Next up on the essays shelf:
At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays
Anne Fadiman is a writer cherished by the O’Malley family, for her book Ex Libris (excerpted here) made up of essays by Fadiman having to do with her lifetime of book-loving. Great stuff. I associate that book with my father, so it is very special to me. At Large and at Small is also a book comprised of essays by Fadiman, although the essays do not have a shared theme, the way they do in Ex Libris. But there is an underlying structure to the book, which she explains in her beautiful introduction. We now live in an age of memoir, where anyone who was once anorexic/abused/addicted can get a book deal, whether or not they know how to construct a sentence. There are reasons for this, none of which are particularly interesting. But the “personal essay” has long roots, way deeper than the recent fervor for memoir. You could even look at some of the travelogues in ancient Greek as “personal essays”, you certainly get a feel for the writer, you get a sense for what he experienced in this place or that, the people he met. Montaigne wrote personal essays. William Hazlitt, a genius of the form, wrote them as well. Charles Lamb. Dickens. The list is endless. There are interesting questions about personal essays, as in: who is the “I” that is speaking? The actual writer? Or a persona the writer is assuming? Fadiman talks about the trend in 18th century essays to start with the word “On” (see Hazlitt). “On Morality.” “On Women.” “On Industry.” So these aren’t strictly personal in a biographical sense, but with someone like Hazlitt you always sense HIM, the unique man, holding the pen. These are essays that require if not expertise then at least research into the topic at hand, gathering quotes, weaving them together into something thought-provoking, yet still with a personal stamp. It’s not about “I feel”, it’s about “I think”.
The essays in this collection range from a history of the postage stamp to a treatise on the development of ice cream. There’s an ode to Coleridge, after reading a captivating two-volume biography of the man. There’s an essay about the history of the American flag. When she and her husband move from Manhattan to the country, she reflects upon moving, and that leads her to Persuasion, a comedy about property/moving. You get to know Fadiman quite a bit here: you get to know her passions (for collecting, for books about arctic exploring – which she already covered in one of the essays in Ex Libris, for proper nomenclature, for certain authors), you get to know the things she scorns, the things she finds funny. You meet her brother, Kim – who was her partner-in-crime in butterfly collecting when they were kids (the subject of her first essay), and who also is a master at making ice cream (his recipe for homemade ice cream, which involves liquid nitrogen, is included in her essay on ice cream). You get to know Fadiman’s husband, her children. That’s the “at small” part of the essays. The “at large” is the topics themselves: patriotism, organization, poetry, culture, literature, the human need for safety, the human need for adventure. So the book is macroscopic and microscopic at the same time (something you often feel when reading Hazlitt.) What has happened in the Memoir Business in the last 20 years is that “microscopic” is now what is valued. Going Macro is passé, not “in”. Fadiman (and there are others) wants to change that.
So. These essays are captivating and show her intelligence, her curiosity, and her humor (the book is often hilarious).
The first essay is called “Collecting Nature”, which begins as a strictly memoir piece about the obsession she and her brother shared as children for collecting butterflies, killing them, and then labeling them. Their parents allowed them to devote an entire room in their California house to this Museum of Dead Butterflies (which they eventually had to sell, and they made quite a nice chunk of cash from it). They would huddle over science books and insect books, trying to discover what they had caught. Eventually they began to have qualms about killing the bugs. So they stopped. But Fadiman’s obsession for collecting and finding the proper names for things continues to this day.
She uses her butterfly mania as a child as the launching-off point to talk about the great and obsessive naturalists of the 19th century, and she delves into their writings, and you get to know some of these authors. She talks about the Collecting Gene, in general. People who like collecting things, however bizarre. Where does that impulse come from? Books have been written about it. Fadiman, insatiably curious, has read those books.
Here, she writes about Nabokov, who also was an obsessive butterfly collector. She sees evidence of that in his literature (and not just in obvious ways).
Here’s an excerpt.
