'I Myself Therein am Nearest to Myself'

In his review of Van Gogh’s collected correspondence, “Calm Even in the Catastrophe” (Forewords and Afterwords, Faber and Faber, 1973), W.H. Auden makes a wise observation about the now forgotten art of writing a letter: 

“The great masters of letter-writing as an art have probably been more concerned with entertaining their friends than disclosing their innermost thoughts and feelings; their epistolary style is characterized by speed, high spirits, wit, and fantasy.”

The best letter writers – Cowper, Keats, Byron, Stevenson, O’Connor – regularly conform to Auden’s epistolary prescription. Cowper can be cloying about his mental distress and his occasional religious mania but he also entertains his correspondents (and us) with the adventures of his pet hares. Cowper’s capacity for sheer silliness is the primary reason some of us still read him, but the master of that gift for absurdity – and it’s a peculiarly modern gift, one we’re attuned to thanks to movies and television – is Charles Lamb. Take the letter he wrote to his childhood friend Coleridge on this date, March 9, in 1822:

“It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig turned out so well--they are interesting creatures at a certain age--what a pity such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank bacon! You had all some of the crackling --and brain sauce--did you remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little, just before the crisis? Did the eyes come away kindly with no Oedipean avulsion? Was the crackling the

colour of the ripe pomegranate?”

There are readers, I’m certain, who find Lamb’s brand of comedy irritating and unambiguously unfunny. They have my pity. With Lamb (and, in the next century, Max Beerbohm) I feel a linguistic temperamental affinity that might explain my appreciation for his sense of humor. He knows when to lay it on thick and when to pull back, as in the following passage from the letter to Coleridge:       

“To confess an honest truth, a pig is one of those things I could never think of sending away. Teals, wigeons, snipes, barn-door fowl, ducks, geese--your tame villatic things--Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or pickled, your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are but self-extended; but pardon me if I stop somewhere--where the fine feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity--there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs, and I myself therein am nearest to myself.”

There’s a coda of sorts to this letter. In September 1822, Lamb published “A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” in London Magazine, and a year later included it in Essays of Elia.