The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  (I take it the distinguished American friend was Emerson? Or Oliver Wendell Holmes?) The OED doesn’t include Froude’s passage, but the quotations there establish that, at least from the mid-seventeenth century, pie could mean “A mass of type mingled indiscriminately or in confusion, such as results from the breaking down of a forme of type.” Quoting from a writer, too, is the breaking of his work down to constituent pieces, with an eye to an alternative typeset reassembly. And a few inches above the OED entry for the typographical pie is the information that, in the fifteenth century and after, Pyes were the English church’s name for certain elaborate ordinals, or books of commemorational scheduling; and the secular pye book became, perhaps relatedly but probably later, “an alphabetical index to rolls and records.” So even in Montaigne’s own time, pies or pyes were, unfiguratively, books, and maybe were, as well, the hashed dark-matter of type—the Drydo-Ovidian “rude and indigested mass”—from which books were formed. Perhaps Montaigne encountered this more specialized use of pie somewhere and mistakenly concretized it as a pasty, causing the scrupulously flour-powdered Cotton to liven it up further as a lumber pie.

  Under either conjectural prehistory of pastissage, we can speculate that Locke read Montaigne/Cotton’s “lumber pies of commonplaces” and wrote of men who make their understandings into “warehouses of other men’s lumber,” and of false knowledge as “a Collection of Lumber not reduc’d to Use or Order,” and then Samuel Johnson read Locke and wrote about those overlooked and neglected thoughts, lying among “other lumber of the memory.” At least, that’s one possible amateur genealogy. Then Ralph Waldo Emerson, reading Coleridge, Locke, Saint Augustine, and Johnson attentively,11 sensed he was in the presence of something very special in the way of recyclable truisms here; and, some twelve years following the appearance of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, in “The American Scholar” (1837), after giving an enthusiastic plug for the Romantic movement, and on his way to a denunciation of the “cold and pedantic” style of Pope, Johnson, and Gibbon, he worked his own preacherly numbers on the mind-lumber theme. “That, which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts,” he declaimed to the slack-jawed Phi Beta Kappans; and then:

  let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing;—and the world lies no longer a dull miscellaney and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.

  Emerson was expressing, in fact, the nineteenth century’s constantly repeated desire—the wish to find unexpected for-eignness and beauty in the lumber at one’s feet. Wordsworth had set things in motion in 1800 by announcing (in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads) that he was imparting to incidents and situations from common life “a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.” But everyone tried out the idea. Hazlitt gave it an entomological turn:

  Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning nothing but a little grey worm; let the poet or the lover of poetry visit it at evening, when beneath the scented hawthorn and the crescent moon it has built itself a palace of emerald light. (Lectures on the English Poets, 1818.)

  Shelley, in 1821, in his Defence of Poetry (published in 1840), gave it a haremy flavor: “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar”; and later he says that it “strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty.”

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton used it to pit prose and poetry against each other:

  Verse cannot contain the refining and subtle thoughts which a great prose writer embodies: the rhyme eternally cripples it; it properly deals with the common problems of human nature which are now hackneyed, and not with the nice and philosophising corollaries which may be drawn from them: thus: though it would seem at first a paradox, commonplace is more the element of poetry than of prose.12

  Leigh Hunt, essayist and teacher of Keats, in his The Seer; Or, Common-Places Refreshed (1840), wants to break open

  the surfaces of habit and indifference, of objects that are supposed to contain nothing but so much brute matter, or common-place utility, and show what treasures they conceal. (“Pleasure.”)

