The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  18 No Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome? Only one of Daniel Defoe’s poems? Nothing by Lewis Theobald?

  (ii)

  Having borrowed a copy of the English Poetry Database from Douglas Roesemann, manager of Chadwyck-Healey’s U.S. base in Alexandria, Virginia, with the rash pledge that I would review it for The New York Review of Books, I stuck the tip of my index finger in the center hole of Disk 2 on a summer afternoon in 1994. This is one of the safer ways to handle a CD-ROM, especially one with a suggested retail value of over ten thousand dollars. (The whole multidisk kit goes for $47,500 in the U.S., according to the last price list I saw.) I was thus able to flourish, to flaunt, around the first joint of a single finger, like one of those living collars certain reptiles unfurl to frighten away predators, “all” of English poetry from 1660 to 1800.

  On the point of popping open my computer’s spring-loaded tray and laying the Pierian pancake in its circular bed—about to enclose its infinite riches in a little CD-ROM drive1 —Inoticed that my finger was a little unsteady, and so too was the iridescently flared CD-reflection of my overbooked room. I was aware of the possibility that my private quote-stash, my typewritten cullings, my heaps of coffee-splashed and ant-jaywalked photocopies on the floor, some of which I had grown quite fond of, would appear embarrassingly skimpy and unmethodical when ranked against the neat, single-sourced lumber-list I knew I would get in minutes using the English Poetry Database. Would the speed and thoroughness of one-stop searching overwhelm my project with easy erudition (airudition, perhaps) and inhibit my will to finish? Dilettante and scholar-pretender though I was content to remain, I didn’t like the idea that readers of The New York Review of Books would assume, merely because I was an admitted Chadwyck-Healeyan, that I had read even less than I had read in the paginal sprints and leg-stretches I had performed to lumber up for my chosen task. I was reminded of A. E. Housman’s contemptuous footnote about a German classicist:

  Wolf, like all pretenders to encyclopedic knowledge, had a dash of the impostor about him, and we have no assurance that he had read the book which he thus presumes to judge.

  Of Housman, D. R. Shackleton-Baily wrote in 1959:

  I have always suspected that the animus which he sometimes seemed to show against the great German dictionary, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, had partly to do with a feeling that such compilations help lazy scholars to conceal their lack of reading.2

  In literary history as elsewhere, a find is valuable to the degree that it is hard to come by, and the frightening thing about a huge full-text poetry stockpile like Chadwyck-Healey’s is that any word or phrase in it, regardless of the bespidered and dust-fledged remoteness of the book from which it was taken, is as easily unearthed as any other. Barring variant spellings, or typos in the original poem or in the transcription, which may help it elude literal searching, no thought, no image anywhere in it is out of the way. Richard Bentley (whom the hard-to-please Housman praised for the “firm strength and piercing edge and arrowy swiftness of his intellect, his matchless facility and adroitness and resource”), when compelled to defend his Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris from an attack by Charles Boyle and friends, wrote:

  I am charg’d with several faults; as first, for citing Passages out of the way. An Accusation I should wish to be True, rather than False. For I take it to be a Commendation, to entertain the Reader with something, that’s out of the common way; and I’ll never desire to trouble the World with common Authorities, as this Gentleman would have me do.

  But on the level playing field of the CD-ROM, Amhurst, Bickersteth, and Smedley are “common Authorities” equal in weight to Butler, Dryden, and Pope: the scholar gets no earned learnedness credits for quoting them. And yet there they are up on the screen even so—blandly, blindingly obscure, insisting on assimilation.

  Unsure of my ability to digest the sudden hairball of new fascinations that Disk 2 was sure to deposit at my feet,3 I postponed the worrying search, and turned instead to my stereo system. Removing the Suzanne Vega CD that was slumbering in my Magnavox portable CD-player (featuring Dynamic Bass Boost circuitry), I replaced it with Chadwyck-Healey’s silver poemage. I listened.

