'Proceed with Daring Synapses'

“. . . I tried to learn from certain highly elliptical writers how much can be omitted from the texture of the page. If it is of any interest, the styles I find most useful to study are those of Hugh Kenner, Osip Mandelstam, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Charles Doughty. All of these are writers who do not waste a word, who condense, pare down, and proceed with daring synapses.” 

You can cavil about some of those names (Pound, most obviously) but never as an English major had I encountered Charles Doughty’s. I took to heart Guy Davenport’s repeated mentions of Doughty in the essays collected in The Geography of the Imagination (1981), including the passage above from “Ernst Machs Max Ernst.“ In “The Symbol of the Archaic” he writes:

 

“. . . the great unknown of English letters, Charles Montagu Doughty [1843-1926], who suspected all writers after Chaucer of whoring after strange dictionaries, who went into the Arabian desert (or ‘Garden of God’)—the most archaic act of modern literature—to save, as he said, the English language. That salvation is still one of the best of books, the Travels in Arabia Deserta . . .”

 

And this, from “Jonathan Williams”:

 

“There’s Charles Doughty, whom entire departments of literature university after university have not read, a state of affairs roughly analogous to a department of physics sublimely ignorant of Proteus Steinmetz.”

 

I read Travels (1888), his account of a twenty-two-month journey through central and northwestern Arabia, for a second time early in the COVID-19 lockdown, after buying the one-volume, unabridged Boni & Liveright edition from 1923. In Thursday’s post I quoted Davenport’s endorsement of the book to Hugh Kenner, specifically “the description of the desert with memories of seeing Vesuvius.” The passage can be found in Chap. XV, “Nomad Life Upon the Harra.” Doughty studied geology at Cambridge, and it shows. In 1872, on his way to Arabia, he stops in Italy and climbs to the rim of Vesuvius, which he recalls in his description of the Arabian Aueyrid Harra, a desolate tract of volcanic rock he calls “a wilderness of burning and rusty horror.” Here is a brief excerpt from the passage:

 

“In the year 1872 I was a witness to the great eruption of Vesuvius. Standing from the morning alone upon the top of the mountain [Etna], that day in which the great outbreak began, I waded ankle-deep in flour of sulphur upon a burning hollow soil of lava; in the midst was a mammel-like chimney, not long formed, fuming with a light corrosive breath; which to those in the plain had appeared by night as a fiery beacon with trickling lavas. Beyond was a new seat of the weak daily eruption, a pool of molten lava and wherefrom issued all that strong dinning noise and uncouth travail of the mountain; from thence was from time to time tossed aloft, and slung into the air, a swarm of half-molten wreathing missiles.”

 

The Vesuvius passage continues for another two pages, inserted digressively into an account of lava fields in Arabia. Most noteworthy is Doughty’s language. His word choice is often unexpected, as in “flour of sulphur” and “uncouth travail.” Perhaps these are examples of what Davenport calls “daring synapses.” They work, they are vivid and interesting, but at the same time eccentric. They cause the reader to pause and contemplate, which is not always a bad thing. You won’t mistake Doughty’s prose for anyone else’s. Davenport liked it so much, he interpolated the passage, lightly edited and without attribution, into his 101-page story “Wo es war, soll ich warden” (The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers, North Point Press, 1990).