At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays
Is it surprising that the revolutionist Jean-Paul Marat, the author of a 1790 pamphlet advocating that “five or six hundred heads be cut off,” was an amateur lepidopterist? Is it entirely a coincidence that Alfred Kinsey, before he collected eighteen thousand sexual histories (along with innumerable nudist magazines, pornographic statues, and pieces of sadomasochistic paraphernalia), collected tens of thousands of gall wasps? Was it not inevitable that John Fowles should have made Frederick Clegg, who collected a beautiful art student and and imprisoned her in his cellar, a collector of butterflies as well? I read The Collector when I was sixteen, and I got a perverse insider’s kick when Frederick drugged Miranda with chloroform and carbon tetrachloride, both of which he had previously used in his killing bottle to drug fritillaries and blues.
But on the other side of the scale – and I believe he carries enough weight to outbalance the entire army of lepidopteran weirdos – there is Vladimir Nabokov. It is my view that if you have never netted a butterfly, you cannot truly understand Nabokov. (This, of course may be merely a rationalization, the ignoble offspring of my desire to believe that the tiger swallowtails of my spent youth did not die in vain.) Only Nabokov, eloping at age ten with a nine-year-old girl in Biarritz, would have taken, as the sum total of his luggage, a folding butterfly net in a brown paper bag. Nabokov chased butterflies on two continents for six decades, spent seven years as a research fellow in entomology at Harvard, where, during the course of his taxonomic studies, he permanently damaged his vision by spending long hours looking through a microscope at dissected butterfly genitalia; discovered several new species and subspecies, including Cyclargus erembis Nabokov and Neonympha maniola Nabokov; and wrote twenty-two articles on lepidoptera, including a 1951 review of my own Alexander B. Klots in The New York Times Book Review. He called it “wonderfully stimulating”. (He did not mention page 164, where, under the heating “Genus Lycaeides Scudder: The Orange Margined Blues,” Klots wrote, “The recent work of Nabokov has entirely rearranged the classification of the genus.” Years after the publication of Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, Nabokov took a copy of Klots from his shelf, showed the visitor that sentence, and said, “That’s real fame. That means more than anything a literary critic could say.”
In a 1931 story called “The Aurelian” – an archaic term for butterfly collector – Nabokov describes a butterfly shop in Berlin whose windows are full of “eyed wings wide-open in wonder, shimmering blue satin, black magic.” To the left of the shop there are stores that sell soap, coal, and bread; to the right, a tobacconist, a delicatessen, and a fruit seller. This is how Nabokov viewed butterflies. One may progress through life surrounded on all sides by drabness, but if there are butterflies at the center, there will never be a want of beauty or romance. What more appropriate passion could a writer have? Lepidopterists, more than naturalists of any other stripe, have long inclined toward the literary, as one can tell from looking at the names they have given the objects of their study. There are butterflies named after Homer, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Propertius, and Persius; after dozens of characters in Greek and Roman mythology; and even after punctuation marks – the question mark, the long dash, and the comma. (Nabokov described the comma in a famous passage about listening to his governess read French classics on the veranda of the family estate outside St. Petersburg, while his attention was joyfully diverted by the comma-like markings on a butterfly that had settled on the threshold.)
Nabokov began the sixth chapter of Speak, Memory – the greatest essay on butterfly collecting ever written – by describing the first butterfly he wanted to catch (a swallowtail) and, in the last paragraph, wrote:
[The] highest enjoyment of timelessness – in a landscape selected at random – is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum in to which rushes all that I love.
(My four favorite words in this passage are “and their food plants”. Only a true entomologist, as opposed to a starry-eyed amateur, would include them in such a lyrical effusion and, what’s more, clearly believe they were lyrical themselves.) Many of the themes in Nabokov’s fiction – metamorphosis and flight, deception and mimicry, evasion and capture – are lepidopteran. And to my ear, his very language is too. The first canto of Pale Fire contains, within its four-and-a-half-page compass, the words torquated, stillicide, shagbark, vermiculated, preterist, iridule, and leminiscate. Nabokov collected rare words, just as he collected rare butterflies, and when he netted one, especially in the exotic landscape of his second language, his satisfaction is as palpable as if he had finally captured the brown and white hairstreak that once eluded him when he was a boy. Nabokov’s style is not just poetic; it is taxonomic. He mentions something close to hatred the village schoolmaster who, taking his charges for a nature walk, used to quash young Vladimir’s hunger for precision, by saying, “Oh, just a small bird – no special name.” And what scorn Nabokov bears for us, his clueless audience, when he writes, “I had found last spring a dark aberration of Sievers’ Carmelite (just another gray moth to the reader.)”