  It may not be universally known that you can play CD-ROM software disks on ordinary audio CD-players. The digital sequence is misread as an analog signal. Eighteenth-century English poetry, as interpreted by my Yamaha stereo receiver and peripherals, generated an edgy square-wave buzz, around a low E-natural, a discordia concors lower than a table saw (except when it is cutting a piece of wood with a split end), more like one of those neck hair trimmers that the stylist pulls out of a drawer in the final phase of a haircut, but with excellent spatial separation and some gratuitous conch-shell oceania on top. Disk 3 (1800–1900, poets A–K) sounded much the same. Every so often the power-substation effects would let up a little and there would be some shortlived but lyrical swooshing, as of several cooling hoses playing over the mind at once, although this was not nearly as pronounced as in the excellent Library of the Future CD-ROM, Version 3 (which offers the complete texts of “over 1,750 historical, classical, and cultural titles” for $149.95): this has some very well-defined swooshing intervals that put me in mind of the circular-sander finishes that David Smith used for his big minimalist sculptures, finishes that as you stare into them become three-dimensional, and yet, like some works of science fiction, yield little in real brain-nourishment.

  The CD-ROM that works best under this sort of auditory misprision, though, is Compton’s Encyclopedia. As a beginner’s encyclopedia, played on a computer, it has its uses (offering black-and-white pictures of lumber mills, for instance), but as a found John Cage for headphones, as a multimedia dramatization of James Russell Lowell’s phrase about “the omniscience of superficial study,”4 it’s perfect. The first track is given over to the usual vagrant digital buzzing and swooshing. But in track two, the left and right channels split, and each carries a separate inventory of audio clips. In your right ear you hear an intelligent woman reading alphabetized words like abdominal cavity, adrenal, algae, brackish, bronchial tree, catastrophic, cephalothorax, conflicting, and contour feathers, while in your left, a Ted Baxtery voice booms out political clichés. (“Give me liberty or give me death!” “The British are coming!” “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes!”) The woman quietly continues with: massive collapse, minute food particles, and mucous membrane, while Roosevelt angrily declares war on “the Japanese empire.” You’ll hear potential energy, prolonged, protective coloration, pyroclastic rocks, receptors, rectangular grid, residues, rhythmic pulsing, savage, and serrated bristles, over Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Stoloniferous, structural defects, taxonomic order, and tentacles accompany Kennedy’s “Ask not” speech. Underground burrows, vulcanism, and voluntary muscle are superimposed over a moment from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. Water-dwelling species comes in over the bark of a dog, a mosquito whines over the Equal Rights Amendment. A third didactic man intones fingerlike projection over some hooting monkeys, and he enunciates encroaching and engorgement over the casual grunts of a pig. The experience is hypnotizing, draining, and not to be missed: it is like living through four years in a suburban high school in forty-five minutes.5

  But even the antiphonal disROMtion of Compton’s audio files couldn’t distract me forever from the duties and temptations of high-speed eighteenth-century retrieval, and two days after my initial failure of nerve I found I was prepared to open my clone-tower’s drive once again and awaken Chadwyck-Healey’s Disk 2 from its dogmatic lumber. I performed a “Standard Search” across the entire disk, and immediately discovered something of value (to me): an additional lumber-couplet from Pope’s first version of The Dunciad, a version I had never read. In Dunciad I, Pope trains his metered hate on Lewis Theobald, the unfortunate critic and minor poet who doomed himself by venturing some acute criticisms of Pope’s edition of Shakespeare. Theobald sits surrounded by books in his study: “He roll’d his
eyes that witness’d huge dismay,” Pope writes (and this happens to be a mock-epic echo of a line from Paradise Lost, as Pope tells us in a footnote—Theobald, like Milton’s Satan eyeing Hell, glances in misery over the gilded prison of his library)—

  He roll’d his eyes that witness’d huge dismay,

  Where yet unpawn’d, much learned lumber lay.

  Notice the “Where yet unpawn’d” clause: probably Pope revised this couplet out of Dunciad II because he had second thoughts about pawning off his earlier and better use of learned lumber, in An Essay on Criticism, on this new placement. But to me the passage was of interest mainly because it proved, as none of the other concordanced lumber-quotations directly did, that Pope was (like Samuel Butler before him) consciously aware of the pawnbrokerly undermeaning of lumber.

