Dr Nash is no armchair critic, telling others how writing is created without experience of venturing on Parnassus himself. Though quite unjustifiably shy about his own achievements, Dr Nash is fortunate in possessing a highly creative imagination, both playful and profound, as those know well who are privileged to enjoy the poems, stories, and witty parodies he never bothers to publish.Randolph Quirk, Foreword to Designs in Prose (1980) by Walter Nash
1.Introduction
In his remarkable understanding and use of language, Walter
(Bill) Nash applies an idea articulated two thousand years ago by another
teacher of expressive style, Quintilian. In his Institutio
Oratoria, X.iii.6, the one quality required when learning how
to engage an audience is “warmth of thought”. The act of writing depends on
constant reviewing and reordering of expression and achieving the right
rhythm. When all goes well, this “warmth of thought” or calor
cogitationis is “revived anew and gathers fresh impetus from
going over the ground again” (Quintilian 1922: 4, 94–5). Near the conclusion
of Nash’s Rhetoric: The Wit of
Persuasion (1989), he acknowledges that
“calor” is “[at] the heart of all the effort”:
It is to the mind’s “warmth” that the pattern and style of discourse must answer, with an artful fastidiousness that awakens a corresponding “warmth” in the mind of the reader. To over-write, to manufacture expression in elaborate excess of content, is tasteless, and is condemned as “frigid”.(Nash 1989: 215)
This contrast between “warmth” and “frigidity” (Latin
frigidus denotes “stiff” or “lifeless”) implies that
the “warmth” of emotion is not necessarily a positive emotion, but could be
negative or hostile. Quintilian’s student of rhetoric, whilst developing his
own eloquence by studying stylistic models, had to undertake spoken and
written exercises, using words to convey not only wise perception, but
strength of feeling and measured decisiveness. Reflecting on his experience
as orator, Quintilian points out that analytical judgement, appropriacy and
emotion (see Cockcroft and Cockcroft et al. 2014: 53–175) all have crucial parts to play.
Quintilian’s student of rhetoric must “consider what the circumstances of
the case demand, what suits the characters involved, what is the nature of
the occasion and the temper of the judge”. Crucially, Quintilian observes
that feeling is also an element in “warmth of thought”: “Sometimes … we must
follow the stream of our emotions (adfectus), since their
warmth will give us more than any diligence can secure” (Quintilian 1922: 4,
98–101).
“Warmth” in these senses characterises Walter Nash’s writing,
both academic and creative. Echoing the title of one of his best-known
studies of style, his analysis and exemplification of “designs in prose” are
matched in his own “designs” in verse. Though the aims are diverse (the
prose seeks to explain, analyse, enthuse and motivate, whilst the verse aims
to evoke, delight and move), their originality, forcefulness and “warmth”
invite the reader to share Bill’s perceptions about language and life.
The next two sections consist of examples chosen first from his
poetry and secondly from his prose. They demonstrate the richness and power
of Bill’s interpretation of calor cogitationis in his own
work as rhetorician and scholar.
2.The poetry
Walter (Bill) Nash’s poetry shows a fascinating and continuing
variation in its “design” and range. The order and rhythm of language, seen
by Quintilian as integral to any persuasion, written or spoken, are notably
more varied in verse than in prose. Line-lengths, rhyme-schemes (or
patterns of half-rhyme, displaced rhyme, or blurred rhyme), and lyrical
forms such as the sonnet, are continually being altered and adapted. This
variation reflects directly comparable variations in the domain
spaces of mental and emotional activity (see Stockwell 2002: 96), evoked by successive poems
within the various time spaces revisited or confronted by
the poet.
Two late selections of Bill’s verse, In Good Faith: Devotional Poems
(2007a) and Memorabilia: Poems from Time to Time
(2009a), represent the breadth of his experience, reported and
re-lived from childhood to old age. A fuller sense of his achievement
requires the study of a succession of small booklets and stapled pamphlets,
whose publishers include Beyond the Cloister (Of Time and Small Islands
[2006a]); Recent
Intelligence: A Sonnet Cycle [2009b]); Authors On Line Ltd (For Old Time’s Sake [2007b], Feather Books
(Waking Late
[2000a]; A Heart
Prepared [2000b]; Rainshowers and Church Doors [2002a]; The Pearshaped Summer
[2003]), together with self-published collections under the motto
nondum quia tandem, such as Nobis Natus (1997); Hesperides,
(1998a); A Death in
Judea (1998b); For a Change, Confessional Verses (2000c),
and Quintus: A Roman
Mosaic (2002b). Individual poems first seen in
earlier selections often re-appear in later ones.