  And in a very Leigh Huntian essay called “A Christmas Tree” in the Christmas 1850 number of Household Words, Dickens himself, entranced by the sight of the tree, invokes (as I clumsily did some pages ago, before I ran across this page of Dickens) the Arabian Nights:

  Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me. All lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans. Common flower-pots are full of treasure, with a little earth scattered on the top; trees are for Ali Baba to hide in; beef-steaks are to throw down into the Valley of Diamonds, that the precious stones may stick to them, and be carried by the eagles to their nests, whence the traders, with loud cries, will scare them.13

  In 1856, Coventry Patmore said it again in the Edinburgh Review: “The poet is doing his noblest work in resuscitating moral truths from the inert condition of truisms and conferring upon them a perennial bloom and power.…” John Stuart Mill gave the theme a try himself in his On Liberty (1859):

  There is only too great a tendency in the best beliefs and practices to degenerate into the mechanical; and unless there were a succession of persons whose ever-recurring originality prevents the grounds of those beliefs and practices from becoming merely traditional, such dead matter would not resist the smallest shock from anything really alive, and there would be no reason why civilization should not die out, as in the Byzantine Empire. (On Liberty, Chapter III.)

  Matthew Arnold, who once absurdly criticized Wordsworth for being under-read,14 weighs in, repetitive and humorless and uninspired as usual,15 in 1863: “The grand power of poetry,” he booms,

  is its interpretative power; by which I mean, not a power of drawing out in black and white an explanation of the mystery of the universe, but the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them.

  Bulwer-Lytton gave the notion of the renovated commonplace a second try, this time in rhyme, in 1869:

  Thou also, old picture of Paradise, well

  In the cobwebb’ed lumber-chamber of Hell

  Hast thou rested, rotted, and rusted:

  Beelzebub’s masterpiece, painted

  Long since, though the canvas be old,

  And the hues of it tarnisht and fainted,

  Yet retoucht with our purple and gold,

  Thou shalt brighten, and glitter, and glow, for him,

  With the colours of Eden ere they wax’d dim.

  Come forth, and be furbisht and dusted!

  (“Orval.”)

  “Cobwebb’d lumber-chamber of Hell” is nicely torchlit; but better still is W. E. Henley’s sad wave at the past, “that wharf of aery lumber,” in his tribute, “My Meerschaum Pipe” (1875), which lifts the veil, or hanky, of custom from the sleeping beauty of that once commonplace appliance. This lyric (found in the English Poetry Database) is fortunately short enough to quote in full, and it is a good example, too, of the congeners slumber, cumber, and lumber, which poets and prose writers have found useful in close proximity:

  My Meerschaum Pipe is exquisitely dipped!

  Shining, and silver-zoned, and amber-tipped,

  In close chromatic passages that number

  The tones of brown from cinnamon to umber,

  Roll the rich harmonies of shank and crypt.

  Couchant, and of its purple cushions clipped,

  Its dusky loveliness I wake from
slumber.

  Was ever maid than thou more softly lipped,

  My Meerschaum Pipe?

  How many pangs herethro’ have lightly tripped

  Into the past, that wharf of aery lumber?

  How many plans, bright-armed and all equipt,

  Out of this glowing brain have skyward skipped?

  Memories that hallow, O regrets that cumber

  My Meerschaum Pipe!

  W. E. Henley, we may learn from Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature, lost a foot early on to tubercular arthritis, and for this reason as well as his general piratical mien inspired the character of Long John Silver in Treasure Island (1883), which has in it just one lumber, a treasure handily unburied from the sandbanks of chapter 5 with the help of the Library of the Future CD-ROM:

  This appeal seemed to produce some effect, for two of the fellows began to look here and there among the lumber [the bushes of broom?], but half-heartedly, I thought, and with half an eye to their own danger all the time, while the rest stood irresolute on the road.

  Interesting that Henley, a forgotten poet of the meerschaum pipe, is thesaurized by Stevenson as Silver, the unforgettable pirate of the maritime poop. “You have your hands on thousands, you fools,” Blind Pew tells the men poking around the bushy lumber for the map. “You’d be as rich as kings if you could find it, and you know it’s here, and you stand there malingering.” And earlier: “Oh, shiver my soul,” he laments, “if I had eyes!”

