When I was young and credulous I took the postwar generation of American novelists rather seriously, even Mailer and Vidal. Along with them came another highly touted name, William Styron. I suspect his books are seldom much read anymore but I owe him an oblique debt for his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951). Styron took his title from a passage in Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial (1658):
“And since
death must be the Lucina of life, and even pagans could doubt whether thus to
live were to die. Since our longest sun sets at right descensions and makes but
winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness
and have our light in ashes.”
That’s how I
first learned of Browne’s admirably purple prose. Among the writers most often
cited by the OED, Browne ranks
seventieth. He is cited 788 times for the first appearance of words in English.
This is the man who
gave us mucous and prostate. A young reader has asked where
he should start with Browne (and other seventeenth-century writers of prose). I
suggest Religio Medici (1643). He’ll
find much comedy in Browne, not something you’ll be alerted to in the classroom. Browne
married Dorothy Mileham in 1641, and the couple had twelve children in eighteen years. In
Religio Medici he writes:
“I could be
content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there
were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar act of
coition. It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is
there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination, when he shall
consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.”
In his
chapter devoted to Browne in the first volume of Hours in a Library (1892), Leslie Stephen (yes, Virginia Woolf’s father)
writes:
“Sir Thomas
Browne seems to be held back from abandoning himself to the ecstasies of
abstract meditation, chiefly by his peculiar sense of humour. There is a closer
connection than we are always willing to admit between humour and profanity. Humour
is the faculty which always keeps us in mind of the absurdity which is the
shadow of sublimity. It is naturally allied to intellectual scepticism, as in
Rabelais or Montaigne; and Sir Thomas shared the tendency sufficiently to be
called atheist by some wiseacres.”
I owe to my professor of eighteenth-century English literature, Donna Fricke, my gift for finding humor, intentional or otherwise, in literary texts. She remains the only reader I have known who discerned comedy in Jean-Paul Sartre – specifically, the chapter devoted to holes in Being and Nothingness.
3 comments:
Reading Sebald's The Rings of Saturn might encourage the appetite for trying Browne, although Browne is absent from most of the book.
Oxford's edition of Browne edited by Killeen is generous.
Dale Nelson
I'm on the fence about William Styron. "Confessions of Nat Tuner" is a bold work of the imagination, well in the classical mainstream of American literature. "Sophie's Choice" is a tasteless exploitation of the Holocaust. Yet I'll always love its first chapter which can be read by itself as a short story. It perfectly captures so much of what it felt like to be a young man in New York City at a particular time.
The best of that generation and the one probably the least prized, then and now, especially by academics (though not by by Mailer, who ranked him first) was James Jones. Self-taught rednecks from Robinson, Illinois, will never make the syllabus...so to hell with the syllabus.
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