In contrast to the success and wide dissemination of his
scholarly and critical work, the poems of Walter Nash have never achieved a
circulation corresponding to their quality. It may be that the visual image
of the dove and olive branch, and the motto on Nash’s
nondum publications convey a frustrated urge to
communicate. The “warmth of thought” is ready to be shared, but poet and
potential audience have “not yet” (nondum) met.
Throughout the poetry, the poet’s voice takes us from our
present reality into somewhere different. It may be back to
Barrow-in-Furness in the 1930s, or to the Tenerife of the poet’s later
years, or to the heart-space peculiar to the domain of
religious poets (see Cockcroft
2005), or to various viewpoints – often satirical – on
contemporary society.
We start the journey with the experience of Walter Nash’s
colleagues and students in the University of Nottingham’s Department of
English, around fifty years ago, where the exuberance of Bill’s verbal
gift – the interplay of responsive reading with the urge to entertain
himself and others – became apparent in the mock-Middle English “Umfrey”
poems that he began to circulate from the late ‘60s onwards. He enjoyed the
comic incongruity between old language and poetic forms and modern
subject-matter. This is typified by “Rodemenderes” whose vigorous
onomatopoeia imitates a fourteenth century poem admired for its lively
realism, “The Blacksmiths” (Arundel MS. 292 – see Robbins 1955: 106–8). In the second stanza of
“Rodemenderes”, Umfrey (Bill’s poetic persona “liv[ing] in a cupboard in the
English Department”) evokes the deafeningly combined noise of pneumatic
drills and their associated machinery:
Drilles drivellynge boreth in mi braynes.
A! Corsede carles that delven yn owre draynes,
Ne can I rime noght, ne make
For yowre sake,
Yowre leeres blake
Haunten mi dremes
With othes and scremes,
With “Overe to yow, Alfe”,
“Berte, yowre waie”.
“Huppe, nou I haf hym”,
Al daie, al daie.(From the original typescript, kindly copied by Frances Nash)
Like the rhythm of blacksmiths’ hammers (“tik, tak! hic, hac!
tiket, taket! Tyk, tak! / lus, bus! lus, das!”), the four-line refrain here,
repeated three times in the poem as a whole, evokes the road workers’
handling of a series of heavy objects such as kerbstones. The swing from man
to man, and the heft exerted, form a distinctive rhythm, with the metrical
stresses directly reflecting the physical sensation of weight. The poem
exists within two time-spaces at once, a peculiar discourse-world which
presupposes a reader familiar not only with the vocabulary of Middle English
and the medieval mindset, but also with contemporary social and political
attitudes in a time of mass literacy and universal suffrage. Thus Umfrey,
the clerk, anxious to “rime” and “make”, expresses his disdain for the
unwashed and unlettered “carles” (i.e. peasants), “delv[ing]” on a modern
tarmac road, much as they would in a manorial field. This contrasts the
isolation of the poet and his empathetic reader hearing the insistent noise
“Al daie, al daie”, with the close-knit working group “delving”. At the same
time the reader also feels genuine empathy with those enduring this hard,
unremitting labour, and the metrical pattern of the refrain is completed.
“Warmth of thought” has converted pain to pleasure.
Comic hyperbole appears in further depictions of Umfrey’s
world. Not surprisingly he has students to teach, and in “A! gentyl ketyl”
longs (anachronistically) for his mid-morning cup of coffee. The poem first
appeared in the cyclostyled poetry sheet Poetry Programme.
The late Peter Widdowson was the first editor and the paper circulated in
the English and American Studies Department at the University of Nottingham
for several years from about 1966. We had bar-based meetings to discuss the
content, and at one we agreed that poems with an element of parody might
carry the pseudonym Thorn Gruin (originally a typo for Thom Gunn).
Accordingly, Nash’s “A! gentyl ketyl” though attributed to Thorn Gruin, is
unmistakably in Umfrey’s voice. Its refrain parodies the 13th century round
“Sumer Is Icumen In” (see Brown
1932: 13, 168–9). To quote Umfrey’s first two stanzas:
A! gentyl ketyl, singe!
