'Desultory, Rambling, Inconclusive'

“Pleasant is solitude among manageable things. And among manageable things, the most manageable for me are words.” 

Writers revel in complaints about their self-chosen task. If a shoe salesman bemoans his aching back and knees, we commiserate. The up-and-down can’t be easy with finicky customers in the seat. Writing is different. It’s a privilege, a blessing of sorts, and in most cases voluntarily adopted. All day we get to play with words, our favorite toys. Even the most intransigent of assignments can be pleasant to wrestle with and subdue. When I interviewed the late novelist William Gaddis, he told me each of his books started as a problem to be solved.                                                                                                                                                              

The sentences quoted at the top by George Santayana are from “The Idler and His Works,” an essay posthumously published in the May 15, 1954 issue of The Saturday Review of Literature and collected in The Idler and His Works: And Other Essays (1957). He writes:

 

“I have seldom been conscious of working hard. Most of my writing has been an instinctive pleasure, a playful impulse, as in running down a grassy slope or exploring a woodland path. The things wrote themselves; and when I dropped the pen, and rose from my writing-table, I seemed to awake from a trance and to be myself again.”

 

Santayana seems to have been an enviably facile writer. No complaints about writer’s block or stalled inspiration. Words flowed when he turned on the tap. He makes his mode of composition sound like a deeply disciplined jazz musician’s:

 

“All is improvised, as in poetry: hence, unless there is a drastic revision, so much repetition, so much that is desultory, rambling, inconclusive. No strict program, no order was predetermined, no precise limits or scope. Such a method or lack of method would have been fatal had there not been sharp definition in my thought, clear principles in my judgments.”

 

A pleasant surprise is the brief biographical note appended to Santayana’s essay by Whitney Balliett, soon to join the staff of The New Yorker and for almost half a century serve as its jazz writer. Balliett says:

 

“His philosophy, into which he poured much of his talent and energy, is loved more by poets and laymen than philosophers, although it is said that William James ‘squeaked with delight’ after he had read the multi-volumed The Life of Reason.”