A Commonplace Book

Commonplace books are not so uncommon. Virginia Woolf kept one. So did Samuel Johnson. W. H. Auden published his, as did the poet J. D. McClatchy. E. M. Forster's was issued after his death. The novelist David Markson wrote terse and enveloping novels that resembled commonplace books; they were bird's nests of facts threaded with the author's own subtle interjections. For fans of the genre, many prize examples have come from lesser-known figures such as Geoffrey Madan and Samuel Rogers, both English, who issued commonplace books that are notably generous and witty and illuminating. These have become cult items. The literary critic Christopher Ricks said about Rogers that, although he may not have been a kind man, "he was very good at hearing what was said."

I am no special fan of most books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, The Yale Book of Quotations, and The New Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations, to name three dependable reference books, are invaluable, for sure, as repositories of literary and verbal history. (Countless other books of quotations aren't reliable at all, and the less said about quotation sites on the Internet the better.) But even the best contain a good deal of dead weight. They lean, sometimes necessarily, on canned and overused thought and, grievously, are skewed to the upbeat. So many of the lines they contain seem to vie to be stitched onto throw pillows or ladled, like soup, over the credulous soul. "Almost all poetry is a failure," Charles Bukowski contended, "because it sounds like somebody saying, Look, I have written a poem." The same is true of quotations and aphorisms. So many have a taxidermied air, as if they were self-consciously aimed at posterity.