The Lambs of London

A post by Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence last week about Peter Ackroyd's novel The Lambs of London (2004) reminded me that I had a copy of that book, unread, on my shelves, purchased several years ago when all I knew of Charles and Mary Lamb was their Tales from Shakespeare. Patrick's post gives a good sense of the pleasures of this slim novel (and you can also turn to him for praise of Charles Lamb's essays, which I plan to dive into this winter); since he's covered that ground, I'll merely share a few aspects that struck me.

Though Ackroyd dwells far less than I would have expected on the sad circumstances of the Lambs' shared life, he does give clear pictures of both Charles's alcoholism--

He had a strange relationship with his drunken self; he considered him to be an unhappy and unfortunate acquaintance to whom he had become accustomed. He would neither defend him nor apologise for him. He would merely recognise his existence.

--and Mary's bouts of insanity. Without overdoing things, Ackroyd suggests that Mary's troubles, if not caused by the cramped life forced on her by Georgian propriety, were at the very least exacerbated by it: while Charles spends his evenings out with friends, Mary stays at home, awaiting the talks they'll have on his return. When she does leave the house, it takes courage; she "decides to venture" into their street. She has barely been out of their neighborhood; a trip across the Thames affords her "a rare moment of discovery." When Charles challenges her about having been out one evening, she whirls on him,

"When you see me in this house I am sleep-walking. I have no real--no genuine--life here at all. Why do you think I long for you to come home each evening? When you are not wretchedly drunk, of course. . . . Whom do I see? Whom do I talk to? Whose propriety is it that I should be pressed to death? Whose convention is it that I am already lying in the family grave?"

By contrast, Charles's life as a young cleark for the East India Company is full of company, wit, charm, and sociability; his companions are sketched quickly but convincingly, my favorite being Alfred Jowett, who was

practical, hard-headed and a little mercenary. He divided his salary by the length of the working year, and had calculated that he earned five pence and three farthings every working hour. He had a written table inside his desk and, whenever he managed to idle away one of those hours, he added that sum to his running profit.

When comparing the lives and ambits of the siblings, it is hard not to think of the James family, of Alice stuck at home while her brothers escaped; in the century that separated them from the Lambs, the situation had improved, but not nearly enough.

Unexpectedly, though Ackroyd centers the story on the tragedy of the Lambs--when Mary, in a fit, killed her mother--he drives his plot with a story of forgery, introducing a young bookseller named William Henry Ireland, who briefly wowed literary England with the slowly doled out discovery of a cache of Shakespeare's papers, including, ultimately, a whole lost play, Vortigern. When his deception is finally undone, he apologetically explains,

I acted out of innocent delight and sheer intoxication with my gifts.

--while his success, however temporary, was rooted in a similar delight: people wanted to believe in the forgeries, wanted to believe that they had not seen the last of Shakespeare.

All of which reminded me of a passage from an interview of D. Graham Burnett conducted with historian Anthony Grafton in the Spring 2009 issue of Cabinet. Speaking of forgery, Grafton says,

[I]n many cases it was the forgers who took on the most ambitious projects of historical recovery. They were the ones who were trying to make the past live again, to animate, to resurrect the lost worlds. They had to steep themselves in these worlds enough that they could actually inhabit them creatively. . . . [I]n many cases there is a sense that these sorts of forgeries are not an effort to falsify the past, but in fact to rescue it. The truly passionate historical forger of the Renaissance was often saying something like, "I really know what was going on back then. I know how this tradition in antiquity worked. I know what the record ought to show, and if it's not there in our crappy manuscripts, well then, dammit, I'm going to put it there!"

And what else is a historical novelist doing but that? History may not have retained any extended account of Charles Lamb's table talk, or of his quiet tenderness towards his sister, or her private worries, but we have Peter Ackroyd, master forger, to fill in the gaps.

"Coleridge was to prove a dangerous companion for the high-strung."

Though I pick up literary biographies because I'm interested in their subject, as I read them I often find myself more drawn to the glimpse they afford of the other writers in the subject's orbit--his friends, enemies, and/or collaborators, who together make up the literary life and conversation of an era. When that era is late Georgian and Regency England, the pleasures afforded by the peripheral figures are almost unparalleled: having set to reading about Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, or Coleridge, we find ourselves learning along the way about such writers as Leigh Hunt, Robert Southey, and William Hazlitt, all interesting in their own right.

