At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays
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———. “Steele and Addison,” “Influence of the Coffeehouses,” “Literature and Clubland,” and “Beginnings of The Tatler.” In Cambridge History of English and American Literature, vol. 9. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–1921.
ON HONORÉ DE BALZAC AND COFFEE
Balzac, Honoré de. Traité des excitants moderne, trans. Robert Onopa. In Weinberg and Bealer, The World of Caffeine.
Pritchett, V. S. “Honoré de Balzac: Poor Relations.” In The Pritchett Century. New York: Modern Library, 1999.
MISCELLANEOUS SOURCES
Jeffries, Stuart. “Secrets and Pies.” The Guardian, March 19, 2003.
Plant, Sadie. Writing on Drugs. New York: Picador, 2001.
UNDER WATER
The Wyoming Water Resources Data System provided the information on the Green River’s flood conditions in June of 1972.
After I read this essay at Wesleyan University in 2005, a man in the audience—Bill Johnston, a professor of Asian history—introduced himself. He told me that the boy who had drowned in the Green River had been his best friend when they were teenagers in Rawlins, Wyoming. I had written that I had forgotten Gary’s last name, the color of his hair, and the sound of his voice. Now I know that Gary’s last name was Hall, and his hair was blond.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Eleven of these essays first appeared in The American Scholar. I’ve made minor changes in all of them. (For the compulsive writer, few things are more satisfying than reinstating a sentence that didn’t fit the allotted space or de-clunking a phrase whose off-rhythm has been jangling in your head for years.) My seven years at the Scholar were bliss. I have never had, and probably will never have again, such kind and careful colleagues as Jean Stipicevic and Sandra Costich. They worked on these essays after midnight, before dawn, and on Christmas Eve, adjudicating fine points of grammar and, through their combination of intelligence and good humor, serving both as dear comrades-in-arms and as ideal readers. John Bethell, my mentor since college, is a consummate wordsmith whose 2:00 a.m. e-mails were familiar essays in miniature. He edited my paragraphs with attention and artistry and confirmed that there is no greater pleasure than working alongside a friend. Bill Whitworth gave me daily instruction in the English lan guage. Aaron Matz energetically ferreted out sources and plugged fact-holes.
Several friends lent warm hands. Adam Goodheart dispensed sterling editorial counsel, told me about French coffeepots and Sicilian granite, and, on a desperate afternoon when I couldn’t find an English version of Diodorus Siculus’s description of Procrustes, translated the Greek. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang guided my reading of Darwin and Wallace during a fellowship year at Stanford and suggested sources on natural history, e-mail, and English coffeehouses. Peter Gradjansky refreshed my memory of our coffee-drinking rituals in Dunster F-13. Charlie Monheim recalled the night we saw Halley’s Comet from the Tasman Glacier. My aunt Carol Whitmore filled me in on my pioneer great-great-grandfathers. Hugh Bethell, Dan Fromson, Campbell Geeslin, Nancy Pick, Henry Singer, and Evelyn Toynton gave me help of various kinds. My friendships with Jane Condon, Maud Gleason, Lou Ann Walker, and Tina Rathborne were wellsprings, as they have been for more than thirty years.
How many writers can say that their publishing house is also a home? I’ve felt that way about Farrar, Straus and Giroux since the day fourteen years ago when my remarkable editor, Jonathan Galassi, called to tell me he was going to publish my first book. I would also like to thank Corinna Barsan, Susan Goldfarb, Jim Guida, Jonathan Lippincott, and Susan Mitchell.
I am indebted to Dorothy Wickenden at The New Yorker for asking me to write “Under Water” and to Deborah Treisman for editing it so sensitively.
No literary agent could do more for a writer than Robert Lescher has done for me.
The following scholars and librarians generously shared their expertise as well as the resources of their institutions: Philip Cronenwett, formerly Special Collections Librarian at the Dartmouth College Library and now director of the Burndy Library; Doug Hesse, the Marsico Writing Program at the University of Denver; Frans Jorissen, the Académie Française de Philatélie; Carl H. Klaus, the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa; Heather Lane, the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University; Ken Lawrence, the American Philatelic Society; Andre Mignault, the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard; James Mitchell, New York University Library; Ellen Peachey, the American Philatelic Research Library; Nick Roberts, the Punch Cartoon Library in London; and Bonnie Turner, Sterling Memorial Library at Yale.
I am grateful to my children, Susannah and Henry, for indulging my weakness for shells and butterflies and, whenever they saw twenty books open on my desk and twenty more on the floor, realizing I was working on an essay and tiptoeing through my office.
My parents, Clifton Fadiman and Annalee Whitmore Jacoby Fadiman, were both alive when I started this book but died before I finished. Their influence is as strong as ever.
My husband, George Howe Colt, and I spent hundreds of hours in bed, under the watchful gaze of the wooden birds I wrote about in “Night Owl,” debating the relative merits of various word choices. “Summary” or “essence”? “Inspect” or “keep tabs”? “Exceptional” or “superlative”? “Imperishable” or “inextinguishable”? The essence of our relationship is the way he keeps tabs on my words and my life, both superlatively, as a result of which my love and gratitude are inextinguishable.
Kim Fadiman, to whom At Large and At Small is dedicated, has been the co-curator of the Serendipity Museum of Nature, my companion on many memorable wilderness trips, and, for fifty-three years, an incomparable brother. We talked endlessly about each of these essays, just as we had talked endlessly about luna moths and pickled tapeworms when we were children. We no longer collect nature, but Kim is still my favorite person with whom to watch it, preferably before making, and then eating, a batch of liquid nitrogen ice cream.