'The Delightful Agony of Arranging Them in Patterns'

Dr. Johnson writes in his preface to A Dictionary of the English Language (1755): “I am not yet so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.” Readers who dismiss Johnson’s prose as lacking poetry have ears of tin. His metaphors are precise and always rooted in reality, so common readers can get the point while admiring the wit. Anthony Burgess admired Johnson the wordsmith and cites him nine times, including the sentence quoted above, in The Ink Trade: Selected Journalism 1961-1993 (ed. Will Carr, Carcanet, 2018).

Burgess was drunk on words. Along with more than thirty novels, he published two books on James Joyce, two on language and a biography of Shakespeare. He loved Joyce, Flann O’Brian and Nabokov. The one time I met him, in the year Stanley Kubrick released his film version of A Clockwork Orange, Burgess was a raconteur of words. He relished the music of language and took pleasure in American slang, while also praising Henry James. In The Ink Trade you can tell Burgess has been waiting years to deploy prized words: ambages (OED: “roundabout or indirect modes of speech”) and gulosity (“gluttony, greediness, voracity”). Some of us collect such words. I started doing so as a teenager, a practice I picked up from the teenage Hart Crane.

This can be overdone, of course. It can start to look like showing off one’s rarefied vocabulary. Consider the word-clotted novels of Alexander Theroux. The Johnson sentence is taken from “Why I Write,” a previously unpublished piece from 1985. Burgess writes:

“Real writers take seriously what writing is about—wrestling with words. Words are not inert counters like cloak-room tickets. They are living creatures which resent being treated as if they were knives, forks and spoons. You cannot take them out of a drawer, use them, then stow them away again. They are stubborn and they sometimes refuse to mean what the writer wants them to mean. It’s not merely a matter of the word itself—there’s also the delightful agony of arranging them in patterns, making music out of them.”

Burgess next paraphrases the Johnson line and adds:

“True, but we have to try to bring the sons of heaven down to earth, and only words can do this. Moreover, there’s an order of reality above things—the sphere of ideas. Ideas cannot exist until they are cast into the form of words. We human beings are intensely verbal creatures. Not many people realise this, but writers live with that awesome knowledge. They are the custodians of a primal human truth.”