so radiantly set out with rings and jewels, lawns, scarves, laces, gold

I went from Holbrook Jackson's Anatomy of Bibliomania to a book of essays by John Berger, a whiplash change of viewpoint, since Berger is a Marxist who hopes that one day a revolution will reduce the desire of human beings for private property, and Jackson is a bookman -- "bookman" is the word he likes -- who spends six hundred and forty-six pages singing glory hallelujah to personal libraries. Anatomy itself is a covetable item of private property, I know, because I wanted to buy it at Powell's in Portland once upon a time, after I found it on a shelf under a window, hardbacked and blue and noted in the margins, and I hung over it like a moon of love, but the book was marked at twenty-five dollars and covetousness never made anyone rich, and so the one I read was a library copy.

He's imitating the Anatomy of Melancholy, as you can see by the title, and he splits his examination of the bibliomaniac into different categories, as Robert Burton did, so that a chapter that opens with The Misfortune of Books is separated into I. Trials and Tribulations, II. Books Lost and Found, III. Neglect and Misuse, IV. Perils of Fire and Water, and the chapter called A Digression of Book Worms is divided into I. A Common Enemy in Every Age, II., The Legendary Bookworm, III. The Bookworm and His Several Variations, IV. Nomenclature and Classification, V. How The Bookworm Discovered America -- etc -- and he fillets quotations into his sentences with Burtonish italics, like this:

Some would have them be microcosms, embracing all life: the making of Shakespeare's mind was the making of the world. Books, said William Wordsworth, are a substantial world both pure and good. Leigh Hunt would have that they are half of the known world, the globe we inhabit being divisible into two worlds: the common geographical world, and the world of books; and he holds further, they are such real things, that, if habit and perception make the difference between real and unreal, we may say that we frequently wake out of common life to them, than out of them to common life. Stephen Mallarmé cries that the world was made for nothing more than to produce a beautiful book, which some even among good bookmen may account a heresy ...

("The making of Shakespeare's mind …" came from Gathered Leaves by Mary E. Coleridge and this fact is in one of Jackson's footnotes.)*

The book is a rush of voices culled and organised and sub-organised and then organised again, clipped off in mid-flow however the author wants, both rabble and order, the author as supervisor or cat-herder, commenting on the personalities of the cats ("and though I adventure to affirm nothing of the truth and certainty of this supposition," adds Jackson at the end of the sentence quote above, "yet I must needs say, it does not seem to me unreasonable") though he doesn't rhapsodise as much as Burton sometimes did,** and he doesn't express himself in lists, while Burton was an author who, overrun by the atmosphere of babble, listed and babbled himself, chucking himself into the stream and babbling more than anyone, a man who fought in two directions, a man saying, "There are too many raindrops to count," and then trying to count them -- lists, lists: -- setting up obstacles for himself and clawing his way over them: -- like this: -- "she," he writes, "was so radiantly set out with rings and jewels, lawns, scarves, laces, gold, spangles, and gaudy devices …" and "For besides fear and sorrow, which is common to all melancholy, anxiety of mind, suspicion, aggravation, restless thoughts, paleness, meagreness, neglect of business, and the like, these men are farther yet misaffected …" and, "Parents and such as have the tuition and oversight of children, offend many times in that they are too stern, always threatening, chiding, brawling, whipping, or striking," and, "For in the head, as there be several parts, so there be divers grievances, which according to that division of Heurnius, (which he takes out of Arculanus,) are inward or outward (to omit all others which pertain to eyes and ears, nostrils, gums, teeth, mouth, palate, tongue, weezle, chops, face, &c.) belonging properly to the brain, as baldness, falling of hair, furfur, lice, &c" -- and then kept expanding his book whenever a new edition came out, well, you might say, there are always more words, some lose their wits by terrible objects, he claims. In this labyrinth of accidental causes, the farther I wander, the more intricate I find the passage, multae ambages , and new causes as so many by-paths offer themselves to be discussed: to search out all, were an Herculean work, and fitter for Theseus: I will follow mine intended thread; and point only at some few of the chiefest.

