The review quotes a passage which will no doubt go straight into the Beckett primers.

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears to me like a veil which one has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it. Grammar and style! To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Biedermeier bathing suit or the imperturbability of a gentleman. A mask. It is to be hoped the time will come, thank God, in some circles it already has, when language is best used where it is most efficiently abused. Since we cannot dismiss it all at once, at least we do not want to leave anything undone that may contribute to its disrepute. To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through–I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

As Banville says, this is the kind of pronouncement that has enthralled critics of modernism and it’s gravy for the deconstructionists.

? yet reading again this famous manifesto from the party of the Nothing, one is driven to ask, however timidly, the simple question: why? Why are grammar and style irrelevant, and what is it they are irrelevant to? Why is language “best used where it is most efficiently abused”? Why should we contribute to the disrepute of language as the next best thing to dismissing it altogether?

One day, I hope, someone will be able to trace the full variety of motives for the twentieth century’s attacks on the organised and ordered word and the various goals of the attackers.

Oh, Banville gave me an idea for the next Wordability competition. Sharpen your keyboards.

The situation: Laura, the heroine and narrator, has married Edward, whom she has only just met, against the wishes of his father. The newly-weds escape by stealing Edward?s father?s coach.

The Postilions had at first received orders only to take the London road; as soon as we had sufficiently reflected However, we ordered them to Drive to M—-. the seat of Edward’s most particular friend, which was but a few miles distant. At M—-. we arrived in a few hours; and on sending in our names were immediately admitted to Sophia, the Wife of Edward’s freind. After having been deprived during the course of 3 weeks of a real freind . . . imagine my transports at beholding one, most truly worthy of the Name.
Sophia was rather above the middle size; most elegantly formed. A soft languor spread over her lovely features, but increased their Beauty–. It was the Charectarestic of her Mind–. She was all sensibility and Feeling. We flew into each others arms and after having exchanged vows of mutual Freindship for the rest of our Lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward secrets of our Hearts–.

We were interrupted in the delightfull Employment by the entrance of Augustus, (Edward’s friend) who was just returned from a solitary ramble. Never did I see such an affecting Scene as was the meeting of Edward and Augustus. “My Life! my Soul!”(exclaimed the former) “My adorable angel!”(replied the latter) as they flew into each other’s arms. It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself–We fainted alternately on a sofa.

From: Jane Austen, Love and Freindship (1787-1790). The spelling is Jane Austen?s. She began L&F at the age of 12.

Ezra Pound in 1914

The teacher or lecturer is a danger. He very seldom recognises his nature or his position. The lecturer is a man who must talk for an hour.

A pleasure of aging: to reconsider books that have helped to form your attitudes. Another: not having to talk for an hour.

Ezra Pound’s The ABC of Reading (1934 – but I read it in the early 1960s) could be described as an eccentric textbook, but it’s more of a manifesto. It comprises a little generalisation about literature, a lot of examples of poetry – almost an anthology – some commentary and a reading list.

Pound thought it necessary to have a standard, to read the best that has been done in its kind. What complicates this goal for him is that no one language holds a monopoly of literary virtue. For Pound, a real understanding of poetry requires a swag of languages (Chinese, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French, Italian, Provencal and more). Cross-cultural comparison holds no terrors. To see that Greek drama is not all that good, he advises you to read Homer. Don’t bother with German – he has read it all for you, and found nothing standard-setting. The monoglot gets a look-in. Pound concedes that you can get most of it by reading ‘authorised’ translations such as Pound’s own of Seafarer, Golding’s Ovid or Gavin Douglas’s Virgil. But the strongest impression left by the book – on one seventeen year old reader, at least – is that anyone without a working knowledge of half-a-dozen languages is a dabbler.

As Pound might say: balls. But at seventeen, the book conjured up a marvellous, if deeply confusing landscape – all those exotic peaks waiting to be conquered – and the promise of initiation into the mysteries of the craft, all presented far more enticingly than the plodding textbooks with their pother about iambic pentameter. I suppose I was open to the idea of a cosmopolitan canon because of my immersion in music ?

Quite apart from its grandiose claims, the book is a bit of a mess. Some of the comments on the texts are enigmatic, most no more than jottings, all of the arguments are flat assertions and there’s a good deal of intimidating but bogus scholarship. I often felt, re-reading it, like a schoolboy lectured to by a fascinating, but slightly mad uncle.

