At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays

by Anne Fadiman

  And:

  Within a day or two of the fatal one, we dressed for dinner a tongue, which we had had salted for some weeks in the house. As I sat down, a feeling like remorse struck me: this tongue poor Mary got for me; and can I partake of it now, when she is far away?

  There were hundreds of words about missing Mary, and not one about missing his mother. In fact, he mentioned her at any length only twice: once when he found his way “mechanically” (a horrifically honest adverb) to the side of her coffin, where he begged her forgiveness for forgetting her so soon, and once, after angrily observing that she had never appreciated her daughter, when he reminded himself, “Still she was a good mother, God forbid I should think of her but most respectfully, most affectionately.” He was trying hard with those italics, but his heart wasn’t in it.

  Lamb’s older brother, John, who was “little disposed (I speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to take care of old age & infirmities,” managed to wriggle out of his familial responsibilities and dump them all on twenty-one-year-old Charles. Lamb—who was, after all, an accountant—calculated that his father’s pension and his own salary together produced about £180 a year, “out of which we can spare £50 or £60 at least for Mary while she stays at Islington [a private asylum].… If my father, an old servant maid, & I cant live & live comfortably on £130 or £120 a year we ought to burn by slow fires, & I almost would, that Mary might not go into an hospital.” John thought Mary should be locked up in a mental institution, preferably Bedlam, for life; Charles was determined to take care of her himself. He bided his time for two and a half years until his father, who he knew would never accept Mary’s homecoming, had the courtesy to die. Ten days later, taking advantage of an act that allowed an insane criminal to be “liberated on security being given that he should properly be taken care of as a lunatic,” Lamb brought Mary home. As Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, Lamb’s friend and first biographer, put it, “he satisfied all the parties who had power to oppose her release, by his solemn engagement that he would take her under his care for life; and he kept his word.”

  Wordsworth, who himself lived with his sister, before and during his marriage, for fifty-five years, wrote of the Lambs:

  Her love

  (What weakness prompts the voice to tell it here?)

  Was as the love of mothers; and when years,

  Lifting the boy to man’s estate, had called

  The long protected to assume the part

  Of the protector, the first filial tie

  Was undissolved; and in or out of sight

  Remained imperatively interwoven

  With life itself.

  Charles and Mary shared a household for thirty-six years, in a state of what Lamb called “double singleness.” They spent their evenings in front of the fire, Mary darning socks while Charles read Elizabethan poetry aloud. They wrote Tales from Shakespeare together, he taking the tragedies and she the comedies, working, as she described it, “on one table (but not on one cushion sitting), like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer’s Night’s Dream; or, rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan.” A collection of his sonnets was

  WITH ALL A BROTHER’S FONDNESS, INSCRIBED TO MARY ANN LAMB, THE AUTHOR’S BEST FRIEND AND SISTER.

  They visited France together (“I & sister are just returned from Paris!! We have eaten frogs”). When he was forty-eight and she was fifty-eight, they affirmed their coupledom by adopting a teenage orphan girl, who later married Lamb’s publisher.

  Mary was lucid and even-tempered most of the time, but under stress—a servant’s death, a change of lodging—she often relapsed into insanity, and Lamb would walk her, weeping, to Hoxton Asylum, carrying a straitjacket. “What sad large pieces it cuts out of life,” he wrote during one such absence. During another, his despair overflowed to Coleridge in the blackest letter of his life:

  Mary will get better again; but her constantly being liable to such relapses is dreadful,—nor is it the least of our Evils, that her case & all our story is so well known around us. We are in a manner marked.… I am completely shipwreck’d—My head is quite bad. I almost wish that Mary were dead.

  It pains me to say it, but I feel quite sure that if Mary had not murdered her mother, her brother would never have become Elia, the persona he assumed in the great essays he wrote in his late forties. I also feel quite sure that Elia would never have been born if Lamb had not been compelled to work as a clerk.

