Customer Reviews

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (Notable American Authors)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table is a demonstration of New England civility in the 1850s. I believe it went through more than 50 editions by the end of the nineteenth century, so it must have been very widely read at one time. The book is packed with amazing observations. Holmes takes the time to wonder why the sense of smell is the quickest path to memory. He rails against puns in a way that is better than punning. He points out human flaws and praises examples of good living. Trees come alive, through prosaic description and poetic flights. Would you like to go back to the 1850s and have a conversation with a Boston intellectual? Here's your chance. There are many old copies of this book sitting around, but it's nice that it's come back into print (again).... (it's also a quiet love story, by the way)

Two oral practices flourished in antebellum America: the lecture (or sermon) and the conversation. Lectures, such as Emerson's "The American Scholar" and sermons, such as the abolitionist sermons of Henry Ward Beecher, are well-known examples of this era. But it was also known as the Golden Age of Conversation, and its greatest practitioner was generally agreed to be Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior.

Holmes was considered an important American writer until the 1920s when he was excised from the American canon by the modernists. They depicted him as willfully provincial, and elitist. What those critics failed to understand was that the Autocrat is also a comic pose, and that Holmes is making sport of everyone, including elitists. Holmes' democratic view of conversation as an open, free-wheeling discourse where anyone could join the Autocrat at his table, as long as they enlivened the conversation, ran counter to the views of his more elitist friends in Boston's Saturday Club in Boston. Holmes loved to talk, and his love for talk made him a democrat, or perhaps a true republican.

His Autocrat is a many sided character: stern and foolish, admonitory and celebratory, a polymorph who will don any temporaty mask necessary to keep the conversation alive. Holmes' playful metaphorical imagination is also a revelation. His gift for translating complex ideas into homey metaphors, aphorisms, and similes is nothing short of miraculous. In the words of another seriously comic American whom I'm sure Holmes would have delighted in, the Autocrat "floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee."

The Autocrat of the Breakfast table begins "in media res," in the middle of a conversation, with the Autocrat attempting to set the rules for conversation at his table. They are generous rules, but even they are open to sabotage by his tablemates at the boarding house. He begins by banning "facts" from his table as impediments to conversation, (a condition that should prevail on today's too numerous current event talking head shows. But I, like the Autocrat, digress).

Here's how the Autocrat starts: "I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the many ways of classifying minds is under the head of arithmetical and algebraical intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is an extension of the following arithmetical formula: 2 + 2 = 4. Every philosophical proposition has the more general character of the expression a + b = c. We are mere operatives, empirics, and egoists, until we learn to think in letters instead of figures." "They all stared. There is a divinity student lately come among us to whom I commonly address remarks like this. "

In other words, as Gibian says in his marvelous OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES AND THE CULTURE OF CONVERSATION: [The Autocrat] only asks us to study his beliefs the way a pragmatist would study the doctrines of any religion: "I don't want you to believe anything I say; I only want you to to try to see what makes me believe it." How refreshing in this age of factoids and statisticoids recited with rancor and ideological certitude, to hear the Autocrat and his tablemates at the boarding house attempting to fashion a democracy through and by their conversation. Nowadays all we have are the unironic Autocrats, control freaks like John McLaughlin, Ted Koppel, Rush Limbaugh, and that guy on FOX whose name I have, pleasantly, forgotten.

Listening to the Autocrat you can almost hear American singing. It's not exactly Walt Whitman's America, but it's still America in the hopeful, experimental antebellum era, and thus a good antidote to the cold technocratic chatter and lukewarm public relations cant we are showered with in this hypermediated century.

