Something over two years ago, my better half found The Works of Charles Lamb: Volume II on a shelf of a holiday market vendor who primarily sold old prints and maps, but kept a few old books on the shelves, mainly as decoration. I’m always drawn to them and have a couple from that year.

It took me over year before I really dived deeply into this collection, inspired by the way his name keeps coming up and a realization that he really was an important man of letters in the first half of the nineteenth century, but since beginning, it’s been something I’ve regularly picked up and read and re-read sections.

This book does not contain his essays nor poetry nor his renditions of Shakespeare’s plays as stories (something he worked on with his sister). These are his letters.

The first section is heartbreaking. He is a young man, but responsible for an aging and clearly senile father (probably suffering from dementia) on a meager income from a job as a clerk. His sister, overwhelmed, it seems, by the burden of caring for her father and a difficult, invalid mother, suddenly loses it. She kills her mother with a knife and injures her father and spends a good deal of the next couple of years in and out of asylums and the homes of informal caretakers.

His letters to friends, including his close friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, are filled with heartbreak. He tries to pay for this sister’s care and cannot even afford his beloved books. He writes almost fawningly to Coleridge (and writes, less often, to Wordsworth; to Coleridge he writes as friend, but to Wordsworth, at this juncture, more as a fan).

It is such a relief to find his situation improving as he becomes, by middle age, a respected part of England’s literary establishment and a sort of tastemaker. He wrote to Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Coleridge, and others as a fellow and more or less equal literary man. He is able to visit friends and go on small trips and afford his books and magazine subscriptions. This was a time of great proliferation of journals and reviews and Lamb was a frequent contributor to them, writing satires, parodies, reviews, and essays.

Oddly, I liked his earlier letters better. They were filled with more feeling, whereas the latter, while of greater interest insofar as they are a window into the literary life of London at the time, are less deeply felt and more lighthearted. Perhaps it is the deeply feltedness of youth – the long, emotional letters to good friends and the desire for connection (and with connection, identity).

Do the French have a concept of ‘the Great French Novel?’ Or other countries – ‘the Great Canadian Novel,’ ‘the Great Chilean Novel,’ ‘the Great Russian Novel?’

Of those, I can imagine the Russians having such a concept, mainly because of figures like Dostoyevsky, Pasternak and especially Tolstoy – Tolstoy being a sort of towering figure of seeming universality. I say ‘seeming’ because I see things from my own, limited perspective and from the vantage point of being a white, heterosexual, western male (none of which are bad things, but could easily have something to do with seeing three white, heterosexual males who are part of a generally Western culture [not something  universally applicable to all of Russian culture] as the candidates for the role). Also, with Russia, poetry plays a larger role in literature than America. Pasternak only wrote one novel, but reams of amazing poetry. And Pushkin is such a massive cultural figure in Russia. And Yevtushenko (who I once met) is someone who aspires to the role of being the equivalent figure (and poems like Zima Junction and especially Babi Yar aspire to a status similar to ‘the Great Russian Novel’).

Adding poetry, what would it mean to add the possible contenders for ‘the Great American Novel’ poems like Langston Hughes’ Harlem or Ginsberg’s Howl? One, a poet of color and the other a gay poet, so getting beyond the straight white thing (though not beyond the ‘male’ thing). But really, the only contender among poems would be by declaring (not without justification) Whitman’s Leaves of Grass a single, book length work.

Which hits on part of the image of the ‘the Great American Novel.’ It’s got to be big, or at least it can’t be short. The Great Gatsby is barely long enough, really. And it’s got to cover something that we see as unique to ourselves and our American identity. And the candidates tend to be white, male narratives like Huckleberry Finn or maybe On the Road.

Do more recent novels like Pynchon’s V or Delillo’s Underworld deserve inclusion (Delillo was certainly aiming for something like that)?

And where am I going with all this? I think I’ve forgotten. Something about concepts of American exceptionalism in views about a certain kind (uniquely American?) of national literature.

Thoughts?