'Style Should Be Oscillant'

The Sketch was an illustrated weekly journal in England published from 1893 to 1959. It doted on high society, royalty, gossip and the arts. The January 2, 1895, issue included an anonymous profile titled “A Few Words with Mr. Max Beerbohm,” accompanied by a photograph of Beerbohm as a boy wearing a sailor suit and a bowl haircut.  He was twenty-two at the time of the article and was still a year away from publishing his first book, The Works of Max Beerbohm. The article begins: 

“Mr. Max Beerbohm left Oxford only last term to plunge into the delights of literature in London. In that short space of time, by his curious contributions to The Yellow Book, he has gained a more than merely esoteric fame. Indeed, he may be said to occupy in literature somewhat the same position as does Mr. Aubrey Beardsley in art.”

  

The writer visits Beerbohm’s home on Hyde Park Place in London and speaks with him in the room where “[Alexander William] Kinglake wrote his famous history of the Crimean War.” Beerbohm, he tells us, has “a passion for paradox and marivaudage – in fact, for all unusual things.”

 

Beerbohm mentions his essay “King George the Fourth” and says: “To treat history as a means of showing one’s cleverness may be rough on history, but it has been done by the best historians, from Herodotus to Froude and myself. Some of my ‘George’ was false, and much was flippant: but why should a writer sit down to the systematically serious, or else conscientiously comic. Style should be oscillant.”

 

The writer asks, “‘Oscillant’? Is that one of your queer words, of which we have heard so much? Do you intend to abandon them, as an affectation?”

 

Beerbohm replies: “Certainly not. They are not affected. At times there is no word in the English dictionary by which I can express my shade of meaning. I try to think of a French, or Latin, or Greek one. If I can’t, then I invent a word—such as ‘pop-limbo’ or ‘bauble-tit’ – often a compound of some well-known English word with an affix or prefix to point its significance. Sometimes I invent a word merely because the cadence of the sentence demands it.”

 

Already we hear hints of the mature Beerbohm, the poker-faced voice of nuanced irony. Seasoned readers covet a small class of writers with whom we share a significant portion of our sensibility. This is not a qualitative judgment. It’s an emotional/aesthetic sympathy. One reads them with the sense that the writer understands the reader, and vice versa. Such is Beerbohm for me. As he writes in “A.V. Laider," “Our mutual aloofness was a positive bond between us.”

 

Beerbohm died seventy years ago today, on May 20, 1956, at age eighty-three.

'Having the Nature or Form of Flowers'

Occasionally I encounter a word so lyrical or amusingly grotesque in its pronunciation or specialized in meaning that I add it to the word museum I carry around in my head. There’s little likelihood I’ll ever use such words in speech or print. I value clarity in language and using them would amount to showing off and confusing people. 

Reading the prose of Sir Thomas Browne yet again reliably contributes another exhibit to the cache. In this case, flosculous, found in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), a volume usually known as Vulgar Errors. To my ear, flosculous sounds vaguely medical, perhaps describing a rare disorder of the kidney. All wrong. Here is the definition given by Dr. Johnson, in his Dictionary: “composed of flowers; having the nature or form of flowers.”

 

Here is one of Browne’s uses: “The outward part is a thick and carnous covering, and the second a dry and flosculous coat [of the nutmeg], commonly called Mace.” And the other: “Putting the dried Flowers of the Vine into new Wine to give it a flosculous race or spirit.” The most peculiar use comes in Chapter XXVI, “Of Sperma-Ceti, and the Sperma-Ceti Whale,” in which Browne describes whale oil:

 

“It flameth white and candent like Camphire, but dissolveth not in aqua fortis, like it. Some lumps containing about two ounces, kept ever since in water, afford a fresh, and flosculous smell.”

 

Presumably, that means a sweet smell, a floral scent, not what one expects from Moby-Dick. Flosculous hasn't been used since the 18th century. The first definition in the OED is “of, relating to, or of the nature of flowers; having the scent or fragrance of flowers.” Among the formally scientific definitions is “composed of floscules or florets.”

