'Garner's Quotations' Review: Uncommon Knowledge

Writers and politicians have long been keen on hoarding oddments in this way, hoping to make them the accessories of their own eloquence. George Eliot called her collection a blotter, and the poet J.D. McClatchy described his as “a sort of ledger of envies and joys.” John Milton’s shows us his wide reading and political zeal, and Robert Burns’s reveals his mixture of whimsy and ambition. Thomas Jefferson chose to keep separate volumes for his literary gleanings and his legal ones. Woodrow Wilson made a point of transcribing morally charged sentences as a means of guarding against sloth and introspection.

In the 16th century, extracts stockpiled for future reference began to be known as “commonplaces.” A satire by John Marston, dating from 1598, contains a character mocked for having “made a commonplace book out of plays,” which he uses to embellish his everyday utterances until it feels as though he “speaks in print.” The name stuck, and the commonplace book flourished, especially in the 18th century. A medium for self-scrutiny and moralizing, it was also a parade ground for the imagination. The phenomenon is still with us, although it exists mostly in digital form—and those who insist on taking down their findings by hand tend to do so with a degree of antiquarian self-consciousness.

In the introduction to “Garner’s Quotations: A Modern Miscellany,” Dwight Garner explains that he started a commonplace book in the 1980s, when he was a high-school student. He has diligently maintained it for almost 40 years. Though the emphasis is on “scavenged wisdom from my life as a reader,” it includes lines from songs (Bob Dylan, Tom Waits) and from plays (David Mamet, Tom Stoppard), as well as inventive profanities, tiny parcels of advice, and the more flavorsome morsels of other people’s chatter—whatever “made me sit up in my seat” or “jolted me awake.” The result is “an aide-mémoire, a kind of external hard drive,” and Mr. Garner, now a book critic for the New York Times, here shares a small selection from it.
A commonplace book is not a neatly ordered dictionary of quotations. Mr. Garner keeps several such dictionaries to hand yet argues that “even the best contain a good deal of dead weight”—too many overused phrases, too many life-affirming nuggets that gum up the mind’s jaws. Rather than lifting readers’ spirits or performing the literary equivalent of taxidermy, he wants to tickle our taste buds. So there’s not a word here from such anthology stalwarts as George Bernard Shaw and Francis Bacon, or from overtly inspirational figures such as Gandhi and Kahlil Gibran. Instead Mr. Garner, bookish but with a liking for the earthy and the ebullient, favors James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Iris Murdoch and Norman Mailer, John Updike and Zadie Smith.

We are treated to a lot of aphorisms and clever aperçus, some instantly attractive and others worth chewing over: Toni Morrison’s “A dream is just a nightmare with lipstick”; Myla Goldberg’s “Nothing amplifies failure like the hug of a stranger”; Aravind Adiga’s “Revenge is the capitalism of the poor.” There are items that could have been lifted from the more upscale sort of gossip column, such as a detail from the rider provided by the singer Grace Jones, who when touring requests that two dozen oysters be kept on ice: “Grace does her own shucking.”

There are also declarations to make you spill your coffee: Henry Miller’s “Better a good venereal disease than a moribund peace and quiet” and Vladimir Nabokov’s assessment of Henry James—“that pale porpoise and his plush vulgarities.” A few entries surely belong in the “retweets are not endorsements” category: for instance, the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli’s assertion that “women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women” and Auberon Waugh’s claim that “it is impossible to be angry for very long with a man who wears a wig.”

“Garner’s Quotations” is ideal for dipping into, whether in the bathroom or when sitting more comfortably. It will be of use to speech writers, journalists on the lookout for catchy maxims and others seeking shortcuts to apparent erudition, as well as to book critics eager to use the word “giftable.” Perhaps with a view to keeping such marauders at bay, Mr. Garner has chosen not to break the text into themed sections. The absence of such divisions makes reading it feel like unfurling a giant scroll (or its modern counterpart, a fathomless blog). And while he has a nose for rare truffles, sometimes he alights on old chestnuts: Gore Vidal’s “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies” and Dorothy Parker’s “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

More often, though, one has the impression of listening in on previously undocumented conversations: Sylvia Plath and David Foster Wallace on wordiness, Ezra Pound and Umberto Eco on being edited, John Ruskin and Margaret Atwood on the Queen of Sheba. Mr. Garner’s juxtapositions, which are never casual, hint at a genealogy of sentiments. They also bear out a remark he cites from the philosopher Jean Baudrillard: “It is invariably oneself that one collects.” A commonplace book is an oblique form of autobiography. Here it doubles up as a literary manifesto—a celebration of direct and exacting voices, a rejection of the fuzzily adorable, and a recommendation of humor as one of the essential tools of both art and life.

—Mr. Hitchings is the author, most recently, of “The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters, or Dr. Johnson’s Guide to Life.”