The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  There is another beakerful of meaning in this seductive word, too. Gallic lexicographers suggest that capharnaüm may be influenced by a ruralism from the region of Berry, in central France. The Berry patois has cafournion or cafourneau or caforgnau (possibly a splice from caverne, “cavern,” and fourneau, “stove”), meaning a little shack or side-room or shed or cabin. So the Eastern strangeness of one ancient biblical etymology merges with the hobnailed and humble country dialect of another. George Sand, soon to become Flaubert’s esteemed correspondent, had called attention to the berrichon word in her pastoral novel La Petite Fadette (1848): her narrator takes a long sentence to explain that a schoolmaster would censure her for saying carphanion rather than carphanaüm [sic], but that she would have to teach him what it referred to: “the lumber-room … the part of the barn next to the stables where we keep the yokes, chains, and tools of all kinds used with working beasts and for working the soil.” (This English is taken from Eva Figes’s 1967 translation, Little Fadette.) Capharnaüm, then, is an ideal word for Flaubert’s purposes, which are to domesticate exoticism, to interleave realism with high romance, to confuse coarseness and exaltation. Homais’s grandly named refuge may also, I note, be a fictionalization of what Flaubert called his “citadel” (citadelle). This was, George Sand writes in her diary for August 29, 1866, “a strange little old house built of wood that he uses as a wine store.”2 No doubt he exercised his predilections there, too.

  Which carries us to Proust, who defended Flaubert’s steely style late in his life from an attack in the Nouvelle Revue Française, but who listed George Sand as his favorite writer when he was fourteen. Readers of Swann’s Way will remember Marcel’s affection for Sand’s “romans champětres,” and for the old forms of speech that his grandmother used, which were like old armchairs, on which

  we can still see traces of a metaphor whose fine point has been worn away by the rough usage [usure] of our modern tongue. As it happened, the pastoral novels of George Sand which she was giving me for my birthday were regular lumber-rooms full of expressions that have fallen out of use and become quaint and picturesque, and are now only to be found in country dialects.

  One has to believe that capharnaüm was one of the worn-away words from Sand’s pastoral dens that Proust had in mind here—and yet in the original, where we would hope to visit un véritable capharnaüm we confront, instead, a mere mobilier ancien, not a packed attic but something old packed away in an attic, as if Proust were deliberately obscuring his tracks by the Galilean lake, or as if he had interrupted his writing to think over “capharnaüm” and then had chosen to redirect his phrasing slightly, unwilling to dose his clause with Emma’s arsenic, or unable to tolerate so thoroughly vulgarized a metaphor in his own prose, although he could love it and celebrate it in his grandmother’s speech and in his mother’s evening readings from Sand. Or Proust could here have fallen in step with some allied passage in an English book—possibly something from one of Ruskin’s cathedral-threnodies (the mention of the fine points of ornament effaced by the rough usury of the modern tongue has a Lombardic stonemason’s provenance that recalls Ruskin), flamboyancies that Proust’s mother had diligently translated for him into “several red, green and yellow school exercise books” (see chapter 9 of Ronald Hayman’s biography), as he, fired up with Ruskin-love despite his own TOEFL-unready English, wrote a series of essays about the church sites that Ruskin had so copiously empurpled. But I must resist the urge to page through the thirty volumes of Ruskin that Proust said he owned, or even through the French studies of Ruskin by Robert de la Sizeranne and J. A. Milsand whose translated passages Proust drew on for his essays before his English improved. I’m sure the lumber rests somewhere there; I’m sure that I would have to spend only four or five days holed up in the ornate 39-volume library edition by Cook and Wedderburn (1903) and—as in the story Ruskin tells in Sesame and Lilies (a work Proust translated) of some schoolboys throwing stones at their books, which they had piled on gravestones—the dead ~ would live again:

  So, also, we play with the words of the dead that would teach us, and strike them far from us with our bitter, reckless will; little thinking that those leaves which the wind scatters had been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but upon the seal of an enchanted vault—nay, the gate of a great city of sleeping kings, who would awake for us, and walk with us, if we knew but how to call them by their names.

