At Large and At Small Read online

  The day I learned I was to edit The American Scholar, a journal that takes its name from that very speech, I ran to my bookcase, pulled out a volume of my brave Emerson, and opened it to his Phi Beta Kappa oration. I expected, like Carlyle, to hear a clear high melody tingling thro’ my heart. Instead, I read the following sentence: “In the right state [the scholar] is Man Thinking.” This is the most famous line in the essay; it was used as The American Scholar’s epigraph until 1976. The first time I read it, I had skated over the phrase, assuming that “Man” was one of those capacious linguistic tents that had once had room for everybody, the way horsemanship included horsewomanship and mankind included womankind.

  On this reading, however, I could see that Emerson really meant Man Thinking. Later in his speech he specifically distinguished the scholar from the “protected class” of “children and women”; they lived under a different tent. So what lesson was I to draw? Even though Emerson supported women’s property rights and counted Margaret Fuller and Harriet Martineau among his friends and didn’t complain when his wife served leg of lamb twenty days in a row, was I nonetheless compelled to write him off as a wicked misogynist and cast him from my bookshelf? No.

  But if I left him on my shelf, did that mean I was forever excluded from the Emersonian fellowship, forced to press my nose against the glass of American intellectual life, as if the Man Thinking Club were a beer-swilling fraternity that invited me on the premises only on Saturday night? No.

  One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights—which in Emerson’s case expired long ago—a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer. The greater the work, the wider the ownership, which is why there are such things as criticism, revisionism, and Ph.D. dissertations. I will not ask the sage of Concord to rewrite his oration. He will forever retain the right to speak his own words and to mean what he wished to mean, not what I would wish him to mean. But I will retain the right to recast Man Thinking in my mind as Curious People Thinking, because time has passed, and the tent has grown larger.

  As we wrangle with these canonic questions, it may be useful to remember that this is not the first Culture War. In seventeenth-century France, Boileau and La Fontaine exchanged a notorious series of barbs with Fontenelle and Perrault in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, a dispute over which was superior, classical or modern literature. The “Ancients” argued that Greece and Rome provided the only worthy literary models; the “Moderns” argued that if Descartes had improved on ancient science, his literary contemporaries might improve on ancient poetry. The quarrel spread across the Channel to England, where Sir William Temple took up the ancient cause, William Wotton took up the modern cause, and Jonathan Swift satirized them both in A Full and True Account of the BATTEL Fought last FRIDAY, Between the Antient and the Modern BOOKS in St. JAMES’s LIBRARY.

  “The present quarrel,” wrote Swift, “is so inflamed by the warm heads of either faction, and the pretensions somewhere or other so exorbitant, as not to admit the least overtures of accommodation. This quarrel first began (as I have heard it affirmed by an old dweller in the neighbourhood) about a small spot of ground, lying and being upon one of the two tops of the hill Parnassus.” The higher Parnassian summit was occupied by the Ancients, the lower by the Moderns. The Moderns, deciding that the Ancient peak was blocking their view, suggested that their neighbors either decamp to a lower altitude or permit the Moderns to carry over a few shovels and “level the said hill as low as they shall think it convenient.” The Ancients declined; the Moderns were indignant; and a war broke out in which

  whole rivulets of ink have been exhausted, and the virulence of both parties enormously augmented. Now, it must here be understood that ink is the great missive weapon in all battles of the learned, which, conveyed through a sort of engine called a quill, infinite numbers of these are darted at the enemy by the valiant on each side, with equal skill and violence, as if it were an engagement of porcupines.

  According to Swift, the Parnassian turf battle produced a series of quarrelsome books, “known to the world under several names, as disputes, arguments, rejoinders, brief considerations, answers, replies, remarks, reflections, objections, confutations,” which, when admitted to libraries, soon found themselves continuing the fray, this time over the more general question of merit. The conflict was bloody but spectacularly incompetent. Aristotle aimed an arrow at Bacon but instead shot Descartes in the eye; Cowley dropped his shield and was sliced in half by Pindar. Swift never revealed which side won: for could anything but a stalemate result from demanding that the world’s readers choose A or B, not A and B, or A, B, C, and Z? That binary view of culture was just as reductive in 1697 as it is now, when the battle between the Ancients and Moderns is still raging (except that Aristotle and Bacon now find themselves fighting on the same side and being commanded to take potshots at Virginia Woolf).