 

Browne is the seventy-third most frequently cited source in the OED, with more than 4,100 quotations. He is credited with coining nearly 800 words and establishing the modern usage of more than 1,600 others. In his Life of Browne (1756), Dr. Johnson defends Browne’s rococo word-horde:

 

“His style is, indeed, a tissue of many languages; a mixture of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant regions, with terms originally appropriated to one art, and drawn by violence into the service of another. He must, however, be confessed to have augmented our philosophical diction; and in defence of his uncommon words and expressions, we must consider, that he had uncommon sentiments, and was not content to express in many words that idea for which any language could supply a single term.”

'Failed in Life and Love'

“Usually he took for his subjects those who failed in life and love. He wrote about the derelict and downtrodden, the old and bereft. Who wanted to read about successful alderman, anyway?”

As a newspaper reporter, “celebrities” never interested me, the politicians and captains of industry hungry for headlines. Too often they sought the “glamour” a reporter might supply them, even in the provincial pages of a smalltown newspaper in the Midwest. Smugness and entitlement are repellant. At the same time I resisted romanticizing the plight of the outsiders, the ready-made poignancy that comes with poverty and failure. It was impossible to avoid both types, of course. The best I could do was maintain an uneasy neutrality, sticking as close as possible to the facts, sorting them out and resisting the effortless clichés. 

The comment at the top is by Scott Donaldson in his biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson, and I think it accounts for my love for the best of Robinson’s poems. He usually resists the romanticizing impulse, the easy route of making losers heroic. His emotional capacity is enormous but carefully regulated. He doesn’t gush. Take his sonnet “Reuben Bright” (The Children of the Night, 1897):

 

“Because he was a butcher and thereby

Did earn an honest living (and did right),

I would not have you think that Reuben Bright

Was any more a brute than you or I;

For when they told him that his wife must die,

He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,

And cried like a great baby half that night,

And made the women cry to see him cry.

 

“And after she was dead, and he had paid

The singers and the sexton and the rest,

He packed a lot of things that she had made

Most mournfully away in an old chest

Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs

In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.”

 

In other hands, the conclusion might have been insufferably cheesy. The poem consists of two carefully structured sentences, loosely defined as before and after. The second flows so smoothly, in the simplest of language, that we think: Where is he going with this? A “Richard Cory”-like punchline would have been a cheap disappointment. Instead, Robinson gives us an entirely unexpected coda to a life. He makes a simple, obscure man noble in his grief.

 

Jules Renard and Robinson share similar sensibilities. Both stood on the outside, looking in. Both possessed healthy capacities for humor and irony. Neither was a rabble-rouser. Renard puts it like this in his journal on May 1, 1902: “Fame. A reputation is made with cement, mortar and liberal quantities of vulgarity.”

'Almost Great'

Henry Oliver poses an interesting question: “What should be on a list of almost Great Books?” Consider it less a critical exercise than a parlor game. Think of the books you have admired and enjoyed, and perhaps reread, that lie beyond the canonical borders, the Dante/Shakespeare/Tolstoy axis. Oliver considers his own list “personal and partial,” as it should be. Here’s my Top Ten (+ two), listed as the titles occurred to me: 

Henry Mayhew: London Labour and the London Poor (1851)

 

Whittaker Chambers: Witness (1952)

 

Anton Chekhov: Sakhalin Island (1895)

 

Charles Montagu Doughty: Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)

 

A.J. Liebling: Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962)

 

Walter Savage Landor: Imaginary Conversations (1824-29)

 

Ronald Knox: Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950)

 

The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham (2024)

 

Guy Davenport: The Geography of the Imagination (1981)

 

Jonathan Swift: A Journal to Stella (1766)

 

Michael Oakeshott: Rationalism in Politics (1962)

 

James Boswell: The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)

 

Walter de la Mare: Memoirs of a Midget (1921)

'An Unknown, Powerful, and Awful Truth'

“It is extraordinary how jargon intimidates; how prone we are to dismiss as irrelevant or dated that which comes unpackaged in the cellophane of current phraseology and images, and has nevertheless to represent those of a totally different era.” 

