The Way the World Works: Essays (6 page)

I’ve filled seven notebooks since then—not many, I admit, but they loom large. They are all spiral-bound: the spiral is itself inspirational, a bit of chromium cursiveness worming through and uniting otherwise easily scattered pages, just as handwritten script links together what is, on the book’s page, an un-umbilicaled sequence of discrete letters. Over the years, I have stepped on some of the notebooks by mistake, so that their pages turn less freely than they once did: it is as difficult to restore a bent spiral binding as it is to repair an overstressed Slinky. In 1983, saline contact-lens solution leaked into the pages of one notebook in my briefcase, obliterating parts of passages from Bacon, Anthony Powell, Darwin, Johnson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as the word
Memory
in a sentence from Martin F. Tupper’s
Proverbial Philosophy
(1852) that I had found reading the
OED
’s entry on
rote:
“Memory is not wisdom: idiots can rote volumes.” Still, despite these injuries, the page-turning, and the reading, continues to be extremely satisfying.

As a rule I transcribe the work of people who wrote a long time ago. It is a way of momentarily reanimating them, slowly unwinding their sentential shrouds; it is the only sure way to sense their idiosyncrasies. Sometimes I whisper the words while I copy them. On December 5, 1994, I copied something from Richard Porson (1759–1808), a classical scholar who could recite much of Smollett’s
Roderick Random
by heart, but who drank too much and wrecked his life. “Anyone might become as good a critic as I am,” Porson says, “if he would only take the trouble to make himself so. I have made myself what I am by intense labour; sometimes in order to impress a thing on my memory I have read it a dozen times and
transcribed it six.” I was struck by this before I copied it over, but only by copying it over did I notice the unobtrusive poise of “make himself so.” Porson spent years in poverty; from him I also transcribed this sentence: “I used often to lie awake through the whole night, and wish for a large pearl.”

My notebooks are seven and three-quarter inches tall and five inches wide; they originally contained eighty sheets. (I’ve torn out pages in the back of some of them.) They are all “narrow ruled.” The first one has a postcard from the National Gallery of Bellini’s
St. Jerome
taped to the cover—I wanted to cover up the words “university note book” printed in eighties moderno-lowercase type. Bellini’s Jerome is an old man in knotted rags reading a big red book in front of a superb thesaurus of rock formations. A lion sleeps nearby. A more recent copybook bears a postcard of Albrecht Dürer’s
Saint Jerome
—the light through the bottle-glass windows in Dürer’s interpretation of Jerome’s study casts rows of shadows on the wall that resemble schematic drawings of plant cells, or softly spiraled cinnamon rolls arranged on trays, and there is a lordly gourd or squash presiding from an eyelet in a roof beam. The coiled feelers of this vegetable have nothing to entwine; they exult in their midair inflections and self-induced spiral bindings. My Dürer-decorated notebook begins with a vocabulary word,
phlyctenule,
that I found reading
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary
(1975): a phlyctenule, for those who may be curious, is a small pustule on the cornea. I was interested in the disgusted “flick” that begins it, interested that it included its own revulsion—words with exotically unknowable foreign roots sometimes survive because we hear ordinary meanings in them.

On January 15, 1988, and then again on June 7, 1994 (forgetting that I’d already done it once), I transcribed
George Saintsbury’s judgment of a certain work of Erasmus. It comes from a posthumous collection of Saintsbury entitled
A Last Vintage:

Perhaps the best thing in it [Saintsbury writes] comes from the mouth of the unblushingly illiterate and good-for-nothing abbot when he says, ‘With immense labour learning is obtained: and then you have to die,’ which is better still in its native Latin,
‘Immensis laboribus comparatur eruditio: ac post moriendum est’
; and which, if not original, remains consummate and unanswerable.