  New lamps for old—that’s what the novelist gives us: he beats the rugs, and with a bit of torn T-shirt he works the Old English petroleum distillate into the starved fleurette of the doubtful fauteil, and suddenly those huddled movables we always vaguely knew we owned and yet never gave their due seem worth hauling out into sunlit living rooms: the city of sleeping things and kings starts up, staggers in, and begins raving like Vault Whitman, who in 1855, ten years before Ruskin had imagined saying “Open Sesame” to the enchanted and encrypted city of the dead, in his thereafter suppressed Introduction to the first edition of Leaves of Grass (an edition that Malcolm Cowley calls, in his Penguin introduction, “the buried masterpiece of American writing”), wrote:

  The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet … he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you.

  Whitman, though, only uses lumber to mean timber.

  Or, less hysterically, Proust could be remembering Middlemarch. During his tussles with the writing of Jean Santeuil he said in a letter: “There are moments when I wonder whether I do not resemble the husband of Dorothea Brook in Middlemarch, and whether I am not collecting ruins.”3 Of Middle-march’s pasty and cold-fingered Mr. Casaubon—the collector of dead mythologies, whose promised Key to them all turns out to open nothing more than a cabinet of dry and worthless salvages from a lifetime of severe study—the impassioned Will Ladislaw says to Dorothea:

  “Do you not see that it is no use now to be crawling a little way after men of the last century—men like Bryant—and correcting their mistakes?—living in a lumber-room and furbishing up broken-legged theories about Chus and Mizraim?”

  (I skimmed 165 pages of the Riverside edition before I found this; the fact that it was embedded in dialogue made it harder to spot.) Some pages earlier George Eliot lays out another lumber-room or curiosity-shop image. “The idea of this dried-up pedant,” thinks Ladislaw as he falls in love with Dorothea,

  this elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor’s back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole)—this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust … (Riverside edition, p. 152.)

  Eliot probably was thinking of Faust’s line to Wagner about the spirit of the age being a Rumpelkammer when she had Will talk scornfully of living in a lumber-room. She translated Goethe and “read probably every word” by him, according to Gordon Haight, one of her biographers; and she helped G. H. Lewes with his once well-known biography, The Life and Works of Goethe (1855).

  Mark Pattison, editor of Pope and biographer of Isaac Casaubon, was George Eliot’s primary model for the character of Mr. Casaubon,4 though Pattison is a more likable and (on paper, at least) a more complicated figure than the Middlemarch dry goods merchant. “To be mesmerized by a vast subject is a dilettante feature and a recipe for disaster,” writes C. O. Brink, in his English Classical Scholarship. “It devitalizes activity and tends to cause such creative powers as there are to wither. I wonder,” he adds, “if not something like it happened to Pattison.”5 And yet the last chapter of Pattison’s best book, his biography Isaac Casaubon, is a frightening but inspiring portrait of a compulsive reader, a Greek-citation-hoarder, an urn-burier, who was (like all scholars, but especially those who spend a lifetime preparing themselves to write something that is too big for
one brain to encompass) “greater than his books.”6 Books Isaac Casaubon did write, as Mark Pattison himself did, but they were never the Big Book, and instead he took Alp-blebs of notes. Unfortunately, the notes are useless without the mind they served:

  What he jots down is not a remark of his own on what he reads, nor is it even the words he has read; it is a mark, a key, a catchword, by which the point of what he has read may be recovered in memory.

