'A Master of Light But Stinging Irony'

I bought Vikram Seth’s novel-in-verse The Golden Gate when it was published in 1986. Around that time I was giving up the practice of writing in books, which had always left me feeling a little uncomfortable. Instead, I switched to keeping notebooks. In The Golden Gate I see that I underlined a single couplet and left no other markings: “Things puzzling, contrary, or ironic / Revivify me like a tonic . . .” Those lines stand as sufficient argument for rhyme in verse and suggest something about the way I think. 

On Sunday, I visited Kaboom Books here in Houston and found two prizes: D.J. Enright’s The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony (1986) and Maurice Baring’s novel C (1924; Oxford paperback, 1986). Enright appends three epigraphs to his extended essay, including the couplet by Seth that I underlined, which I take as a retroactive stamp of approval from the late poet and critic (1920-2002). Monographs like Enright’s – learned, amusing, utterly nonacademic – are no longer written. Here is his opening sentence:

 

“Irony had always struck me as alluring: a way of making statements, not unlike that of poetry, which through the unexpectedness and the avoidance of head-on assertion had a stronger chance of discomposing, if not winning over, the person addressed.”

 

When I first read C some years ago, the late Terry Teachout told me he also admired it. It’s a novel I wouldn’t have enjoyed when young, which is also true of Max Beerbohm (see his caricature of Baring), Walter de la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget and the novels of Ronald Firbank. Too fluffy and insubstantial. I’ve learned that our most stridently held tastes are often the ones we discard first – talk about irony. In C, Baring describes Mr. Pringle, an instructor at Eton:

 

“There was something fundamentally gentlemanlike and urbane about him. He was polished, Attic, rather highly-strung, and given to nervous brainstorms in school; an electric teacher, stimulating to boys he liked and got on with, but blighting to those whom he did not like, and a master of light but stinging irony.”