  But only the poets and storytellers have eyes. Even Macaulay isn’t quite up to par, according to Saintsbury’s History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1896–1910): “A poet of the very highest class Macaulay was not; his way of thought was too positive, too clear, too destitute either of mystery or of dream, to command or to impart the true poetical mirage, to ‘make the common as if it were not common.’ ”16 James Russell Lowell similarly qualifies his praise for Dryden:

  But if he [Dryden] have not the potent alchemy that transmutes the lead of our commonplace associations into gold, as Shakespeare knows how to do so easily, yet his sense is always up to the sterling standard.

  Christina Rossetti entitled an entire book Commonplace, and Other Short Stories (1870). One of the stories is an account of a lost masterpiece by Titian—a landscape with a female nude and some grapes—that is overpainted with a crude image of a flaming dragon by one of Titian’s envious and less talented friends. The story ends:

  Reader, should you chance to discern over wayside inn or metropolitan hotel a dragon pendent, or should you find such an effigy amid the lumber of a broker’s shop, whether it be red, green, or piebald, demand it importunately, pay for it liberally, and in the privacy of home scrub it. It may be that from behind the dragon will emerge a fair one, fairer than Andromeda, and that to you will appertain the honour of yet further exalting Titian’s greatness in the eyes of a world.

  The superficial exoticism of the dragon hides the long-limbed lumber-luster of the naked and fruitful commonplace.

  “Make It New,” Pound’s manifestoid call, and “Make It Strange,” the Formalists’ onion-dome of a translation, is thus shorthand for a hundred years of poetical and critical orthodoxy. By 1914, Saki had stocked a six-page short story with the esthetic theory. In “The Lumber-Room” (collected in Beasts and Super-Beasts), young Nicholas announces that there is a frog in his breakfast. His elders scold him for thinking such a thing. As it happens, however, there is a frog in Nicholas’s breakfast—his meal being a predecessor of Marianne Moore’s horticultural definition of poetry, an imaginary breakfast with a real frog in it. (Nicholas has put the animal there himself.) As punishment, he is kept from visiting the beach with his vile cousins; and, watched over instead by his antipathetic aunt, he is forbidden to visit the gooseberry garden. So Nicholas decides to visit the lumber-room instead:

  The key turned stiffly in the lock, but it turned. The door opened, and Nicholas was in an unknown land, compared with which the gooseberry garden was a stale delight, a mere material pleasure.

  In keeping with the general features of dark rooms of the Human Understanding, it is “large and dimly lit, one high window opening on to the forbidden garden being its only source of illumination.” Like Saint Augustine’s memory, it is a “storehouse of unimagined treasures.” There is a piece of framed tapestry with a wolvish hunting scene, a roll of Indian hangings, some twisted candlesticks in the shape of snakes, a duck-shaped teapot, brass figures of peacocks and bulls, and, of course, a book: a “large square book” containing pictures of birds. (“And such birds!” A catalog of bird-wonders follows.) Just as Nicholas is “assigning a life-history” to the mandarin duck, his bad aunt calls accusingly from the gooseberry garden, and our hero is quietly pleased:

  It was probably the first time for twenty years that any one had smiled in that lumber-room.

  Naturally the other children turn out to have a crummy time at the beach, while Nicholas, deprived of two layers of purported treats (beach and garden), meditates happily on possible plot-twists for the dusty hunting tapestry, having suddenly come into a fabulous inheritance in the nineteenth-century lumber-room of fiction. We are left with the expectation that Nicholas will grow up to write quick, cruel, funny stories about nasty grownups and sharp-toothed beasts, as his creator had.

  Mervyn Peake changes the sex of his fifteen-year-old visitor to the fictional lumber-room in his Titus Groan of 1946, but Fuschia’s hiding place is very similar to Nicholas’s:

  The fact that this room was filled with lumber did not mean that she ignored it and used it only as a place of transit. Oh no, for it was here that many long afternoons had been spent as she crawled deep into the recesses and found for herself many a strange cavern among the incongruous relics of the past. (p. 60.)

  Mervyn Peake, since he must as a writer go beyond Saki, posits for Fuschia two even more secret areas beyond the lumber-room—the acting room, and the secret attic. Fuschia describes the tripartite house of fiction to herself:

  I know where I go. I go here. This is where I go. Up the stairs and into my lumber room. Through my lumber room and into my acting room. All across my acting room and up the ladder and on to my verandah. Through the door and into my secret attic. And here it is I am. I am here now. I have been here lots of times but that is in the past. That is over, but now I’m here it’s in the present. This is the present. I’m looking on the roofs of the present and I’m leaning on the present window-sill and later on when I’m older I will lean on this window-sill again. Over and over again. (p. 62.)

  So useful and welcome does the curiosity-shop model of literary activity become that by 1961, Muriel Spark could confidently assume, when she had a character in her book The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie write a treatise called “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” that we would know pretty much what she was getting at. The commonplace was the entire arbitrarily window-framed world, the world of moral clichés, the world of cardboard-character types, the world of material junk, so familiar it was rejected and put in storage, and the transfigurer was the connoisseur-pawnbroker-auctioneer who saw where he or she might tie a dangly handwritten price on a little white string, assigning value and ownership where there had before been only oppressiveness and shopworn confusion.

  Arthur Danto, a philosopher at Columbia, “admired and coveted” Muriel Spark’s title, and, having evidently secured her permission (as he tells us in his Introduction), he used it as the title of his own book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (1981), a “takeover” (Danto’s word) that, whatever the merits of his book, may not sit quite right with some observers, since Spark was obliged to give her gracious consent regardless of whatever private misgivings she might have felt in seeing a professional esthetician detach her quiet invention from the warmth and privacy of its living chapter and plaster it all over a study (mainly) of the smirking, loveless twentieth-century “transfigurations” of Duchamp and Warhol and their camp-followers—handlebar mustaches
on the Mona Lisa, fake Brillo boxes, etc. Danto devotes a paragraph to Hamlet, passingly mentions Proust’s long sentences and Hemingway’s short ones, and alludes to “Johnsonian symmetries” and “Shakespearean fustian” (p. 197), but he says nothing about Wordsworth or Coleridge or Tennyson; his coverage of the textbook pop-art Modernists is not at all the sort of Transfiguration that Muriel Spark’s Tennyson-reciting Sister Helena of the Transfiguration, or Miss Brodie herself, would have wanted anything to do with in their prime.

  Muriel Spark’s approximate contemporary Elizabeth Bishop is a modern poet-commonplacer for whom Sister Helena would more likely have had some affinity. The Concordance to Elizabeth Bishop, one of a whole series of Garland Concordances put together under the supervision of Todd K. Bender, directed me to the lumber in Bishop’s late book of poetry, Geography III. Bishop, adopting the voice of Robinson Crusoe, has a passage about how Crusoe’s few island possessions, which once “reeked of meaning” when they were all he had, are now no more than “uninteresting lumber.”17 This by an American in 1976. It is the most recent use of the older English sense of the word by an American writer that I have found—with the exception of the title of an essay in Government Publications Review, vol. 13, 1986, called “A Mystery Tour Through the Lumber Room: United States Census Publications, 1820—1930, A Descriptive Essay,” by Michele Fagan,18 and also excepting a poem (assuming he is American) by a person named Hugh Croft that was part of a wedding ceremony between Keith and Kirsten Evans-Orville whose “online recreation” was posted in a series of messages in September 1993 on the WELL. I found the poem by typing a Unix command, “!extract -f lumber misc,” to extract lines from any messages holding “lumber” (or “golden slumbers” or “convention of plumbers”) from the WELL’s Miscellaneous Conference. The relevant stanza is: