`Books Think for Me'

Anne Fadiman is an enthusiast, and that serves her well when she writes about writers. The best essays in her new collection, At Large and at Small, are devoted to Coleridge and Charles Lamb. Unfortunately, most of her familiar essays, as she calls them, are given over to such subjects as ice cream and coffee, which bring out in Fadiman the fussy, the cute (even her Lamb essay is titled “The Unfuzzy Lamb”)and the self-regarding. Her essays take on sovereignty only when she devotes them to people other than Anne Fadiman.

Lamb (1775-1834) is her perfect subject. Despite a life that would break the strongest among us, he too had a gift for enthusiasm. In 1795, Lamb spent six weeks in a mental hospital. In September of the following year, his sister Mary fatally stabbed their mother with a table knife, and attacked their father. Charles obtained Mary’s release from lifelong imprisonment on the condition he took legal responsibility for her, and they lived together until his death, even collaborating on Tales from Shakespeare, which became a bestseller. His masterpiece is Essays of Elia (1823), which gives the lie to what Fadiman calls “his undeserved reputation for being namby-pamby and fuddy-duddy.” He ranks with Samuel Johnson and his friend William Hazlitt among the supreme essayists in the language. Here’s Fadiman:

“Let me consent at the outset that I have a monumental crush on Charles Lamb. My fantasies are not exactly adulterous, but neither are they devoid of sensuality. Though never married and probably celibate, Lamb knew how to seize eros by the throat, give it a few sublimational shakes, and transform it into some of the most voluptuous prose ever written.”

I’m skeptical of the psychosexual business but “voluptuous,” with its suggestion of almost too much of a good thing (like zaftig used to describe a woman), is perfect. Here’s a passage from “All Fool’s Day” that demonstrates Lamb’s gift for empathy. Fadiman could learn from this, for Lamb is simultaneously observer and observed:

“I have never made an acquaintance since, that lasted; or a friendship, that answered; with any that had not some tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants; the security, which a word out of season ratifies. And take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.”

Another of Lamb’s gifts is his felicitous use of unexpected, almost-wrong words and phrases – “honest obliquity of understanding,” “palpable hallucination,” “a dram of folly in his mixture.” His essays seem almost out of control – again, that word “almost.” Lamb is always skirting excess, and the resulting tension energizes his prose. That, too, is a lesson for Fadiman. Her prose is serviceable but seldom pleasure-giving in itself. At root, it’s prosaically journalistic, and her quotes from Lamb put her words to shame. Even when addressing ostensibly more serious subjects, Lamb is never less than witty. This comes from “A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis”:

“Shut not thy purse-strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outwardly and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to inquire whether the "seven small children," in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth, to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him. If he be not all that he pretendeth, give, and under a personate father of a family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor. When they come with their counterfeit looks, and mumping tones, think them players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things, which, concerning these poor people, thou canst not certainly tell whether they are feigned or not.”

I love those last two lines for the way they embody Lamb’s compassionate wit and his gift for projecting himself into the lives of others. He had no talent for hatred or contempt. Lamb – or his persona, Elia – engages us in conversation and confides in us. He seems fond of us, and we grow fond of him. In “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” Lamb expresses the thoughts of many a book lover while also opening a well-lit little window into his teeming mind:

“I dream away my life in others’ speculations. I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.

“I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read any thing which I call a book. There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.

“In this catalogue of books which are no books -- biblia a-biblia -- I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards bound and lettered at the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large; the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those volumes which `no gentleman's library should be without’: the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philosophy. With these exceptions, I can read almost any thing. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding.”

Let’s thank Anne Fadiman for being “so catholic, so unexcluding” as to introduce new readers, and re-introduce old ones, to the pleasures of Lamb’s company. Who else would banish Hume and Gibbon to the same non-book realm as Scientific Treatises and Almanacks?