'As a Whole It Is a Gallimaufry'

“[O]ne is tempted—though it might be dangerous—to maintain that the best books in the world were written chiefly for pleasure and with an after-hope to please.” 

Things get sticky when you start plumbing a writer’s intentions. Let’s just say that a dwindling species of serious reader reads for the most readily understood of reasons – pleasure. There are other respectable motives  -- the acquisition of knowledge, for instance, which overlaps with pleasure. “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics,” Guy Davenport declares, “but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.” For some of us, pleasure – as you have come to define it – is mandatory.

 

A visiting friend noticed a volume of Walter de la Mare’s poems on our coffee table and asked about it. I suggested he read de la Mare’s 1921 novel Memoirs of a Midget and he tells me it has “moved to the top of [his] reading list.” In turn, he sent me a pdf of de la Mare’s essay “A Book of Words” (Pleasures and Speculations, 1940). Nominally, it’s a review of a wonderful-sounding book published by the Englishman Robert Nares (1753-1829) in 1822: A Glossary of Words, Phrases, Names, and Allusions in the Works of English Authors, Particularly of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. De la Mare writes of such dictionaries – grab bags of knowledge and wonder, really:

 

“[W]hat in the making—given the material, means and craftsmanship—pleases the maker of a thing has pleasure in its gift. It will charm as well as interest; may in proving useful prove delightful. . . . The term dictionary remains austere, and, no more than either lexicon, concordance, or thesaurus, suggests a paradise of dainty delights.”

 

I dissent, a little, but de la Mare tells us Nares – an amateur scholar in the etymological sense -- considered his Glossary an “amusement,” and our reviewer quotes similar judgments by John Bunyan and Montaigne. “A Book of Words” runs to twenty-eight pages. Nares is “always easy, never specialistic or dry.” His Glossary is an eccentric anthology of linguistic treasures, relying heavily on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and de la Mare is our guide. The temptation to quote is strong and I am weak:

 

“The unconscious, surely, whatever and wherever it be, requires constant nourishment. A weekly platter of hors d’oeuvres should not come amiss. And Nares is crammed from cover to cover with these seductions. Yet it is no mere collection of gauds, toys, trinkets, gewgaws, pieces of festive finery. Its aggregate is the mirror of a time, of a state of the imagination, of a complete continent of human interest. It is English in bouquet to the minutest bubble of its foam. It is the work of a man’s mind, masculine, substantial, sound, various.”

 

You’ve probably noticed that de la Mare, like Montaigne and Burton, loves assembling catalogs of nouns, verbs and adjectives as though he were celebrating the bounty of the world: “Most doers, makers, inventors, game-players, tool-users, technicians, men of knowledge and of science are frequently in need of innovations—some they find are apt, racy, vivid, and serve; others are awkward, dead-alive, clumsy, pedantic; and many are ephemeral.” And the next paragraph: “Slang, colloquialisms, solecisms, vulgarisms are determined gate-crashers.”

 

De la Mare was himself a collector of verbal treats, a gifted anthologist. In 1923 he published Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages. When a revised edition was published in 1951, Elizabeth Bishop reviewed it in Poetry. Her review was a declaration of quietly unfashionable defiance: “Although much of the poetry I happen to admire is not to be found in it, I shall think this is the best anthology I know of.” It’s a book for children, but the sort of children they hardly make anymore. Best of all are de la Mare’s notes, almost 300 pages of them, included at the back of the book in a section called “About and Round About.” As the conclusion of “A Book of Words,” de la Mare writes of Nares’ Glossary:

 

“As a whole it is a gallimaufry, though one neither confused nor heterogenous. It may be reserved, and no doubt the undeserving will continue to reserve it, for the noonday’s need, not for the midnight’s luxury. Still, first and foremost, its amused author hoped and intended to ‘entertain’ his reader. He succeeds in so doing, with words; and what better claim on our attention can novelist, historian, or poet prefer?”