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table is a demonstration of New England civility in the 1850s. I believe it went through more than 50 editions by the end of the nineteenth century, so it must have been very widely read at one time. The book is packed with amazing observations. Holmes takes the time to wonder why the sense of smell is the quickest path to memory. He rails against puns in a way that is better than punning. He points out human flaws and praises examples of good living. Trees come alive, through prosaic description and poetic flights. Would you like to go back to the 1850s and have a conversation with a Boston intellectual? Here's your chance. There are many old copies of this book sitting around, but it would be nice if it came back into print.... (it's also a quiet love story, by the way)

The imaginary scene is a boarding house breakfast. Conversation is dominated by a lively gent who's seen it all. He holds forth on women, school, philosophy, rowing, interrupted from time to time with verses such as the Deacon's Masterpiece. It's witty, poignant, and rightfully a classic.

This is a delightful little work. Comprising a series of articles published in the Atlantic Monthly in the 1850s, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table is a rambling but never disjointed first-person narrative of "conversations" between the narrator (the "Autocrat" from the title) and his fellow boarders in a Boston boarding house. I use the term "conversations" because the work is primarily monological, with the other boarders chiming in only infrequently to interrupt the Autocrat's musings and observations.

The Autocrat is learned and urbane. He speaks intelligently on a diverse array of topics, including the rules governing the art of conversation (including the "pun-question", which he dismisses as "verbicide"), horse racing, writing, deja vu, the superior ability of the olfactory sense in recalling old memories, old age or "senectitude", laughter, poetry, knowledge, the benefits of rowing, boxing, hats, trees and other topics. Interspersed throughout the work are collections of verse as well.

While not a page-turner, I found myself reasonably engaged throughout the work with two exceptions: (1) there are a couple of passages in French (I have no French), one of which is fairly long and (2) the budding and finally flowering romance at the end of the work I found to be rather dull reading and somewhat superfluous, given the nature of the work.

While reading this book I felt as though I had escaped from my overly-structured, hectic existence - and the collection of (often vulgar) characters that pass uninvited across the stage of my life - to become a part of the much simpler yet richer world of the Autocrat. Time slowed down. Reflection and conversation were the order of the day. I realized with regret that the deliberate reflection that nourishes a flow of ideas, and from which yet new ideas oft emerge, had at some point been demoted in my own life to the status of a luxury.

"The Autocrat" is convoluted but remarkable nevertheless. First published in 1858, it is still refreshing. Don't wince at the potential for the rigid corset-style of Victorianism. Holmes casts it aside and even surprises you with the typeface in one instance. His language is often refreshing and is usually easy to read. Whether or not it is original or not I cannot say, but I recognize some of Holmes's words as influencing later writers, like Irvin Cobb and H.L. Mencken, and I imagine he influenced many more.

Holmes writes charmingly. He is funny and philosophical. He also manages to transport the reader to an earlier Boston and New England. The only thing lacking is a plot.

Holmes was an alumnus of Philips Academy in Andover, MA, and the library there is named after him. I'm going out on a limb here, but I think it was his genius and not his munificence that was being commemorated.

PS: Do not confuse him with his son, Junior -- the famous justice of the Supreme Court.

Delightful, because his ideas are so modern and so all-encompassing - the man thought about everything! - and yet expressed in a form genial and classical, and as non-dogmatic as you can get. His tongue-in-cheek style is a charming context for such far-ranging thinking. A grand insight into into the mind of a real American ante-bellum intellectual.

But it is so endlessly rambling that I kept getting confused. Why divide it into 12 sections, when each section is indistinguishable from the others? If there is any theme or system to the material, I lost it in the intellectual underbrush. Also his style is rather turgid, even for the 1850s; I find it easy to read his contemporaries Dickens and Carroll, but I found myself having to go back from time to time to sort out Holmes' grammar.

If you feel at home in unstructured literature, you will find much to love in the Autocrat. If not, maybe not.

An interesting range of thoughtful opinions, imbedded in a look at American life in the 1850s, by the father of a future Supreme Court Associate Justice. Part of the charm of this book is in the fact that at that time horses had been the only means of human-assisted transportation for the last few thousand years (with the exception of the new-fangled railroad which was changing the world). Electronics were not even imagined. Automobiles were 50 years into the future.