Fanny Burney tells me to put down the laptop and take up a pen right this minute!

Last week, I had my nagging sense of guilt over being delinquent in correspondence with a couple of friends reanimated by reading a letter that Joseph Conrad sent to a friend apologizing for a similar failure. I resolved to make good . . . but first I had to finish my post on Byron and Boswell, which sent me to Fanny Burney's letters, in hopes that she'd written something amusing about the wild Lord--and what did I come across on the first page I turned to but another reminder of my neglected duty!

This one took the form of a coy, witty letter from Burney to her son admonishing him for not writing, and it's worth reproducing in full, as it gives a sense, in distilled form, of the charm, intelligence, and playfulness that emanates from all of Burney's letters and journals:

5 June, 1816

Wednesday.
Stanhope street, Bath.

Are you ill, my dear Alex?
If so, beg your Friend--
      or your Apothecary--
      or your Gip*--
      to write a line instantly,
      and we will be with you immediately.
                                    or
      Has any disappointment or mischance annoyed your happiness, and sunk your spirits?
      If so, open your heart at once,
comfort and kindness are all that will be offered you: -- sympathy, my Alex, that will sooth and relieve you--
                                    But--
      If you can have neglected to write,
      or only have mislaid a Letter, and not searched for it--
      then, indeed. Your own self-reproach--
      upon reflection--
will tell you the reproaches you will merit from us: though even then, a candid and immediate avowal will cancel them.
      At all events--If You, or some Proxy--answer not by return of Post, My suspense and uneasiness will make Me instantly address Mr Chapman or Dr. Davy.**

And now you'll surely all understand if I cease blogging for the night and turn instead to making good my epistolary debt.

You, meanwhile, might go visit Shaun Usher's stunning new blog, Letters of Note, where reproductions of odd and interesting letters will surely keep you busy until I've safely handed my own missives to yon postman.

"Great poets / foretell their own deaths in a single line"; I, instead, use up several on trifles

{Photos by rocketlass.}

The morning's snow is but a memory, the clouds that brought it now on their way to New York, leaving us with a cold sliver of moon . . . and what's that it illuminates? Oh, no--it's that lazy columnist's friend and succor . . . the Notes Column! Like a Rod Blagojevich press conference, this post is unlikely to offer any coherent theme or defense of its existence, but it might quote some poetry!

It's been months since I've resorted to one of these; how about this time rather than a numbered list, I tart the blog up as if it were a gossip column?

ITEM! I ventured to Chicago's Harold Washington Library on Monday to pick up some supplementary volumes for a review that is due now. {Note the italics. They're to remind me of what I ought to be doing right now rather than assembling this list. They're not, you'll note, working.}

I easily found the books I was after, but when I laid them on the circulation desk I hit a snag: according to the librarian, one of the volumes I had handed him, The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun (1988), didn't exist. Or at least it didn't exist in their system; despite what the computer asserted, the physical book did to all eyes appear to be right there in hand.

I'm familiar with the frustration of looking on a library shelf for a missing book that the system assures you is there, but this was my first experience with its opposite. Could this be some tendril of the Invisible Library infecting an actual library?

Oh, and I owed an $.80 fine. Ed, do we levy fines at the Invisible Library?

ITEM! Speaking of looking for books on shelves: anyone who has ever worked in a bookshop has experienced the dreadful moment when, as you search the shelves in vain for a book requested by a customer, you realize that the customer looming at your elbow is the author of the book in question, attempting in a decreasingly subtle way to determine whether his fears of irrelevance and disregard are quite justified. It is a singularly awkward situation, for which the only remedy is the white lie, a suddenly recovered memory of the satisfied customer who left the store mere moments ago, beaming with joy, day made because you'd sold her that very book. You're sure you'll have another copy in any day now, in anticipation of another such customer.

Well, reading Fanny Burney's journals has confirmed my suspicion that authors were always so--as, fortunately, were quick-witted booksellers:

We amused ourselves, while we waited there, at a Bookseller's shop, where Mrs Thrale enquired if they had got the Book she had recommended to them. "Yes, Ma'am," was the answer; "and it's always out--the Ladies like it vastly."

ITEM! Speaking of the Invisible Library: this blog has been remarkably free lately of writing about that master of invisible book creation, Roberto Bolaño. My mind, on the other hand, has not: nearly five months after I read it, 2666 still staggers around in my thoughts. If you're having the same problem, you might as well go read what I think might be the best review of the novel yet, Sam Sacks's at Open Letters Monthly. More than anyone else I've read, Stark assembles a coherent argument about the book's aims, starting with this proposition:

But it must be reemphasized that, with one significant exception that I’ll look into later, every character, every occurrence, and every development of this book is brought into existence for the purpose of being negated. Nothingness is the single connecting motif of the five disparate sections, and it doesn’t bind them so much as drape across them like a shroud.