  The rivulets of ink still flow, and the battlefields of the Culture Wars are still strewn with corpses. “Anger and fury,” observed Swift, “though they add strength to the sinews of the body, yet are found to relax those of the mind.” The anger is real, but I believe that our wars, like Swift’s, are a fiction: a theoretical—or, as Sharon Uemura Ronholt would put it, a “posttheoretical”—construct that would appall many of the writers over whose words the armies of the left and the right are trading grapeshot.

  In order to analyze their strategies, let us return, in a pre theoretical way, to Procrustes—or rather to his nemesis, Theseus. It was Theseus who slew Procrustes on his own bed, though it is not recorded whether he stretched his ill-mannered host or lopped him off. Procrustes was not the only unpleasant character Theseus encountered while he was walking from the Peloponnesus to Athens. There were five others, and it seems to me that, with a little Procrustean stretching, they might represent the various hazards you are likely to encounter as a literary wayfarer wending your way through the obstacle course of the Culture Wars.

  The first rogue was Periphetes the Club-Bearer, who had the ungallant habit of beating travelers to death with a giant bronze club. Theseus, never known for his subtlety, grabbed the club himself and bashed Periphetes over the head with it. Theseus was apparently so pleased with Periphetes’ club that he stole it and carried it around with him for the rest of his life. This episode reminds me of how the right berated the left for politicizing culture, and then appropriated the weapon of politicization in order to bash the left over the head with it. I don’t recommend that you follow suit.

  The second was named Sinis the Pine-Bender. Sinis liked to bend two trees down to the ground, tie his victim to them, and let go. The trees sprang back in opposite directions, and the victim was torn in half. Surely these two trees are the political poles, each pantingly eager to embrace you, with the danger that you, too, will end up in pieces.

  Theseus dismembered Sinis with his own pine trees, and then, after persuading Sinis’s daughter that he would treat her honorably, he seduced, impregnated, and abandoned her. It’s no wonder that the next challenge Theseus encountered was an angry female: the Wild Sow of Crommyon, a monstrous pig that was rampaging around the countryside, terrorizing local farmers. Who could the Wild Sow be but every male academic’s nightmare of the enraged feminist who is barging her way into the very tenure slot he covets? Theseus responded to the Wild Sow of Crommyon as we would all like to respond to what we most fear: he killed her.

  After she was out of the way, he met a murderer named Sciron. Sciron required his visitors to wash his feet, and when the ablution was complete, he kicked them off a cliff into the Saronic Gulf, where they were eaten by a giant turtle. Sciron could be none other than the forces that want you to take books that have always been an intimate part of your life, such as Huckleberry Finn, and kick them out of the canon. The giant turtle would make the Huck critics particularly happy, because if Huck Finn were not only banished but actually digested, there would be no danger of his ever creeping back into the canon.
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br />   After Theseus got rid of Sciron, he met Cercyon the Wrestler, whom of course he outwrestled. I like to think of Cercyon as your own conscience, with which you will often wrestle as you grapple with these slippery and vexing questions of culture and morality. I hope, however, that, unlike Theseus, you do not choke your conscience to death.

  Now let us imagine that, as a modern-day Theseus negotiating the thorny path of cultural politics, you have somehow managed to resist all these dangers, perhaps with a shade more finesse than your predecessor. Athens is still far away, and you are exhausted. What do you think you would long for most in all the world?

  A bed, of course.

  And that is just what Procrustes offers you. A soft bed, I am sure, with 600-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, a high-loft duvet, and goose-down pillows.

  Don’t lie down.