  “To this vast mass of material,” writes Pattison of the real Casaubon, “his own memory was the only key.” A sympathetic scrutineer, looking over Isaac Casaubon’s shoulder with Pattison’s help at his literary remains, sees only what Dorothea Brooke finally worked up the courage to examine in her fictional Mr. Casaubon’s cabinet—he sees (again in Pattison’s surprisingly lyrical and heartfelt words)

  disjointed fragments, lying there massive and helpless, like the boulders of some abraded stratification.7

  But the observer must nonetheless acknowledge, Pattison urges, that in the posthumous rubble of Isaac Casaubon (as in that of Mark Pattison, who abandoned his huge history of Renaissance scholarship) he is witnessing “the remains of a stupendous learning,” which is something valuable and admirable, after all. Eliot called her Middlemarch notebook “Quarry,” and this Ozymandian final chapter by Pattison, uninsistently autobiographical, was certainly one of the marmoreal desolations from which she prised chunks and cooked them for lime.8

  Nor should we be surprised that Mark Pattison resorts to the word “lumber” himself, as he prepares to defend Isaac Casaubon’s old-fashioned scholarship from the attacks of anti-pedants like Thomas De Quincey:

  De Quincey has endorsed the complaint that “the great scholars were poor as thinkers.” De Quincey wrote at a time when “original thinking” was much in repute, and was indeed himself one of the genial race to whom all is revealed in a moment, in visions of the night.… A freshness and a vigour characterise the english and german literature of the fifty years 1780–1830, which are due to this effect [?effort] to discard the lumber of “unenlightened” ages.9

  Looking up from this passage, which indirectly puts De Quincey and Pattison at antipodes, one can almost envision George Eliot conjuring up the figure of De Quincey as she worked out the character of Will Ladislaw—De Quincey being, like Ladislaw, a Lake-poet enthusiast, though not actually a poet, a follower of German esthetic philosophy, though not quite a philosopher himself, and above all, an extremely chatty and intelligent journalist. Why De Quincey himself resisted the temptation to use the word lumber in recounting his opium dreams or in writing about Pope I do not know.10

  But to return to Proust momentarily, before we take leave for the time being of the confusingly crowded French tabernacle and return to the safe haven of Augustan English prose (since my French is sorrier than Proust’s English, and Proust, says Hayman, “would have found it hard to order a chop in an English restaurant”11)—the thing worth pointing out is that in Swann’s Way, in the paragraph that follows Marcel’s comparison of George Sand’s figures of speech to an old and exiled armchair, when he speaks of the “beauty and sweetness” of his mother’s reading voice, and of how she

  supplied all the natural tenderness, all the lavish sweetness which they demanded to sentences which seemed to have been composed for her voice and which were all, so to speak, within the compass of her sensibility

  —the thing worth noting is that Proust may be not only remembering George Sand’s novels at bedtime, which in their quaint way supplied him with a stock of “narrative devices” that are “common to a great many novels,” but also privately cherishing his mother’s more recent literal renderings in French of Ruskin and (perhaps) other English masters of the longer-handled ladle. And it is just possible that Proust owes something of his feeling for his grandmother’s linguistic furniture to Henry James’s Spoils of Poynton, a novel about (to be crude) the sale of old furniture. Proust’s grandmothery passage about the metaphors effaced by the usure of the modern tongue recalls James’s lovely “She hated the effacement to which English usage reduced the widowed mother.…” from chapter 5. I don’t know enough about Proust to say with any certainty that he had read James’s Spoils, but it is his kind of book,12 and Proust did after all write (in 1910), as quoted by Ronald Hayman:

  It is curious that in all the contrasted kinds of writing from George Eliot to Hardy, from Stevenson to Emerson, there is no literature which exerts on me a power comparable to that of English and American literature.

  On Proust’s own authority, then, let’s politely take leave of him and George Sand and of Flaubert, especially Flaubert: for if it is this fraught an undertaking to arrive at a full-bellied understanding of a plain English pork-chop of a word like lumber-room, as I am finding it to be, then it will be next to impossible to make sense of Flaubert’s untranslatable chutes and laideurs. Let’s return, instead, to the green and pleasant Samuel Johnson.

  1 Eleanor Marx Aveling, who was responsible for the version of Bovary that Nabokov assigned, did use an umlaut. She, we learn from Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, was the first English translator of the work, and, sunk in a cafard-naum of her own, she later killed herself with prussic acid.

