'Anthologies of Miscellaneous Literary Passages'

What the sophisticated and cloddish alike dismiss as “trivia” is often the spice that keeps life’s banquet palatable. One revels in knowing G.K. Chesterton’s wife’s maiden name, the color of Franz Kafka’s eyes and the nature of Goldbach’s Conjecture. I’ll never earn a dime knowing these things and they will never grant me longevity or cure my arthritis but knowing them comforts me. When I begin to understand something I can place it in context and relate it to other bits of knowledge. Trivia may be interesting for its own sake, like finding a gold coin on an empty beach, but even a jury-rigged system of taxonomy permits us to fit it into our knowledge of the world and fend off chaos for another day. Guy Davenport once told an interviewer: 

“My range of interests may be accounted for by my being 75. It’s really a very narrow range. There ought to be a psychology that studies indifference, the ‘flat affect’ of non-response. Response is, beyond the usual culturally-trained and biological reactions to the things of the world, the result of education carried on by curiosity.”

 

Let’s consider a writer much admired by Davenport, the English clergyman, conversationalist and wit Sydney Smith (1771-1845). In 1804-06, Smith delivered a series of lectures at the Royal Institution later published as Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy. In it he writes: “Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.”

 

That stands as good, superficially perplexing advice. I haven’t read Smith’s lectures but I found Daniel George Bunting’s reference to them in Lonely Pleasures (Jonathan Cape, 1954). Writing under the pen name Daniel George (1890-1967), he was an English poet, critic and industrious anthologist whom I learned of from yet another writer, Aaron James, in an essay devoted to him last year in The Lamp. James focuses on George’s 1938 anthology, All in a Maze, and puts it in context:

 

“Anthologies of miscellaneous literary passages experienced a kind of vogue in the middle decades of the twentieth century, stemming ultimately from the Renaissance traditions of the commonplace book or the florilegium; surviving commonplace books by writers such as Virginia Woolf and W. H. Auden show that writers of the era still found it practically useful to compile short passages from other authors for their personal reference. In the age before Google, reference books of this sort were an essential aid to research in literature, with scholars relying on books of quotations, concordances, and thematically ordered collections of extracts to supplement their memories of a large body of literature.”

 

My university library has the two books by George mentioned above in its collection. Lonely Pleasures (a readily misunderstood title) comes with a parodic index, as explained by James:

 

“[A] collection of essays and book reviews, features a formidable mock index, a parody of scholarly precision (‘Acton, Lord, and atomic power, 255 . . . Adam, his eldest daughter’s hat exhibited, 85 . . . Eliot, T. S., his feet among those I have sat at, 14 . . . and the bottoms of his trousers, 257 . . .’) But to understand the point of the satire we must recall that, in the days before computers, the mock index of Lonely Pleasures would have been done by hand, and would have been just as time-consuming and painstaking to produce as the index of a scholarly work of history.”

 

George is a sort of quiet humorist who takes books seriously – a species long extinct. He seems to have read everything and is not the sort of pompous reader who arranges the books he reads like trophies on the mantel piece. I owe much of my education to anthologies, especially when I was young, and George enables me to carry on that tradition. In a piece from 1947 on Christmas books, collected in Lonely Pleasures, he writes:

 

“For as long as I can remember I have been given books for Christmas. Some I still treasure – a Barnaby Rudge presented to me when I was about nine, and Johnson’s Lives of the Poets when I was twelve. Johnson began, I remember, with the life of Cowley in which he referred to Dr. Sprat, ‘an author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature’. At twelve I tended to confuse Dr. Sprat with his namesake who could eat no fat, and I am still not quite able to take him seriously. In any event I was probably too young for Johnson; the book remained unread for three years.”