian lumbarkamer of second-hand literary heirlooms only to have to contend with the dust and sheets of an Anglo-American substitute.