THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE
By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
One chilly morning in 1958, while we were waiting for the school bus, a more sophisticated boy than I made a passing reference to The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. I had never heard of it. In fact, I am not certain that he himself had ever read it, but he was smart and he certainly might have. The reason I remember the moment is because of the amusing and arresting title. Even then I knew slightly of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The fact that the father of this famous man had himself written a notable book somehow seemed unusual; my father never wrote a book.
I estimate that it was about 15 years later that during a Saturday drive through upstate New York I stopped at a rural used book and furniture store. And there it was, smallish, partially leather-bound, complemented by marbled paper, and offered for sale at a price even I could afford[1]. So I bought it. Today, more than 50 years after that, having always respectfully displayed the purchase in my living quarters wherever I lived, I have finally realized that I had never actually read The Autocrat. And now I have.
My expectations were limited. I anticipated a novel, I think, somewhat along the lines of Life With Father. In fact, the book is not at all a novel, but instead what appears to have been a series of articles published by Holmes during the mid-19th century in the Atlantic magazine[2]. What may be fictional about the work in general would appear its architecture, by which I mean that it is presented as the recollections of the narrator, the “Autocrat,” of how he dominated the morning meals in a boarding house of his residence with his reflections on a variety of subjects, his audience being a group of younger co-tenants. But it is easy to assume that the author Holmes and the Autocrat are alter egos.
Holmes is not a philosopher, and neither is he a great author. He knew that of himself and did not aim higher. But to read him is also to know that he was a great observer, a great wit, and a clever writer -- and he obviously also knew that about himself. For a man of mettle, this would surely have left him with both a sense of resigned impotence and melancholy, but also energized by a stubborn resolve not to be forgotten altogether. He had no intention that his talents should go unnoted in what he called “The Solemn Archives of Oblivion’s Uncatalogued Library.” I fancy The Autocrat and the Atlantic Magazine were the natural result of those elements. For what it is worth, posterity is the beneficiary, as he must have intended.
Delivery. Introduced by a few pages titled “The Autocrat’s Autobiography,” the book is then divided into a dozen or so untitled chapters. In fact, the topics, which are wide ranging, are never even identified by anything so plebeian as a subheading. As readers, we simply encounter a series of supposedly verbatim pronouncements by the Autocrat which he has made at table over months or maybe years to his captive audience. When one subject is exhausted, he simply paragraphs and begins anew with nothing more than an extended dash.
His most common device is to call the attention of his auditors to unnoticed or insignificant details of life with wit and some brevity. His technique is to quote himself and, where modesty requires it, recite some of the varied reactions of his co-tenants[3]. As an exemplar, in one passage toward the beginning he cautions against revealing any intimate private feeling to one’s own family members. More than any stranger, one who knows you well “can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul.”
Developing a Theme. The Autocrat’s observations are really opinions that he has long held, neatly repackaged as meditations, recollections, asides[4], rejoinders, near epigrams, comments on recent events. etc. Here is an example from the opening pages:
“Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine glass spoil a draught of fair water.”
More than a few times, his asides sound almost like Dr. Johnson, though with a practical edge to it:
“A thoroughly popular lecture ought to have nothing in it which five hundred people cannot all take in a flash, just as it is uttered. . . . A lecture should be something which all can understand, about something which interests everybody.”
Such durable observations, particularly when fortified by a witty diminuendo, were alone sufficient to keep me reading.
And yet there was also another feature in The Autocrat, not explicitly intended by the author, which periodically evoked in me a vague nostalgia. When I was young, my unreflecting reaction to tales of the past – even serious historical facts – was to regard them as faintly hypothetical and immaterial to the life I was living. Over time, of course, realities have lodged themselves even as my imagination has also quickened. And so, even passing references in the book to unexceptional details of the 19th century -- boarding houses, muddy streets, school mistresses, churchyard cemeteries, the fruitless vigil for The Wasp, etc. – were pleasantly engaging even when inserted as only incidental background.
During a reflection on the creation of poetry, the Autocrat describes an old man at the table who abruptly interrupts him and begins in a clear voice to recite a poem from his own youth. Everyone is struck into silence. And then the Autocrat turns to us, the reader: “Don’t ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand trembles! If they ever were there, they are there still.”
And this introduces another topic. In Chapter VII, he offers a kind, witty, and wistful -- but devastating -- passage of a dozen pages about how to recognize and approach old age. The Autocrat has recalled the “professor’s” lengthy reminiscence of his own wry recollections of how he has been forced by the innocent remarks and behavior of others to confront the inevitable. We are then given an imagined dialogue between the professor and “Old Age” itself on the same unavoidable topic. The Autocrat then takes up the subject, attenuating Shakespeare’s seven acts into 15. Then a passing aside: “Nature gets us out of youth into manhood, as sailors are hurried on board vessels – in a state of intoxication.” Naturally we then must consider “De Senectude,” presented in the professor’s modern English-language interpretation. There is a concluding uncredited glance at Justice Shallow’s “bona robas.” Then in Chapter IX, he returns to the wider topic. Originally, he says, he had been writing to an older audience. Now his remarks are for the young.