A zoo of words, a marshalling of ornament, this arrangement of verbs and nouns as if they were objects on a shelf, and this intimation of flood, of flooding; every time he begins a new list he starts us on a road that could go on for twenty lines or end after only three examples, a rollercoastery and exhausting way of writing -- exhausting for the reader, who is suspended in a state of excited and deranged vigilance, never knowing what the writer is going to do next, he might veer off into another list, he might come to a sudden halt and chop the list short with "&c." All writing asks for dominance over the reader but Burton makes the dominance obvious. The book is all dominance, this ragbag encyclopaedia, a Johnsonian exercise, a hysteric maintaining his hysteria.

Johnson used to rise early to read him. "It is, perhaps, overloaded with quotation," he told Boswell. "But there is great spirit and great power in what Burton says, when he writes from his own mind."







* You can find it here, with an introduction by Edith Sichel.

FOR most people there is a beginning and an end. It is important to recall that they were born, and that they died at such and such a date. But to say of Mary Coleridge that she was born in September 1861, that she lived nearly forty-six years, and died in August 1907, means little. She was never of any age, and excepting that as life went on she grew and ripened, she was much the same at twenty as at forty.

** eg. "Expect a little, confer future and times past with the present, see the event and comfort thyself with it. It is as well to be discerned in commonwealths, cities, families, as in private men's estates. Italy was once lord of the world, Rome the queen of cities, vaunted herself of two myriads of inhabitants; now that all-commanding country is possessed by petty princes, Rome a small village in respect. Greece of old the seat of civility, mother of sciences and humanity, now forlorn, the nurse of barbarians, a den of thieves. Germany then, saith Tacitus, was incult and horrid, now full of magnificent cities: Athens, Corinth, Carthage, how flourishing cities! now buried in their own ruins: corrorum ferarum, aprorum et bestiarum lustra, like so many wildernesses, a receptacle of wild beasts. Venice, a poor fisher-town, Paris, London, small cottages in Ceasar's time, now most notable emporiums."

vanity is, I take it

On Tuesday afternoon I stopped by a secondhand bookstore where I found a row of dull-red George Meredith hardbacks the size of my hand - my hand with the fingers spread out very slightly - not right out, and not held together, but just relaxed and settled like a spider. Some of them had covers raised in vertical hard pinstriped ridges; these ones made a zipping noise when I ran a fingernail across the stripes. I bought The Shaving of Shagpat and went home. After that, a wave of covetousness, because I wished I'd bought The Egoist as well.

My Shagpat opens with this dedication.

To
G. Nora Young
From
George D. [?] Young
November 1906
--

"Age cannot wither her,
nor custom stale
her infinite variety."

"Antony & Cleopatra"

Why covetous? I'd never read Meredith before, I didn't know if I'd like him or hate him, so why covetous? The books were attractive, but there were other attractive books in the shop; I didn't want to buy them. The books were old, but there were other, older books there. I picked Meredith off the shelf in the first place because I'd read an essay by someone who called him a great forgotten Victorian, quoting Oscar Wilde, "His style is chaos illuminated by flashes of lightning."* Still, I'd read other books that people praised, and I hadn't liked them, I knew this, I knew this, so why did I feel that I must have Meredith? I was irritable the next morning, short-tempered, distracted, I kept thinking of The Egoist, I was in a knot of anxiety because I was afraid that someone else would buy it. Eventually I went back and picked up the set, carried them around the shop, thought about putting them back on the shelf, didn't: paid for them - not only The Egoist but Beauchamp's Career, Diana of the Crossways, Rhoda Fleming, and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Once I had them in my hands I felt calm. The covetousness had been switched off as suddenly as a light.

I've seen people write about this kind of behaviour as if it's laudable, beautiful, joyous, exciting - I'm a bookaholic! - I must have books! - I love books! - the books are falling off my shelves yet I buy more! - books books books! - but mine was a barbaric compulsiveness, reason couldn't budge it. I know that if this had been a collection of mismatched editions, some modern paperbacks, some older books, one from the 1930s, let's say, and one from 1900, a TV-tie-in from the 1990s, a Signet Classics edition with the smudged-looking Signet cover, I might have bought The Egoist out of curiosity, remembering that it was his most famous book, but the rest wouldn't have seemed interesting. But I knew in the shop that if I left one behind I would fret over it. It was as if there was a charm over the books, marked out by the boundary line of George or G. Nora Young's signatures inside the covers.** I'd been reading about this kind of spell in the Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton identified love as a cause of melancholy, and spells as one cause of love, telling us that Charles the Great once fell in love with a woman "of mean favour and condition" because she kept a magic ring in her mouth.

The bishop went hastily to the [woman's] carcass, and took a small ring thence; upon the removal the emperor abhorred the corpse, and, instead of it, fell as furiously in love with the bishop.

Eugene Field in his little Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, makes a comparison with love.

Just as a man who takes pleasure in the conquest of feminine hearts invariably finds himself at last ensnared by the very passion which he has been using simply for the gratification of his vanity, I am inclined to think that the element of vanity enters, to a degree, into every phase of book collecting; vanity is, I take it, one of the essentials to a well-balanced character -- not a prodigious vanity, but a prudent, well-governed one.

But Fields is too whimsical for me: this inclusion of "prudent, well-governed," seems to mask the pointlessness of walking around a bookshop with half of George Meredith's oeuvre in my hands, wrestling against the feeling that I must buy these books that I might never read. I didn't feel prudent or well-governed - I felt disgusted, and closer to Burton:

"For love," (as Cyrus in Xenophon well observed) "is a mere tyranny, worse than any disease, and they that are troubled with it desire to be free and cannot, but are harder bound than if they were in iron chains."

*


* I don't remember who wrote this essay or where I found it. Paging through Aspects of the Novel today for a different reason I discovered that E.M. Forster thought Meredith was bad at character, that his descriptions of nature are "too fluffy and lush," that the social values in his books are "faked," but, "He is the finest contriver that English fiction has ever produced, and any lecture on plot must do homage to him."

** It looks like her first name was Gladys. The dedication inside Beauchamp's Career reads:

Glad
With love from G.D.Y.
19th Sept: 1920

Drornin Designs in the Dirt

Sometimes the whole problem of finding something is solved when you work out where to look. I poked around after Kilvert's diary for a while before thinking to check the British History section of one secondhand bookshop, and there it was, green-faced and innocent behind a picture of a man on a horse jigging through foliage. "If you had Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy," I asked the woman behind the counter, "where would you put it?"

She said: "In the window and it would sell in five minutes." There are beautiful copies of the Anatomy, she went on, valued at thousands of dollars: thousands. Everyone who has the book holds on to it. Difficult to find, impossible. And thousands of dollars - think!

When I asked a man behind the counter of a different shop the same question he replied smartly, "Here!" and put his arm out to the shelf behind him, and laid his hand on the spines of three large grey-blue rough-textured hardbacks. I checked the price. It cost two hundred dollars.

When I asked at a third place they asked me to describe it, then, after I tried to explain, recommended the self-help section.

If a stranger told me they were looking for a long book in which a man writes about the causes and cures of depressive sadness I would probably recommend self-help too, or maybe psychology. This third shop has some very exact categories, for example: Naval Fiction, which is three shelves of paperback spines decorated with tall ships, bits of fierce opal-coloured seas, and the disembodied hands of sailors holding swords or flintlocks. These are leftover gesticulations from the wraparound illustrations on the front and back covers. Sometimes a little face comes into it, wearing a hat and straining forward to reach whatever is happening under the title. Somewhere inside the story the counterpart of this man is reaching that event, whatever it is, and getting shot or sliced open with a cutlass, or perhaps surviving, or losing an eye; he probably doesn't even have a name assigned to him, this man with his pink face, brown moustache, and one brisk black dot of an eye, he's nothing but a background character who wants a moment of glory or intelligence, a Rosencrantz or a Guildenstern, always trying to find out what is going on, and never getting to the cover where everything is explained, even the name of his creator, who, given the category, is usually going to be Patrick O'Brian, author of the Aubrey-Maturin series. I own one of O'Brian's books but haven't read it; I picked it up at a library sale for fifty cents.

"The author's use of naval jargon provides another noteworthy stylistic feature, with little or no translation for the "lubberly" reader," says the Aubrey-Maturin Wikipedia page, and I think of Christina Stead, and the baby-slang she invented for Sam Pollitt, although she sometimes gives you translations in brackets, as O'Brian does not:

Henny heard him going past the back veranda with three boys, saying, "See what Megalops donin: he don't say nuffin, maybe he's thinking; wook [look]. Little-Sam, Megalops drornin [drawing] designs in the dirt."

Stead establishes a difference between family-Sam and work-Sam, telling us that when he comes home from a field trip to Malaysia, having spoken to adults for eight months, his private language comes rustily off his tongue. Her slang locates us in this private world, the family, that outsiders never see. We're buried in it, as the children are, we're given its perspective. But after finishing A Little Tea, A Little Chat last night I wonder if Stead's greater immersion technique isn't the repetition she uses, the habit she has of giving a character one or two stock responses and then having him -- in Chat it's a man -- re-use them until the character becomes a monument to those words, cemented in place, as Dickens cements Micawber by having him swear that something will always turn up, so that the character becomes a constellation of its own tropes. The author of Chat is vicious about this, though, in a way that Dickens is not. Stead's circumstances as she was writing the book were not good; she was living in a single room, in Brussels, with her lover but without friends: "She was monumentally bored," writes her biographer Hazel Rowley. She was "subject to low-grade depression," "she was profoundly disillusioned" and "A Little Tea, A Little Chat was Stead's angriest book to date."

The lead character in Chat, Robert Grant, is not funny, not likely to charm a reader, he is self-deluding, a liar, a cheat, not a sweet rogue, but a droning self-absorbed one. He says, pitifully, "I need a 'ooman," then says it again, then again, then speaks for half a page on the subject (a good, sweet 'ooman, who will take care of him) and then, a little while later, resurrects this 'ooman once more, and then gives another wheedling speech, this one lasting for a page. On and on this goes, speech after speech, and if it's not the 'ooman, then it's his plans for a Broadway play that will push 'em into the Atlantic, or some other idea that keeps rotating through his head. We hear about these ideas once, twice, three times, four, five, six. He never changes. There are only three or four notions in his head and he keeps recycling them. Grant is the city-man as machine, so caught up in the forward-moving life of the city that he never pauses to take stock of his ideas; outer progress is inner stasis. The author pushes our noses in his rottenness and holds them there. The only way to get away from him - to come up for air - is to shut the book.

Plenty of writers create characters who are bores, sometimes for comic relief, sometimes in order to make them serious or vicious, but it's not often that an author impresses the character's boringness on the reader by making them bored with him as well. Usually this is something a writer tries to avoid. Mervyn Peake, fretting over Nannie Slagg's long speeches in a letter to a friend, decided to trim her short. Stead would have made her longer - would have fashioned the entire book around her. The weight of her Gormenghast would have been a different weight. Peake gives the reader the idea that life in Gormenghast is heavy, irresponsive, opposed to the light, bright, active life he tells us he prefers, by moving the story along slowly, describing the setting minutely, and making the setting itself large and heavy. Stead, in Chat, works toward a sense of oppressive weight as well, but here the setting is New York city in the 1930s, an active place, full of opportunities to make a profit, get money, get ahead, meet artists, actors, writers - the horrible oppressive weight is inside the characters, not in the setting, and they have no wish to escape it, they can't, or won't, or don't realise that they might. Her idea of human nature here is a kind of internalised castle Gormenghast.

Sam is one of those providential larger-than-life creations, like Falstaff, whom we wonder and laugh at and can't get enough of …

wrote Randall Jarrell in his introduction to the Man Who Loved Children, but by page three hundred of Chat I was thinking: "I wish this book would end. I wish this man would stop, just stop." Robert Grant is Stead at her most reader-punishing.

She sat with her head sunk between her shoulders. Amazed, he got up and came up to the other end of the table. She sat there without a movement. He bent over her shoulder and read,

Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, I can't stand your gassing, oh, what a windbag, what will shut you up, shut up, shut up. And so on ad infinitum.