  For thirty-three years, Lamb sat on a high stool, identical to those occupied by thirty other clerks; dipped his goose quill into two inkwells, one containing black ink and the other red (he called the latter Clerk’s Blood); and recorded the prices of tea, indigo, and piece goods. Not only did he hate his work; as Winifred F. Courtney, one of the most perceptive of his biographers, has pointed out, he was bad at it. Courtney examined some of Lamb’s ledgers and found that he frequently made mistakes. He rubbed them out with his little finger, but they nonetheless haunted his dreams, from which, he wrote in one of his Elia essays, he “would awake with terrors of imaginary false entries.” It is worth remembering that while he was adding up figures in the East India House’s stygian offices at Nos. 12–21 Leadenhall Street (what name could be more appropriate?), his friends—Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Godwin, De Quincey— were rambling in the Lake Country, experimenting with mind-altering drugs, siring illegitimate children, and planning a utopian community in America (“We shall… criticise poetry when hunting a buffalo,” wrote Southey). And yet, improbable as it seems, Lamb was an essential member of their coterie. It’s as if the inner circle of the Beats had consisted of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, and an accountant at H&R Block.

  When I first read Lamb, I imagined his life as an essayist to have been a pleasant stroll along a level, well-trod path. Now I see it as a technical climb along a knife-edged ridge, with a thousand-foot drop on either side. To the left lay the memory of the “day of horrors” and the constant anxiety over Mary’s sanity, both of which threatened his own sanity as well as his ability to summon up sufficient calm to write. To the right lay the deadening drudgery of Leadenhall, which threatened to swallow his creativity whole. (Remember that during Melville’s nineteen years as a customs inspector, he wrote absolutely nothing of note.) In the narrow space between anarchy and regimentation lay his essays, which I believe were made possible by—and also protected him from— his life’s opposed poles.

  Before the murder, Lamb had published only poems, and they were uniformly terrible. Immediately afterward, he told Coleridge: “Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of that kind.” The intended renunciation did not last long, but the output lessened, and, with a couple of exceptions, the quality did not improve. Because he took poetry far more seriously than prose, after the murder it seemed a self-indulgence, a “vanity”—unlike journalism, which paid, and thus contributed to Mary’s keep. In the dedication to Coleridge that introduced his Collected Works of 1818, he wrote, “The sap (if ever it had any) has become, in a manner, dried up and extinct: and you will find your old associate… dwindled into prose and criticism.”

  The “dwindling” was, in fact, a miraculous expansion. When he wrote those self-effacing words, he had already published some fine literary and theatrical criticism, but he was to find his true voice in the fifty-two essays—on chimney sweeps, on weddings, on old books, on sickness, on gallantry, on witches, on beggars, on roast pig, on ears—that he wrote between 1820 and 1825, working nights and Sundays, for the London Magazine. “True voice” is an odd phrase to use for a series of works written under a pseudonym (he borrowed “Elia” from an Italian clerk who had worked with his brother) and, though autobiographical, mendacious in some crucial respects. Elia, for instance, wrote, “Brother, or sister, I never had any—to know them. A sister, I think, that should have been Elizabeth, died in both our infancies.” Mary became the more comfortably distant “cousin Bridget,” who was, of course, neither ins
ane nor a murderess. Lamb’s mother was never mentioned; his father was transmuted into an amiable factotum named Lovel, no relation to Elia. And while the real Lamb cared devotedly for his relatives, Elia called his poor relations “a lion in your path,—a frog in your chamber,—a fly in your ointment,—a mote in your eye.” By such therapeutic subterfuges did Lamb’s imagination extricate him from his family’s stifling bonds.

  True voice it was: funny (unlike Lamb the poet), intimate (unlike Lamb the accountant), and relaxed (unlike Lamb the family pillar). But not inextinguishable. On March 29, 1825, Lamb retired, with a generous pension, from the East India House, an event he chronicled in “The Superannuated Man.” This was Coleridge’s favorite essay; he called it “worthy of Charles Lamb in his happiest Carolo-lambian Hour.” With heartbreaking bafflement, the superannuated Elia, released from the “thraldom” of his own clerkship, confessed, “I wandered about thinking I was happy, and knowing I was not.… I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some necessary part of my apparel.” Lamb lived nine more years but wrote no more great essays. He and Elia had retired together, and without the clerk’s humble vantage point, he found himself without a platform. Just as Lamb had required Mary’s madness to nudge him from poetry to prose, so he required his old chains to liberate the unpretentious alter ego who defined the modern familiar essay.

  Lamb once compared bad journalists to “the crooked man, of whom a facetious Greek Professor relates this comical story, that he swallowed a tenpenny nail, and voided it out a cork-screw!” Lamb did the opposite: he swallowed a series of corkscrews and turned them into tenpenny nails. I have spent many a Carolo-lambian Hour grieving over his life’s unfair twists and turns and wishing that posterity could vindicate Elia’s efforts to straighten them out. “Damn the age!” Lamb once said. “I will write for antiquity.” Antiquity is not cooperating. My dog-eared 1933 anthology (the dog-eared part is fine; Lamb preferred well-thumbed volumes), called Everybody’s Lamb, has become Hardly Anybody’s Lamb. If I could make him Everybody’s again, in my own whiffling century, I would forswear my spectacles, play at put, mend pens, kill fleas, stand on one leg, or shell peas.

  ICE CREAM

  read last March that the town council of Stafford, New Jersey, had passed an ordinance stating: “At no time shall a vendor be permitted to use a sound device, mechanical bell, mechanical music, mechanical noise, speakers, [or] amplifiers.” The target was ice cream trucks, whose peripatetic tootles the council wished to classify with the roar of jets and the blast of car alarms. As a child in suburban Connecticut, I had always considered the purl of the Good Humor truck to be more closely akin to a cricket’s chirp or the sound of summer rain: a seasonal gift, wreathed in sweet associations. I was therefore heartened to read, in May, that Jeffery Cabaniss, the owner of Jef-Freeze Treats, had successfully challenged the constitutionality of Stafford’s anti-tootle law in federal court. Mr. Cabaniss’s only concession was to change his truck’s melody from “Turkey in the Straw,” which had particularly vexed the residents of Stafford, to the less familiar, and thus presumably less irksome, “Music Box Dancer.”

  The New York Times called Mr. Cabaniss a “First Amendment hero.” I didn’t give a fig about the Constitution. I cared about the contents of Mr. Cabaniss’s truck. As far as I was concerned, a vote against Jef-Freeze Treats was a vote against ice cream, and a vote against ice cream—even against Klondike Krunch Bars and Power Ranger Pops, which constitute the heart of the Cabaniss inventory—was a vote against the pursuit of happiness.

  I recently calculated (assuming an average consumption of one pint of ice cream per week, at 1,000 calories per pint, and the American Medical Association’s reckoning of 3,500 calories per pound of stored body fat) that had I eaten no ice cream since the age of eighteen, I would currently weigh −416 pounds. I might be lighter than air, but I would be miserable. Before I was married, I frequently took a pint of Häagen-Dazs Chocolate Chocolate Chip to bed, with four layers of paper towels wrapped around the container to prevent digital hypothermia. (The Nutrition Facts on the side of the carton define a “serving size” as a quarter of a pint, but that’s like calling a serving size of Pringles a single potato chip.) Now, under the watchful eye of a husband so virtuous that he actually prefers low-fat frozen yogurt, I go through the motions of scooping a modest hemisphere of ice cream into a small bowl, but we both know that during the course of the evening I will simply shuttle to and from the freezer until the entirety of the pint has been transferred from carton to bowl to me. A major incentive for writing this essay was that during its composition this process was not called greed; it was called research.

  My favorite flavors are all variations on chocolate, vanilla, coffee, and nuts, none of which is good for you. I do not like fruit flavors. They are insufficiently redolent of sin. Strawberry ripple is the top of a slippery slope at the bottom of which lie such nouvelle atrocities, recently praised in The New York Times, as tofu-anise, cardamom, white pepper, and corn ice creams. Corn? Why not Brussels sprouts? (I shouldn’t say that too loudly, lest the Ohio State University Department of Dairy Technology, which has created sauerkraut sherbet and potatoes-and-bacon ice cream, derive inspiration for a new recipe.) On the other hand, ice cream shouldn’t actually kill you. When I called the Häagen-Dazs Consumer Relations Department a few days ago to verify the butterfat content of Mint Chip, I was alarmed to hear the following after-hours message: “If you have a medical emergency with one of our products that requires immediate attention, please call Poison Control at 612-347-2101.” What medical emergency could a few scoops of ice cream possibly precipitate? It is true that circa 400 b.c., Hippocrates, or one of the anonymous writers who were later known as Hippocrates, warned that snow-chilled beverages might “suddenly throw… the body into a different state than it was before, producing thereby many ill effects.” It is also true that in 1997 the British Medical Journal noted that “ice cream headaches” can be produced by cold temperatures on the back of the palate, which stimulate the spheno-palatine ganglion to dilate blood vessels in the brain. However, the article concluded with the heartening sentence “Ice cream abstinence is not indicated.”

  As I have said, I take a dim view of healthful ice cream, and was thus cheered to learn from a spokeswoman at the International Dairy Foods Association that sales of high-fat ice cream are going up and sales of low-fat ice cream are going down. Had I lived in eighteenth-century Naples, however, I might have softened my anti-salubrity stance. According to Filippo Baldini, a physician who wrote a 1775 treatise on the medicinal properties of sorbetti, cinnamon ices are an efficacious remedy for diarrhea; coffee ices for indigestion; pine-nut ices for consumption; ass’s-milk ices for maladies of the blood; cow’s-milk ices for paralysis; and sheep’s-milk ices for hemorrhages, scurvy, and emaciation. This pharmacopoeia sounds right up my alley. In fact, if Dr. Baldini were practicing today, I would add my name to his patient rolls without delay. “You’re looking a trifle emaciated, Ms. Fadiman,” he’d say. “Here’s a prescription for Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk. BlueCross BlueShield will reimburse in full.”

  Although very cold ice cream numbs the taste buds that perceive sweetness (the basis for the entreaty that used to adorn cartons of Häagen-Dazs: “Please temper to a soft consistency to achieve the full flavor bouquet”), I prefer my ice cream untempered. I also like it even better in the winter than in the summer. Seasonal Good Humor trucks notwithstanding, it is a grave error to assume that ice cream consumption requires hot weather. If that were the case, wouldn’t Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield have established their first ice cream parlor in Tallahassee instead of Burlington, Vermont, which averages 161 annual days of frost? (Ben explains his product’s winter popularity by means of the Internal-External Temperature Differential and Equalization Theory, whereby, he claims, the ingestion of cold foodstuffs in freezing weather reduces the difference between the internal body temperature and the ambient air temperature, thus making his cust
omers feel comparatively warm.) Wouldn’t John Goddard, an outdoorsman of my acquaintance, have arranged for a thermos of hot chicken soup instead of a half gallon of French vanilla ice cream with raspberry topping to be airdropped to him on the summit of Mount Rainier? And wouldn’t the Nobel Prize banquet, held every year in Stockholm on the tenth of December, conclude with crêpes Suzette instead of glace Nobel? As the lights dim, a procession of uniformed servitors marches down the grand staircase, each bearing on a silver salver a large cake surrounded by spun sugar. Projecting from the cake is a dome of ice cream. Projecting from the dome is an obelisk of ice cream. Projecting from the obelisk is a flame. When the laureates—who have already consumed the likes of homard en gelée à la crème de choux fleur et au caviar de Kalix and ballotine de pintade avec sa garniture de pommes de terre de Laponie with no special fanfare—see what is heading their way, they invariably burst into applause.

  The Greek grammarian Athenaeus tells a catty story about Diphilus, an Athenian dramatist who lived in the fourth century B.C.:

  Once upon a time Diphilus was invited to Gnathaena’s house, to dine, so they say, in celebration of the festival of Aphrodite.… And one of her lovers, a stranger from Syria, had sent her some snow… the snow was to be secretly shaken up in the unmixed wine; then she directed the slave to pour out about a pint and offer the cup to Diphilus. Overjoyed, Diphilus quickly drank out of the cup, and overcome by the surprising effect he cried, “I swear, Athena and the gods bear me witness, Gnathaena, that your wine-cellar is indubitably cold.” And she replied, “Yes, for we always take care to pour in the prologues of your plays.”