His overall assessment is a more harsh than mine, but it is forceful and convincing, one of the few writings on 2666 that I'm confident will stay with me and inform my eventual rereading of the novel.

Bolaño fans should also check out the appreciative review of his collection of poetry, The Romantic Dogs, that Ed Pavlic (author of the exceptionally good prose poem collection Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway) wrote for Verse. Pavlic opens with a quotation from the fragments of Empedocles that reads like an uncanny anticipation of Bolaño's fictions:

I shall tell thee a twofold tale. At one time it grew to be one only out of many; at another, it divided up to be many instead of one. There is a double becoming of perishable things and a double passing away. The coming together of all things brings one generation into being and destroys it; the other grows up and is scattered as things become divided. And these things never cease continually changing places, at one time all uniting in one through Love, at another each borne in different directions by the repulsion of Strife.

The Romantic Dogs has mostly been drowned out by the hubbub surrounding 2666, but Pavlic makes a good case for why it's worth taking a look at.

ITEM! Way back in June when I read The Savage Detectives, I unexpectedly found myself comparing the young, horny, violent infrerealists of Bolaño's Mexico City to Giacomo Casanova. Casanova's wonderfully amoral twelve-volume History of My Life frequently finds him reciting poetry, but always in an instrumental fashion: poetry is a marker of his refinement and sensibility, one of many tools that he uses in his neverending quest to get into women's pants. There is never a sense, as Casanova is recounting his recitation of a poem, of a poem truly affecting him; the reader--or at least the contemporary reader--gets the sense that he would have used whatever was to hand, that if knowing obscure facts about CC Sabathia or Dungeons and Dragons would have pitter-patted the hearts of the ladies, he would have been just as happy to deploy those.

The infrarealists, on the other hand, while they certainly do use poetry as an aphrodisiac (part of the overly masculine atmosphere of the early part of the novel that would have turned me off were Bolaño's prose not so captivating). At the same time, however, Bolaño makes us believe that poetry also is a crucial part of their self-definition, and even their way of understanding the world. Of all the poses to adopt, they've chosen a relatively marginalized one, and the enthusiasm and vigor with which they enact it--especially late in the novel when the youngest of them, Garcia Madero, reveals an encylopedic knowledge of poetic form--is bracing. Poetry is an instrument for these young men, but it's not solely or merely an instrument; its roots and its effects run far deeper.

ITEM! Which reminds me: I promised you some poetry, didn't I? How about this, which Melville includes in the "Extracts" assembled by a "poor," "hopeless, sallow" sub-sub-librarian with which he opens Moby-Dick--and which thus, almost Ouroborically, brings us back to where we started, with libraries:

Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him;
One would think the deep to be hoary.

It's from Job, which I believe Blagojevich has yet to quote--but fear not, Rod! There's still time to work it in!

Fanny Burney on Russian Royal Bling

While reading Fanny Burney's Journals and Letters the other night, I came across the scene below in a letter to Burney's family friend Charles Crisp from November and December of 1775. Burney, aged 23, wrote of a party for Prince Orloff of Russia, a "handsome and magnificent Figure," whose height prompted her to confess,

I felt myself so Dwarfish by his high Highness, that I could not forbear whispering Mr Chamier , who had met with him elsewhere.

The Prince was dressed, as princes are wont to be, in dazzling raiment, including a

a Picture of the Empress Hung from his Neck, which was set round with Diamonds of such magnitude and lustre that, when near the Candle, they were too dazzling for the Eye. His Jewels, Dr King says, are Valued at above £100,000.

Near the end of the night, Burney wrote, one of the attendees at the party, James Harris,

told me he wished some of the ladies would express a desire of seeing the Empress's Picture nearer; "I, you know," said he, "as a man, cannot, but my Old Eyes can't see it at a distance."

Unconstrained by any manly reticence, Burney obligingly asked to see the medallion, and

When we got it, there was hardly any looking at the Empress for the glare of the Diamonds. Their size is almost incredible. One of them, I am sure, was as big as a Nutmeg at least.

All of which reminded me of something . . . but what? Oh, right--Ludacris:

Watch out for the medallion, my diamonds are reckless--
Feels like a midget is hanging from my necklace.

Plenty of less Ludacris Fanny Burney highlights on the way in coming weeks--this book is a treasure.