To Make a Book. It is not worth investigating, but it occurred to me that some time after the initial articles had evoked favorable public response, someone – probably Holmes himself -- decided that a single collection might be an attractive next step. Perhaps this would explain why the pieces begin to be a bit lengthier and why the rudiments of a narrative begin to emerge.
His Audience/ His Readership. We quickly derive that the others at the Autocrat’s breakfast table – young pertinacious John, the school mistress, a divinity student, the poor relation, the professor[5], etc. -- largely play no role other than as occasional interlocutor or as a vehicle used by the Autocrat to move the conversation in the way he chooses. His autocracy is mostly benign – first, simply because he has decided to present himself as such in his title[6], second because he does consider his observations as noteworthy, and third because his breakfast audience is for the most part younger than he, admiring, and deferential. It is not hard to imagine their later amused conversations among themselves, not only about their beloved autocrat’s idiosyncrasies, but also revisiting his bracing views of the world.
Ending The Book. Once the decision had been made to combine the Autocrat’s random observations into a single volume for separate sale, a decision must have been made that commerce would require more than an abrupt ending. Whatever the reason, toward the end we are gradually introduced to something that eventually develops into that narrative I just mentioned as the Autocrat decides to share with the other boarders a bit more of his personal history. Once a lengthy passage on the trees of New England has been exhausted[7], he asks the school mistress, “Will you walk out and look at those elms with me after breakfast?” (Here appears one of his sub-rosa brackets in which he describes both how she agreed and also how the “old gentleman” at the table took it in.)
We have now left the breakfast table. The following eight pages detail the various subjects which their conversation touched on as they walked. They pass the grave of a young man, killed 100 years earlier in a love duel. Then they contemplate a recently abandoned old house which the Autocrat uses as a metaphor to dilate on the likeness between houses and men’s souls, as aided by his recollections of earlier musings by “the professor.” (The text does not suggest it, but it is hard not to imagine the patient silence of the girl walking all this time with such a loquacious older man.) Indeed, the writer then catches himself and assures his readers that he had inserted what we have just read for their pleasure alone. Instead, he goes on, he acknowledges that he did converse with the school mistress – “a very interesting young woman” – but that as to their specific conversation, readers should mind their own business.
This is immediately followed by a passage entitled “Extract from My Private Journal -- To be Burned Unread.” I hardly need pause here to point out that it was obviously not burned and was in fact published. So here we have one of the more obvious – but ingenuous – dissimulations in the entire Autocrat. It begins with a confession:
“I am afraid I have been a fool; for I have told as much of myself to this young person as if she were of that ripe and discreet age which invites confidence and expansive utterance. . . . Yet what is this which has been shaping itself in my soul? Is it a thought? -- is it a dream? – is it a passion? -- Then I know what comes next. . .” [His thoughts then immediately jump to a mental asylum which he encountered in his youth, and they in turn then take him to Vathek’s Hall of Eblis of mummies lifting their hands revealing not their hearts but ashes.] “No, I must not think of such an ending! Dying would be a much more gentlemanly way of meeting the difficulty.”
In the next two chapters the school mistress is not mentioned. Perhaps we have been misdirected. And yet, after this noticeable absence, she appears again when the Autocrat recalls some spunk in her soft-voiced personality. She has confided that she once declined an opportunity to see the Alps – which she would love to see -- because she had rather be anything than be a governess to a rich family. In the next paragraph the Autocrat’s own memory of the Alps brings a mental picture to him of Mont Blanc:
“Figures in the foreground; two of them standing apart; one of them a gentleman of – oh – ah – yes! the other a lady in a white cashmere leaning on his shoulder.”
The book closes sweetly when this unnamed girl later acknowledges that she would be pleased to take the “long path” in their walk. An ending far more satisfying than simply clearing the breakfast table.
[1] Its first owner was probably Mary Lee Hall whose name is written on the interior flyleaf. May God bless her. Today the interior pages have become perilously brittle.
[2] Holmes may even have even been a founder of the Atlantic, which would be a reliable way of getting himself published.
[3] I.e. occasional interjections (always bracketed in the text) advancing the topic at hand – and breaking up what might become a tedious lecture. As the book progresses, these little scenes are enlarged somewhat.
[4] He specifically informs his readers that the portions of his text which he puts in brackets – and they are numerous – were never delivered orally to his fellow boarders. I have taken this as a gesture at verisimilitude.
[5] Among these, the “professor” recurs most frequently, sometimes playing the part of alter ego and elsewhere serving as at least an exemplar to draw out the Autocrat’s ensuing ruminations. Then later, the school mistress takes on an even more active role.
[6] The “autocrat” conceit somehow insulates Holmes himself as author from overweening pretention as the book progresses. With little use of the personal pronoun, the Autocrat’s pronouncements sound imperial without being self-congratulatory.
[7] The Autocrat betrays a particular love for the trees of New England, specifically oaks, elms, and chestnuts. He devotes many pages to describing the beauty, size, and even history and location of distinct samples, several of which have been given names by local residents. I must say that I share this attachment which now strikes me as even more poignant given the virtual eradication by blight of chestnuts and, more painful, the loss of the magnificent elms which were so characteristic of the Cornell campus of my youth.