Wery am I for þi boiling!
I crye to þe,
“Ey, jolie potte, goo boile!”
To ese me of me Toile
I wolde han café
A! ketyl, singe!
For café mi throte is drye
These lippes parchen in a droughte, perdye;
With poudred chalke
Mi tung is overspred,
Doted and nigh to ded
Am I, wi[th] sely talke
A! ketyl, singe!(Poetry Programme No. 22, 1969: 7)
This echoes the joyous “Lhude sing cuccu!” of the original
poem as the mediaeval poet greets the cuckoo, herald of summer. Nash varies
Umfrey’s first injunction “A! gentyl ketyl, singe!” modulating it to the
terser refrain “A! ketyl, singe!”. Furthermore, Nash’s
parody suggests a dusty indoor scene instead of summer lushness. Instead of
the energy of nature, where “Awe bleteþ after lomb /louþ after calue cu, /
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ” (ll. 6–8), the cultivation of knowledge is
arid and exhausting. However, an exotic remedy – “café” – promises to turn
this situation around:
There sitten mi scoleres;
I mote mi wisdom poure in hire eres
Til hit renne oute.
Helpe me to laste oon houre,
Lat hoote waters poure
From jolie spoute!
A! ketyl, singe!
As time passed, colleagues began to receive copies of very
different material, as Bill engaged with the poetry of Horace, culminating
in the appearance of Quintus: A
Roman Mosaic (2002b). Horace’s warm empathy and
expressive resourcefulness, his readiness to re-live past experience in his
poetry, and his acute observation of current society provided a model. Nash
similarly sought to recreate his own experience of life’s most vital
relationships, and to come to terms with old age and the inevitable end of
life. The parallels and contrasts between the two poets remain striking.
Horace’s father (freed slave) and Walter Nash’s parents (shipyard worker and
housewife) are of modest origins; to their sons, they are not only deeply
loved, but carry similarly massive moral and emotional authority. The
extreme vicissitudes of Horace’s life contrast with the gentler trajectory
both personal and professional, of Walter Nash’s life. Below is a selective
view of how all this is reflected in his poetry.
A vivid past reality space opens up in two
poems that recreate the experiences of north-country childhood and youth.
The poem “Val Cumberbatch” appears twice, once prefacing a section of his
prose memoir For Old Times’
Sake (2007b: 101), and again in the verse collection
Memorabilia
(2009a: 21). In the memoir it helps to convey the full range of
what young Walter shared with his father, representing the peak of
experience at a rugby league match, together with the social pleasure of
being with a supporters’ group on “play-away” days. He gives the example of
an occasion when a packed railway compartment, halted below a moonlit
hillside, burst spontaneously into a Victorian song about the moonlight,
sung in parts. In contrast, the poem’s moment is seen from two
perspectives – the player’s and the crowd’s:
Val Cumberbatch running, to win the match,
breaking away on the wing, shaking
one tackle off, then two, and their full back
coming too late to forestall the try in the corner –
adept, rapt, he moves, in arrogant flight
swooping, swerving, on elegant legs loping, …(Nash 2009a: 21, 1–6)
“Warmth of thought” at the same time separates Cumberbatch,
the supremely talented player reading the game, seizing his
chance to score, and then unites him with the spectators. In his intense
concentration on the target and the necessary action, Cumberbatch is
successively described as “adept”, “rapt”, “in a stillness” (l. 7) and
moving “with a scholar’s gravity, through groves / of contemplation” (ll.
9–10) to the point where “anthems disrupt his study, and his body / lies
prone and gasping among the exultations” (ll. 11–12). Nash comments:
This I remember from my boyhood years,
remember it now in the trance of a halting sentence,
remember the power of it, the grace, the composure
humbly recall, as I stumble into verse.(Nash 2009a: 21, 13–16)
In contrast, “Northern Washday (1930s)” (2009a: 17) recalls his mother’s weekly,
uncelebrated routine task, and the protracted physical effort needed to
perform it. Thirty lines of uneven blank verse evoke each stage of
relentless work – heating water, washing, scrubbing, rinsing, wringing,
mangling, carrying in baskets, setting up the clothes line, pegging out the
washing – from “dollylegs twisting, bell of the posser plunging” (l. 14), to
the point when “she grips the pegs in her mouth / as garment by garment the
clothes go up to dry”. Most vivid is the final cessation of activity (ll.
