The Book of Lost Books

by Stuart Kelly

  The Pantochronochanon shows how influential the Urquharts have always been. Tracing their descent from Adam’s third son, Seth, rather than through Cain, Urquhart’s forebears have an uncanny knack for being tangentially involved in world history. His great × 109 grandmother, Termuth, found Moses in the rushes. Uthork, his great × 66 grandfather, was the general for the mythic Fergus I of Scotland. He can, he claims, “produce testimonies of Arabic, Greek and Latin,” which will be as irrefutable as the Elements of Euclid.

  Similarly, in the Logopandecteision, he outlines his universal language, but withholds the grammar and vocabulary he has already developed. The language creates a one-to-one correspondence between words and things, as in Leibniz’s scheme, and each word, being built up from syllables, contains in itself its location in the scheme of things: as if the scientific Latin name of an organism, containing its phylum, genus, and species, could be compressed into a word of no more than seven syllables. Urquhart’s image is of a map,

  so many cities which are subdivided into streets, they againe into lanes, those into houses, these into stories wherof each room standeth for a word; and all these so methodically, that whoso observeth my precepts thereanent shall at the first hearing of a word know to what city it belongeth and . . . after a most exact prying into all its letters, finding the street, lane, house, story and room thereby denoted, he punctually hit upon the very proper thing it represents by its most specifical signification.

  Not only can everything be named; every sound the mouth can make is made meaningful.

  Precision is not the least of the virtues of Urquhartese. Each word “hath at least ten several synonymas” and the language has “a wonderful facility . . . in making of anagrams.” In his true, hyperbolic style, his language outdoes every other tongue, having eleven genders, seven moods, ten cases, and “four voices, although it was never heard that ever any other language had above three.” The names of soldiers express their exact rank, and the names of stars contain their latitude and longitude, in degrees and minutes. Urquhart could, if let free, single-handedly rebuild Babel.

  Before he is written off as a harmless lunatic, it is worth mentioning that Urquhart does express some linguistic truths. He understands that translation is, by its nature, impossible, and that “were . . . languages stript of what is not originally their own, we should not be able . . . to purchase so much as our breakfast in market.” Though it is highly speculative, and possibly satirical, it is not the work of an unversed charlatan.

  Why were the proofs of a universal history and the primer of the universal language denied to the world? Partly, of course, because they were never written. The whole phantasmagoria is an elaborate charade designed to win him his freedom and announce his fame. But he did lose a large number of manuscripts after the Battle of Worcester. Even if they did not contain the Elixir of Eternal Life and the Specifications for an Engine to Travel to the Stars, they would have been shot through with his own quintessenced and cup-shotten mokes, his serpegiar bliteri and heteroclite idiosyncrasy, as he himself would say. It seems appropriate to let the good knight tell his own tale of misfortune, when, after the rout of the regal party at Worcester, two swindlers and plunderers in Master Spilsbury’s house find nothing . . .

  but manuscripts in folio to the quantity of sixscore and eight quires and a half, divided into six hundred fourty and two quinternions and upwards . . . they in a trice carried all whatever els was in the room away save those papers, which they then threw down on the floor as unfit for their use. Yet immediately thereafter, when upon carts the aforesaid baggage was put to be transported to the country, and that by the example of many hundreds of both horse and foot whom they had loaded with spoil, they, . . . apprehending how useful the paper might be unto them, went back for it and bore it straight away; which done, to every one of those their camards whom they met with in the streets, they gave as much thereof for packeting up of raisins, figs, dates, almonds, caraway and other such like dry confections and other ware as was requisite; who, doing the same themselves, did together with others kindle pipes of tobacco with a great part thereof and threw all the remainder upon the streets save so much as they deemed necessary for inferiour employments and posteriour uses.

  Of those dispersedly-rejected bundles of paper, some were gathered up by grocers, druggists, chandlers, pie-makers or such as stood in need of any cartapaciatory utensil and put in present service to the utter undoing of all the writing thereof both in its matter and order.

  Abraham Cowley

  {1618–1667}

  LIKE MANY A child prodigy, Abraham Cowley found his middle age to be fraught with the dark memories of dashed hopes. The seventh son of a posthumous father, he had certainly flourished quickly. Before the age of ten he had found, and read, a copy of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in his mother’s chamber, a fortuitous discovery, since the bulk of her books were theological treatises. Enthusiasm soon turned to imitation, and by the age of eleven he had composed and published two poems. By 1633, he had written sufficient verses for them to be collected together as PoeticalBlossoms. The teenage writer went on to produce a pastoral play, Love’s Riddle, and a Latin comedy, Naufragium Joculare, while at Cambridge. The stage seemed set for his erudition, wit, and gentle amiability to secure for him the position of foremost writer of the age.

  The Civil War, however, intervened. With his “heart set wholly upon letters, I went to the university, but was soon torn from thence by that violent public storm, which would suffer nothing to stand where it did, but rooted up every plant, even from the princely cedar to me, the hyssop.” As an adherent of the monarchy and Charles I, Cowley moved from Parliamentarian Cambridge to Royalist Oxford, dashing off a satire on the king’s foes entitled The Puritan and the Papist. But, as he would later recollect in biting understatement, “a warlike, various and a tragical age is the best to write of but the worst to write in.”

  Between 1644 and 1654, Cowley was based on the Continent, predominantly in the service of Lord Jermyn, the secretary to Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I. He continued to publish, with The Mistress in 1647 and another comedy, The Guardian, in 1650; most of his time, however, was taken up with coding and deciphering documents for his master and correspondence between Henrietta Maria and Charles, as the pitched battles on English soil were superseded by espionage and intrigue. Between continents, Cowley undertook several undercover missions, to the Netherlands, Jersey, and Scotland. In 1655, he returned to England, apparently to live in semiretirement and discreetly provide occasional reports on the state of the nation to the exiled court. He was arrested as a Royalist spy, in London, and released on bail of £1,000.

  It has been suspected that Cowley struck a deal with the establishment of the day. The seventeenth-century academic gossip Antony à Wood maintained there was an encomium by Cowley on Cromwell, though these lines have never surfaced. What is certain is that Cowley did retire, eventually to Kent, where he seems to have been held in slight suspicion after the Restoration of Charles II (despite an enthusiastic ode welcoming the king back). He became a doctor of physic, and spent the last years of his life composing a Latin poem in six books on herbs, flowers, and fruit trees: from poetical blossoms to botany.

  What caused Cowley’s change, from debonair poet at the heart of the political system to secluded naturalist? A snapshot of his state of mind can be found in the remarkable Preface to his Collected Works of 1656, published the year after his release from prison.

  “My desire has been for some years past,” he wrote, “... to retire my self to some of our American Plantations.” A comprehensible enough inclination for a man slung in jail the instant he stepped back on the native soil, which had been soaked with his king’s and colleagues’ blood. But throughout the Preface, Cowley’s stance toward himself as a poet, and toward poetry in general, is almost pathological. What happened in the past was over and never to be repeated or explored. His Collected Works was, he claimed, “a little Tomb of Marble.” “T
o make my self absolutely dead in a Poetical capacity, my resolution at present, is never to exercise any more that faculty,” he wrote and, when asking his critics to look kindly on his efforts, maintained, “I may make a just claim to the undoubted priviledge of Deceased Poets.”

  This literary death-wish, this “encourage[ment] to learn the Art of Oblivion,” is not without its psychosexual undertones. He was “made a poet as irremediably as a child is made a eunuch.” Moreover, “as the marriage of infants do but rarely prosper, so no man ought to wonder at the diminution or decay of my affection to Poesy, to which I had contracted myself so much under age.” The poem “Destiny” offers another, bizarre image: the Muse:

  circumcised my tender soul, and thus she spake:

  “Thou of my church shall be;

  Hate and renounce” said she

  “Wealth, honour, pleasures, all the world for me.

  Thou neither great at court, nor in the war,

  Nor at th’Exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling Bar.

  Content thyself with this small, barren praise

  That neglected verse does raise.”

  Cowley’s description of the poetical life here sounds more like an undesirable designation than a restful and expected tapering. “I can no longer write” was an adequate cover story for “I will not longer write.”

  He included, in the 1656 Collected Poems, four books of an epic poem which he had “neither Leisure hitherto, nor . . . Appetite at present to finish”; and though he may have subsequently had time, desire did not return over the last eleven years of his life. He described his abandoning of the poem with characteristic sly self-deprecation: “men commonly play not out the game, when it is evident that they can win it, but lay down their cards and take up what they have won.” Nonetheless, he included an analysis of his intentions that would have a significant impact on English poetry.

  The Davideis was to be an epic poem on the life of the biblical King David. He “designed [it] into Twelve Books . . . after the pattern of our Master Virgil.” Fidelity to his model even led Cowley to include hemistichs, or half-lines, since such lines appear in The Aeneid: he seems not to have realized that they are evidence that Virgil’s poem too is unfinished, or at least unperfected. Cowley clearly had the poem plotted out in no small detail. It would encompass

  many noble and fertile Arguments behind; as, the barbarous cruelty of Saul to the Priests at Nob, the several flights and escapes of David, with the manner of his living in the Wilderness, the Funeral of Samuel, the love of Abigail, the sacking of Ziglag, the loss and recovery of David’s wives from the Amalekites, the Witch of Endor, the war with Philistia, and the Battel of Gilboa; all of which I meant to interweave upon several occasions, with most of the illustrious Stories of the Old Testament, and to embellish with the most remarkable Antiquities of the Jews.

  The poem would end, not with David’s anointment as king of Israel, but with his “most Poetical and excellent Elegie . . . on the death of Saul and Jonathan.”

  Poetry, Cowley argued, in the ungodly time of Cromwell as much as in the pagan past, had been usurped by the Devil, and needed to be redeemed. “Why will not the actions of Sampson afford as plentiful matter as the Labors of Hercules? . . . Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelitesinto the Holy Land, yield incomparably more Poetical variety, than the voyages of Ulysses or Aeneas?”

  In an astonishing moment of clarity, Cowley bows away from his poem, and nods to the future simultaneously. “I shall be ambitious of no other fruit from this weak and imperfect attempt of mine, but the opening of a way to the courage and industry of some other persons, who may be better able to perform it thoroughly and successfully.” Step forward, John Milton.

  Cowley resembles a poetic mutant, a hopeful monster in the evolution of English poetry: he developed new sensitivities, better strategies; he adapted himself to an obvious niche that, unfortunately, did not yet exist. He was the new, right kind of poet, in the wrong old place, time, and uniform.

  His Collected Poems is a pruning of his output. “I have cast away all such pieces as I wrote during the time of the late troubles . . . as among others, Three Books of The Civil War it self.” Book I of this appeared in 1679, the other two were discovered in the mid-1980s. The poem was an attempt to narrate the conflict between Roundheads and Cavaliers as if it were an epic already, and with the epic’s foregone conclusion that the good would triumph. God blessed the king, and the Devil inspired Cromwell. Life, however, took a different turn from literary precedent. Cowley dismissed his political epic brusquely, saying, “it is folly to weave laurels for the conquered.”

  One wonders if Milton realized the irony: that the epic would always be written in political exile. His Paradise Lost was composed under the autocratic rule of Charles II, not the government of Cromwell. John Dryden would only translate The Aeneid after James II was forced to cede the British throne to William III. Alexander Pope put The Iliad into English at a time when the king couldn’t even speak the language. James McPherson’s forged epic poem Fingal, by Ossian was launched after Culloden, when the Gaelic it was supposedly written in was being actively suppressed. Epic, for the British poet, is always tinged with elegy.

  Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)

  {1622–1673}

  “MANUSCRIPTS DON’T BURN,” wrote Mikhail Bulgakov in his greatest work, The Master and Margarita, even though, as a biographer of Molière, he knew that the letters and unpublished works of his hero, including the final masterpiece, L’Homme du cour, had been consigned to the flames. But Bulgakov does not mention in The Life of Monsieur de Molière another work we know to be lost: though whether or not it is truly lost is problematic.

  Despite many of the events of his life, Molière was the luckiest and sanest of comedians. When his stammering on the stage elicited catcalls and well-aimed vegetables, he turned into a writer, and a writer of genius at that. When his company was thrown out on the street, he bounced back into opulent surroundings. When his daring works caused outrage, he was safely under the patronage of the duc d’Orléans. When an outraged theatergoer stood up during a performance of Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire, and loudly declared he was being libeled, the audience laughed twice as hard that anyone would willingly claim he was the model for an avaricious, jealous, bourgeois fool. Fortune’s vacillations and vicissitudes always ended up as opportunities, and every brickbat became a laurel. Even the rumor that he had married his own daughter barely scratched his public standing—though his former mistress’s offspring made his life a misery nonetheless.

  Molière’s comedy proceeded from a sense that vices were follies. It was not just the gulling of the miserly Harpagon in L’Avare that was funny; it was the intrinsically ludicrous nature of thinking that hoarding one’s wealth was a feasible scheme. Intellectual pretension in Les Précieusesridicules, the fear of death in Le Malade imaginaire, hypocrisy in Tartuffe, cynicism in Le Misanthrope, lust in countless disguises: every atrocious kink in human psychology, whereby the inevitable was pointlessly avoided, was the source of gloriously unaffected glee.

  But from what secure vision of the world did Molière’s iron-hard ironic castigation stem? As a boy he had been taught, like countless other young men, to read the work of the Latin philosopher Lucretius. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius advocated an Epicurean worldview: the gods were unnecessary, error was its own punishment, and, as individuals from St. Paul to Samuel Johnson found, there was no use kicking against the pricks of a cosmos that cared nothing about the vanity of human wishes. Happiness was the product of avoiding pain: so, syllogistically, the person who not only provided pleasure, but also highlighted the unprofitability of mankind’s habitual sloppy thinking and silly desires, would be nothing less than a mundane saint in a heavenless universe.

  In one instance, Molière outdid his mentor. Lucretius, to prevent the future sufferings he would no doubt have to endure, committed suicide. Molière, on finding his friends so lachrymose in drink that they we
re intent on drowning themselves, agreed with them, but cautioned that such a philosophically relevant protest at the conditions of existence would no doubt be undermined if it transpired that they performed the action when flushed with wine. The suicide would take place the next day, after breakfast, when, of course, it didn’t.

  Molière wrote a translation of Lucretius. The Abbé de Marolles had mentioned in 1661 that Molière intended to publish the work, the year before his first major success with L’École des femmes. It never appeared. Since we have Lucretius himself, the loss of a French version might seem a minor affair. To an extent, this is true. Just as the orbit of Uranus, strained out of kilter by the presence of Neptune, allowed Verrier to predict the existence of another planet without having seen it, so Molière’s debt to Lucretius can be fathomed in the elliptical circuit of his thinking, even though the actual homage has perished, save for a speech on the blindness of lovers derived from Lucretius in Le Misanthrope.

  To hear him, with his own elegance, express the futility of striving and the fiction of the divine, would have been invigorating. But—as he might well have chosen to translate the title of De Rerum Natura—c’est la vie.