'He Would Set His Hands to His Sides and Laugh Most Profusely'

For three years I wrote a weekly column for a newspaper in upstate New York, in addition to working as a features writer and occasional jazz and book critic. I borrowed the column’s title from Joyce: “Here Comes Everybody.” The point was to write only about people who were not and would never be newsworthy. In the condescending phrases heard in editorial meetings, “the little people,” “human interest.” I wrote about a guy who played musical saw, collectors of sand and leper-colony money, and a busking, out-of-work jazz drummer who performed on the sidewalk in front of city hall. My motive was reverse-snobbery. I didn’t want to write about the mayor or captains of industry, politics or business. That stuff always bored me, so I resolved to balance our coverage.

When hard up for a story, I would visit one of the locks along the Mohawk River, now part of the Barge Canal, a remnant of the original Erie Canal opened in 1825. I would watch pleasure craft raised and lowered in the locks, some from as far away as Florida. The process took long enough that I could carry on conversations with the captain and passengers. The locks were also favored by fishermen, who proved reliably thoughtful, contemplative and rowdy, confirming Ishmael’s observation in “Loomings,” the first chapter in Moby-Dick: “Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.” (The first American edition of Melville’s book was published on this date, Nov. 14, in 1851.)

These memories returned when I came across a passage from A Register and Chronicle Ecclesiastical and Civil by White Kennet (1660-1728), who is writing of Robert Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621):

“The author is said to have labored long in the Writing of this Book to suppress his own Melancholy, and yet did but improve it . . . . In an interval of vapours he could be extremely pleasant, and raise laughter in any Company. Yet I have heard that nothing at last could make him laugh, but going down to the Bridge-foot in Oxford, and hearing the bargemen scold and storm and swear at one another, at which he would set his Hands to his sides and laugh most profusely. Yet in his college and chamber so mute and mopish that he was suspected to be felo de se.”

Literally, the Latin translates as “felon of himself” and refers to a suicide. In early English common law, a person who kills himself is a criminal. John Aubrey in his Brief Lives wrote of Burton: “Memorandum. Mr. Robert Hooke of Gresham College told me that he lay in the chamber in Christ Church that was Mr. Burton's, of whom 'tis whispered that, non obstante all his astrologie and his booke of Melanchollie, he ended his dayes in that chamber by hanging him selfe.” Though charming, as Aubrey often is, he’s wrong. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

“There was a rumour that he hanged himself in order to conform with his own astrological calculations about his date of death, but this was a story told about other astrologers, and had it been true he would not have been buried in the cathedral at all.”

Knowing that he laughed at the salty talk of Elizabethan bargemen confirms my love of Burton and The Anatomy of Melancholy. Paraphrasing Pliny, Burton observed: “Our whole course of life is but matter of laughter.”