Today, the terms spittoon and cuspidor are largely interchangeable, spittoon being the more usual. In this 1893 Handlan Company catalog, cuspidor referred to the model having a bowl-shaped base, a pinched neck, and a funnel-shaped opening.

Great Expectorations

by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

No one entering the sacrosanct precincts of a grand old library can fail to notice the stale must, the fetid clamminess, the creeping damp that clings to the walls like a school of famished limpets. Yet even the most oafish clod, the most churlish bumpkin has the sensitivity to detect in this moldering mire of sodden decomposition a certain air of venerable refinement, an undeniable aura of distinction, a lustrous patina of unvanquished high purpose.

For it is a curious fact that the mildew and moisture that afflict the vetust, somber-hued volumes, in their dank and stately resting places of book vault, locker, dungeon and crypt, and the acrid mephitis which emanates from the sticky, flyblown spines of these aggregated tomes and which infects the atmosphere with a pervasive stench, comprise nothing less than the collective residue of the Golden Age of Literary Criticism.

The glacial attritions of time have yet to efface altogether the treasured holdings of the classical athenaeums. The world’s book hoards have yet escaped being routinely ravaged by worms and ransacked by bats. The wave of general atrophy that has engulfed the repositories of the printed page has yet to reduce them to a habitation for owls. But the rancid taint of putrefaction perfumes their hallowed corridors with the scent of rotting orchids—the reeking signature of their forgotten heritage.

This sickly sweet sogginess, this elegant fustiness of decay is an artifact of the era of Samuel Johnson and harks back to the day when a serious bibliophile devoured books by the bushel basket. Because the corpulent lexicographer had a slight stutter and sprayed spittle when he spoke, acolytes of the great man—other jolly, rotund jelly bellies of the throw-the-lamb-shank-over your-shoulder type—the gourmands of literature—adopted these affectations in the spirit of emulation and, by the time of Ruskin and Pater, well-lubricated speech impediments were à la mode.

Johnson, the Apostle of Ague, was a drama critic and something of a Grub Street hack and, like all those of his breed, was constantly confronted by deadlines. His was something of a nervous disposition and, between being flustered by merciless time constraints and a natural penchant for barely contained hysteria, the far-famed literary lion found himself continually at pains to keep from coughing, sniffing and spitting as he went about his daily tasks. Sheaves of parchment and gallons of goose quill-raddled writing tincture, quickly converted into pearls of learned critical analysis, flew from his desktop in sheet after sepia, sweat and spittle-stained sheet as the mighty critic blustered, bloviated, barked and spat his way through the grueling workaday round.

Johnson’s entourage of fawning admirers, ever-anxious to curry favor with their master, to hang on his every word and ape his every breath, soon took to imitating his eccentric mannerisms, including the seemingly involuntary act of spitting promiscuously in a fashion redolent of the spray shot from the nozzles of the fountains at the Tivoli Gardens. Necessity is the mother of invention and, because the natural expansiveness of discourse instinctive in most critics and reviewers was far too impractical for the purposes of a daily newspaper, brevity became the order of the day. Johnson led the charge by spearheading a new, concise approach to reviewing consisting of a pithy, almost telegraphic style. His confreres eagerly and unquestioningly followed suit, ever loyal and ever ready to fall into ranks behind their infallible leader. In no time, notices consisting of a few terse utterances abruptly punctuated by a hosanna, a hallelujah, or other monosyllabic particle of praise or, conversely, by a string of equally attenuated epithets, curses, and barbs, all accentuated by a frenzied effervescence of phlegm, became the prevailing mode for critical expression. Even the messenger boys from the Fleet Street boiler rooms got into the spirit of things and telegraphed their communiqués with a few concise directives capped by an exuberant spritz of saliva.

Johnson’s orbit of personal toadies expanded its ripples from his original stone. Junior criticasters, neophyte reviewers, aspiring arbiters and pundits fourth-class all got in the swim and soon his entire circle of sycophants could be heard augmenting their abbreviated sanctions and truncated disparagements with emphatic expulsions of phlegm. Long-winded critics, whose effusions ran to reams of foolscap and buckets of ink, were peremptorily deemed obsolete and their turgid expositions indicative of impoverished imagination. Critics who did not spew geysers of full-bodied, industrial strength saliva during the acts of reading and writing were dismissed as antiquated fuddy-duddies, addle-pated nincompoops and worse.

These were the curious circumstances which led to the formation of the Phlegmatic School of criticism.

