'The Note of Conversation, Plain and Terse'

When his former teacher J.A. Cuddon died in 1996, the English poet Clive Wilmer wrote his obituary, “By definition, a bookman,” for The Guardian: 

“‘Charles’ Cuddon, as his friends called him, could not have been more fascinating: erudite, genial, stoically courageous (especially during his last illness), a passionate lover of words, and one of nature’s unconscious egalitarians. . . . He made you want nothing more than to live the life of a writer.”

 

I knew Cuddon only as the author of A Dictionary of Literary Terms (1977), a reference work I’ve occasionally used. Wilmer describes it rightly as “full of wit, wisdom, and out-of-the-way information.” It’s the sort of dictionary that exceeds its utilitarian function and can snag a reader’s prolonged attention. Cuddon taught at Emanuel School, South London, from 1954 to 1993. He published five novels and I’ve made an interlibrary loan request for his 1960 travel volume about Istanbul, The Owl’s Watchsong. Wilmer makes him sound like a deeply interesting man:

 

“He was, for instance, a wonderful conversationalist: he wore his learning lightly and excelled as a raconteur. His manner of speaking—a gift to affectionate schoolboy mimicry—was revealing of his character and outlook. His sentences were spontaneously stylish, his choice of words unaffectedly felicitous, yet all that he said seemed edged with a certain gruffness, as if to remind himself that language had its limits.”

 

To commemorate Cuddon’s retirement, Wilmer wrote a 118-line poem, “Letter to J.A. Cuddon” (New and Collected Poems. 2012), in which he describes his friend's manner of teaching:

 

“So you’d address –

In Hopkins, say -- morphologies of line,

The erotic love that figures the divine,

Grey falcons stooping, the Ignatian rule,

Forms literary and biological –

All of the things, in short, I wished to know

Or thought I should, once you had sketched them so.”

 

In Wilmer’s estimation, Cuddon was the vibrant opposite of the time-serving teachers we’ve all had inflicted on us – drones who encouraged drone-ness in their pupils. Cuddon’s speaking style, Wilmer says, is reflected in his tastes in poetry:

  

“I think of one

Lesson when you contrasted styles of verse.

The note of conversation, plain and terse,

Was what you favoured. The luxuriant—

In music as in sensuous ornament—

You admired too, for richness and for skill,

But had your reservations. I can still

Hear you chastise as facile and as glib

The sort of bard who runs off at the nib.”

 

I see that a fifth edition of Cuddon’s Dictionary (2013), updated by others since Cuddon’s death, is available online. The editor of the fourth edition tops his preface with an appropriate passage from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici:

 

“I make not therefore my head a grave, but a treasure of knowledge; I intend no monopoly, but a community in learning; I study not for my own sake only, but for theirs that study not for themselves.”