Another symptom of “presentism”: unwillingness to acquire at least a working knowledge of a new language by a writer from the past. “Acquire” is misleading. It’s not like learning Russian as an adult. “Adapt to” or “become comfortable with” are closer. A lazy reader will object to anything he is unable to instantaneously comprehend. More than fifty years ago one of my English professors complained that most of her students were unable to read anything written before Hemingway’s arrival. This came in the context of reading Tristram Shandy, which several classmates were complaining about.

 

The passage quoted above was written by the American poet Josephine Jacobsen (1908-2003) in "The Masks of Walter de la Mare," published in the Fall 1978 issue of The Sewanee Review. I take her observation personally because for many years I ignored the work of de la Mare in poetry and prose largely because of the language and his interest in the mutedly uncanny. His sentences often seemed fey, fuzzy and whimsical. After all, he wrote for kids, didn’t he? I wanted hard, flinty language. Jacobsen concentrates on de la Mare’s stories, which I now acknowledge as among my favorites:

 

“What is De la Mare's primary -- and forever relevant -- premise?” she asks. “It is the premise of strangeness, and of its creature, the stranger. That stranger is the one who is suddenly caught peering at us as we pass in a dim room before an unexpected mirror.”

 

De la Mare treats strangeness realistically. That’s not a gratuitously cute paradox. His world is strange and his people are sensitive to it. It’s not like the gorefests in contemporary horror movies. I don't ever recall encountering overt violence in a de la Mare story. It’s a matter of atmosphere, of quietly puzzling, barely perceived events. Often the main character is more confused than frightened. His stories seldom feel like genre-based slumming. Jacobsen articulates this quality:

 

“De la Mare has essayed the difficult task of catching that strangeness, of examining it in its effects, of relating it to what we know and what we do not. He has done it in ghost stories (if something as ambiguous as the ghostly element in these tales can be so crudely classified); by a lovely and acid sort of fairy tale; but more often and more characteristically by his stories of those who dwell on the edge--that line which divides (or does not) reality and appearance, life and death, which he has taken for his precarious foothold.”

 

De la Mare’s language delicately delineates events our rational minds ignore or safely categorize as “odd” and then forget. Jacobsen writes:

 

“It is the truly vital, the greatly endowed with life, who are most acutely aware of death, as witness the graves, plumes, hearses, and skulls of the Elizabethans; and the bland timidity of the dreadful vocabulary tailored for Our Senior Citizens, with its Rest Homes, Golden Age Clubs, Loved Ones, and Memorial Parks. De la Mare's world -- far from being that of the sugar-spun pixies with which his nonreaders often tend to associate him [that was me] -- is one of a grim and terrifying beauty, mined by abysses, peopled with the sleepwalkers of a trustful materialism, the constant borderline of the assaults of an unknown, powerful, and awful truth.”

 

[See the late Jane Greer’s 2023 essay “‘A poet, dangerous and steep’: reintroducing Josephine Jacobsen.”]

'Enliven This Vale of Tears With a Little Fantasy'

I defy you to identify the writer being described: 

“[A]ll he really wanted to do in company was to make jokes, to turn the world upside down and laugh at it, to enrich and enliven this vale of tears with a little fantasy. The important questions of man’s relationship to God and man’s responsibility for the material and spiritual welfare of his fellow men could be left to private contemplation. The main purpose of human association was to share enjoyment of the world's absurdity.”

 

What an admirable testimonial. No, it’s not Mark Twain or P.G. Wodehouse. I’ll give you another clue: This is a son, also a writer, describing his father, and the son was himself a rather funny fellow. Both, but especially the father, were gifted writers of prose, the father one of the finest of the last century. One more sample:

 

“[He] was a small man--scarcely five foot six in his socks--and only a writer, after all, but I have seen generals and chancellors of the exchequer, six foot six and exuding self-importance from every pore, quail in front of him. When he laughed, everyone laughed, when he was downcast, everyone tiptoed around trying to make as little noise as possible. It was not wealth or power which created this effect, merely the force of his personality.”