Despite allegations of oversimplification, the terse pronouncements of the Phlegmatics could make or break reputations and a favorable notice from their camp catapulted many a “coming fellow” into heady new status as the cock of the walk and the talk of the town. Some also found it useful, in attracting the ladies, to affect a touch of liver disease, with its characteristic jaundiced pallor—a look which Byron would later exploit with his notorious diet of water and soda crackers.

Quiller-Couch, Saintsbury

Now only a footnote to history, the Phlegmatics were once a dominant cultural force, as the so-called foxing and flyspecks that freckle the margins of old books will readily attest. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, George Saintsbury, John Drinkwater, Lascelles Abercrombie all numbered among their ranks; their Gallic cousins Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Ernest Renan, and Hippolyte Taine trod hotly on their heels. Iron oxide-dusted vintage photographs show their waistcoats damp with drool.

Saint-Beuve, Renan

On a bad day, when his gout was flaring, or when he was in his cups, Dr. Johnson was known to exhibit a mean streak. His invective grew vituperative and it was said that he spat venom and vitriol, and that the drinking vessel resting inconspicuously at his elbow was not a tankard of ale but a beaker of bile. During binge or bender, he would fly into a rage at the slightest provocation and, when his tirade had subsided, his temper’s barometer had normalized, and the winds of rage had dropped from gale force to sporadic gusts, it took a squadron of swabbies to mop up the aftermath of the swath cut by the rheumy hurricane unleashed by his fury; a hurricane which sent onlookers ducking under tables, opening parasols, and tying on bibs, and which left in its wake a mound of disheveled books whose pages were befouled by yellowish water spots and discolored by dried spittle. His disciples were a more genteel lot and, although they could be imperious critics, were given to a greater portion of levity and mirth. Their raucous laughter combined with vociferous spitting and obstreperous ringing of hand bells used to summon servants, made for more racket than a carnival midway shooting gallery on a Saturday night! These alarming conditions eventually led to the code of silence enforced in libraries to this day.

Indeed, several decades after Johnson’s death, the Phlegmatics still held sway. The formal salon and the reading lounge had supplanted the tavern as the gathering place of choice for literati and the passage of three-quarters of a century had seen the arrival of a host of new amenities and practical conveniences including the introduction of the gleaming brass cuspidor or spittoon, a glistening, campaniform or hourglass-shaped amphora which quickly became a ubiquitous sight at saloons and libraries everywhere and whose hollow, metallic sides rang like a bell’s when struck with an artfully aimed projectile.

Picture the scene: drooling dotards slumbering in their club chairs; officious maitres d’hotel, anxious valets and bumbling busboys at the ready with sterling silver crumbers, monogrammed napkins and horn-handled whisk brooms; spittoon attendants bustle to and fro and smartly frocked referees, perched atop their catbird seats, adjust their yellow kid gloves, whistles at the ready. Like vultures hunched over a rancid heap of carrion, like hyenas slavering over a wildebeest brisket, the implacable critics prepare for the immersion. Oiling their throats with atomizers and anti-astringent lozenges, the learned arbiters methodically pontificate through a preliminary round of ahas and ahems preparatory to the first, formal pass. Then the gushing encomia and the venting of spleen begin in earnest and assume ever-mounting proportions until the furniture rocks on its footings and the atmosphere reverberates with the angry airbursts like artillery practice for the bombardment of Fort Henry or for a frontal assault at the Stalemate of the Somme.

It starts with a phthisic, half-smothered cough—the death rale of a prehistoric ground sloth—then rapidly graduates to a cacophony of laryngeal strife. A tremolo of the tonsils, a belligerent ratcheting in the throat, a huskily enunciated harrumph or pshaw, then a spastic explosion, as sympathetic as the growl of a saber tooth tiger, fragments into a melee of spontaneous jubilations, summary commendations, peremptory rejections and abrupt dismissals. The spittoons resound in a frothy chorus: Pling! Plang! Pattoo…eeee! Splish! Splash! Tweeng! Twang! Splat! Phlong…g…g…g…g…g!

This virile splurge of vital juices, this orgiastic outpouring of untethered phlegm could signify a reputation ruined or a career dashed by a single jet of an eminent critic’s stringy drivel. Contrarily, a name might be made, a career assured by the nasal toot of an over-excited colleague, complacently immersed in an engrossing book, with a mucilaginous gob of slobber dribbling down his chin.

Every grunt, every groan, every shout of joy uttered by the Phlegmatics, as they came to be known, was an event and cause for contemplation. The edicts and pronouncements born of these delirious spitting sessions, whether flattering or hostile, were carefully logged and tabulated. Notices became a sort of liquid shorthand, a splutter-fraught stenography telegraphed first in a code of ohos! and ahas!, ughs! and ouches! then finally clipped and pared to its essentials in snottiness. And, for all its leanness and immediacy, this lexicon of the loogie afforded a remarkably full register of notes, chords, nuances and subtleties of expression.

