A partner at the Houston law firm where my youngest son is working as an intern this summer has loaned him two nineteenth-century law books. Both were compiled by John G. Wells (1821-80) and were bestsellers in their day, long before the practice of law was fully professionalized:  Every Man His Own Lawyer, and Business Form Book: A Complete Guide in All Matters of Law, and Business Negotiations, for Every State in the Union (H.H. Bancroft & Co. of San Francisco, 1867).   Every Man His Own Lawyer; or, the Clerk and Magistrate’s Assistant. This is the “tenth edition, improved,” published by William Wilson of Poughkeepsie in 1844.   Both are the size of mass-market paperbacks and bound in leather, which is scuffed and worn. Both are in delicate condition. The front cover of the former has detached from the spine and the pages in both are foxed but legible. Wells writes in his “Introductory” to the former:   “This work, prepared some years ago, was received with great favor by the public, attaining a larger sale, it is believed, than any work of this kind ever published. Lapse of time has brought material changes in the statutes of many of the States; the war has not only altered the social conditions of some of them, but has introduced the Internal Revenue system, National Banks, modifications of the Tariff, [13th and 14th] amendments to the Constitution of the United States, emancipation of the slaves, and the General Bankrupt law.”   The book is organized by occupation and social role, making it user-friendly. Chapters are devoted to farmers, mechanics, discharged soldiers and sailors (two years after the Civil War), immigrants, and married men and women. Wells includes templates for such documents as “Order of Commissioners to lay out a Highway” and “Deed by a Sheriff of an Equity of Redemption sold at Auction.” The emphasis is not on law in the abstract but on the minutiae of legal documentation. The books are eminently practical, as useful as dictionaries, and are aimed not just at lawyers but at average American citizens. They are early examples of a well-known category of books today: “Self-Help.”   The autodidactic impulse among Americans was once very strong. People seemed to assume they could teach themselves almost anything – a trade or craft, science, engineering, medicine, the Western literary tradition. “Experts” were not automatically deferred to. One could, like Abraham Lincoln, attach himself as an apprentice to an experienced professional. Few Americans attended a college or university or even completed their secondary education.    Lincoln practiced law for twenty-three years before he was elected president. He may have consulted Wells’ guides. He never attended law school – not unusual for the mid-nineteenth century -- and was entirely self-taught. He handled cases ranging from debt to murder at the justice of the peace, county, circuit, appellate and federal levels, and kept an office in Springfield, Ill.   Consider that even in his own day, Lincoln was judged by some a hick, born in 1809 on the frontier in Hodgenville, Kentucky. Now we know he was educated and well-read by the standards of his day, and through strict application became one of the great American writers of prose. In 2007, Robert Bray published “What Abraham Lincoln Read—An Evaluative and Annotated List” in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. Bray’s research determined which books were read by Lincoln. Among others he confirmed were John Bunyan, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, William Cowper, Daniel Defoe, Euclid, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Gray, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pope and much of Shakespeare. In 2010, Bray published Reading with Lincoln (Southern Illinois University Press), in which he writes:   “From boyhood on, Lincoln’s habit of reading concentrated a naturally powerful mind; and reading provided models of voice and diction to one who had inborn talent as a storyteller and a near-flawless memory and therefore needed only the stimulus of literary greatness, and emulative practice, to emerge as a great writer himself.”   Bray emphasizes that Lincoln as an adult read “deeply rather than broadly.” In his own words, he went to school “by littles” and his reading was full of holes, but he read deliberately and what he read he remembered. He read like a writer – learning, testing, gleaning, absorbing, assimilating. Serious writers, when they read, are always weighing and assessing: “This works. This I can use. Forget that.”   Lincoln’s mind was deeply analytical, coupled with a gift for pithily articulating his thoughts – essential gifts for a successful lawyer and an embodiment of the democratic ideal. In his “Introductory,” Wells describes his guide as “a book that everybody can understand, and that will enable every man or woman to be his or her own lawyer.”

It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out of the ocean 35 trillion yesterdays ago, small and slippery, gills trembling with the shock of air, fins budding feet, limbs growing sinewy and furred, then unfurred, spine unfurling beneath the bone cave housing three pounds of pink flesh laced with one hundred trillion synapses that still sing with pleasure and awe when touched by the wildness of the world. Even as the merchants of silicon and code try to render us disembodied intellects caged behind screens, something in our… read article

Fragments, vol. 5

I’ve learned with time that my mind has periods of attentiveness followed by drifts into passive, relaxed states of consciousness. I’m awake but almost empty. I might be taking a shower or staring out the window at nothing. That’s when I occasionally find myself in an old song or childhood memory or, more mysteriously, inhabiting a character from fiction, taking on his values. When I become conscious of this channeling, it disappears leaving a faint, lingering impression, like the afterimages left by bright lights.  Recently I found myself in Austin King, the Illinois lawyer, father and put-upon husband at the center of William Maxwell’s 1948 novel, Time Will Darken It. It’s the opening scene. King is in his bedroom getting dressed for a party for relatives visiting from Mississippi. His wife, pregnant with their second child, is not speaking to him. She resents the party and the presence of outsiders.   I wasn’t recalling the words but the setting, emotional and physical, which I had abstracted from the text. I’ve read Maxwell’s novel three or four times, starting in the late seventies. I know it well. Unintentionally, I had projected myself into King because his emotional state was familiar – conflicted, guilty, wanting to satisfy contradictory wishes and please everyone. I didn’t have to go looking for it. I carry it as a latent memory.   There’s a semi-popular theory floating around out there that we read fiction to boost our empathy quotient. In short, we read to learn to be better human beings, to feel the pain of others. That’s silly but also kind of obnoxious. How self-centered. Willa Cather would have snorted. My flashing onto the bedroom of Austin and Martha King lasted seconds. I enjoyed the sensation but made no effort to hang on to it. It was a fairly primitive mental event, not freighted with philosophical baggage. A handful of other fiction writers have done this for me, all in my private pantheon – Chekhov, James, Proust, among others. Part of the reason I value them is that they leave these phantom scenes in my subconscious mind, through no effort of my own.   Time Will Darken It, along with So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), is Maxwell’s finest novel.  In 1955, Maxwell delivered a speech at Smith College, “The Writer as Illusionist” (collected in the 2024 volume of the same title, published by Godine). He likens a novelist to a dog who dreams of chasing a rabbit. He writes:   “The novelist’s rabbit is the truth—about life, about human character, about himself and therefore by extensionh, it is to be hoped, about other people. He is convinced that this is all knowable, can be described, can be recorded, by a person sufficiently dedicated to describing and recording, can be caught is a net of narration. . . . . But what, seriously, was accomplished by these writers [Maxwell has just mentioned Turgenev, Lawrence, Woolf and Forster] or can the abstract dummy novelist I have been describing hope to accomplish? Not life, of course; not the real thing; not children and roses; but only a facsimile that is called literature.”     The finest writers of fiction, those we treasure most highly, work simultaneously in two mediums – words and human beings. William Maxwell died twenty-five years ago today, on July 31, 2ooo, at age ninety-one.

And create an interspecies future that benefits humans and ecologies alike.