'The Cosiness of a Human Nest'

I’ve never consciously ranked coziness – the OED prefers cosiness -- high among the literary qualities I most admire in books and writers. Many of my favorite writers – Swift, for instance, and Larkin – are anything but cosy. Early uses of cosy date from the eighteenth century and all are positive, true to the earliest definition: “of a place: sheltered and thus warm.” The first negative – and, thus, comic -- use was reported in 1927, in a letter by Max Beerbohm, and defined, rather ambiguously, like this: “warmly intimate or friendly; sentimental; freq. in pejorative sense: complacent, smug, unadventurous, parochial.” 

In a remembrance of W.H. Auden published in 1975 and included in W.H. Auden: A Tribute, edited by Stephen Spender, Dr. Oliver Sacks writes: “. . . I asked Wystan how he experienced the world, whether he thought of it as being a very small or a very large place. ‘Neither,’ he replied. ‘Neither large nor small. Cosy, cosy . . . (and in an undertone) . . . like home.”

 

That’s close to my positive sense of the word. For a native Northerner it conjures winter – wind and snow outside, warmth and contentment inside, likely under a blanket, book in hand. Then the negative creeps in: complacent, disdainful of others who are less cozy. The latter connotation can even carry a political taint. I thought of coziness while reading an essay by Leigh Hunt, “My Books” (1823). The English essayists suggest coziness, Lamb more often than Hazlitt, and even Lamb’s sense of humor sometimes detracts from the mood. Hunt, a lesser writer, sustains the mood:

 

“Sitting, last winter, among my books, and walled round with all the comfort and protection which they and my fireside could afford me,—to wit, a table of high-piled books at my back, my writing-desk on one side of me, some shelves on the other, and the feeling of the warm fire at my feet,—I began to consider how I loved the authors of those books; how I loved them, too, not only for the imaginative pleasures they afforded me, but for their making me love the very books themselves, and delight to be in contact with them.”

 

There’s nothing hip or postmodern about Hunt. He wants to please his readers by sharing his sense of intimacy with books. Sacks would understand:

 

“Cosy, cosy – it was one of his favourite words, one of the words he most used when chatting. (He was dissatisfied by its coverage in the great OED, and thought of re-doing this, making an anthology of the cosy, giving the word its full and proper world-embracing power.) Whenever he said ‘cosy’ in his peculiar voice, it seemed to acquire a special richness of evocation and meaning. Once we saw a bird fly to its nest atop a sooty lamp-post in St Mark’s Place: ‘Look!,’ exclaimed Wystan. ‘It’s gone home to its nest. Think how cosy it must be in its nest!” For a moment I felt (I fancied I felt) exactly what the bird felt – cosy, protected, at home, in its nest. And Wystan’s apartment in the East Village, though squalid and cluttered and dilapidated and dirty, this too was cosy, wonderfully so: it had the cosiness of a human nest.”