In Adam Sisman's book on Wordsworth and Coleridge, the most striking peripheral figure--aside perhaps from Dorothy Wordsworth, who is nearly a primary subject in her own right--is unquestionably Charles Lamb. These days, Lamb is little known compared to the era's stars--I surprised a guide on a walking tour of London a few years ago by being familiar with him when we stopped at his memorial on Gilspur Street. He's best remembered for the Tales from Shakespeare (1807) that he wrote with his sister Mary, which served as my first encounter with Shakespeare many years ago; if he's known beyond that, it's for the tragic circumstances of his life, which saw him having to care for Mary after she stabbed their mother to death and attacked their father in a psychotic fit.

But Lamb's other work--primarily essays--does have its fans, including Peter Ackroyd (who wrote a novel about Charles and Mary a couple of years ago) and Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence, who for the past couple of years has been urging people to seek out Lamb, describing his essays as

seriously charming or charmingly serious, and written in some of the most freely associative prose you’ll ever enjoy.

Elsewhere, Kurp has written that Lamb,

like Sterne on most occasions, perfected a carefully calibrated tone of inspired silliness. He was a master of “almost.” His prose is almost self-indulgent, almost incoherent, but his internal gyroscope usually kept it in balance. Nothing requires more control than appearing out of control, with perfect grace, though Lamb mastered other voices.

That jibes with the impression one gets from Sisman's account, which quotes freely from Lamb's letters to Coleridge, whom he once described as

the only correspondent and I might add the only friend I have in the world. . . . I have never met with any one, who could or can compensate me for the loss of your society--I have no one to talk all these matters about to.

Lamb even unexpectedly calls to mind the genial strangeness of Robert Walser when he describes a period that he spent "very agreeably" in an asylum following a breakdown, after which, Sisman notes, he explained to Coleridge that, though he had "got somewhat rational now, and don't bite any one," he remembered those six weeks

with a gloomy kind of Envy. For while it lasted I had many many hours of pure happiness. Dream not Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of Fancy, till you have gone mad. All now seems to me vapid; comparatively so.

In those letters to Coleridge, he also demonstrates another facet of his talent that Patrick has noted, a facility as a critic, giving Coleridge the needed advice to

Cultivate simplicity . . . or rather, I should say, banish elaborateness; for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.

Patrick's testimony--and carefully chosen quotations--had already convinced me that Lamb was worth seeking out, but, as with so many worthy pursuits in life, that intention had fallen by the wayside; Sisman's account has reminded me to act on it, and I expect I'll have lines from Lamb to share in the coming months.

"A dedicated reader of Lamb," Patrick writes, "grows to love him as a friend." The list of writers about whom even a devoted reader can feel that way is short, cherished, and very personal, but I trust Patrick's opinion enough to harbor hopes that Lamb will be of its number by year's end.

"Light up you li'l ol' bug o' lightning"

In response to my mention of Johnny Mercer's "Glow-Worm" in yesterday's post, Patrick Kurp of the wonderful Anecdotal Evidence sent me a link to this clip of the Mills Brothers performing the song on "The Nat King Cole Show":



The performance is enthusiastic, yet retaining an element of cool. The smile on Donald's face when he takes the lead seems fully genuine: these guys are having fun with this song.

Gene Lees's biography of Mercer, Portrait of Johnny (2004), offers this account of the writing of "Glow-Worm" from singer Betty Bennett:

When I was singing with the Alvino Rey band, we had a vocal group called the Blue Reys. Because we recorded for Capitol, Johnny was going to do a tune with us. He was writing special lyrics to "Glow-Worm." We met with him and rehearsed the tune, the first two choruses. But there was a chorus missing. So he said, "Wait a minute, I'll run down to my offiec, I think it's on my desk." So he was gone fifteen minutes and came back with a wonderful lyric--having just written it.

Not to question Ms. Bennett, or to criticize one of my favorite songwriters, but if the verse she's referring to is this one--

Glow little glow-worm, turn the key on
You are equipped with taillight neon
You got a cute vest-pocket Mazda
Which you can make both slow and fazda
I don't know who you took a shine to
Or who you're out to make a sign to
I got a gal that I love so
Glow little glow-worm, glow
Put on a show worm
Glow little glow-worm, glow

--well, let's just say I bet Mercer had better fifteen-minute inspirations over the years. Yet the essential silliness of the lyrics doesn't really matter: "Glow-Worm" is an utter trifle, some fun wordplay serving as an excuse to trot out a nice little jump beat, but like so many Mercer songs, once you hear it, it stays with you.