Writing for Antiquity

Yesterday’s mention of Virginia Woolf’s mentions of Charles Lamb sent me back to The Charles Lamb Day Book, a small volume of pleasing heft compiled by E.V. Lucas and published in London by Metheun & Co. in 1925. Lucas (1868-1938) was an impressively hardworking and prolific English writer, best known today for his writings on cricket, who also produced a biography of Lamb. In his brief preface to the Day Book, Lucas writes:

“Lamb belonged externally very little to his own time. He cared nothing for politics or public events, although he was not sorry when the death of a royal personage gave him a holiday. He preferred, as he put it, to `write for antiquity.’”

Lucas, in three sentences, succeeds in making Lamb even more attractive than I already knew him to be. The book consists of excerpts from all of Lamb’s work, not just the well-known letters and Essays of Elia. Most selections have no overt connection with the date Lucas assigns them. Here, from an 1810 letter to Coleridge, is May 7:

“A book reads the better, which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots and dog’s-ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or over a pipe, which I think is the maximum.”

This is merely common sense to any uncommon common reader. I know my black-covered Random House edition of Ulysses as well as I know my sons’ faces. I ordered it 41 years ago from the Book of the Month Club, and it’s the copy I used when I read the novel the first three or four times. It’s almost unintelligibly annotated, with taped-in notecards for additional marginalia. The cover is tattered, like a battle flag (the early readings were like that). Without flipping I can find the page where “Moses Herzog” made his debut in 1922, when Saul Bellow was not yet seven years old. You know a long-familiar book the way you know the neighborhood you grew up in. April 6 brings two passages, both from “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading.” First:

“Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

“A newspaper, read out, is intolerable.”

And this:

“I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people’s thoughts. 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.”

In most writers, whimsy is wretchedly cute, like a woman talking baby-talk. One questions the adulthood of such writers. Lamb, like Sterne on most occasions, perfected a carefully calibrated tone of inspired silliness. He was a master of “almost.” His prose is almost self-indulgent, almost incoherent, but his internal gyroscope usually kept it in balance. Nothing requires more control than appearing out of control, with perfect grace, though Lamb mastered other voices. Consider the May 28 passage, taken from “Popular Fallacies”:

“The children of the very poor have no young times. It makes the very heart to bleed to overhear the casual street-talk between a poor mother and her little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a condition rather above the squalid beings which we have been contemplating. It is not of toys, of nursery books, of summer holidays (fitting that age); of the promised sight, or play; of praised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes. The questions of the child, that should be the very outpourings of curiosity in idleness, are marked with forecast and melancholy providence. It has come to be a woman, -- before it was a child. It has learned to go to market; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs; it is knowing, acute, sharpened; it never prattles.”

Lamb was gifted with natural empathy. His experience of family saw to that. Unlike many who write of the poor, Lamb betrays no trace of self-congratulation for the compassion he feels, and thus no condescension. His prose, as always, is filled with particulars (“of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes”), and that lends it a power and vividness lacking in much “do-gooder” writing, where the real emphasis is on the writer, not the subject.

As this is a leap year, I checked to see if Lucas included an entry for Feb. 29. He did, with a proviso that is better, in its Lamb-like mock-seriousness, than the selection. Here is the former: “(To be read only once in four years)”. And the latter, from an 1804 letter to Wordsworth: “Merit, God knows, is very little rewarded.”

Lamb was likewise a shrewd critic. The following excerpt, from Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare, is dated July 6. It sounds highly applicable to much contemporary, feel-good agitprop:

“A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous passions, and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal casuists could discern in the differences, the quarrels, the animosities of man, a beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the iterately inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us all is hypocritical meekness, A reconciliation scene (let the occasion be never so absurd or unnatural) is always sure of applause. Our audiences come to the theatre to be complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful similarity of disposition between them. We have a common stock of dramatic morality out of which a writer may be supplied without the trouble of copying it from originals within his own breast.”

Please hunt for The Charles Lamb Day Book, an utterly charming book long out of print. It’s no substitute for the essays but offers a taste of their delights and some idea of Lamb’s range and versatility. It’s compact enough for pocket or purse and, for lovers of good sense and good prose it’s almost “inspirational.” Here’s a final sample, for Aug. 11, taken from an 1809 letter to Coleridge. I might serve as one of many appropriate mottos for Anecdotal Evidence:

“I am out of the world of readers. I hate all that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather myself up unto the old things.”