In point of fact, the reductionist approach to literary criticism not only effectively eliminated the oppressively turgid, treatise-length critiques of the Restoration period and of Dr. Johnson’s immediate predecessors, but took matters to their logical conclusion by condensing even the most picayune paean or snippet-sized squib, the most miniscule encomium or pismire-proportioned drubbing, into an exuberant spritz of approving saliva or a disdainful expulsion of damning phlegm.

The intellectual jurisdiction of the Phlegmatic School wove itself outward in an ever-widening web, and many impressionable minds were snared in its skeins. By the salad days of the aforementioned Messrs. Pater and Ruskin, themselves both confirmed Cuspidorians, as the Phlegmatists came to be called in certain quarters, the spitting mania was getting out of hand and attracted an inordinate amount of attention in the press. A wit at The Pettifogger dubbed the spitters “crooners” and jibed that for every citizen who openly embraced phlegmatic doctrine, there were twenty “secret spitters” hiding in the grass. Continuing the colubrine analogy, he claimed that those of this persuasion started by hissing like garter snakes and ended by spitting like cobras. Many became the butt of jokes and were even subjected to incivilities, but the tyranny of the spitting compulsion was insuperable and librarians who vainly tried to rein in Phlegmatism’s excesses found that it was like trying to mollycoddle a manta ray.

Before Joseph Lister sanitized the planet, wrapped the world in a swaddling of sterility, and ushered in the Age of Antisepsis, enforcement of library hygiene was less than stringent. Books were culled, critiqued, discarded, and re-shelved with all the care an opportunistic tribe of scavengers would accord a rubbish heap previously ransacked by Laestrygonians. Everywhere among the remnants of the present day, peppering the pages of a vast, protean Pantibiblia, is the evidence of an unrestrained bacchanal of spit-spraying: piebald specks and mottled flecks of finely aged phlegm. It is a cartography defying decipherment, a crazy maze of miniature maps, the complexities of whose contours would stump Magellan and stymie Anaximander.

For a hundred years Phlegmatism wound its snail-like way, leaving its trail of slime on books bequeathed to posterity. What passions, what counter-passions, consternations and confoundments its tracks and traces bespeak! How many rhubarbs in the reading room, how many outbursts of laudation and condemnation, how many battles royal of dissenting and conflicting opinions do its smears and streaks denote?

Municipal libraries of the snot-stained century in question were flush with period amenities: flamboyant cast iron reservoirs luxuriant with potent ptyalogogues; ink wells percolating with high-grade expectorants; vials and ampoules of fast-acting salivary stimulants; vitamin-enriched oral moisturizers in ostentatious platinum dispensers. In contradistinction to the rule of silence which prevails today, assisted by riffles and baffles of sound-deadening insulation, the better book repositories of the Golden Era were fitted with resonators and amplifiers which fed the general insurrection.

Imagine it all: the critics oil their pipes for a second round. A pinch of snuff or stinkweed is used as a primer to the salivary glands and, before long, a free-for-all ensues. A blast of shrill liquids splatters everywhere, besmirching walls, ceilings, and floors with morsels of ickiness. The donnybrook broadens, and a no-holds-barred melee of glandular secretions describes chaotic arcs of aerial dissemination; constellations of oral and nasal mulch-bits glitter overhead, and nothing escapes contamination. Thistles and thorns of critical discourse bristle throughout the arena, then the pouting and petulant palaver sink again into momentary quiescence. It is the hush before the hubbub. Once again, voices stentoriously expatiate about this and that; a mélange of mirrors and metaphors circles in the air; then the critical claptrap is unceremoniously cut; hoarse, half-hesitant clearings of the throat begin to be heard; sniffles and snuffling yield to husky, falsetto mutterings; strangled, gargling sounds and other ill-modulated sonorities consolidate into a multitudinous purr; then an unruly confabulation of wailing and warbling coalesces into a far-ringing trumpeting of strident, soul-subduing detonations. A fracas of glutinous muck lobs skyward. A greasy gel peppers the heavens, and a panspermia of precipitates is hurled in all directions. Every exposed surface is begrimed by all manner of unsavory unction. A commotion among the vocal cords, a corruption in the gullet, a series of raspy hawkings, an occasional cachectic cough, a random, pre-ejectile snarl precede a generalized, tussive uproar. The bosh and banter die down, the prattle and twaddle subside. All incidental music gives way to a reprise of act one, whose players make their entrance with renewed fury. With an air of disdain worthy of a Chinese empress, one well-fed critic, an archipelago of glistening globules dribbling from his lips, prepares to erupt with an emphatic expulsion of sputum. His heartfelt enthusiasm infects his fellows, and a vigorous bout of incisive spitting follows as cued. Discharge after violent discharge of slimy mucus is let fly, in a geyser of raw, undiluted power. A flurry of phlegmy globules, a hailstorm of mucoid droplets, a squall of sticky slobber rains indiscriminately on people, places and things.

Feuds develop and opposing factions duel with an intensity born of rank despair. Magniloquent in their contempt, they berate, rebuke, recriminate, revile. The gravel-voiced belligerants conspue one another at every opportunity, sanctioning their draconian decisions with emphatic streams of rheum.

In the heat of the moment, they have lost their reason along with all decorum and self-control. Like clowns in a pie fight they blob one another in a frenzy of desperation. Hissing and spitting like alleycats, the skirmishers take no prisoners. Disgorging a slimy strand of varicolored ejectamenta, a sullen, patrician arbiter offers an open challenge. He is answered immediately by a volley of spittle, which drizzles his bald head with a soilure of angry serum. Spewing, spraying, flinging, heaving, squirting, gushing, splashing, drenching, a spate of juicy blobs of drivel and semi-coagulated clumps of smut rains down in an overarching crescendo.

"How To," by Cara Barer

There is Faust festooned by a frosting of fossilized phlegm; Cristabel encrusted with a diadem of dried spittle; Ivanhoe embossed by a splutter of dappled froth; Sonnets from the Portuguese scumbled with a slather of viscid goo; A Pilgrim’s Progress raddled with phosphorescent scum; The Decameron christened with a shower of slaver; Germinal muddied by a splurge of yellowed foam; Morte d’Artur blemished by a deluge of boogers; Mysteries of Paris speckled by a rash of vintage smudges and rancid condensation; Canterbury Tales splashed with a sprinkle of curdled goop; Ovid’s Metamorphoses smeared with a dollop of desiccated sputum; The Anatomy of Melancholy coated by a spatter of brownish-green sap; The Satyricon baptized by a splash of faintly blanched broth bordered by a rugose ring of glaucous maculae.

When the spouting is finished, the desolation resembles a debris field left in the wake of a winter typhoon…

Crews of sanitation specialists and cadres of janitorial attendants were charged with cleaning up the mess. Like umpires at a scrimmage in a slaughterhouse, they went about in their immaculate uniforms, scrutinizing the destruction, sizing up the damages, and making mental maps of the innumerable stagnant puddles of mucoid glop. In dozens of locations stood the sputum cups and cuspidors. Scattered haphazardly, they ranged in character from elaborate, jewel-encrusted urns to simple wooden buckets. At the end of the day, even the gold-plated krater presented by the Society of Drama Critics or the extravagantly filigreed, chryselephantine ewer awarded by the Ladies Literary Auxiliary were merely gleaming receptacles teeming with septicity. Sinks and drains were routinely clogged as the corps of Sisyphean hygienists emptied vat after sloshing vat. Lugging slop pails brimming with gall, the mutely bustling menials had no place to pour their contents but in the lavatory commodes and urinals, and the plumbing of these appliances was quickly fouled by the overload. Among the contestants vying for critical supremacy, bullseyes were a rarity and the result was pandemonium. The referees, with their phlegm-clogged whistles, threw in the towel without a fight. Then the stewards and the wait staff resumed their stubborn pantomime, manning a bucket brigade so busy it would make a dervish dizzy.

Thus it was that spitting was elevated to the status of an art form. Like the Romans, who engaged in belching at table to express satisfaction with a dining experience and a sense of general well-being and contentment, Phlegmatics and their adherents indulged in public acts of expectoration. So popular did the practice become that fencing masters moonlighted by giving instruction in how to direct a stream of spittle and strike a moving target, and in how to purse the lips and sculpt the tongue for optimal proficiency in taking aim with the accuracy of a camel. Bottle clubs originally were so named not for the concealed liquor containers carried by patrons but for the hip flasks they used for disposal of drool.

