Some books, including several of the best, defy conventional literary formulas and genres. Consider Moby-Dick. Is it a novel in the same inarguable sense as Middlemarch, another very big book? What about Tristram Shandy, with its endlessly deferred plot, digressions within digressions and passages “borrowed” from other writers and interpolated into Sterne’s text? Its oddness has stymied many readers, even Dr. Johnson. Montaigne’s Essays are wayward works having little in common with contemporary essayists claiming decent from the Frenchman. (Joan Didion, anyone?) What these works share, apart from eccentricity and vast learning, is elasticity. Anything, any subject or narrative whim, might have been stuffed into their already bursting forms.
The grandfather of such
oddities is Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in
1621, with five subsequent editions, each longer than its predecessor, brought
out during Burton’s lifetime. I remember discovering Burton as a freshman in
the university library, and thinking I could read it for the rest of my life,
which has proven true. It’s a wisdom book chock full of knowledge, much of it
outdated but still fascinating. Gary Saul Morson calls it “a kind of patchwork
interesting both as a reference work and as a special kind of creation all its
own.” Burton stitches together other men’s words into a quilt of quotations,
and defends his method, saying he was
“. . . enforced, as a bear
doth her whelps, to bring forth this confused lump; I had not time to lick it
into form, as she doth her young ones, but even so to publish it as it was
first written, quicquid in buccum venit (whatever came uppermost) in an
extemporean style, as I do comply all others, effudi quicquid dictavit genius
meus (I poured out whatever came into my mind) out of a confused company of
notes, and writ with as small deliberation as I do ordinarily speak. . . . idem
calamo quod in mente (what my mind thinks my pen writes).”
Burton’s method shouldn’t
be confused with such literary cul de sacs as “automatic writing” or Jack Kerouac’s
nonsensical “spontaneous bop prosody.” While following a trail of associations spawned
in a remarkable memory, Burton resembles a jazz musician who simultaneously improvises
and follows a theme. In The Words of Others: From Quotation to Culture
(Yale University Press, 2011), Morson writes: “The Anatomy is like life,
unrehearsed, and life is like the Anatomy, a first draft.”
Burton died on this day, January 25, in 1640 at age sixty-two. Less than twenty percent of the population of Elizabethan England lived past the age of sixty. One qualified as “old” at fifty. Shakespeare, Burton’s close contemporary, died at fifty-two.
3 comments:
For Burton, the most recent edition is: "The Anatomy of Melancholy" by Robert Burton; edited by Angus Gowland (New York: Penguin Classics, 2021), xxxix + 1,324pp. All the Latin quotations throughout have been translated into English (in the main body of the text), and there are footnotes and extensive explanatory endnotes. A well-done hardback.
For Johnson, just yesterday the mail brought me George Birkbeck Hill's "Johnsonian Miscellanies," originally published in two volumes by The Clarendon Press (1897) and reprinted in New York by Barnes & Noble, Inc. (1966). In Hill's preface, he reveals that he was urged to edit this work by Sir Leslie Stephen. This meant that Hill's plan to publish an edition of Johnson's "Lives of the English Poets" had to be temporarily set aside. He did finish that project, however, and those three volumes were published in 1905, four years after Hill's death. W. Jackson Bate, himself a biographer of Johnson, provided a forward to the 1966 reprint.
My first attempt at Anatomy of Melancholy was a failure. "This is just a crazy man," I thought , "making lists of words." But thanks to the urgings of this blog, I revisited it several times over the years. Finally, it clicked, and it the Anatomy is now the sole book at my bedside. I love the great and sometimes simple truths, the errors, the glimpses into the temporal culture shared by Shakespeare and Donne, and yes, the lists of words.
If you love Burton's book, you might also love "The Anatomy of Bibliomania" (1930) by Holman Jackson. It's brilliantly written imitating Burton's style, but Jackson's subject is, of course, books and reading. Originally published in two volumes, it was re-published in one volume (unabridged) in 1950.
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