  COLERIDGE THE RUNAWAY

  n 1779, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge was seven, he asked his mother to slice him some cheese for toasting: “no easy matter, it being a crumbly cheese.” His older brother Frank, his great rival in the family, sneaked into the kitchen and minced the cheese into tiny, untoastable pieces. Sam flew at Frank; Frank pretended to be seriously hurt; when Sam bent over him with fearful solicitude, Frank laughed and punched him in the face. At this juncture, Sam grabbed a kitchen knife and was on the verge of reducing his brother to the same condition as the cheese when their mother, the decorous wife of a Devonshire vicar, walked in. “I expected a flogging,” recalled the thwarted murderer fifteen years later, “& struggling from her I ran away, to a hill at the bottom of which the Otter flows.”

  Coleridge spent a stormy night on the riverbank, shivering with cold and fright but reflecting “ at the same time with inward & gloomy satisfaction, how miserable my Mother must be!” Dozens of villagers combed the churchyard, scoured the streets, dragged the ponds and the millrace. The fugitive awoke at 5:00 a.m., too chilled to move. “I saw the Shepherds & Workmen at a distance—& cryed but so faintly, that it was impossible to hear me 30 yards off—and there I might have lain & died—for I was now almost given over.” His cries were finally heard by the local squire, Sir Stafford Northcote, who had been searching all night. “He carried me in his arms, for near a quarter of a mile; where we met my father & Sir Stafford’s Servants,” wrote Coleridge. “I remember, & never shall forget, my father’s face as he looked upon me while I lay in the servant’s arms— so calm, and the tears stealing down his face: for I was the child of his old age.—My Mother, as you may suppose, was outrageous with joy.… I was put to bed—& recovered in a day or so—but I was certainly injured— For I was weakly, & subject to the ague for many years after.”

  It was the first time, but not the last, that Coleridge ran away. Each successive escape recapitulated pieces of the pattern established in this archetypical truancy: misbehavior; flight; an absence charged with both misery and pleasure; rescue; illness; a tenderly supervised convalescence. The upshot was that he wriggled out of any number of tight spots, but, as often happens when one evades an unpleasant consequence, he was usually overtaken by another, larger one.

  Coleridge’s night on the riverbank is retold near the beginning of Richard Holmes’s two-volume biography, a work so vital that it sucks the air out of the readers’ “real” world, rendering it torpid by comparison, and draws us into a parallel world that seems infinitely richer in oxygen. (This is, of course, exactly what Coleridge did in “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel,” whose dreamscapes are vivid enough to trump reality.) That a book should be more compelling than its readers’ lives is in itself no proof of great art. The young mother who ignores her crying baby because she is engrossed in As the World Turns, the teenage boy who neglects his homework because he is busy decapitating cybermonsters, the driver who misses his exit because his favorite song comes on the radio—all have experienced, in ruder forms, something akin to what I felt on reading Coleridge. The difference is not just that Holmes is a wonderful writer; it is that he invites us to enter a real life and live it, year by year, alongside a real person. It is impossible to read this book without forming opinions of Coleridge’s friends as if they were one’s own: Charles Lamb is a brick, Robert Southey a bluenose, William Hazlitt an ingrate, William Wordsworth an egotist. (The essential Coleridge-and-Wordsworth scene: A soirée at the Lambs’. Coleridge sits at one end of the dinner table, quoting Wordsworth. Wordsworth sits at the other end, quoting Wordsworth.) And it is impossible to read this book without imagining what it would be like to talk with Coleridge (dazzling), have him as a houseguest (arduous), walk with him in the Lake Country (fun for the first forty miles), lie with him in a field to study the moonlight (damp).

  I half-woke one morning recently with an obscure sense of dread, nagged by the feeling that someone close to me was in trouble. I knew that soon I would be sufficiently alert to remember who it was and to start making plans to help him, plans that I feared would be difficult and complex and likely to swallow up my day. I turned over in bed and saw volume 2 of Coleridge on my bedside table. It was open to page 350. When I had left him at midnight, Coleridge was lying in a sweat-soaked bed at the Grey Hound Inn in Bath, in December 1813, having argued with two housemates and fled into the night. He was nearly penniless; had missed the last stagecoach and walked five miles in a rainstorm, dragging a bag of books and old clothes; had a terrible cold; and was hallucinating from an opium overdose.

