Dry as Dust

I HAVE never had to make the irrevocable choice of one book for a desert island and I am reasonably sure I never shall have to; yet if such a contingency should arise I know quite well where my choice would fall: not upon Homer or Vergil; not Dante, Shakespeare, or the Bible; but upon a random volume chosen from the publications of the so-called ‘learned societies,’ whose infinitely great compendiums of infinitely small knowledge line the shelves of every college library.

In these weighty volumes the disorderly mind and the freedom-loving imagination can find full value of danger and pleasure. This is no place for one who likes his facts neatly wrapped, tagged, and ready for delivery. Let the ordered mind beware! These are the country roads of scholarship: the wheel-worn path that leads to the village dump; the log road zigzagging its way to a high clearing where a solitary spruce stands guardian of the surrounding second growth. These paths are for the wanderers, the vagabonds of the world, those who will journey all day through the hidden valleys and the darkened groves, caring little where night will find them, content alone with the roadside sights and sounds. Only such a person will ever be a learned-journal addict.

There is always some first pleasurable sensation that makes an addict of an otherwise normal person. For me this was a matter of sound, a delight in rich vowels and sonorous words. The Publications of the Modern Language Association, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Speculum, and the Early English Text Society — I spoke them slowly, savoring each syllable; I spoke them trippingly on the tongue; I chanted them in rhythmic cadence, with more than Gregorian fullness of tone. In a word, I became quite drunk on them. And then, one fatal day, I took the second and final step toward becoming an addict. I opened a volume of the P. M. L. A, — volume 31, to be exact — at two o’clock one January afternoon. Four hours later I was still avidly reading and saw no signs of ever getting around to looking up the required reference. But what shoes and ships and sealing wax, what cabbages and kings I had learned! Where the unicorn first reared his storied head among the roses and the sands of the East, and why such a lordly creature was blessed with only one horn, what Dante ate when he went out to dine, and what Sam Johnson had for breakfast, became matters of everyday knowledge, while the cloud completely cleared from about the knotty problem of Chaucer’s father-in-law’s stepson and Milton’s grandfather’s trip to the Orient. I could even give short talks on thirteenth-century plumbing.

From that day my reputation grew. I became a member of the élite, the eternally busy students who look up all the suggested references. But alas! I never did learn the inside story of the dating of Troilus and Criseyde; I became instead an authority on fourteenth-century food and drink; Milton’s debt to Ovid strikes no chord in my memory, but I do know exactly what herbs will cure heart disease, that ‘ common ailment of the young toward the vernal equinox,’ as one twelfth-century physician put it. If the facts of Shakespeare’s life escaped me, the color of his eyes and the status of the seventeenth-century bed did not. Instead of becoming an authority along the worthy lines my professors suggested, I became an authority on all the trivia and débris of the centuries. I walked along the beach of scholarship, picking up and making mine the orange peels and wave-smoothed glass, the bits of wood and tasseled rope that the tides had floated in from the depths of poetry and legend. A length of battered hemp may be just another piece of rope, and a learned article on ‘ floures whyte and rede ’ may be just another footnote to one’s Middle English Reader. But a piece of rope may have been part of a new hoisted skull and crossbones, or it may have been the one piece of rope that did not hold; and the ‘floures whyte and rede’ may cast loose all symbolism and become real English daisies in real earth, flowering in a growing garden with a flesh-and-blood Emily.

Where classical legend jostles a minute bit of historical fact and Oriental magic mingles with the fine points of Aristotelianism, you can read for hundreds of pages and never touch the same subject twice, for the turning of every page brings you to a new country and a new century. Stay-athome souls can spend their afternoons reading one book, knowing that there are 361 pages in the book and that each and every page concerns itself with Milton’s family; give me a grab bag where Milton’s family may put in an impromptu appearance at any moment and may choose to remain in seclusion for weeks at a time.

What a help in the drawing-room these volumes have proved to be! Genealogy, military history, gardening, or even the weather — no matter where my dinner partner’s conversation may lead me, I can still find, tucked away in some corner of my memory, the odd fact or allusion that will fill the gap left by yesterday’s rain and tomorrow’s snow. When the talk turns to food and drink, as it should often do in all properly civilized families, I assume a look of dreamy superiority and other-worldliness and tell in what proportions Vergil used to mix his drinks of honey and sweet wine; how the Goodman of Paris blended his cinnamon and cloves, and how deeply Chaucer relished his violet and onion salad. It was an experience to dine out in the Middle Ages, as I have known ever since the day I traded an article on the date of Chaucer’s birth for a note four pages farther on describing an Italian wedding feast that the poet might have attended, but probably did not. Turn your attention for just a moment to a roast pheasant served with a smoothly blended sauce of parsley, rosemary, white ginger, cloves, and wine. Or consider powdered spices, almonds, and a light Burgundy poured over a well-roasted rabbit. Here surely is a conversational topic of quite equal value to that last little dinner in Paris, ‘How strange,’ I say, ‘that you do not know what they did with cinnamon in the twelfth century!’

‘ Dry as dust’ is the conventional term applied to the scholarship of the learned journals; less complimentary is the term usually applied to those who read them for pleasure. There is, however, no statute against eccentricity even in its most advanced stages, and so to-day, when friends discourse to me on the sterility of scholarship, I reflect to myself how much less fun life and literature would be if I did not know that Chaucer ate violet and onion salad, and that Charlemagne’s pet elephant walked all the way from Indo-China for the blossoms from the Emperor’s best rose tree.