Kenneth Cox

Based on a profile written by the American poet August Kleinzahler and published in the Australian online literary journal Jacket, I have ordered a book by an author I had never heard of before. The first paragraph of Kleinzahler’s piece was enough to grab me:

“The literary essays of the Londoner Kenneth Cox are among the finest essays written by anyone, on any subject, in English. As pure writing — literature, if you will — these essays deserve to be read and reread as one would attend to the essays of Hazlitt or Joseph Mitchell. At their best they are masterpieces of the genre. They refresh and delight. They are a tonic for the mind and are best approached in the morning hours. One’s entire day will be the better for it. As proposition, explication and argument of any given text they are without equal. Models of clarity, concision and insight, they make a mockery of almost all contemporaneous academic criticism, which by comparison will strike the reader as fuzzy, ham-fisted, self-aggrandizing, tendentious and dim. So it should come as no surprise that Cox’s book of essays, published in 2001, Collected Studies In The Use Of English, has been completely ignored in academic circles, where it would be of most use.”

Either Cox, who died in 2005 at the age of 89, is very good or Kleinzahler is a world-class bullshit artist, because I paid almost $40 to order the book and have it shipped from England. It won’t arrive for a month or so, but any writer ranked with Hazlitt and Mitchell is rare and worthy of attention, and so are essays that “refresh and delight.” As if to bolster what Kleinzahler says, I was unable to locate the book in any public or academic library in Texas. In fact, according to WorldCat, the vast world-wide library database, only 29 libraries in the world own a copy, mostly in the United States, with a few in England and Canada.

Cox represents a species of writer that interests and attracts me – the lone, largely self-taught, unaffiliated polymath. Professionally, he was a writer/editor for the BBC, and did not publish his first essay – on Basil Bunting – until 1966, when he was 50 years old. His principle interests were the High Modernists – especially Pound – and their step-children, the Objectivists – Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, among others. He was not attached to a university, and most of his work was first published in the English journal Agenda.

Besides Kleinzahler’s, Jacket #28 (October 2005) includes 11 other pieces by and about Cox, including memoirs, poems and criticism – more than enough to make me impatient for Cox’s book to arrive. Here’s a sampler, drawn from the Jacket festschrift, starting with Cox on Joyce:

“One of the few to have possessed the secret of melodious English Joyce is of all writers the most Mozartian. He made the life that originally filled him with horror appear in verbal recollection lovely and such fun. The difficulty with his writing is simply the limit set by human nature to the accumulation of aesthetic pleasure.”

And here’s an excerpt from a letter Cox wrote to Kleinzahler:

“I didn’t give a toss about the writer’s state of mind, all I cared for was the play of words. I would go round savouring a phrase to test it, taste it, till I could decide if it was ‘good’ or had to be spat out. That word taste is not a metaphor. People talk about the sound of language but the real thing is its taste, in the mouth, harsh crisp sweet pungent, produced by the movement of sound.”

And Cox on Lorine Niedecker, the wonderful Wisconsin poet:

“Her silences derive from an intellectual conviction that art, like science, demands total concentration on the object of attention.”

And two instructive paragraphs on the great Basil Bunting:

“He disdained the illusion of spontaneity and other tricks to wow groundlings. He kept separate the constituents of consonantal clusters, relishing sibilants and fricatives as much as plosives and liquids, and studied the duration of pauses as carefully as the duration of syllables. He had a way of pronouncing sweet that recalled sipping a liquid through a lump of sugar . . . Always intense and personal his response to any writing was determined by the pleasure and interest it afford him.

“The absence of this factor makes the academic study of literature a hollow sham, its presence a test of character and truthfulness. It is not true that Bunting’s work lacks message but it is the message of art. Older than religion and not openly moralistic its practice instils certain patterns of behaviour and inhibits others. Bunting’s ethos was skaldic and feudal with a Sufi glaze.”

In Jacket #22 (May 2003), in his review of Cox’s book, Peter Campion wrote:

“Collected Studies in the Use of English has neither a wide distribution nor an academic cachet. But for his capacious understanding, his taste, his curiosity and his first rate prose style Cox deserves his place alongside critics like Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport. If Cox’s readership is a small one, his book is built to last.”

Praise – especially the part about Kenner and Davenport -- doesn’t get much higher. Like many an autodidact, Cox sounds as though he could be cranky, even fierce. Kleinzahler writes:

“Cox was a formidable presence to be alone in a room with, discussing literature and the life of the mind. He tolerated my observations. I doubt they were of any real interest to him. At one point I decided to brave the observation that the closest model for the method and style of his essays seemed to be the 19th century British naturalists. This speculation evinced no little temerity on my part. Cox regarded me closely for a few moments and in a manner I had not experienced previously. It made me uneasy. Fortunately, I was correct and Cox later sent me this passage from Alfred Russel Wallace’s autobiography My Life.”

I won’t include the lengthy passage from Wallace. You can read it in Kleinzahler’s story. But it’s so beautifully and precisely written that a copy of Wallace’s two-volume My Life sits on my desk. I already respect Kenneth Cox and his critical judgment.