The origins of the unfortunate term “snotty” and also of the epithet “drivel”, along with a host of similarly inelegant appellations, are all attributable to the legacy of the Phlegmatics, especially when used in reference to the mechanics of critical analysis or as qualifiers for bad literature. At the height of Phlegmatic influence, the Thackerayan satire I Spit on Your Grave led to a craze for pilgrimages to gravesites of favorite authors, and guided tours were organized by travel agents who furnished complimentary expectoration bibs as souvenirs. A magazine called the Expectorator enjoyed enormous readership and the best-selling novel By Phlegm Possessed was widely discussed and quoted. Some wit—a hack from the Pettifogger as it turns out—pointed out that the word “janitor” comes from the name of the dual-faced god Janus—the god of doors—who had a face looking forward, and a face that looked back—suggesting that if Janus had a hundred heads and the ten thousand eyes of his fellow deity Argus, he’d still be at a loss to track the dispersion of phlegm-balls at an energetic spitfest.

But, in the blink of one of Argus’ eyes, crud-glutted urns became a thing of the past. The shiny spittoons of yesteryear, which once graced the serious reading establishments of the civilized world, seething with carbolic acid and glistening with goo, have been tucked away in cellars and attics, stuffed into steamer trunks, relegated to the custodial closets of the great libraries—the Bodleian, the Biblioteque Nationale, the Philadelphia Municipal Reading Room; the Chicago Central Library, the Bibliothek of Berlin—at least, such has been the fate of those not filched and hoarded by unscrupulous administrators…

The disappearance of the noble spittoon, once a universal fixture, had been precipitated, in equal measure, by both practical considerations and by the caprices of fashion. The consequences of Phlegmatism had become a question of large-scale disposal. Jorums of library mucus put on skids and slid down ramps to be emptied in the Thames or Schuylkill led to the development of modern sewage systems. Hydraulic engineers were summoned to address problems of fluid mechanics and to deal with increasingly urgent demands for effective sludge management. Tinplate trenches and zinc-lined silos sprouted among the skylines of national capitols; galvanized aluminum runnels of elaborate, elevated sewers and spectacular flumes of magnificent aqueducts came to dominate the silhouettes of cityscapes around the globe.

Huge liquid storage tanks—reservoirs of spit—at first used to generate electricity for nearby libraries, were later augmented by ancillary tanks filled with acids and corrosives which acted as cultural barometers to gauge fluctuations in prevailing trends and tastes. Cultural erosion could be clearly ascertained by measuring the evaporation rate of their distillates. Fountains for phlegm, some as tall as the Eiffel Tower, dotted the terrain and massive, motorized conveyor belts, their silvery sluiceways glittering in the late afternoon sunlight, competed with brightly gilt scaffolds of deadweights and pulleys erected to support the complex of gutters, channels and saliva sumps which fed into a churning, universal slough…

The reign of Phlegmatism reached its denouement for the most prosaic of reasons. While men, as may be commonly observed, spit boldly, proudly, defiantly, jubilantly, ladies, in their pudor, spit discreetly from behind handkerchiefs, silk scarves, and outspread fans.

By the time the Bloomsbury Group began to convene, the Phlegmatic School was already on its way out, and ripe for a fall. Rather than spitting overtly, with audacious self-satisfaction and unbridled verve, the female members of the Bloomsbury Group took to wearing bibs, shields and veils; Virginia Woolf, in particular, with typical tyrannical prissiness, insisted that the others observe the same niceties of form and modesty and soon everyone was spitting up his or her sleeve, thank you. The others continued to take their lead from the old biddy when she introduced facial diapers.

Diehard Phlegmatics considered Woolf’s expropriation a crass rebuke, and rejected her reforms out of hand. In response, they formed splinter groups. Vomiting had always been frowned upon—a member was banished for a year from a phlegmatic forum, another expelled from a reading club for this offense. But, with the fading of phlegmatism, the “Regurgitators” phased in, and still more radical offshoots of the Vomit School—the “Barfers” and the “Pukistes” stole their day in the sun. The only bodily secretion besides saliva that the Phlegmatics permitted was perspiration, which was tolerated because it connotes excitement, industry, and assiduous application to the task at hand (critical analysis). Tears, later to be so important in association with the Sentimental School, made a tentative appearance in a trial role among the Post-Phlegmatics, but had little lasting impact.

Shorn of its force, deprived of its sting, Phlegmatism went the way of all flesh. Ever since its ignominious demise, literary analysis has been a spent force and a dead art. Now a mute profession, its muffled voice croaks feebly; its garbled utterances but the bleatings of the obsolescent and the burpings of the moribund.

It is said that, in the basement of the British Library, in a steel-ribbed room set aside for the rarest of items among the most special collections, Samuel Johnson’s crude cuspidor serves as the centerpiece for a trove of thousands of others inspired by it. Visitors claim that an eerie phosphorescence seeps from the razor-fine slit framing the door of the vault, a radiant aureole enhaloing its hallowed confines—the accumulated wisdom of a hundred years of Higher Criticism…

From the series Forays in Fictive History by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert

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