"'Tis the most dangerous employment you can have"

I picked up Penguin's one-volume selection of the journals and letters of Fanny Burney, a novelist and friend of Samuel Johnson, after Johnson biographer Peter Martin claimed that her journal was nearly the equal of the diaries of Pepys and Boswell. I've just begun to read it, so I can't vouch for Martin's position yet, but I can already tell that it's going to provide two of my favorite literary pleasures: the revelation of how very different the thoughts and emotions of people in other ages could be from ours, and the reminder that they could also at times be nearly as recognizable and familiar as our own.

Frances Burney began her journal at age sixteen, and even knowing that the place and life of an upper-class sixteen-year-old in Georgian England were wildly different from those of any teen today, a recognizable teenage vitality and self-absorption shine through the distancing effect of the eighteenth-century prose in the early entries. What sixteen-year-old's journal hasn't opened with some entry like the following?

27 March 1768

To have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintance and actions, when the Hour arrive at which time is more nimble than memory, is the reason which induces me to keep a Journal: a Journal in which I must confess my every thought, must open my whole Heart!

The second entry in this selection offers even more recognizable youthful enthusiasm and drama:

July 1768

I am going to tell you something concerning myself, which, if I have not chanced to mention it before will I believe a little surprise you--it is, that I scarse wish for any thing so truly, really, and greatly, as to be in love--upon my word I am serious--and very gravely and sedately assure you that it is a real and true wish. I cannot help thinking it is a great happiness to have a strong and particular attachment to some one person, independent of duty, interest, relationship or pleasure: but I carry not my wish so far as for a mutual tendresse--No, I should be contented to love sola--and let Duets be reserved for those who have a proper sense of their superiourity. For my own part I vow and declare that the mere pleasure of having a great affection for some one person to which I was neither guided by fear, hope of profit, gratitude, respect--or any motive but mere fancy would sufficiently satisfy me, and I should not at all wish a return.

At the same time, we're reminded of the difference in eras by the vigor with which those around Burney discouraged her when they discovered her occupation. A year before starting her journal, she had sworn off writing as a waste of a woman's time, burning a manuscript containing "Elegies, Odes, Plays, Songs, Stories, Farces, Tragedies, and Epic Poems," as well as a novel, The History of Caroline Evelyn. Though her plunge into journal-keeping less than a year later may have demonstrated a change of heart on her part, it didn't reflect a change in the beliefs of her social circle, as this entry about a conversation with a friend of her mother reveals:

August 1768

I have been having a long conversation with Miss Young on journals. She has very seriously and earnestly advised me to give mine up--heighho-ho! Do you think I can bring myself to oblige her? What she says has great weight with me; but, indeed, I should be very loath to quite give my poor friend up. She says that it is the most dangerous employment young persons can have--it makes them often record things which ought not to be recorded, but instantly forgot.

The most dangerous employment young persons can have! Seems a bit quaint now, no?

But what I'm really looking forward to in the journals and letters are appearances by Johnson, Boswell, and others of their set. The account of a visit with Boswell in this long letter to her sister of October 1790 is priceless:

[Mr Guffardiere] proposed bringing [Mr Boswell] to call upon me; but this I declined, certain how little satisfaction would be given here by the entrance of a man so famous for compiling Anecdotes! But yet I really wished to see him again, for old acquaintance' sake, and unavoidable amusement from his oddity and good humour, as well as respect for the object of his constant admiration, my revered Dr Johnson.

Later, as Burney and Boswell approached the royal palace, where she was to attend to the Queen, Boswell made quite a scene:

He then told me that his Life of Dr Johnson was nearly Printed: and took a proof sheet out of his pocket to shew me! with crowds passing and re-passing, knowing me well, and staring well at him! . . . [H]e stopt me again at the Gate, and said he would read me a part of his work!

There was no refusing this: and he began,--with a Letter of Dr Johnson's to himself: he read it in strong imitation of the Doctor's manner, very well, and not caricature. But Mrs Schwellenberg was at her Window--a crowd was gathering to stand round the Rails,--and the King and Queen and Royal Family now approached from the Terrace.--I made a rather quick apology; and with a step as quick as my now weakened limbs have left in my power, I hurried to my apartment.

How fortunate we are, nearly two hundred and fifty years later, to have that scene--and to have the ability to know, intimately, through their own private accounts of their thoughts and feelings, both its actors!

"A very poor creeper upon the earth," or, Johnsonian gleanings for a snowy night

Tonight, after waiting an inordinately long time for the bus as the snow piled high and I slowly lost sensation in my feet, I opened Peter Martin's Samuel Johnson: A Biography (2008), to find that Johnson, as he so often does, afforded me a bit of consolation. I, after all, required only a few minutes of warmth to banish the pain from my feet; Johnson, on the other hand, had to endure protracted bouts with gout. Quotes Martin:

"I enjoy all the dignity of lameness. . . . I am a very poor creeper upon the earth, catching at anything with my hands to spare my feet." "It is of my own acquisition, as neither my father had it or my mother."