“Consummate and unanswerable” (a phrase worth whispering to yourself three times slowly) has an autobiographical heartfeltishness: Saintsbury, more than most hard-reading garreteers, labored to accumulate and keep in good repair a productive enormity of book-memory. He consumed a French novel every morning before breakfast, but that was just warming up. All day his bookmarks were near at hand, finding pages to mark, and after dinner he was at it still, reading on, and writing with learnedly brimming charm and chattiness about what he read; with the result that there are few French, English, Greek, or Latin writers of more than antiquarian interest in whom he hasn’t found some trait, or tag, or particularity, worth praising. He is the greatest praiser in the history of criticism—each thing he reads provokes him to written acknowledgment in the form of a review-essay thank-you note, and every encountered writer feeds his own genial style without misdirecting or overburdening it.

Lots of passages from George Saintsbury have gone into my copybooks, and a fair amount of William James, too; some Olivia Manning, some Iris Murdoch, some Dryden, some
Updike, some Philip Sidney. Here’s a sample Olivia Manning passage, from
The Great Fortune:

They had been served with a rich goose-liver paté, dark with truffles and dressed with clarified butter. Inchcape swallowed this down in chunks, talking through it as though it were a flavourless impediment to self-expression.

Here’s another Manning extract, from
The Spoilt City:

Yakimov, discomforted by a sense of lost advantage, stared into his empty glass for some moments before it occurred to him that he had in his possession the means of re-establishing interest in himself. He drew from his hip pocket the plan he had found in Guy’s desk. ‘Got something here,’ he said. ‘Give you an idea . . . not supposed to flash it about, but between old friends . . .’

He handed the paper to Freddi, who took it smiling, looked at it and ceased to smile.

In copying these over (in 1985) I was forced to take stock of every hyphen, every observational glance. I became Olivia Manning’s flunkey, her amanuensis, her temp worker, in effect saying to her, for however long it took to thread her words on the page,
Where you go, I follow.
Such labor is usefully humbling, because it delivers you back into the third grade, when you copied things off the board and had to pay attention to the little boat shape in the last stroke of the cursive capital
B,
but it isn’t mechanical or fancy-cramping because the transcriber’s mind can think its own pinstriped thoughts on the sly, betweentimes.

And, just as helpfully, every appealing highpoint that you read with transient delight can become, through
commonplacing, merely average: it is no longer the jewel it was when you pried it from the dried salt marsh of its page, but has now itself been reduced to the primordial matter out of which only your own writing can lift and deliver you—you become, even textually, Sir Thomas Browne’s Amphibian, “compelled to live in divided and distinguished worlds”—between the belly-squirming world of sedulous apprenticeship, and the nakedly leaping bipedal world of self-expression. Thus Bach copied out Buxtehude’s and Vivaldi’s music to learn its secrets, staying up late in his brother’s latticed music library even though forbidden to do so; thus Wallace Stevens copied out in his commonplace book (entitled
Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujets
) what D. J. Bach had to say about Schoenberg; thus E. M. Forster in middle age copied out Tennyson and Macaulay; and thus Gibbon copied over Pascal, and Giannone’s
History of the Kingdom of Naples:

This various reading, which I now conducted with discretion, was digested, according to the precept and model of Mr. Locke, into a large commonplace-book; a practice, however, which I do not strenuously recommend. The action of the pen will doubtless imprint an idea on the mind as well as the paper; but I much question whether the benefits of this laborious method are adequate to the waste of time; and I must agree with Dr. Johnson (Idler, No. 74), ‘that what is twice read is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed.’

But that’s not true, is it? Gibbon couldn’t have formed his style—that unique window display of teacups and sarcophagi—without having felt his way, word by word, at the artificially impeded speed of handwriting, through some of the poetry of Gray and Pope, for instance. Probably he
remembered Johnson’s
Idler
essay because he had once been moved to commonplace it himself.

To commonplace
—is it a legal verb? It is, according to Samuel Johnson:

Commonplace-book

A book in which things to be remembered are ranged under general heads.

I turned to my
common-place book
and found his case under the word
coquette. Tatler
.

To Commonplace

To reduce to general heads.

I do not apprehend any difficulty in
commonplacing
an universal history.
Felton
.

