The CD-ROM that works best under this sort of auditory misprision, though, is Compton’s Encyclopedia. As a beginner’s encyclopedia, played on a computer, it has its uses (offering black-and-white pictures of lumber mills, for instance), but as a found John Cage for headphones, as a multimedia dramatization of James Russell Lowell’s phrase about “the omniscience of superficial study,”4 it’s perfect. The first track is given over to the usual vagrant digital buzzing and swooshing. But in track two, the left and right channels split, and each carries a separate inventory of audio clips. In your right ear you hear an intelligent woman reading alphabetized words like abdominal cavity, adrenal, algae, brackish, bronchial tree, catastrophic, cephalothorax, conflicting, and contour feathers, while in your left, a Ted Baxtery voice booms out political clichés. (“Give me liberty or give me death!” “The British are coming!” “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes!”) The woman quietly continues with: massive collapse, minute food particles, and mucous membrane, while Roosevelt angrily declares war on “the Japanese empire.” You’ll hear potential energy, prolonged, protective coloration, pyroclastic rocks, receptors, rectangular grid, residues, rhythmic pulsing, savage, and serrated bristles, over Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Stoloniferous, structural defects, taxonomic order, and tentacles accompany Kennedy’s “Ask not” speech. Underground burrows, vulcanism, and voluntary muscle are superimposed over a moment from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. Water-dwelling species comes in over the bark of a dog, a mosquito whines over the Equal Rights Amendment. A third didactic man intones fingerlike projection over some hooting monkeys, and he enunciates encroaching and engorgement over the casual grunts of a pig. The experience is hypnotizing, draining, and not to be missed: it is like living through four years in a suburban high school in forty-five minutes.5
But even the antiphonal disROMtion of Compton’s audio files couldn’t distract me forever from the duties and temptations of high-speed eighteenth-century retrieval, and two days after my initial failure of nerve I found I was prepared to open my clone-tower’s drive once again and awaken Chadwyck-Healey’s Disk 2 from its dogmatic lumber. I performed a “Standard Search” across the entire disk, and immediately discovered something of value (to me): an additional lumber-couplet from Pope’s first version of The Dunciad, a version I had never read. In Dunciad I, Pope trains his metered hate on Lewis Theobald, the unfortunate critic and minor poet who doomed himself by venturing some acute criticisms of Pope’s edition of Shakespeare. Theobald sits surrounded by books in his study: “He roll’d his eyes that witness’d huge dismay,” Pope writes (and this happens to be a mock-epic echo of a line from Paradise Lost, as Pope tells us in a footnote — Theobald, like Milton’s Satan eyeing Hell, glances in misery over the gilded prison of his library)—
He roll’d his eyes that witness’d huge dismay,
Where yet unpawn’d, much learned lumber lay.
Notice the “Where yet unpawn’d” clause: probably Pope revised this couplet out of Dunciad II because he had second thoughts about pawning off his earlier and better use of learned lumber, in An Essay on Criticism, on this new placement. But to me the passage was of interest mainly because it proved, as none of the other concordanced lumber-quotations directly did, that Pope was (like Samuel Butler before him) consciously aware of the pawnbrokerly undermeaning of lumber.
For in English prose and poetry, lumber doesn’t mean what most Americans think it means (“felled timber”); rather it means, roughly, old household goods, slow-selling wares, stuff, or junk—junk of the sort you might find at a junkshop, or even, figuratively, at Yeats’s foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. The bookful blockhead’s head is not filled with fresh, sap-scented New England plywood, ready for postdoctoral carpentry, but rather with broken, sprung, pawed-over, and possibly pawned Old World trinkets and bric-a-brac. “Lumber, old stuffe” is the concise definition given by Robert Cawdrey, author of the first English dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall … of hard usuall English wordes (1604).
Only recently did we lose this meaning in the United States. When William Faulkner, in a class at the University of Virginia in 1957, described the writer “reaching into the lumber room” to find the plots and images he needs, he was referring to what he moments earlier had called his “junk box.”6 But by 1987, that old drossy sense of “lumber” was sufficiently dormant in American usage that Donald Duclos could write an interesting paper (published in The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter and listed in the MLA CD-ROM Index) entitled “A Plank in Faulkner’s ‘Lumber Room’: The Emperor Jones and Light in August.” The paper calls attention to some telling verbal similarities between Faulkner’s book and O’Neill’s play. “I suggest,” Duclos writes, “that that play became a significant plank in [Faulkner’s] lumber room of building materials.”
We shouldn’t be surprised that Duclos mistook Faulkner’s meaning. There has always been confusion over lumber-room in America — and in Mississippi, Faulkner’s state, the existence of a nineteenth-century Natchez firm called the R. F. Learned Lumber Company left matters especially ambivalent.7 Faulkner himself, being American, used lumber often enough in the familiar building-supply sense — for instance, a character pauses “among the mute soaring of the moon-blond lumber-stacks” in “Pantaloon in Black,” a pleasant surprise I found via volume 1 of Jack L. Capps’s 1977 concordance to Go Down, Moses, one of the series of concordances overseen by The Faulkner Concordance Advisory Board at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. H. L. Mencken, in The American Language, writes that “Lumber, in England, means articles left lying about and taking up needed room, and in this sense it survives in America in a few compounds, e.g., lumber room”; but even if the compound hadn’t survived in America when Mencken was writing, Faulkner could have found it easily in the junk box he reached into most often and most helpfully, Ulysses. Near the beginning of Joyce’s novel, Stephen Dedalus stands in front of his students thinking about storytelling and memory. (“For them too history was a tale like any other too often heard, their land a pawnshop”; Pyrrhus and Julius Caesar, being stories, “are not to be thought away”—“they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted.”) Stephen then dismisses his students from class:
Quickly they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and clamour of their boots and tongues.
On the next page, “Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom.” And then, on page 714, we find a “lumbershed with padlock for various inventoried implements.” You can collect these passages8 by reading Ulysses, of course, or, if you’ve already read it and can’t face reading it again, or if you don’t want to read it at all, you can arrive at them as I did, with the help of Miles L. Hanley’s Word Index to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1937), a manually typewritten volume that was the result of gluing Joyce’s words onto 220,000 cards9 and alphabetizing them into six wooden racks of post-office pigeonholes. (Theresa Fein, notes Hanley in his acknowledgments, is the person who did most of the actual work of typing, alphabetizing, proofreading, and verification — I hope Joyce wrote her a thank-you.)10 The Word Index’s page references don’t exactly match the pagination of the familiar Random House edition, but they are close enough that you can eventually spot what you’re looking for, and when you do, you feel (because you had to hunt a little harder than usual) that you’ve done some real scholarly work.