'Old Landor's Bones Are Laid'

On Tuesday I wrote about Walter Savage Landor, his poems and especially Imaginary Conversations, a collection of 174 dialogues, mostly of historical and literary figures, published in five volumes between 1824 and 1829. I keep a mental list of books I admire and enjoy that seem to go largely unread by others, and periodically urge them on readers – Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island. The toughest sell is likely Landor (1775-1864). For reasons of style, subject matter and length (ironic, considering his mastery of the epigram), most readers are immune to his charms. Here’s how one reader replied to Tuesday’s post: 

“I read one volume of Imaginary Conversations, having had it urged upon me by this blog. I wish I'd known in advance about R. Brimley Johnson’s Aphorisms. There's good stuff in Landor, but you have to go through a lot to get it.”

 

No argument here. Imaginary Conversations is one of those books that teaches us how to read it, and not everyone learns. You pace yourself and adapt to Landor’s rhythms. His language can feel stilted and is seldom colloquial in a contemporary sense. You can’t read his dialogues the way you might read a collection of short stories. Landor has his longueurs, as the boys say down at the bowling alley.

 

I was surprised in 2014 when Oxford University Press published Adam Roberts’ Landor’s Cleanness: A Study of Walter Savage Landor. It’s hard to think of a major writer in the English tradition less fashionable. Roberts devotes his final chapter to Imaginary Conversations, and sympathizes with my reader quoted above:

 

“What is it that contaminates the poised and controlled masterpieces known collectively as Landor’s Imaginary Conversations? In a word it is boredom. The exquisiteness, appositeness, and almost sensual pleasure of the prose is as often spoken by a bore as by a master.”

 

Roberts speaks our language. He understands readers who find mostly tedium in Landor’s dialogues. But note that he describes some of Landor’s speakers, not  the author himself, as bores:

 

“One way of defining a bore would be: a person who doesn’t see that what interests him does not interest you. Or perhaps, more precisely: a person who assumes thoughtlessly that you will also be fascinated by what fascinates him.”

  

We’re all familiar with bores and have devised strategies over the years for dealing with them, whether nodding and smiling, telling them to shut up or running out the door, depending on the species. Roberts tells us the “currency” of the dialogues in Imaginary Conversations is “prolixity.” He quotes Landor telling Robert Browning, “with a sort of crashing honesty, the format gave him ‘more room’ than poetry. The reader’s heart may not leap up to hear this.”

 

As my reader suggested above, modern readers might favor a prudently chosen, intelligently abridged edition of Imaginary Conversations. I wonder if any of the dialogues have ever been adapted for the stage. Perhaps such thoughts confirm the reactions of modern readers: Why bother? Aren’t the dialogues mere curiosities, remnants of another literary age when, in Roberts’ words, conversation was “well[-]constructed and harmonious,” and prose wasn’t that far away from conversation? Landor writes in “Southey and Porson”: “I would seriously recommend to the employer of our critics, young and old, that he oblige them to pursue a course of study such as this: that . . . that they first read and examine the contents of the book; a thing greatly more useful in criticism than is thought.”

 

[Here is the first stanza of Yvor Winters’ “Anacreontic”: “Peace! There is peace at last. / Deep in the Tuscan shade, / Swathed in the Grecian past, / Old Landor’s bones are laid.”]

  

[Wurmbrand asks: “But what are some others on your mental list?” The American Scene by Henry James, Maurice Baring’s 1924 novel C,  the jazz writings of Whitney Balliett, Stevie Smith’s three novels, the short stories of Peter Taylor, V.S. Pritchett’s 1951 novel Mr. Beluncle, anything by Yvor Winters and his wife, Janet Lewis.]