`Not an Ill-Natured Man'

His correspondence is so consistently generous with fellow feeling and linguistic riches, opening a letter from Charles Lamb must have felt like Christmas morning. To keep up with his copious flow of inspiration, Lamb resorts to dashes, geyser-like gushes of words, endless puns and gags and parenthetical asides so densely packed with digressions they threaten to burst. Consider his acquaintance John Bates Dibdin, born 23 years after Lamb, in 1798, to a family of literary aspirants. Like Lamb, Dibdin worked as a clerk. He edited European Magazine, traveled to Madeira for his health but died of consumption shortly after his return to England, on May 11, 1828. Lamb wrote his first letter to Dibdin almost two years earlier, in June of 1826. It’s a virtuoso performance:

“I never knew an enemy to puns who not an ill-natured man. Your fair critic in the coach reminds me of a Scotchman who assured me he did not see much in Shakespeare. I replied, I dare say not. He felt the equivoke, looked awkward and reddish, but soon returned to the attack by saying that he thought Burns was as good as Shakespeare. I said that I had no doubt he was – to a Scotchman. We exchanged no more words that day.”

Gossip and a comic travelogue follow, after which Lamb commiserates with Dibdin over remedies for illness and depression – amusingly and amusedly, if you can imagine. Lamb has already loaned Dibdin some favorite volumes:

“Mary bids me warn you not to read Anatomy of Melancholy in your present low way. You’ll fancy yourself a pipkin or a headless bear, as Burton speaks of. You’ll be lost in a maze of remedies for a labyrinth of diseasements – a plethora of cures. Read Fletcher; above all the Spanish Curate, the Thief, or Little Night Walker, the Wit Without Money, and the Lover’s Pilgrimage. Laugh and come home fat. Neither do we think Sir T. Browne quite the thing for you just at present. Fletcher is as light as soda-water. Browne and Burton are too strong potions for an Invalid. And don’t thumb and dirt the books. Take care of the bindings. Lay a leaf of silver papers under ‘em as you read. And don’t smoke tobacco over ‘em – the leaves will fall in and burn or dirty their namesakes. If you find any dusty atoms of the Indian Weed crumbled up in the Beaumont and Fletcher, they are mine. But then, you know, so is the Folio also. A pipe and a comedy of Fletcher’s the last thing of a night is the best recipe for light dreams, and to scatter away Nightmares. Probatum est [Latin: It is proved].”

Lamb’s voice, the voice we already know from his essays, is so human and unstuffy it confers the impression of an ongoing conversation. Here’s the conclusion of the letter:

“And rub up your Muse – the family Muse – and send us a rhyme or so. Don’t waste your wit upon that damned Dry Salter. I never knew but one Dry Salter who could relish those mellow effusions, and he broke. You knew Tommy Hill, the wittiest of Dry Salters. Dry Salters! What a word for this thirsty weather! I must drink after it. Here’s to thee, my dear Dibdin, and to our having you again snug and well at Colebrooke. But our nearest hopes are to hear again from you shortly. An epistle only a quarter as agreeable as your last would be a treat.”

As a Lambian addendum, I should mention that I’m quoting from the fat Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb, published in 1935 by The Modern Library. The introduction was written by Saxe Commins, now forgotten but once the senior editor at Random House, from 1933 to 1958. I think of Commins as William Faulkner’s editor, but here’s a partial list of other writers he worked with -- Theodore Dreiser, Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Sinclair Lewis, James Michener, William Carlos Williams, Isak Dinesen and Eugene O'Neill. I relish the implausible fact that Stein and Michener shared an editor.