1 Mack loses restraint altogether when he writes: “I will make no secret of my belief that in his younger days Pope shows signs of the interest in word-catching that he scorned in others.” (“ ‘Books and the Man’: Pope’s Library,” in Collected in Himself, 1982, p. 318.)
2 Compare Nabokov: “A book is like a trunk tightly packed with things. At the customs an official’s hand plunges perfunctorily into it, but he who seeks treasures examines every thread.” (Lectures on Literature, “Charles Dickens,” p. 89.)
3 As Harold Bloom points out in his thoughtful The Western Canon, 1994.
4 There are fifty-five instances of lumber on Disk 3 (1800–1900, A-K) and forty-five on Disk 4 (1800–1900, L–Z): a total of one hundred lumber-uses for the nineteenth century. Compare this with the 129 lumbers on Disk 2, for the period 1660–1800, A–Z: much more poetry in the nineteenth century, less lumber. Yet lumber and lumber-room often feel overused in nineteenth-century contexts, and don’t in the eighteenth century. Word-frequency studies, then, can’t tell you whether something is more or less of a cliché.
5 Thomas Hood includes a defense of puns in the prefatory matter to the second edition of his Whims and Oddities (first ed. 1826): “I am informed that certain monthly, weekly, and very every day critics have taken great offence at my puns,—and I can conceive how some Gentlemen with one idea must be perplexed by a double meaning. To my own notion a pun is an accommodating word, like a farmer’s horse,—with a pillion of an extra sense to ride behind;—it will carry single, however, if required.”
6 From Traherne’s “In Making Bodies Lov could not Express.”
7 Which makes no sense, since Mistress Masham’s Repose takes place in Malplaquet, where lumber-users congregated. The Professor (who is, in Fritz Eichenberg’s illustrations, longobarded) recalls that “Dr. Swift was at Malplaquet, as we know, in 1712. He came here straight from Twit-nam, with the poet Pope.” In White’s Malplaquet there are “larders, laundries, cupboards, closets, still rooms, coal cellars, outward rooms frequented in his early days by Dr. Johnson, servants’ halls, sculleries, harness rooms, pantries, dairies, cloakrooms, storerooms, and so forth,” but no lumber-room. Did I miss it? The word lumbago jumped out at me several pages from the end (p. 249), but then I realized my error. (Lumbago makes you lumber because it hurts your back to walk normally.) When my mother read White’s book to me, I assumed that “bloaters” were large pale German hot-dogs, but the Concise Oxford Dictionary says, incredibly, that they are smoked herrings. Listening to her read, I aspired to be the Professor—to live in a small booky shack in an overgrown garden. And in fact my office at this moment bears some resemblance to the Professor’s Rumpelkammer: “As he was one of those unfortunate people who leave the book open at the quotation in some accessible place, all the window ledges, oven-shelves, mantelpieces, fenders, and other flat surfaces were stocked with verified quotations, which had long been forgotten.”
8 Old English Libraries, Ernest A. Savage, 1912, p. 200. Savage quotes (pp. 202–3) from Henry Anstey’s description (in his introduction to the Munimenta Academica) of the “ponderous iron chests, eight or ten feet in length and about half that width” that were kept by the university stationer at Oxford in the late fifteenth century, holding “as many as a hundred or more large volumes, besides other valuables deposited as pledges by those who have borrowed from the chest.”
9 Lewis Theobald, Richard Foster Jones, 1919, p. 280.
10 Jones points out (p. 14) that Johann Jacob Bodmer (1698–1783), translator of Paradise Lost into German prose and author of an influential pre-Romantic treatise on the wonderful in poetry, was a fervent enthusiast of The Cave of Poverty. Theobald and Bodmer (a professor of history at Zurich) corresponded. Thus Pope’s piddling arch-pedant, of all people, is a distinct English impulse behind German Romanticism, and German Romanticism in turn feeds back into English Romanticism. This pre-Romantic influence-laundering through a Swiss account makes more under-standable a tiny but odd resemblance between the “Ten thousand doors” that lead to Theobald’s gloomy cave and the “twice ten thousand caverns” reached by the tidal swell in Keats’s sea-sonnet.
11 “It is hardly surprising that the phrase ‘learned lumber’ recurred to Pope’s mind when describing Theobald’s library in Dunciad, Book 1.” (Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life, p. 429.) Peter Seary’s superb Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1990) devotes an appendix to Theobald’s (vanished) library, which was auctioned over four evenings in 1744. Seary also shows that Theobald became increasingly sensitive to the Dunciad’s charge of pedantry, and therefore, in his edition of Shakespeare, suppressed his inclination to give tiny textual questions their discursive due: “Theobald’s commentary established a new standard for editors of English texts and created new levels of expectation in the reading public, but a regrettable consequence of his fear of being considered a pedant is that often he fails to do himself justice in his accounts of his discoveries,” writes Seary (p. 178). And Seary compellingly argues that Samuel Johnson, not Pope or even the despicable Warburton, was responsible for the conclusive defamation of Theobald as a scholar by the end of the eighteenth century: Johnson took over Theobald’s methods and insights for his own edition of Shakespeare and for his Dictionary (“Theobald instituted the practice of citing parallels as a means of explicating obscure English words, and Johnson in the Dictionary followed his practice on an unprecedented scale,” p. 207), while making unfair jabs at Theobald and failing to give him proper credit. Still, it is Pope’s Dunciad that defames Theobald now—the fact that Johnson underappreciates him in his prefaces does no active harm to his reputation.
12 Filelfo’s orations and epithalamials were, writes John Addington Symonds, “conceived in the lumbering and pedantic style that passed for eloquence at that period.” This is a lumber that mixes the sense of heavy footfalls and old vocabulary. (Renaissance in Italy, Modern Library, p. 456.)
13 See “Some poems specifically considered but rejected” in the notes to Christopher Ricks’s Penguin edition of The Golden Treasury, p. 511: “on whole too slight” was the final judgment in the manuscript of the anthology. In Edmund Gosse’s Critical Kit-Kats, p. 145, there is this about the poem: “Mr. Bailey’s Festus was really a power for evil, strong enough to be a momentary snare to the feet of Tennyson in writing Maud, and even of Browning.”
14 One of the dark-red Cornell Concordances that lure the eye here and there in the stacks—some of the others in the series sort the words of Ben Jonson, Herbert, Yeats, Blake, Skelton, Pascal’s Pensées, Mandelstam, Racine, Beowulf, E. E. Cummings, and Swift. I can be sure I haven’t missed any lumber in Samuel Johnson’s poetry thanks to the Cornell Concordance to the Poems of Samuel Johnson. (A Latin epigram called “The Logical Warehouse: Occasioned by an Auctioneer’s having the Groundfloor of the Oratory in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields” was the closest I got to lumber-room: it is printed as a poem of doubtful authorship in the Oxford edition of Johnson’s poems.) One can easily become sentimental about these great series of concordances, since the more full-text material is available electronically, the less esteemed and understood they will be. They have magical as well as meaningful value, to use Larkin’s dichotomy. “This person is worth studying,” they affirm; “every word that this person wrote deserves its own private lanai of a line.”
15 I am avoiding it.
16 Maybe part of the reason scholastic learning was dismissed as “the lumber of the schools” was that Peter Lumber’s Sentences occasioned so many heavy folio volumes.
17 Pattison’s Essays, vol. II (1889), “Pope and His Editors.”
18 A. E. Housman, Selected Prose, ed. John Carter, p. 107. Carter’s selection was published in 1962, however, the same year as Pale Fire, so that in order for this passage to have had some slight influential bearing on Nabokov’s novel, we would have to assume that Nabokov read it in its original form in an issue of Oxford’s Classical Quarterly from 1907, which is a sizable assumption
.
19 Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, p. 171.
20 Garden darkened, daisy shut,
Child in bed, they slumber—
Glow-worm in the highway rut,
Mice among the lumber. (R. L. Stevenson, “Night and Day”)
21 There is a mouse among the lumber of Stultifera Navis: or, The Modern Ship of Fools, by William Henry Ireland (1777–1835), once famous as a forger of Shakespeariana. Section XXXI, entitled “Of Foolish Antiquaries,” has:
Old stones, bones, coffins, without number,
Pots, pipkins, pans, such kitchen lumber;
Old chain, mail, armour, weapons rusty,
Coins, medals, parchments, writings musty:
Yet, after all antiques, not one compare I can
To that most rare of all, an antiquarian.
(“Mouse” comes earlier in the poem, in a footnote.) The English Duden (1960), a pictorial dictionary, gives an illustration for “lumber” in its two-page spread on “The Store Room” which shows an old umbrella, some cardboard boxes, a set of weightlifter’s disks, and (no. 74) “the mouse.”
22 “Tremenheere’s ‘Cynthia’ of Propertius,” in Selected Prose, pp. 91–93.
23 The lombard, or lombarda, was a kind of military “engine,” says the OED, used in sixteenth-century Spain. The first quotation the OED supplies for this separate meaning of lombard is from 1838. But Samuel Wesley uses artillery lumber in a metaphor in 1700, from his Epistle to a Friend concerning Poetry:
A thousand trivial Lumber-Thoughts will come,
A thousand Fagot-Lines will crowd for room;
Reform your Troops [i.e., rewrite, cut], and no Exemption grant,
You’ll gain in Strength, what you in Numbers want.
It’s tempting to think of the military lombard as a species of small trebuchet, turning dead lumbering weight into parabolic flight. (In the Scientific American, July 1995, Paul E. Chevedden, Les Eigenbrod, Vernard Foley, and Werner Soedel describe a modern reconstruction of a medieval trebuchet that successfully tossed a junk car, sans engine, eighty meters, using a thirty-ton counterweight. For a few seconds that car was not junk, it was science—it soared above all landfills.) But it may be that the lombarda wasn’t in fact a portable trebuchet, but some sort of gun or cannon (cf. the OED’s ambiguous quotation of Zurita’s Annales, 1610: “Començo se a combatir la ciudad con diuersos trabucos [trebuchets?] y lombardas”)—or that Samuel Wesley (who was for a short time a chaplain on a man-of-war, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, and may have had some idea of what he is talking about, as I do not) is referring with his lumber-thoughts not to the lombarda at all, whatever it was, but the limber. The limber was a “two-wheeled carriage forming a detachable part of the equipment of all guns on travelling carriages,” according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., “Limber.” The limber-box held ammunition. The notion of an army pulling its horse-drawn limber-carriages overland could have further helped the word “lumber” to load up on its heavy, hulking connotations. (Limber is still a word in use in the military sense, by the way. You can buy a Civil War cannon and sixteen-inch limber for $130 from the Art & Artifact catalog, Fall Preview, 1995, p. 35: “The wheeled artillery limber with an opening trunk [that is, the limber-box] attaches to the back of the cannon.”) Possibly lumber-thoughts was a simple typo for limber-thoughts (rather than a variant spelling of lombard-thoughts) in the one and only printing of Samuel Wesley’s poem.
24 The quartos of Francis Jeffrey are little better than lumber now, but not the quartos of Southey: Southey brought us the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears (in The Doctor), as well as one of the great poems about scholarship. Palgrave in his Golden Treasury titled it “The Scholar.” Here are the first and last stanzas:
My days among the Dead are past;
Around me I behold,
Where’er these casual eyes are cast,
The mighty minds of old:
My never-failing friends are they,
With whom I converse day by day.
My hopes are with the Dead; anon
My place with them will be,
And I with them shall travel on
Through all Futurity;
Yet leaving here a name, I trust,
That will not perish in the dust.
25 “Lumber-room as usual. Old fire-guard, old shoes, two fish-baskets, washing-stand on three legs, and a poker.” (A Christmas Carol, “Marley’s Ghost.”) The detectable strain of anti-Semitism, or at least of raised Semitic consciousness, in some lumber-contexts can’t be ignored. Jews are the heroic keepers of the past; that fact has amused or irritated some poets and novelists. Nabokov himself, however, wasn’t anti-Semitic.
26 The word (or a word, at least) for lumber-room in Russian is kladovaia. Vladimir Krymov wrote Iz Kladovoi Pisatelia (1951), which some online library catalogs translate as From a Writer’s Lumber Room. In keeping with general European usage, a lombard in Russian is a pawnshop.
(iv)
And why was Nabokov so interested in the word? It may have caused him some memory-triggering linguistic trouble when he was teaching Madame Bovary in translation at Wellesley and Cornell. In the course he taught, partially published as Lectures on Literature, Nabokov worked over Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which contains some “lumber of crates and bottles” and some “crazy lumber,” although he didn’t mention this fact to his students), and Bleak House; the scene at Krook’s Rag and Bottle Warehouse, displaying “Kitchen-Stuff,” “Old Iron,” “Waste Paper,” “shabby old volumes,” and “Bones” (no lumber) Nabokov described in detail. Then he came to Madame Bovary, and dwelt on the “wonderful” jam-making scene (Part III, ch. 2) in which (and this is Nabokov, not Flaubert, speaking)
little Justin, who having been told to fetch an additional pan for the jam, took one from the lumber room in the dangerous neighborhood of a blue jar with arsenic.
This is the same lumber-room arsenic that Emma later eats, having coaxed the key from Justin. Twice in his lecture notes Nabokov mentions Flaubert’s “lumber room”—it is the alchemical garret in which Homais, the self-important druggist, stores his apothecary materials and performs chemical putterings, pretending to be more of a man of science than he is:
He often spent long hours alone there [writes Flaubert, as translated by Lowell Bair], labeling, decanting and repackaging, and he regarded it not as an ordinary storeroom, but as a veritable sanctuary from which issued all sorts of pills, boluses, decoctions, lotions and potions which he had made with his own hands and which would spread his fame throughout the countryside.
In the original French, the name that Flaubert has Homais give his upstairs sanctuary is not one of the cluster of basic alternatives for “warehouse” or “place of storage”—words like depôt or magasin or debarras or grenier. Rather it is the exotic-sounding (exotic at least to English-speakers) capharnaüm. Capernaum was the town in Galilee where such a press of spectators gathered to hear Jesus (Mark 2) that a palsied man had to be lowered in his bed through the roof to be healed, and it was the site of various other miracles and pronouncements, including the sermon Jesus preached (John 6) after the feeding of the five thousand with the magic loaves and fish-baskets. Hence “un vrai capharnaüm” came to mean (according to the stacked volumes of Littré and Le Grand Robert and Trésor de la Langue Française), a room in which lots of things are tumbled together pell-mell—a “lieu de désordre et de débauche.” Harrap’s dictionary and the Oxford French Dictionary offer bear-garden and glory hole as English equivalents, but these have an unsavory ring. “Lumber room” is the term that J. Lewis May supplies in his translation, the text that was imported into the Library of the Future CD-ROM. Translations by Mildred Marmur (Signet), Joan Charles (edited by Somerset Maugham), Alan Russell (Penguin Classics), Francis Steegmuller (Quality Paperback Book Club), and Paul de Man (Norton) give Capharnaum without umlaut or explanation;1 clearly, however, the English reader needs some interpretive help. Low
ell Bair’s translation for Bantam floats depository as an alternative, turning Homais’s beakered retreat into a sperm bank, which may not be so far wrong, since it is the place where, in Flaubert’s nudging phrase, he “se délectait dans l’exercice de ses prédilections.” Gerard (not Manley) Hopkins, on the other hand, in his Oxford Classics edition, gives the burly and Father-Knows-Bestial Den.
Nabokov also addressed the problem of the best English equivalent. Although he uses lumber room in the published text of his lectures on Madame Bovary, it seems that he also at times tried storeroom. On a handwritten list of mistranslated words that he evidently read aloud to his students, in order that they might correct their copies of the Aveling translation—a facsimile of which, headed “Last Batch of Mistranslated Words,” one may inspect in the Lectures on Literature paperback, p. 161—Capharnaum appears next to “storeroom (or house of confusion).” An additional hard-to-read note says “derived from the name of a [?devastated] city in Palestine.” Maybe this list dates from a period following the first composition of the lectures: having encountered some American-undergraduate bewilderment when he used lumber room, Nabokov possibly fell back on a plainer word. But Den, depository, and storeroom are not good enough: they strip the faded splendor, the reverberantly umlauted plume of Carthaginianism, from capharnaüm, which in the mouth of a small-town pseudo-savant and freethinker like Homais is exasperating and ludicrous, and yet still preserves (as does lumber room, with its fitful gleams of old gold and Lombard wealth) a residue of its own original radical glory. “I can’t accept the idea of a God who goes walking in his garden with his cane in his hand, lodges his friends in the bellies of whales, dies with a groan and comes back to life three days later,” Homais tells Emma; his capharnaüm holds “acids and caustic alkalis” (which he sells on credit to Charles), rather than a prophet and a throng of converts. But it is nonetheless a place of novelistic transubstantiation, of course, in which Emma, driven to eat fistfuls of arsenic powder in Homais’s chemical attic, an act without any of the classical panache of asps or hemlock, nonetheless manages to resurrect herself as an immortal tragic heroine, right on the powder-white page.
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