'Gusto Goes a Huge Long Way'

My fourth-grade teacher, Miss Gertrude Martin, gave us an interesting assignment, one I can’t imagine a teacher embracing today (too risky): Select your favorite word and tell us why you like it. I didn’t have to ponder because I had already read Poe’s “The Bells” and been seduced by “tintinnabulation,” six syllables of pure music. Only three years later, in first-year Latin, did I learn the origin of so enchanting a word. It was the combination of rhythm, length and exotic sound (vaguely medical) that hooked me. It was a one-word poem. Today I couldn’t read Poe on a bet.

If given the same assignment now, again I wouldn’t have to think hard about my choice: gusto, two syllables of Italianate zest, a word I’ve written about before, as did Marianne Moore (with humility and concentration) and William Hazlitt. First, there’s the sound, a perfect trochee, followed by the wonderful optimism of the long o, so unencumbered and open to possibility. Its applications are myriad: books, language, prose, poetry, love, cuisine, music – much that is most enjoyable in life. The word shows up again in Max Beerbohm’s 1942 BBC broadcast “Music Halls of My Youth” (Mainly on the Air, 1946). The war was on and Beerbohm celebrated the popular entertainment of half a century earlier. When Siegfried Sassoon heard Beerbohm’s broadcast, he wrote in a letter to Sir Sydney Cockerell:

“Max’s talk I listened to with delight. For me it was and will be the only B.B.C. half-hour worth remembering in 1942. No words can express what I feel about it. I laughed aloud — but there were tears in my eyes too.”

Sure signs of gusto in action. Here’s the passage in which Beerbohm uses the word three times in as many sentences: “Indeed, I cannot claim for these ditties much more than that there was in them a great gusto. But gusto is an immense virtue. Gusto goes a huge long way.”

In my lexicon, the opposite of gusto is enervation or anemia of the spirit. I would ask that you reevaluate the word and reconsider Beerbohm as its embodiment.