`Tenacious of the Obscure and Remote'

For three years in the nineteen-nineties I wrote a weekly column, “Here Comes Everybody,” for a newspaper in upstate New York. At the same time I was writing two or three features a week, and reviewing jazz concerts and the occasional book. I took the column’s Joycean title seriously: I strove to write about almost every person in our circulation area, my only prerequisite for inclusion being that they were obscure and anonymous, the opposite of celebrities. The city where I worked, once a prosperous company town, was hemorrhaging people and money. For decades, the company in question had been moving jobs south and overseas, and the city had turned into a sad place. Sad, yes; but for a writer of my temperament, ripe with stories. A friend on the copy desk called me “the poet of failure,” a title I liked very much.

I thought of those happy days and of the mostly unhappy people I was writing about as I came upon a passage in A Portrait of Charles Lamb by Lord David Cecil. The author is describing Lamb’s gift for attracting people from diverse backgrounds and classes:

“His circle were drawn mostly from the middle and professional ranks of society: academics, civil servants, journalists, art critics, a few actors. They were more often poor than rich; a few were successful, but more were unsuccessful. Lamb, sympathetic with human weakness, had an especially soft spot for the unsuccessful. Even when failure had a bad effect on a man and inclined him to sponge or soured his temper, Lamb regarded him with unillusioned indulgence.”

I’d like to think I, as a person and a writer, take people on their own merits. Self-centeredness, pretensions and what Dr. Johnson scorned as cant repulse me, not poverty or other external, inessential qualities. One of the reasons I no longer read newspapers is their growing reliance on “celebrities,” the wealthy, famous and powerful, and the way they ignore ordinary people except when they’re in trouble. This is a matter of temperament, not politics, and the same was true for Lamb. William Hazlitt writes of his longtime friend in “Elia, and Geoffrey Crayon,” a chapter from The Spirit of the Age: or Contemporary Portraits (1825):

“He does not march boldly along with the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary direction. He prefers bye-ways to highways. When the full tide of human life pours along to some festive shew, to some pageant of a day, Elia would stand on one side to look over an old book-stall, or stroll down some deserted pathway in search of a pensive inscription over a tottering door-way, or some quaint device in architecture, illustrative of embryo art and ancient manners.”

In my column I was self-consciously working in the lowlife tradition of Liebling and Mitchell at The New Yorker. They, too, identified with a self-chosen, ill-sorted cast of precursors, including Defoe, Stendahl, Dickens, George Borrow, Pierce Egan and especially Hazlitt, the proto-New Journalist who wrote “The Fight.” I suspect they also knew and appreciated Lamb, though his gifts were less strictly journalistic. Hazlitt writes:

“Mr. Lamb rather affects and is tenacious of the obscure and remote: of that which rests on its own intrinsic and silent merit; which scorns all alliance, or even the suspicion of owing any thing to noisy clamour, to the glare of circumstances. There is a fine tone of chiaro-scuro, a moral perspective in his writings. He delights to dwell on that which is fresh to the eye of memory; he yearns after and covets what soothes the frailty of human nature. That touches him most nearly which is withdrawn to a certain distance, which verges on the borders of oblivion: that piques and provokes his fancy most, which is hid from a superficial glance.”

This is Hazlitt the portraitist at close to his best, working in a tradition that seems nearly as extinct as the quill pen and the semi-colon.