“Felton” turns out to be one Henry Felton, D.D., who in
A Dissertation on the Classics
(1710) wasn’t sure that the activity of reducing to general heads was always beneficial:

Common-Placing
the
Sense
of an Author, is such a stupid Undertaking, that, if I may be indulged in saying it, they
want common Sense
that practise it. What Heaps of this Rubbish have I seen! O the Pains and Labour to record what other People have said, that is taken by those, who have nothing to say themselves! . . . When I see a beautiful Building of exact Order and Proportion, taken down, and the different Materials laid together by themselves, it putteth me in mind of these
Common-Place Men
.

Felton may be right—you don’t want to take it too far. Charles Reade, the nineteenth-century novelist, had so many commonplace books that “they completely filled one of the
rooms in his house,” according to Richard Le Gallienne. He devoted one full day out of each week “cataloguing the notes of his multifarious reading.” Still, it worked for him. The big risk, if you accumulate a lot of chirographic bits and pieces, is that you will be tempted to quote more of them than you should. In a review of a book called
The Progress of the Intellect,
George Eliot criticizes the author (Robert William Mackay) for writing pages that “read like extracts from his common-place book, which must be, as Southey said of his own, an urn under the arm of a river-god, rather than like a digested result of study, intended to inform the general reader.” Don’t feel you must recirculate everything that you have found (so I tell myself); a recopied passage will urn its keep even if you never quote it anywhere.

There is good to be gained in signing someone else’s mind-signature, in scribbling in tongues: the retracing of a series of long-lost authorial motions with your own present pen, if you do it in the proper spirit, out of a desire to stay delight’s presence rather than out of autodidactic obligation, or even if you begin reluctantly, dutifully, troubled by feelings of self-pelf in the face of so many pressing university-press editions, can calm and steady your state, not to mention improve it, for while the transcribing may appear to be a form of close and exclusive concentration, it has an equally important element of peaceable meditative mindlessness as well, like playing with a paper clip. Reading is fast, but handwriting is slow—it retards thought’s due process, it consumes irreplaceable scupperfuls of time, it pushes every competing utterance away—and that is its great virtue, in fact, over mere underlining, and even over an efficient laptop retyping of the passage: for in those secret interclausal tracts of cleared thought-space, in those extended dreaming
blanks of fair-copying between the instant it took the eye to comprehend a writer’s phrase, and the seeming eternity it then takes the hedgehog hand to negotiate that phrase again in legible, physical loops on the notebook page (especially on the verso side of the notebook page, when the spiral binding interferes annoyingly with the muscle of the little finger), during which all of your purplest hopes are compelled to idle, and you must pay attention to some common rhetorical turn that you had never until then deigned to think about, at the same time your constrained prose-aptitude is stimulated to higher rates of metabolism by what Johnson called “the contagion of diligence” and through its temporary forced conformity with another person’s exhaust-system of expression—in this state of rubber-burning, clutch-smoking subservience, new quiet racemes will emerge from among the paving stones and foam greenly up in places they would never otherwise have prospered.

Just don’t do it too much—and always use quotation marks.

(2000)

Preface to
A Book of Books,
by Abelardo Morell

I
n the old black-and-white TV series, Superman, when he needed to pass through a wall, would put his palms against it and lean, frowning. Gradually his caped form would merge with the plaster and pass through lath and two-by-fours, and then he would reappear in the next room. It wasn’t as easy as flying, apparently, but it could be done. This became my childhood model of reading. You press your mind, your forehead, against the beginning of a book, the cool cover of it, appreciating its impenetrability. It is rectangular and thick, heavy enough to stop a bullet or press a leaf flat. It will, you think, never let you through. And then you begin to lean into it, applying a little attentive pressure, and the early pages begin to curl back with a soft, radish-slicing sound, and you’re in. You’re in the book. The thick, unitary clumps of chapters fan out into their component pages, and each turned
page dematerializes itself, once read, into the fluent, cajoling voice its words carry, and then you’re past the midpoint, and the book stretches out before you and behind you like a string of paper lanterns in a huge shadowy tent. Then you’re almost done, and the pages begin to shrink and solidify once more. When you reach the last sentence, there rests under your left thumb a monolithic clump of paper through which, it seems, you could not possibly have traveled.