'Confortable, Companionable, and Catholic'

It’s nice to have one’s unspoken and probably dubious thoughts confirmed. Most of the parlor games I indulge in are confined to my skull, never to be inflicted on the world. Then along comes Paul Jordan-Smith:

“One of the most fascinating occupations ever invented for the idle bookman is that curious speculation which concerns itself with attempting to elect, out of all the libraries in the world, the single volume which would yield the most permanent satisfaction to one cast upon a desert island.”

This is the first sentence of Jordan-Smith’s Bibliographia Burtoniana: A Study of Robert Burton’s ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ with a Bibliography of Burton's Writings (Stanford University Press, 1931). I remembered him from another Burton connection. In 1975, a friend showed me his 1927 edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy edited by Floyd Dell and Jordan-Smith, the first edition with the Latin translated (by Jordan-Smith). I had known of Dell through his dealings with Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser, and thought of him as a minor left-wing Chicago writer. Years later I bought a copy of their Burton. Jordan-Smith continues:

“And I believe that I, and at least two others, have at last settled the matter—for ourselves—by  choosing (not without longing eyes cast at Montaigne, Rabelais, Anatole France, Thomas Hardy, et cetera ad infinitum), as the most confortable [sic], companionable, and catholic of all good books, old Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.”

Jordan-Smith goes on to parade the names of the book’s eminent admirers: Dr. Johnson, Sterne, Keats, Lamb, Thackeray, Byron and Dr. William Osler. (I would add Anthony Powell and Alexander Theroux.) I no longer remember who or what introduced me to Burton’s Wunderkammer. I was a freshman and it might have been a stray reference in one of the writers just cited. I remember reading the Anatomy in an old three-volume edition borrowed from the university library. I always had a taste for books elastic enough to hold almost anything, and those that deliver equal parts question and answer. The Anatomy is on my short list of desert-island volumes, alongside others by Montaigne, Shakespeare, Johnson, Boswell, Gibbon, Melville, Proust. What do these books share? Apart from bulk, inexhaustibility. Imagine the poor soul who chooses the thriller du jour as company. Within hours the book is useful only as kindling.

Jordan-Smith’s book is less scholarship than celebration. Like many a one-book man, he is besotted with his author. He notes that Burton quotes roughly a thousand writers in the Anatomy and lists, alphabetically, the 122 most often cited, from Achilles Tatius to Zanchius. It’s a meta-book, a one-volume library, a dense core sample of one man’s learning and wit. It’s the sort of book Max Beerbohm called “dippable-into.” Jordan-Smith writes:

“Let, then, the man who intends setting sail for his secluded island home, where the sound of the motor horn and the whistle of the factory are not heard, take with him this incomparable volume of wit and wisdom, that he may know the delight of following that ‘fantastic old great man’ through his imaginary peregrinations where he steps from Atlantis into Eden and Eldorado, crosses the Southern Seas into the Unknown Austral Land, walks over China with Marco Polo, sports with hippogriff and mantichore [sic], flies from the callous folk in the island of Choa (where they ‘Oslerize’ the aged), and vaults into the Empyrean. He will then learn what ‘a most incomparable delight it is to melancholize, and build castles in the air . . .. led round about a heath with a Puck in the night.’”