32–5):
…the clenching springs of work unwind.
She leans against the backstreet wall, her arms
folded across her chest, the one knee flexed,
her head bowed down, as though in meditation.
This marks the transition from the present reality of extreme
protracted effort: “My mother’s hair is awry, her face is scarlet, / sweat
blinds her, breath’s a whistle in her throat”, to the next stage of the day.
The lexis “folded”, “flexed”, “bowed” conveys tension still dissipating and
her sheer weariness. In contrast to Val Cumberbatch’s “contemplation”, with
its intense focused effort, Harriet Nash’s quasi-meditation suggests a
simultaneous relaxation of the body and clearing of the mind, in readiness
for new tasks.
Before moving to the poems reflective of his later years in
Tenerife, where “warmth of thought” is consistently felt, we should examine
Nash’s conscious extension and refinement of expression, his “artful
fastidiousness”. In the introduction to Recent Intelligence (2009b) he outlines the
reasons for his experiments with the sonnet form (and other fourteen-line
poems that go beyond the sonnet’s formal limits):
These stubs of sonnetry are put to use here as forms of commentary, or annotation, or incidental remark, and thus become an element in a general “orchestration” of structural and acoustic resource, attempting to extend the range and rhetorical appeal of sonnet practice.(Nash 2009b: 10)
Part I of the cycle “From the Wilderness” is about “a moral
and religious crisis”, and is centred on the spiritual heart
space of the poet, where he is poised between fear of an
ultimate loss of God’s presence, and hope that it does exist. In contrast,
Part II “On Queer Street” applies the logos of “commentary,
or annotation, or incidental remark” to a world that seems to have lost not
only God, but the heart space itself, the heart being
hardened to any sense of loss. Part III is described as “a clutch of poems
‘talking to each other’, about related things such as the passage of time,
penitence, creativity, redemption” (Nash
2009b: 9)
The distinctiveness of particular sonnets in the cycle is
typified by the twisting monosyllabic punch of half-rhymes in the octave of
“From the Wilderness” (iii):
We bookish men, confiding in the mind,
soon lose the confidence of what we mean;
thought-galleries are darker than a mine
and every pitfall makes a breach to mend;
in daily rigour each one works his stint
at thesis, doctorate, edition, tract,
into this pious torment they are tricked –
hard labour, hardly better than a stunt …
Despite the lack of full rhyme (or rather, because of it), the
abba/cddc pattern stands out, as “men” twists to “mind”, and “confide”
elides into “confidence”. To depend on mental analysis weakens our
concentration on the purpose which drove us to do so, as “mean” slides apart
from “mind”. It is also worth noting that “tract” and “pious” hint at a
quasi-religious quality in academic effort, distracting further from the
poet’s spiritual quest. In the final two lines the evocation of colour and
its absence – at once metonymical and metaphorical – leaves the
heart space empty:
too late the honoured scarlet, nothing’s new
in no-man’s land; the common wear is grey
A different “warmth” is conveyed in the sixth sonnet of Part
I. Here the dominant emotion is evoked for the reader by a fourfold series
of syntactical inversions, each foregrounding a new trigger for anger:
To church I go, and break out in a rage;
they manacle the sinner with their cant,
they fill the hungry with their naked want,
fears they inspire, in order to assuage,
doubts they provoke, in order to remove
faults they impute, in order to forgive,
hell they imply, in order to reprieve,
The four monosyllabic words (“fears … doubts … faults … hell”)
stand out like grammatical subjects but prove to be the object of
self-serving, inadequate action on the part of the clergy. But after
protesting at this “Punch and Judy pitched at heaven’s gate” (I. 11):
A voice in me says “wait, and you will know;
come in; be still; prepare for nothing; wait.
This echoes Horace at his most stoically philosophical, and
also reminds us of the collection entitled A Heart Prepared (2000b).
The poem “The Last Need”, part of the sequence “Lines for my
Lass”, and also appearing in Memorabilia (2009a), prefaces the next
stage in our discussion of Bill’s poetry. It is deeply human and clearly
reflects his spiritual and emotional journey:
Now we have need of courage, now the heart
must serve us in this last redoubt of living,
this barrack of old age; come, dearest friend
who had such art
to school me in the disciplines of loving.
