At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman Read Free Book Online

regimentation lay his essays, which I believe were made possible by—and also protected him from— his life’s opposed poles.
    Before the murder, Lamb had published only poems, and theywere uniformly terrible. Immediately afterward, he told Coleridge: “Mention nothing of poetry. I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of that kind.” The intended renunciation did not last long, but the output lessened, and, with a couple of exceptions, the quality did not improve. Because he took poetry far more seriously than prose, after the murder it seemed a self-indulgence, a “vanity”—unlikejournalism, which paid, and thus contributed to Mary’s keep. In the dedication to Coleridge that introduced his
Collected Works
of 1818, he wrote, “The sap (if ever it had any) has become, in a manner, dried up and extinct: and youwill find your old associate… dwindled into prose and
criticism
.”
    The “dwindling” was, in fact, a miraculous expansion. When he wrote those self-effacing words, hehad already published some fine literary and theatrical criticism, but he was to find his true voice in the fifty-two essays—on chimney sweeps, on weddings, on old books, on sickness, on gallantry, on witches, on beggars, on roast pig, on ears—that he wrote between 1820 and 1825, working nights and Sundays, for the
London Magazine
. “True voice” is an odd phrase to use for a series of works writtenunder a pseudonym (he borrowed “Elia” from an Italian clerk who had worked with his brother) and, though autobiographical, mendacious in some crucial respects. Elia, for instance, wrote, “Brother, or sister, I never had any—to know them. A sister, I think, that should have been Elizabeth, died in both our infancies.” Mary became the more comfortably distant “cousin Bridget,” who was, of course,neither insane nor a murderess. Lamb’s mother was never mentioned; his father was transmuted into an amiable factotum named Lovel, no relation to Elia. And while the real Lamb cared devotedly for his relatives, Elia called
his
poor relations “a lion in your path,—a frog in your chamber,—a fly in your ointment,—a mote in your eye.” By such therapeutic subterfuges did Lamb’s imagination extricatehim from his family’s stifling bonds.
    True voice it was: funny (unlike Lamb the poet), intimate (unlike Lamb the accountant), and relaxed (unlikeLamb the family pillar). But not inextinguishable. On March 29, 1825, Lamb retired, with a generous pension, from the East India House, an event he chronicled in “The Superannuated Man.” This was Coleridge’s favorite essay; he called it “worthy of CharlesLamb in his happiest Carolo-lambian Hour.” With heartbreaking bafflement, the superannuated Elia, released from the “thraldom” of his own clerkship, confessed, “I wandered about thinking I was happy, and knowing I was not.… I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they had been some necessary part of my apparel.” Lamb lived nine more years but wrote no more great essays. He and Elia had retiredtogether, and without the clerk’s humble vantage point, he found himself without a platform. Just as Lamb had required Mary’s madness to nudge him from poetry to prose, so he required his old chains to liberate the unpretentious alter ego who defined the modern familiar essay.
    Lamb once compared bad journalists to “the
crooked man
, of whom a facetious Greek Professor relates this comical story,that he swallowed a
tenpenny nail
, and voided it out a cork-screw!” Lamb did the opposite: he swallowed a series of corkscrews and turned them into tenpenny nails. I have spent many a Carolo-lambian Hour grieving over his life’s unfair twists and turns and wishing that posterity could vindicate Elia’s efforts to straighten them out. “Damn the age!” Lamb once said. “I will write for antiquity.”Antiquity is not cooperating. My dog-eared 1933 anthology (the dog-eared part is fine; Lamb preferred well-thumbed