  For in English prose and poetry, lumber doesn’t mean what most Americans think it means (“felled timber”); rather it means, roughly, old household goods, slow-selling wares, stuff, or junk—junk of the sort you might find at a junkshop, or even, figuratively, at Yeats’s foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. The bookful blockhead’s head is not filled with fresh, sap-scented New England plywood, ready for postdoctoral carpentry, but rather with broken, sprung, pawed-over, and possibly pawned Old World trinkets and bric-a-brac. “Lumber, old stuffe” is the concise definition given by Robert Cawdrey, author of the first English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall … of hard usuall English wordes (1604).

  Only recently did we lose this meaning in the United States. When William Faulkner, in a class at the University of Virginia in 1957, described the writer “reaching into the lumber room” to find the plots and images he needs, he was referring to what he moments earlier had called his “junk box.”6 But by 1987, that old drossy sense of “lumber” was sufficiently dormant in American usage that Donald Duclos could write an interesting paper (published in The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter and listed in the MLA CD-ROM Index) entitled “A Plank in Faulkner’s ‘Lumber Room’: The Emperor Jones and Light in August.” The paper calls attention to some telling verbal similarities between Faulkner’s book and O’Neill’s play. “I suggest,” Duclos writes, “that that play became a significant plank in [Faulkner’s] lumber room of building materials.”

  We shouldn’t be surprised that Duclos mistook Faulkner’s meaning. There has always been confusion over lumber-room in America—and in Mississippi, Faulkner’s state, the existence of a nineteenth-century Natchez firm called the R. F. Learned Lumber Company left matters especially ambivalent.7 Faulkner himself, being American, used lumber often enough in the familiar building-supply sense—for instance, a character pauses “among the mute soaring of the moon-blond lumber-stacks” in “Pantaloon in Black,” a pleasant surprise I found via volume 1 of Jack L. Capps’s 1977 concordance to Go Down, Moses, one of the series of concordances overseen by The Faulkner Concordance Advisory Board at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. H. L. Mencken, in The American Language, writes that “Lumber, in England, means articles left lying about and taking up needed room, and in this sense it survives in America in a few compounds, e.g., lumber room”; but even if the compound hadn’t survived in America when Mencken was writing, Faulkner could have found it easily in the junk box he reached into most often and most helpfully, Ulysses. Near the beginning of Joyce’s novel, Stephen Dedalus stands in front of his students thinking about storytelling and memory. (“For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop”; Pyrrhus and Julius Caesar, being stories, “are not to be thought away”—“they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted.”) Stephen then dismisses his students from class:

  Quickly they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and clamour of their boots and tongues.

  On the next page, “Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom.” And then, on page 714, we find a “lumbershed with padlock for various inventoried implements.” You can collect these passages8 by reading Ulysses, of course, or, if you’ve already read it and can’t face reading it again, or if you don’t want to read it at all, you can arrive at them as I did, with the help of Miles L. Hanley’s Word Index to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1937), a manually typewritten volume that was the result of gluing Joyce’s words onto 220,000 cards9 and alphabetizing them into six wooden racks of post-office pigeonholes. (Theresa Fein, notes Hanley in his acknowledgments, is the person who did most of the actual work of typing, alphabetizing, proofreading, and verification—I hope Joyce wrote her a thank-you.)10 The Word Index’s page references don’t exactly match the pagination of the familiar Random House edition, but they are close enough that you can eventually spot what you’re looking for, and when you do, you feel (because you had to hunt a little harder than usual) that you’ve done some real scholarly work.