The tone of the book is hilariously dogmatic. Read for yourself, he repeatedly urges, ignore the textbooks, shrug off received opinion, do the hard yards, get up the languages and read for yourself. Then you’ll see I’m right. This is the double-bind that made two generations of English students bite their fingernails.

Despite all this, if someone wanted to begin to read poetry seriously, there are worse books. Pound may be dogmatic, but he also cares passionately about the craft as well as the art of poetry, and almost anyone would profit from a careful reading of his examples. Today, when even first year course descriptions routinely speak of gender, race, class and identity, when the drift is towards treating creative work as ‘evidence’, this is again the stress we need.

A few of many good things.

His kinds of writers: inventors, masters, diluters, good writers without salient qualities (those ‘fortunate enough to be born when the language is in good working order’), writers of belles-lettres, the starters of crazes. (39)

His advice to seek out the earliest example of a style or an innovation, to see the colour pure before it’s mixed with others.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

There is one quality which unites all great and perdurable writers, you don’t NEED schools and colleges to keep ‘em alive.

In the spirit of which, when I am asked what should be done about Shakespeare in schools, I tend to say drop him. (It is probably time to extend the ban to universities. ) “But then they’ll never read him . . .”; as if a mountaineer scrambling around in the Grampians had never heard of Everest. Those who can read him will seek him out. Those who can’t are spared their sufferings. Does it ever occur to you that declaring someone official literature might have a downside? Who don’t you trust – Shakespeare? serious readers? What makes you bother about unserious readers?

Dr Moody concludes her page:

Since the existence of large fan communities generates money and favorable partisan coterie publicity, it is in the interest of anyone who works or becomes involved with any projects involving Austen and (lately increasingly) Burney to begin with an exaggerated respect; any sharp criticism must be presented in somewhat disguised forms.The phenomenon of the cult figure or group of texts is an important one in our era, and we need frank discussion of how different cults arise, what imagined characteristics cult figures are typically endowed with by their fans, what kinds of people become fervent fans of literary writers and their characters, and what is the effect of such cults on serious study of works of the imagination.

We could do all that. Or we could just tip-toe away. They’re making too much noise to notice.

Norbury Park, Wednesday, November 3rd 1784

Nothing can be more truly pleasant than our present lives. I bury all disquietudes in immediate enjoyment; an enjoyment more fitted to my secret mind than any I had ever hoped to attain. We are so perfectly tranquil that not a particle of our whole frames seems ruffled or discomposed. Mr Locke is gayer and more sportive than I have ever seen him; his Fredy seems made up of happiness; and the two dear little girls are in spirits almost ecstatic; and all from that internal contentment which Norbury Park seems to have gathered from all corners of the world into its own sphere.

Our mornings, if fine, are to ourselves, as Mr Locke rides out; if bad, we assemble in the picture room. We have two books in public reading, Madame de Sevign?’s Letters and Cook’s last voyage. Mrs Locke reads the French, myself the English.

Our conversations, too, are such that I could almost wish to last for ever. Mr Locke has been all himself – all instruction, information and intelligence, – since we have been left alone; and the invariable sweetness, as well as judgment, of all he says, leaves, indeed, nothing to wish.

They will not let me go while I can stay, and I am now most willing to stay till I must go. The serenity of a life like this smooths the whole internal surface of the mind. My own, I assure you, begins to feel quite glossy ?

_The Famous Miss Burney: the Diaries and Letters of Fanny Burney, eds Barbara G. Schrank and David J. Supino, 1976.

1. Estimate the number of household servants required to support this idle lifestyle and the quantity of agony endured by them.

2. Comment on the phrase gathered from all corners of the world with particular attention to the plantation slaves of the West Indies.

3. Specify the ideological function of (a) Madame de Sevign? (b) Cook’s Voyages.

4. Which form of address is the more sexist, Fanny Burney or Miss Burney?

4. Stop sighing with helpless, hopeless longing.

?This is vintage Waugh,? said an insider, ?from the same period as Vile Bodies and Scoop, and every bit as sharp and laugh-out-loud funny as those books.?

Those looking for a reason for living need look no more.

Next morning, the quarrel is made up. Johnson owns that he spoke in passion, Boswell that he took it too hard, and they set out in a boat for Skye.

In most of The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson it is Johnson who is the star, Boswell the roadie, Johnson the sage, Boswell merely his amanuensis. It is clear who is dependent on whom. Yet in this incident, the roles are suddenly reversed.

This is depression at work, a condition almost always marked by the fear of abandonment. (Whether early experiences of abandonment ’cause’ depression can be left moot.) It is dusk, a bad time (Lowell’s ‘skunk hour’) in the daily mood pattern. Johnson maintains a ‘dreary silence’ and ‘seems to be meditating’. All in all, if I am right, he is in an extremely vulnerable state. Boswell’s sudden, unexplained departure fills him with fear and enrages him. Their friendship has given him not the least ground to suppose that Boswell will behave unpredictably (‘one cannot tell what he may do next’). In that phrase we hear the formless panic of depression.

Although the rage subsides, he is still angry later that night.

Sir, had you gone on, I was thinking that I should have returned with you to Edinburgh, and then have parted from you, and never spoken to you more.

Neither man invokes depression under its 18th century names (‘spleen’, ‘hyponchondria’) to account for this incident. And obviously there are other possible readings of Boswell’s account. What makes me more confident of mine, however, are two Latin poems Johnson composed later that week.

The first is an Ode to the Isle of Sky. (I quote the English versions made later.)

And yet to climb the hilly heath,
Or search the hollowed cave beneath,
Or count the white waves as they flow,
Affords no cure for mental woe.

The storms that shake the troubled soul,
‘This thine, Almighty, to control;
And, as thy wise decrees dispose,
The tide of passion ebbs and flows.

A second Ode, a few days later, is addressed to Hester Thrale.

Whether she sooths her husband’s toils,
Or spreads her fond maternal smiles,
Or with a book the hours beguiles
Her fancy to regale;

May she of me be mindful found!
May faith with mutual faith be crowned!
So shall the shores of Skie resound
The gentle name of Thrale.

He wishes to know that when they are separated, he and this woman on whom he has come to depend so much, that he is not gone from her mind, that their ‘mutual faith’ is sustained.

This sequence of moods, feelings and actions on the Tour shows one way in which Johnson’s depression is woven into the texture of his everyday experience. We are so accustomed to thinking of him as a granitic block that to imagine him as needy and dependent requires some adjustment. Needy and dependent, however, he certainly was, a fact about him recognised more clearly by women – Fanny Burney, Hester Thrale – than by men. Johnson names and knows what ails him, and is familiar with many of its effects. Perhaps by ‘passion’ he meant, not just strong emotion, but also the effects of illness, and means Boswell to pick this up. If so, Boswell didn’t.

Garrison Keillor nailed it. Writers don’t want to mumble ‘Glad you enjoyed the book’. They want to say ‘Rise, my grateful people.’

Those who know him only through the Life of Johnson may not appreciate that Boswell’s collected writings will run to maybe forty volumes when the mighty Yale edition is completed. True, Boswell was exceptional and would be exceptional in any period. I cite him because of the role writing played in his life.

It wasn’t what he did for a living and it wasn’t what he did for fun. For most of his adult life he alternated between playing the laird at his estate (a role he took seriously), practising law in Edinburgh and going on sprees to London. There he put in his time drinking, socialising and whoring. Yet he found time to fill those forty volumes.

No doubt he was gifted. No doubt it helps not to have to make your own bed. Do the sums, however, and you realise that he must have written that unfailingly lucid prose just as fast as his pen could splutter across the paper. He could do this because he practised.

In Boswell in Holland, the second in Yale’s thirteen volumes of the private papers (the ‘trade’ edition) we find him in Utrecht studying law. He writes every day: his journal, a memorandum book, lengthy letters, dialogues recalled verbatim from the previous night, five French couplets ( to improve his French) and a short essay in Dutch (to improve his Dutch). The lectures he attends, by the way are in Latin and when necessary he speaks that language. Much of this multi-lingual activity involved translation, a superb discipline for someone learning to write.

Alexander Pope did not arrive at the perfection of his couplets by accident, or overnight. Couplets were almost the only verse-form he used, and the world was material to be turned into them.

From his attention to poetry he was never diverted. If conversation offered anything that could be improved, he committed it to paper; if a thought, or perhaps an expression more happy than was common, rose to his mind, he was careful to write it; an independent distich was preserved for an opportunity of insertion and some little fragments have been found containing lines, or parts of lines, to be wrought upon at some other time.

He was one of those few whose labour is their pleasure: he was never elevated to negligence, nor wearied to impatience; he never passed a fault unamended by indifference, nor quitted it by despair. He laboured his works, first to gain reputation, and afterwards to keep it.

_ Johnson, Life of Pope.

Athletes of the pen.