 

You’ve been reading Auberon Waugh in Will This Do?: The Memoirs of Auberon Waugh (1991) remembering Evelyn Waugh, his father, who seldom fails to make me feel good about life again if my thoughts have grown grim. There’s probably no prose in the world I admire more than his. For example, in his first and best travel book, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (1930), Waugh spends his first night in Paris in the Crillon, a comfortable but expensive hotel. Complaints about money – real or parodied -- are often funny. Next day, Waugh moves to a cheaper place: “My next hotel was remarkably less comfortable. It was exactly facing into the Metro, where it runs very noisily above ground, and the bed was, I think, stuffed with skulls.”

 

Note the rhythm. The passage begins like a unpromisingly naturalistic travelogue and closes like a bear trap. Here’s the rest of the paragraph:

 

“The only furniture was a bidet and a cupboard full of someone else’s underclothes. There were some false teeth under the pillows, and the door opened oddly, being permanently locked and detached from both hinges, so that it could only be moved at the wrong side just far enough to admit of one squeezing through.”

 

One more sample of Waugh fils on Waugh père:

 

“The most welcome aspect of him, as a parent, was his lack of interest in his children, at any rate until they were much older and became fit subjects for gossip. So long as we were out of sight and sound, we could do whatever we wanted. In that sense, he was a permissive, even indulgent parent. At the age of nine or ten I announced that I was interested in chemistry--I never studied it at school, but neither of my parents would have known that--and wished to make some chemical experiments for Christmas. Papa thought this a capital idea, and asked for a list.

 

“Not many parents, I believe, would be prepared to give their sons of nine or ten bottles of concentrated sulphuric, hydrochloric, and nitric acid to play with unsupervised. Some will decide that this was a deliberate, Charles Addams-like plot to get rid of me, but my parents were similarly unconcerned about firearms, which presented a greater threat to everyone else. From my earliest years I stalked our 40 acres alone looking for small animals, or blasted away at targets around the house. Similarly, they were unconcerned about school rules and school reports, holding all authority in derision until the threat of expulsion brought with it the danger that children might be returned home.”

'By Other, Less Difficult, Media'

Prophecy is best left to the prophets. Writers are not a notably prescient bunch. Too often, like the rest of us, they see only what they hope for, not what the future holds. Consider the catastrophe-mongering of the late Paul Ehrlich. And yet, while hardly trying, a writer will sometimes stumble onto a keyhole into the future. Seventy years ago, Louis MacNeice wrote “To Posterity” (Visitations, 1957):

 “When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards

And reading and even speaking have been replaced

By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you

Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste

They held for us for whom they were framed in words,

And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,

Or will your birds be always wingless birds?”

 

It reads like an elegy for poetry and literary culture. “Books in graveyards” recalls Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” with its “storied urn.” Traditionally, a book carved into a gravestone signified the Book of Life, awaiting review by the Heavenly Critic. Engines and epileptics “seize up,” frozen into inoperability. Ours is inarguably the age of “other, less difficult, media.” Critics have been calling our time “post-literate” at least since the Sixties. It’s a happy new reality for some (those who prefer their media “less difficult”), grievous for others (all who live by the word).

 

MacNeice pays poetry and the written word a splendid compliment. When the world is no longer “framed in words,” when the best eyes and ears of the past are no longer consulted, when we presume to confront the world in all our arrogant solitude, what remains?  A weirdly mutated world of “wingless birds.” Without words, grass is no longer “green” but something less.

 

In his 1935 essay “Poetry To-day” (Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, 1987), MacNeice had already addressed posterity, saying it “affects to put dead poets and movements in their place; to tell us their real significance and cancel out their irrelevances.” Such presumption is, he says, “tidy and saves thinking.” MacNeice rises to eloquent common sense:

 

“If we do our duty by the present moment, posterity can look after itself. To try to anticipate the future is to make the present past; whereas it should already be on our conscience that we have made the past past. We fail to appreciate a great poet like Horace because we don’t let him puzzle us.”

 

MacNeice failed to foresee his own death at age fifty-five a mere six years after “To Posterity.”