  So when Pope in The Dunciad neatly describes a row of owlish scholars—

  A Lumberhouse of Books in ev’ry head,

  For ever reading, never to be read

  —the lumber-house he has in mind is not a moon-blond, plank-ranked lumberyard at all, as I used to think, but a “Lombard-house,” or a pawnshop. He wants us to understand that scholars are borrowing from the past, cashing in on and taking credit for things they don’t own. He hasn’t forgotten that he was himself born on or just off Lombard Street, so named because thirteenth-century Lombard pawnbrokers (cf., Longobardi, “long-beards”11) collected there to do business, replacing persecuted Jews. (Pepys called it “Lumber Street” in 1668; Wycherley spelled it “Lumbard Street” in 1675.)12 It is a street “still familiar to the public eye,” writes De Quincey in one of his essays on Pope, and important

  first, as the residence of those Lombards, or Milanese, who affiliated our infant commerce with the matron splendours of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean; next, as the central resort of those jewellers, or “goldsmiths,” as they were styled, who performed all the functions of modern bankers from the period of the Parliamentary War to the rise of the Bank of England,—that is, for six years after the birth of Pope.…

  Lumber seems originally to have meant possessions pawned to a Lombard, or money received in exchange for articles pledged to a Lombard; a lumber-room or lumber-house or lumber-office was a pawnbroker’s establishment, or, more broadly, a storeroom in a bank where a debtor’s possessions were held as collateral. During Pope’s childhood, there were several proposals for the founding of charitable, semi-public lumber-houses, on the model of church- or state-funded monts-de-Piété in Paris, Amsterdam, and Rome—one prospectus, circa 1708, entitled The New Lombard Houses, proposed to lend money “in a manner most cheap and easie to the Industrious Poor” at the rate of about 5 percent—nonetheless, pawnbroking remained a private enterprise in England. Elisha Coles’s long-running English Dictionary listed the various spellings in 1676:

  Lombard, Lombar, Lum-, D. a bank for ufury or pawns, alfo as Lombardeer, an Ufurer or Broaker, fo called from the Lombards, Longobards, Inhabiting the hither part of Italy, and much addicted to Ufury.

  (D. stands for “Dutch.”) The successor to Elisha Coles was Nathan Bailey; his Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721) became, according to Gertrude Noyes, “the most popular and representative dictionary of the eighteenth century.”13 Its fourth edition appeared in 1728, the year of Pope’s first use of “Lumberhouse”; it has:

  LOMBAR-Houfe [of lumpe or lompe, Du. a Rag] a Houfe in which feveral Sorts of Goods are taken in as Pawns: Alfo where they are expofed to Sale.

  LOMBARD-Street [fo called, becaufe the Refidence of the Lombards, who were great Ufurers, &c.] a Street near the Royal Exchange, London.

  This sense of lumber-house is obsolete now, although Brewer’s Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Phrase and Fable (1991) includes a related entry for LOMBARD: “An acronym for Loads of Money but a Real Dickhead.” Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary half seriously includes Minsheu’s onomatopoeic derivation from 1627: “Lumber, old baggage of houshold stuffe, so called of the noise i
t maketh when it is remoued, lumber, lumber, &c.” (Skeat comments: “If any reader prefer this fancy, he may do so.”) The Pocket Dictionary, or Complete English Expositor (“A Work entirely new, and defign’d for the Youth of both Sexes, the Ladies and Persons in Business”), published in 1753, defined Lumber as “Old, heavy, ufelefs furniture”; and Samuel Johnson, two years later, influentially but too narrowly defined it as Any thing ufelefs or cumberfome: any thing of more bulk than value, adducing a wonderful sentence from one “Grew,” who is, I assume, Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712), a plant-microscopist and Royal Societitian:

  If God intended not the precife ufe of every fingle atom, that atom had been no better than a piece of lumber.

  Johnson also gives Pope’s “lumber-house of books in ev’ry head” as an illustrative quotation—without, however, any hint of banking or brokering in his definition: the usurious sense of lumber had always been slightly slangy, and Johnson held “modern cant” in low regard. (He was “at all times jealous of infractions upon the genuine English language, and prompt to repress colloquial barbarisms,” said Boswell of him.)14 Latham’s dictionary, in 1866, sticks very close to Johnson’s definition: “Cumbersome matters of more bulk than value; old stuff.” Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) also echoes Johnson: