'The Lasting Vivification of a Word'

I’ve read Walter de la Mare’s essay “A Book of Words” (Pleasures and Speculations, 1940) for the second time in a week, and have decided one might easily write a book about it. The prose is dense with interesting and useful ideas: 

“The prevalent weakness, too, of many minds–the radical deficiency of mediocre books—is not only the possession of a scanty vocabulary, but also of a vocabulary nebulous, unattached, inexact, inert. On the other hand, the weakness of an over-latinized vocabulary usually consists in its feeble relationship to the senses, to actuality. Thomas Brownes are few.”

 

In the second category we might place Alexander Theroux and William H. Gass, intemperate, word-drunk fools. I love language, too, but it has to be tempered by good sense and good will. Showing off and flummoxing the reader is childish, while the first category is too vast to specify. De la Mare is no stingy minimalist. The prose in his stories, novels and essays is rich – but with purpose. He is not a stodgy utilitarian when it comes to language. Neither is he a self-indulgent boor. This passage occurs earlier in the paragraph quoted above:

 

“For the lasting vivification of a word the presence of the object to which it applies is of course indispensable. Yet word may come first, its object later.”

 

Some writers will understand. Words sometimes bubble unexpectedly into awareness from – where? The unconscious? Memory? The Muse? I don’t know but when it happens I don’t unquestionably accept the mystery word. I weigh it. Does it work? Is it appropriate? I’m not Yeats and no spirit guides my fingers on the keyboard. “To the senses,” de la Mare reminds us, “to actuality.” Consider Joseph Epstein’s explanation of how he writes, which sounds very familiar to me:

 

“I just tap in one paragraph after another with little notion of whether they fit together or not. As a writer, organization or structure (to use the architectural metaphor) isn’t even my short suit. My method of composition is to attempt to write one interesting sentence after another and hope that the interest, so to say, will compound itself  and the absence of a high plan will go unnoticed.”

 

Browne perfectly exemplifies de la Mare’s point (and perhaps Epstein's). Browne ranks for me with Swift, Hazlitt and Waugh as a writer of vivid, memorable English prose. In his life of Browne, Dr. Johnson complains that the “exuberance of knowledge, and plentitude of ideas sometimes obstruct the tendency of his reasoning, and the clearness of his decisions . . .” True on occasion but Johnson here is being a fuddy-duddy. It’s not Browne’s “exuberance of knowledge” (a wonderful thought) or “plenitude of ideas” that sometimes fail him but the limits of sixteenth-century medical and scientific learning. We don’t read Browne in lieu of the Merck Manual.

 

Johnson describes Browne’s style as “vigorous, but rugged; it is learned, but pedantick; it is deep, but obscure; it strikes, but does not please; it commands, but does not allure . . .” Johnson doesn’t know it but he's actually describing Browne’s allure precisely. He is the seventy-third most frequently cited source in the OED, with more than 4,100 quotations. He is credited with coining 784 words and establishing the modern usage of more than 1,600 others. With some disapproval, Johnson adds:

 

“[Browne] fell into an age in which our language began to lose the stability which it had obtained in the time of Elizabeth; and was considered by every writer as a subject on which he might try his plastick skill, by moulding it according to his own fancy.”

And that's a good thing in the hands of a gifted writer. 

[The Epstein passage can be found in Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet (Yale University Press, 2013), co-written with Frederic Raphael.]