Tasting the Language

The Scottish Poetry Library asked American poet August Kleinzahler to name some of his “old favourite” books, and this is how he answered:

“Old favorites, gee . . . Moby-Dick, Isaac Babel's stories. I could go on. I seem to respond to closely written texts, sentence by sentence, where I can taste the language, experience the musculature of the syntax.”

How telling that a poet’s first choices are prose writers, though not, fortunately, writers of “poetic prose,” from the tribe of Thomas Wolfe, Jack Kerouac and John Updike at his most preciously self-regarding. I share Kleinzahler’s taste, though not exclusively. In the wrong hands, “closely written texts” turn into purple prose or high-compression avant-garde inertia, with language so dense it emits no light, like a black hole. Some prose ought to be transparent – look at Swift, Orwell (in his essays and reviews) and Waugh. But the yeasty, Elizabethan gusto of Melville and Babel’s lyrical modernism are always rich and nourishing – like meatloaf and potatoes after a regimen of, say, the soy milk and sprouts of Raymond Carver or Richard Ford.

Moby-Dick is a great black comedy brought to life by the rowdy, philosophical, undomesticated, masculine voice of Ishmael. No voice, no book: It’s a tall tale told by a mad autodidact – the antiauthoritarian voice of American democracy, the counterpoint to Ahab’s ravings. Take Chapter 95, “The Cassock,” a three-paragraph jape that begins:

“Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen there lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous cistern in the whale huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone, -- longer than a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet black as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg.”

That’s Melville’s way of saying “whale penis.” The comedy slowly builds as a sailor known as a mincer chops it up, cuts arm holes and dons the cassock “in the full canonicals of his calling.” Melville won’t let go of the religious analogy, calling the mincer “a candidate for an archbishoprick” – a blasphemously phallic pun. Much of Moby-Dick is like this – highly textured, bawdy language out of Shakespeare, Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne (all of whom Melville read before writing his great book).

Kleinzahler’s choice of Babel is perfect. Even in translation, his prose is lapidary, words set like stones in a mosaic. This comes from “The Cemetery in Kozin,” in Red Cavalry, as translated by Peter Constantine:

“Gray, abraded stones with letters three hundred years old. The rough contours of the reliefs cut into the granite. The image of a fish and a sheep above a dead man’s head. Images of rabbis wearing fur hats. Rabbis, their narrow hips girded with belts. Beneath their eyeless faces the wavy stone ripple of curly beards. To one side, below and oak tree cleft in two by lightning, stands the vault of Rabbi Asriil, slaughtered by Bogdan Khmelnitsky’s Cossacks. Four generations lie in this sepulcher, as poor as the hovel of a water carrier, and tablet, moss-green tablets, sing of them in Bedouin prayer.”

Babel’s sentences, many without verbs, are fitted into the paragraph like the stones in the graveyard – muteness transformed into eloquent sadness by the “musculature of the syntax.” I remember something similar in Gogol’s style, which animates the inanimate. The language crackles and glows with an energy appropriate to the grotesque lives of the characters.

The opposite of Kleinzahler’s “closely written texts,” of course, is most genre fiction and other forms of popular writing – newspapers, magazines, advertising and, to be honest, most blogs. Either the writers are unable to write or they take a reverse pride in writing badly.

I prefer Kleinzahler’s prose to his poetry. His nonfiction collection, Cutty, One Rock, is a raffish melding of Basil Bunting and Raymond Chandler in which you can, as he says, “taste the language.” This is from a hilarious piece called “Too Bad About Mrs. Ferri,” in which Kleinzahler as a boy tries to get an autograph from one of his neighbors, the comedian Buddy Hackett, in the Palisades section of Fort Lee, N.J.:

“He was barely taller than I was, and I was seven years old. He was red-faced and breathing moistly and with some difficulty, like a toy bulldog on a sultry day. `Whuh da you want, kid?’ he asked in one of America’s most distinctive voices. I identified myself, told him where I lived, and asked for his autograph. He glared at me, incredulous, for a few moments (I could sense the wife and maid cowering inside) and said, `Fuck you, kid; talk to my agent!’ and slammed the door in my face.”

It gets even better. It’s not Melville or Babel, but it’s sharp, energetic, artfully calibrated prose.