'There’s No Such Thing As a Synonym'

My favorite literary non-form may be commonplace books, those magpie collections unified only by the sensibilities of their hunter-gatherers. They are kept by industrious readers and serve as literary Wunderkammern, cabinets of bookish wonders that may reveal a reader’s truest autobiography. In his final years, the English poet and critic D.J. Enright published three of them: Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1995), Play Resumed: A Journal (1999), and Injury Time: A Memoir (2003). On Monday I bought a copy of Interplay at Kaboom Books, and only when I returned home did I learn that today is the twenty-second anniversary of Enright’s death. These are charming books, the critic in his off-hours, and I suggest you try to find them. Enright quotes “The Refined Man” from Rudyard Kipling’s sequence “Epitaphs of the War,” written during World War I: 

“I was of delicate mind. I stepped aside for my needs,

    Disdaining the common office. I was seen from afar and killed . . .

How is this matter for mirth? Let each man be judged by his deeds.

    I have paid my price to live with myself on the terms that I willed.”

 

Followed by these comments: “Kipling’s ignoble, slightly comical occurrence—a soldier prefers not to urinate in company—issues in a weighty conclusion. So much packed into that last line, just one line. All that’s needed is a further line, speaking for those, less happy, who weren’t free to will the terms they would live on, and still paid a price.”

 

Enright is aware, of course, that Kipling’s son John was killed in the Battle of Loos in 1915.

 

Enright’s previous passage is a swipe at postmodernism (“must be terribly exhausting”). The next concerns Clarice Lispector’s Discovering the World, followed by thoughts on children and such films as The Exorcist, and then Henry James' What Maisie Knew. Enright has the kind of mind whose company I enjoy. Later he writes:

 

“There’s no such thing as a synonym. Which is why compilations of them are so splendidly serviceable: not merely helping you to find the right word but leading you toward the exact thought. As for ‘wrong’ words, a foolish but instructive parlour game is to rewrite Shakespeare with recourse to a thesaurus: ‘Be extinguished. Be extinguished, short-term source of illumination.’”