  2 See the Steegmuller-Bray translation of the Flaubert-Sand correspondence (1993), p. 18, and Anne Chevereau’s edition of Sand’s Agendas, vol. III (1992), p. 384.

  3 Proust: A Biography, Ronald Hayman, p. 139. Either Proust or Hayman leaves off the terminal “e” in “Brooke.”

  4 For some of the details of the link, see John Sparrow’s Mark Pattison and the Idea of University. Gordon Haight strongly disagrees that Mr. Casaubon was inspired by Mark Pattison, and devotes Appendix II of his biography to the “canard.” But he isn’t convincing.

  5 English Classical Scholarship, 1985, p. 132. To be mesmerized by a tiny subject can be a dilettante feature and a recipe for disaster, too. Brink goes on to quote from a letter of A. E. Housman to Lord Asquith asserting that Pattison was “a spectator of all time and all existence, and the contemplation of that repulsive scene is fatal to accurate learning.”

  6 Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892, Section X, p. 434.

  7 Isaac Casaubon, p. 430. There are rhythms in this exciting sentence-fragment that remind one of Gibbon’s translation of Poggio’s description of fifteenth-century Rome: “The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws and elect their magistrates, is now enclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes. The public and private edifices, that were founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant; and the ruin is the more visible, from the stupendous relics that have survived the injuries of time and fortune.” (Decline and Fall, vol. VIII, ch. 71.) The incoherent notes that survive a great classical scholar who has failed to complete his great work have, then, some of the sublimity and grandeur of Poggio’s broken Forum. Still, I did not succeed in finding any lumber in Gibbon’s descriptions of fallen Rome or sacked Constantinople.

  8 Latter-day Romans made cement by burning marble ruins for lime. A footnote by Dean Milman in the 1855 Milman, Guizot, and Smith edition of Gibbon, published by John Murray, says (vol. VIII, p. 277): “Ancient Rome was considered a quarry from which the church, the castle of the baron, or even the hovel of the peasant, might be repaired.” Gordon Haight reports that George Eliot read Decline and Fall in 1855 and again in 1864; Middlemarch was written c. 1870.

  9 Isaac Casaubon, pp. 448–9.

  10 In his treatment of Pope’s Essay on Man, however, De Quincey pre-sciently describes Mr. Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies. The Essay on Man is a work, writes De Quincey, “which, when finished, was not even begun; whose arches wanted their key-stones; whose parts had no coherency; and whose pillars, in the very moment of being thrown open to public view, were already crumbling into ruins.” (Essays on the Poets, “Alexander Pope,” Ticknor & Fields, 1856, p. 193.)


  11 My French isn’t nearly as bad as my Latin, which would have made Virginia Woolf cough discreetly behind her hand.

  12 As is Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66), a Poynton precursor in which some beloved old furniture of a dead mother is stored away by a tasteless stepmother: “Most girls would be glad to get rid of furniture only fit for the lumber-room,” says Mrs. Kirkpatrick, on p. 189 of the Oxford Classics edition. I’m grateful to my wife for pointing out this reference. While I was reading Wives and Daughters (just to p. 189, where I stopped, off to lumber-pastures new), I came across some passages about a certain Lord and Lady Cumnor and heard in their names the minuet-music of country gentry, and was reminded of Alexander Pope’s game of ombre in the second version of The Rape of the Lock. It occurred to me that if one didn’t know anything about the etymology of lumber, one might guess that it was from l’ombre, “shade” or “shadow”—and one would imagine that lumbery things were stored away in the shadows of l’umbra-rooms, overseen by Pope’s melancholy gnome, Umbriel, whose name is just lumber with the l displaced. The Concise Oxford French Dictionary has mettre un homme à l’ombre meaning (colloquially) to put a man in prison, and this is also one of lumber’s slang senses in English: to be in lumber can signify imprisonment (as can to be in limber and to be in limbo), per Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang.