Book as Universe

In 2001, New York Review Books brought out a paperback edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy, a volume with the dimensions and heft of a brick. It’s an attractive piece of bookmaking, with Philippe de Champaigne’s Vanitas (skull, hourglass) on the cover, but it remains essentially impossible to read. In fact, to read Robert Burton’s masterpiece in this edition (of about 1,400 pages) would amount to destroying it. The spine would crack and eventually split into discrete, pocket-sized sections, approximating the three partitions into which Burton organized his unorganizable work. Buying the NYRB edition amounted to vanitas on my part. I already owned the three-volume Everyman’s Library edition – my reading copy – and the one-volume, all-English edition, edited by Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan Smith in 1927. The latter features larger type but some of the translations from Latin seem shaky, so I tend to avoid it – another act of vanitas, I suppose – but it’s the edition a Cleveland friend and I used to read aloud when we were young and had gotten sufficiently drunk. We did the same with Whitman.

When NYRB put out the new edition, the novelist William Monahan reviewed it for Bookforum, an enviable assignment. His was a rare review that one actually remembers with a fondness that becomes suffused into the book itself. Clearly, Monahan has not merely read The Anatomy of Melancholy, but lived with it and in it:

“No prose writer – ever -- has been more of a universe than Robert Burton, self-curing author of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), an essay on the humors that went utterly out of control and became the craziest, best entertainment ever written in English -- far more important than the King James Bible in terms of effect on alpha-class letters.”

All the right people have loved Burton, and Monahan cites them – Johnson, Keats, Lamb – and he might have added Swift, Sterne and Joyce. He makes it clear that Burton was book-drunk and word-drunk, mad with learning, but his work, in its timelessness, is as much about us as it was about his Elizabethan contemporaries:

“Burton's seventeenth-century observations evoke a world that you may consider different from ours only if you wish to remain in a state of parochial deformity. All men in all times, it seems, are prone to wind, lust, fidgets, fanaticism, credulity.”

Burton’s prose is dense and chewy, like black bread fresh from the oven, and comparably satisfying and nourishing. Any honest writer could learn from Burton’s erudite example. Monahan says:

“The Anatomy is a great mine to lay in the paths of the paraliterate. If you know anyone, a `writer,’ possibly, who thinks English began and ended with Strunk and White, give the Anatomy to them, and a little while later you will see them wandering toward a monastery, the nearest bottle, or a job as a gardener. The boldest adept—the reader with Ovid in his pocket, who might even know that Henry IV once stood barefoot in the snow with his wife at the gates of Canossa, may yet never achieve the summit of this book. You may think you have planted your flag on it, but you are perpetually at base camp, playing poker with Sherpas by a spirit stove, occasionally stepping out of the tent to look at what you've gotten yourself into. Opened randomly, the Anatomy can produce a kind of vertigo and sudden unconsciousness, after which you find yourself standing dazed in the next room, worrying with Burton—whether you dropped the volume an hour or three years ago—that Scandberg's death was possibly insufficiently lamented in Epirus. Yet opening at random is what this book, like the Bible, or Ulysses, is ultimately for.”

If you need permission, or encouragement, to read the Anatomy, take it from Monahan, or from me, or from Burton:

“Who is he that is now wholly overcome with idleness, or otherwise involved in a labyrinth of worldly cares, troubles and discontents, that will not be much lightened in his mind by reading of some enticing story, true or feigned, whereas in a glass he shall observe what our forefathers have done, the beginnings, ruins, falls, periods of commonwealths, private men's actions displayed to the life, &c.”