  I was relieved. The runaway was someone else’s responsibility. Nonetheless, I was unable to settle down to work until I had read far enough ahead to assure myself that Coleridge would be properly taken care of. (As usual, he was. A benevolent local doctor looked after him for two weeks until a rich businessman of Coleridge’s acquaintance removed the patient to his house in Bristol. There Coleridge remained for nine months, sharing his capacious bedroom with a manservant specifically charged with suicide prevention. He complained of gout, kidney stones, erysipelas, stricture of the urethra, cirrhosis of the liver, and “angry Itching,” from at least some of which, along with opium withdrawal and hypochondriasis, he actually suffered. A year later, restored to health, he commenced writing the Biographia Literaria.)

  Coleridge’s greatest escape took place in 1793, when he was twenty-one. He was a student at Cambridge, deep in debt, racked with the pains of unrequited love, and frequently drunk. His mortifications (“Mine is a sensibility gangrened with inward corruption”) came to a head with the customary decision to run away. William Godwin described what happened: “spends a night in a house of ill-fame, ruminating in a chair: next morning meditates suicide, walks in the park, enlists, sleeps 12 hours on the officer’s bed, and upon awaking is offered his liberty, which from a scruple of honour he refuses—marched to Reading—dinnerless on Christmas day, his pocket having been picked by a comrade.”

  Coleridge had accepted a bounty of six and a half guineas to enlist as a private in the 15th Light Dragoons, under the alias Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. A time-honored way to run away from oneself is, of course, to change one’s name. Coleridge never liked “Samuel”: “such a vile short plumpness, such a dull abortive smartness in the first Syllable, & this so harshly contrasted by the obscurity & indefiniteness of the syllable Vowel, and the feebleness of the uncovered liquid, with which it ends.” In his private notebooks, he referred to himself as S.T.C. or Essteesee; as a writer, he used the pseudonyms Aphilos, Cordomi, Cuddy, Gnome, Idoloclastes Satyrane, Laberius, Nehemiah Higginbottom, Nicias Erythraeus, Ventifrons, and Zagri. Private Comberbache was his most hapless alter ego, a man spectacularly unsuited to his post, barely able to ride a horse and subject to saddle sores that “grimly constellated my Posteriors,” but beloved by his fellow soldiers. In a 1931 essay, E. M. Forster described the young recruit thus:

  He talked and laughed, didn’t mind being teased, changed from subject to subject; he was superb; nothing could stop him when once he had started, and if asked to write a letter for you it was the same: the ink poured out in a torrent, so that by the ti
me she had got to the fourth page the girl couldn’t do otherwise than give in.… [His] idea that a horse ought to “rub himself down and so shine in all his native beauty”—well, it was the idea of a zany, still when the letter was written and the girl on the way there or back there was no reason you shouldn’t brighten his horse up for him; it didn’t take long, and you knew which end kicked and which bit, more than he did.

  Private Comberbache was eventually removed from his horse and assigned to care for a trooper with smallpox. For eight days and eight nights he and his “poor Comrade” were quarantined in the Pest House, a tiny hut at whose door food and water were left by soldiers too frightened to enter. Comberbache was the perfect nurse, comforting the patient during fevers and hallucinations, “the putrid smell and the fatiguing Struggles.”

  The experience of nursing and being nursed was to become a recurrent theme in Coleridge’s life and work. In the sickroom, he performed equally well horizontally and vertically. As a patient, he surrendered blissfully to what Charles Lamb called the “magnificent dream” of illness, whether he was being nursed as a child after his night on the riverbank or lying with his gouty leg propped up on Wordsworth’s sofa while the women of the house stroked and tickled him. But whenever the tables were turned, he exhibited both sympathy and fortitude. When his brother-in-law Robert Lovell was dying of fever, he sat with him all night; when his young protégé Charles Lloyd had epileptic seizures, he gently restrained him; toward the end of his life, when his son Derwent had typhus, he hovered over his bed day and night, sponging his face and forcing him to drink water. On the twenty-third day of Derwent’s fever, he recorded in his notebook, by candlelight, that he had “Turned a poor (very large & beautiful) Moth out of the Window in a hard Shower of Rain to save it from the Flames!”