The thought led me back to a passage in Boswell's Life, in which, to support his contention that Johnson was the author of a couple of lines of anonymous doggerel, he asks,

Why may not a poet suppose himself to have the gout, as well as to suppose himself to be in love, of which we have innumerable instances[?]

But why, oh why would a poet want to put himself through that?

Other gleanings from tonight's reading of Martin's splendidly quote-filled biography:

1 In his final years, Johnson lived in a house at 8 Bolt Court, to which he welcomed a remarkable mix of friends and charity cases as free boarders. According to Martin, by 1777, they numbered seven, though I can only put names to six: Francis Barber, Johnson's manservant; Anna Williams, a blind poet who had lived with Johnson for years; Dr. Robert Levet, described by Hester Thrale as a "superannuated surgeon," and by Johnson as "a brutal fellow, but I have a good regard for him for his brutality is in his manners, not his mind"; Poll Carmichael, a Scotswoman who may have been a reformed prostitute; and an old friend of Johnson's late wife, Mrs. Desmoulins, who moved in along with her daughter in 1777. As Martin puts it,

She completed the recipe for domestic chaos in the house, for she and Mrs Williams despised each other and the normal bickering in the house increased exponentially. Mrs Thrale was both amused and horrified that Johnson's house was "overrun with all sort of strange creatures, whom he admits for mere charity," "but as they can both be occasionally of service to each other, and as neither of them have any other place to go to, their animosity does not force them to separate." None of the inhabitants, in fact, liked Mrs Desmoulins. "Mr Levet who thinks his ancient rights invaded, stands at bay, fierce as ten furies," Johnson grumbled to Mrs Thrale; "Mrs Williams growls and scolds, but Poll does not much flinch." After a year with all of them, Johnson summed up the turmoil in the house: "We have tolerable concord at home, but no love. Williams hates everybody. Levet hates Desmoulins and does not love Williams. Desmoulins hates them both. Poll loves none of them."

It sounds like either a logic puzzle or a 1930s screenplay, some sort of cross between Ball of Fire and You Can't Take It With You; I will admit to enjoying the image of Johnson as the grumbly patriarch on a sitcom, perhaps played by Jeffrey Jones.

2 Descriptions of Johnson's unusual physical presence are common, many of them highlighting the tics that most people now agree were most likely symptoms of a neurological disorder. Two that are quoted in the final portion of Martin's book seem worth sharing, however, for their language alone. First, from the Reverend Thomas Campbell, an Irish clergyman who, on meeting Johnson, was unimpressed:

[He] has the aspect of an idiot, without the faintest ray of sense gleaming from any one feature--with the most awkward garb, and unpowdered grey wig, on one side only of his head--he is forever dancing the devil's jig, and sometimes he makes the most drivelling effort to whistle some thought in his absent paroxysms. . . . [He] flew in a passion rather too much.

Then there's this description from the more appreciative Fanny Burney, who is known to us now as the author of Evelina:

He is, indeed, very ill-favoured; is tall and stout, and stoops terribly; he is almost bent double. His mouth is almost continually opening and shutting, as if he was chewing. He has a strange method of frequently twirling his fingers, and twisting his hands. His body is in continual agitation, see-sawing up and down; his feet are never a moment quiet; and, in short, his whole person is in perpetual motion.

Martin writes that Burney's journals, "full and rich with the novelist's wit and vibrantly recorded scenes," deserve to be ranked with those of Pepys and Boswell. That's high praise; anyone out there willing to second it, and thus launch me on a library trip?

3 Johnson, as is well known, was at best opinionated, at worst downright difficult to get along with. The following exchange with his close friend Mrs. Thrale succinctly sums up Johnson's problem keeping his manners:

As he confessed to Mrs Thrale, "I am always sorry when I make bitter speeches & I never do it, but when I am insufferably vexed." "But you do suffer things to vex you, that nobody else would vex at."

James Boswell was often the source of that vexation. Though the more one reads about Johnson, the more on realizes that he really did feel warm friendship for Boswell, at the same time, his exasperation at Boswell's transparent attempts to draw him out on various topics regularly bubbled over. I can't resist closing with two of his complaints about his importunate friend that, though oft-quoted, still bring joy. First, to Boswell himself:

You have but two topics, yourself and me, and I'm sick of both.

Then, about Boswell to another friend:

Boswell's conversation consists entirely in asking questions, and it is extremely offensive.

Why is it that every time I see those lines I smile, loving both men more?