We’ve looked and looked, but after all where are we?

Do we know any better where we are,

And how it stands between the night tonight

And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?

How different from the way it ever stood?

—Robert Frost, “The Star-Splitter”

The two of them spent a lot of time looking! But by the end of the poem, the speaker—presumably Brad’s neighbor—confesses:

I—and you, too, dear follower— have looked and looked and looked,  but where am I with my Alexander Gordon research! Do I know any more now that I did in 2013 when I identified him as the author of the Humourist essays?

Probably not, at least in terms of having discovered additional evidence to seal my already tight claim.

But I have found information that makes my knowledge of Alexander Gordon more rich and more robust.

Since last week, I have been looking at the two letters from “Chindonax Britanicus” (William Stukeley, antiquarian best known, perhaps, for his investigations of Stonehenge) to “Galgacus” (Alexander Gordon. Stukeley and Gordon were lifelong friends. And, indeed, it was Stukeley who, in his diary entry of May 28, 1758, credited  Alexander Gordon for a detailed account of the natural history of South Carolina that  had been read at the Royal Society that same day.  However, Stukeley was mistaken, as I discovered! The true author was the naturalist Alexander Garden, also of South Carolina. (See my A Correction to Alexander Gordon’s Canon, 256 Years after a Mistake Was Made!)

Be that as it may, the two letters that I have been looking at are intriguing to say the least. In the September 25, 1723, letter, Stukeley alludes to the fact that Gordon might have been on the “brink” of marriage:

Methinks I see the foundation of Chateaugordon a laying while Signior walks gravely among the workmen–measuring out the length of the gallery, disposing of the drawings, the basso relievos & the likes into the proper pannels.

Stukeley continues with:

Or perhaps his leading Lady spouse by the arm and drawing a ground line for a fountain, a shady walk, an alcove where he is to sit in a summer evening with Horace, Milton, Tasso & the like. I suppose there is to be a fine vista to some Grampian Mountain, Roman Camp, etc., & here the descendants of the Gordonian Race are to be depicted round the dining room like olive branchyes.

The above passages–short excerpts from the letter–are revealing because Stukeley knew Gordon’s interests: Italy, architecture, drawings, vistas, and writers such as Horace, Milton, and Tasso. These interests appear as well throughout The Humourist essays as well.

In the next letter to Gordon, dated November 30, 1723, Stukeley continues to talk about marriage, seemingly in an effort to dissuade Gordon from taking the leap, noting that marriage is not for everyone and that many who had “cast the dice” wished otherwise! Nonetheless, he says to Gordon:

May your spouse arise from the nuptial bed more lovely than the July sunbeams when they play upon the tops of the Caledonian mountains […]

Earlier in the letter, Stukeley also thanks Gordon for his drawings:

I commend you prodigiously for the pains you have taken in searching out & measuring & drawing such an immeasurable parcel of Antiquitys as you give me an account of.

Drawings of antiquities, as I am confident you will recall, play an important role in The Humourist essays.

And, even earlier in the letter, Stukeley makes a special-jewel comment:

Mr. Kirkel gives his service to you & wishes much he had your drawing of Raphael to make a print from.

While I knew that Gordon was an accomplished artist, I did not know until now about his drawing of Raphael. So that knowledge—allusion—may be helpful. I am reminded of a passage from The Humourist essay of December 24, 1753, in which he, too, speaks of Raphael:

If a sign-painter can imagine himself possessed of the finger of a Raphael, that his portraits are surprizing, his pencil bold and animating, and that his figures swell on the canvas and quicken into life, permit him to hug the blest idea, no one suffers for it, no one receives an injury;

While in the midst of looking at the letters, I ventured off into some more general research on Alexander Gordon. Remember: only in an ideal world does research move along smoothly and methodically from points A to B to C to D to Z!  In the real world, research—like writing—is recursive. We often find ourselves at what we believe to be the end of the task when we find ourselves circling back to an earlier point.

And I am glad that I circled back, trying to find out more about Alexander Gordon and William Stukeley. In doing so, I landed upon Iain Gordon Brown’s meticulously researched and well-documented article “Chyndonax to Galgacus: New Letters of William Stukeley to Alexander Gordon,” published in 1987 to commemorate the tercentenary of Stukeley’s birth. Brown includes the two letters that I have discussed briefly as well as a third one. His introduction to the letters is invaluable, especially for some new and detailed information about Alexander Gordon.

I knew—at least I think that I knew (and I may have mentioned it in an earlier post)—that Alexander Gordon had worked in a Custom House in Scotland. Brown’s article, however, provides Gordon’s own views of his “other” occupation. In a letter to his friend and benefactor Sir John Clerk, Gordon writes:

As to the Custome House, I confess if the question was putt to me sincerely, if these matteres sute exactly with my genious and taste, I could not so far hipocrese as not to confess that the keeping talies of Norwegian barrell skews on a bitt of stick or paper, and the retaining the nice number of hemp matts and Almagnia whistles in one’s head, is not the very noblest exercise that a rational creatour may be employd in these so precious hours. ‘Tis a sad thing not to have been born to few riggs … I am observant of Caesar’s due even to the methematicall division of pickled herring. The town is astonished to see one whom they thought un huomo di [Piazza] so far metamorphosed as all at once to drop into salmond barrels, matts of flax, ganging firkins, etc.

Who would have guessed? Alexander Gordon now joins the ranks of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, two other American writers who worked in a Custom House!

Therein lies one of the joys of research: sometimes—without even looking—we land on the unexpected!