Solway

Like pâté de foie gras, David Solway’s essays must be consumed slowly, with discretion and discernment. Over-consumption results in elation and a cranky intolerance for slipshod prose and foolish convictions. In one of the essays in Random Walks: Essays in Elective Criticism, typically couched in a digression straining at its parenthetical confinement, he defines poetry as “a unified structure of significant ideas and feelings in sprightly, powerful, sonorous, or memorable language,” and thus formulates his working credo. Solway’s prose, like his poems, revels in the gaiety of language, and possesses a dense surface of bottomless depths. In his foreword to Random Walks, itself a morsel of gout-inducing richness, Eric Ormsby writes:

“Solway's prose, like his marvellous poetry, never resembles the inert, exiguous, virtually comestible sentences of his contemporaries who write a prose so vapid that it dissolves as it is read and, like junk food, leaves neither taste nor nourishment behind. Solway's prose, by contrast, is memorable; it is also lithe, mischievous, shapely, impudent, and ceremonial. His is a style that manages to be magisterial and agitated, in equal measure and at the same time. In my view, this is because Solway presents the distinctive intellectual phenomenon of a stubbornly conservative mind incessantly drawn to risk itself. In Solway's risk-taking, it is form -- the shape of a sentence, the shape of a poem -- that rescues and exposes him at every moment.”

Not surprisingly, Solway numbers among his enthusiasms such precursors as Rabelais, Montaigne, Sterne, Swift, Joyce, Beckett and fellow Canadian poet Irving Layton – word-gluttons all. In Solway’s work you’ll find no trace of the pinched, niggling sense of linguistic enervation so endemic to contemporary poetry and prose. Here’s Ormsby again:

“Open almost any book by David Solway on almost any page and you will be brought up short, before anything else, by the language. There are those famous `$50 words' which an admiring but exasperated fan once wrote to him about. I would place these unusual words at a higher dollar value, but I too could easily fill a page or two of this introduction with examples of such words, the stubborn use of which argues some perverse strategy on the author's part. Among our contemporaries perhaps only in Solway's work does one come across such rara aves as borborygm and sordine, anamorphoscopic and nisus, exantlation, lenticular, ipsissimosity, bregmatic, despumated, and (my own favourite) ultracrepidarian.”

Not one of the gems plucked by Ormsby from Solway’s lexical mother lode is recognized by my spell-checking software – surely a triumph of style in an age of verbal etoliation (which my spell-check also fails to recognize). In Saturday’s post regarding John McGahern’s prose, I celebrated it as a triumph of tone. In his Kafka essay, “The Trial as Jewish Joke,” Solway writes:

“One of the great difficulties in life as well as literature is how at the same time to be serious and unpretentious, how to achieve the profound while avoiding the lugubrious, how to express feeling without being sentimental; or, in the Jewish idiom, how to suffer without redundance.”

Damning the present ascendancy of “subject” over “form,” of “meaning” over “manner,” Solway writes in “The Word and the Stone”:

“Contemporary English-language poetry has by and large forfeited the power to move by its determined attempt to factor language out of the poetic equation. It is not on the whole a poetry that insists on its status as word….As it converges increasingly on the idiom and cadence of prose and, even further, begins to echo the flat, indolent, and anonymous rhythms of normative speech, it proceeds to obliterate the objectivity and viability of language as an essential and miraculous part of the larger world that it presumably describes, questions, opposes, or underwrites. The poem begins to disappear into its subject, drawing away from itself, sacrificing its own incommutable [Spell-check: negative.] nature as noble or memorable `speech’ and thus paradoxically impoverishing the experience it intended to clarify or enhance.”

Calories be damned, read David Solway, another gifted stranger from the North, and disregard the borborygm of his hapless contemporaries.