A cozy bedtime read
AT LARGE AND AT SMALL:
Familiar Essays
By Anne Fadiman
240 pages Farrar, Straus and Giroux $22
Reviewed by Sarah Morgan
This book appealed to me the moment I opened my mail. I noticed the hardcover edition, once unwrapped, was about the size and shape of a large paperback; the teal-blue cover and delicate woodcut were created to resemble books of an era past. When I hefted it I found it light yet weighty, the perfect proportions for a book. The title perfectly describes this book of familiar essays.
In her preface, which is worth a read in and of itself, Anne Fadiman discusses her father, New York writer Clifton Fadiman, and his 1955 essay, “A Gentle Dirge for the Familiar Essay.” He bemoans the loss of a genre of writing that was, in his words, “setting to the horizon, along with its whole constellation: formal manners, apt quotations, Greek and Latin, clear speech, conversation, the gentleman’s library, the gentleman’s income, the gentleman.”
Many years later, in this cozy book, his daughter takes up the challenge. As Anne Fadiman says, “Today’s readers encounter plenty of critical essays (more brain than heart) and plenty of personal essays (more heart than brain) but not many familiar essays (equal measures of both).” She admits that she is not a scholar but an enthusiastic amateur. “My bookshelves and file cabinets resemble the nest of a magpie that collects shiny objects, with diamond rings tucked next to tinfoil candy wrappers.” But this comment belies her careful research and knowledge of the classics as she writes from her head and heart for the next 240 pages.
But let us begin at the beginning. In the first essay, “Collecting Nature,” she describes in detail her childhood love of collecting butterflies. She writes without apology about the killing jar that she, then six, and her brother Kim, then eight, used to stifle their catch with chloroform and later carbon tet (they were too young to even pronounce the word tetrachloride) while learning about Lepidoptera. She also discusses the shame that took place two years later and the painful period of overlap when “the light of decency was dawning but the lure of sin was still irresistible. Like alcohol, nicotine, or heroin, lepidoptery is hard to renounce.”
Then she veers off into collecting as a whole, discussing Darwin, a collector beyond our wildest imagination, and Alfred Russel Wallace, a British naturalist so obscure that the book Fadiman checked out of the university library hadn’t been disturbed from its shelf since 1949.
Then she is off to talk about literature, in particular, John Fowles’ novel The Collector, which she read at sixteen, enjoying the insider’s thrill when his character Frederick Clegg drugged the young Miranda with chloroform and carbon tet. About Nabokov, and his various short stories on the subject of collecting, she states empathically, “It is my view that if you have never netted a butterfly, you cannot truly understand Nabokov.” Eventually, she loops back around to the joys of identifying, classifying, and labeling found objects, the Dymo Labelmaker, and the Serendipity Museum of Nature (No Smoking, Please) she and her brother maintained in an extra room when they were growing up.
Many of her essays cover as much territory. “The Night Owl,” for instance, discusses passionately the circadian sleep patterns of herself and her husband, George Cole—opposites of course, which came as no surprise to me. In my experience, the expression “opposites attract” usually involves such mundane matters as sleep, temperature preference, and food tastes. Fadiman begins her essay describing the bedposts of her matrimonial bed, which an artist friend made for them: his, a lark and bird of mornings; hers, an owl, a night creature always. But she soon digresses with wit and quotes from famous nocturnal allies, both living and dead.
But perhaps my favorite essay, and it is difficult to choose only one, is “The Unfuzzy Lamb.” Fadiman acknowledges right away that she has a monumental crush on Charles Lamb, the model for her writing style.
In this wonderful essay she de-fuzzies the man, all his grim and dark history, his friendship with Coleridge, his love of his sister Mary, who stabbed their mother to death, and how Lamb sacrificed himself to care for her rather than see her committed to an asylum.
She describes a group of Lamb’s friends who gathered frequently to converse. He was earning his living as an accountant, as he did his whole adult life, but his other friends, Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, Godwin, de Quincey, she depicts as a troupe “rambling in the Lake Country, experimenting with mind-altering drugs, siring illegitimate children, and planning utopian communities in America.” She compares this with an imagined modern-day version of the group. “It’s as if the inner circle of Beats had consisted of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, and an accountant at H&R Block.”
Throughout the book Fadiman keeps up this wonderfully droll point of view while rummaging around in the subjects at hand. These include such topics as ice cream, for which she has a passion and defends it to its last drop of butterfat. In fact, she gave her brother a silver ice cream scoop as a present once. She also dedicated the book to him: Collector of Tiger Swallowtails, Emperor of Ice Cream. She includes his recipe (and the provisional warning: “I’m not sure you should try this at home”) that calls for the use of liquid nitrogen in order to lower the temperature for a creamier consistency. She also cites a 1997 British Medical Journal article noting the cause of ice cream headaches--something my husband was interested to know about. The essay also covers the ancient history of ice cream, dating back to the pharaohs (of course), and favorite deserts from her childhood.
In other essays she discusses such ordinary—or familiar—subjects as coffee and getting mail, moving with a similarly lighthearted yet careful methodology. The whole book invites the reader into the world of a truly inquisitive mind, allowing us to feel we know the writer in a most intimate way. We are wiser for our time spent in her company. She has an infectious sense of humor and a curiosity evidenced by her extensive research. Her bibliography is packed with books you might like to read, her own opinions, and a few notes on the essays themselves. Of particular interest to me was her post-note on the last, and most personal, essay in the book, “Under Water.”
Even though Anne Fadiman, by her own admission, is neither learned in Greek or Latin nor formal in her manner, and is certainly not a gentleman, she writes the kind of familiar essay her father would have been proud to read.
At Large and At Small is the perfect book for your bedside table. But, beware; it will cause you to have a monumental crush on Anne Fadiman for years to come.
Sarah Morgan is a past contributor to The Internet Review of Books. She loves stories; she has all of her life. She grew up in Oregon and now lives on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica where there is a world of stories at her doorstep. Some of them are about nature and some about human nature, but if they are interesting she writes about them. Her work has appeared in Real Travel Adventures, Escape From America, and Notre Dame magazine.
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