You taught me to begin. Help me to end.
Beauty’s awry and health’s amiss. All flesh
is paper, crumpled by the years, and by them
anxiety is bred, and furtive pain.
Sweet love, refresh
Your conquest of these upstarts. Come, defy them.
They will go down and we shall rise again.
They are not of our spirit; the uncouth
burden of sickness, age that slowly, dully,
baffles the hearing, overclouds the sight.
Come, my heart’s youth,
come, my companion in the darkening valley,
and arm in arm let us address the night.
This poem is again indebted to Horace, recalling the Roman
poet’s companionship with Maecenas (comites parati), yet
radically different. Where Horace keeps erotic love apart from friendship,
Nash unites them in his affirmation of marriage (“dearest friend”… “Sweet
love”). His poem uses the metaphor of confrontation as he and Helen are
conscripted into the ageing process, a “last redoubt” against death and a
restrictive “barrack”. The poem poises the threat of decay and death against
the resilience of life. Clarity of thought and feeling evoke “warmth”, gratitude, comradeship, trust and tender reassurance.
The word “heart” is given huge emphasis in this poem: it has a
triple significance – philosophic, emotional, and Christian. When the poem
first appeared, in the collection referred to above, A Heart
Prepared (Feather Books Poetry Series No. 121, 2000b: 15), its text echoed that
title, and also the book’s two epigraphs, in which the same phrase occurs.
The first is from Samuel Daniel’s Epistle to the Lady Margaret,
Countess of Cumberland (1616): “This floating life hath but
this port of rest, / A heart prepared, that fears no ill to
come” (see Daniel
1965: 114) and the second instance appears in Nash’s translation
of the final lines of Horace’s “Epistle to Lollius”
(Epistles, 1.18,111–13):
Enough, to pray to God, giver and taker,
for life and means; as for a heart prepared –
that I will hope to fashion for myself.
It is important to note that the Latin aequum
animum can also be translated as “a balanced mind” as opposed
to “a heart prepared”, and animus also denotes “the seat of
feeling, the heart”. Indeed, Daniel seems to lead the way here, when he
alludes in his next stanza to “This Concord (Madame) of a wel-tun’d minde”.
Indeed Nash’s poems work individually, collectively and through contrast, in
a “concord”, warmed by thought, feeling and poetic intuition. For example,
in the closing lines of “Waking Late”, he implores Christ for enough time
(2007a: 39):
to test
Your sheer truth in the shabby house of age’
And let these voices babbling in my heart devise
such songs, such leaping verses, that although
the verse falters, still the music makes Your voice
my cry, and let my cry come home to Thee.
The “heart” as source of music, and of all significant action
good or bad, is a key word in Christian verse, from Herbert’s “Antiphon (I)”
where “But above all the heart / Must bear the longest part”, to Hopkins’s
“Felix Randall” and his “heavenlier heart”. But Nash refers in the same poem
to “my Horace” (Epistles, 2.2, 55) to evoke that “shabby house of age” and
his acceptance of it (“singula de nobis anni praeduntur
euntes”). The music of Nash’s poem accommodates all readers,
secular and Christian, and draws on all three connotations of “heart”, using
the word repeatedly.
Collectively, his poems evoke the joys, bitter failures and
blessings of his past, the pains and pleasures of the present, the fear of
death and (for him at least) “the hope of glory”. It is significant however
that the dedicatee of Memorabilia, Helen Nash (“my lass”),
never appears as a companion in his active exercise and exploration of
faith, which is largely solitary. The collection In Good
Faith reflects his journey, and in these poems he endows the
people of the Bible with voices, from the Virgin Mary to Pontius Pilate,
invokes Christ in prayer, and presents himself as a communicant member of
his local congregation.
What distinguishes “The Last Need” and the other poems of that
sequence (2009a: 39–43) is their
heartfelt quality, their emotive present reality. They
cover the span of time from Bill and Helen’s first years together, as in
“Otherdays” (“I recall / the gleaming fall / of hair, the raven-black / silk
at her back”). He even enlists grammar (“So / long we have known each other
/ we do not finish our / Sentences, and Verbs / go all uncomplemented”). In
“The Last Need”, Bill and Helen are like Horace’s comites
parati – “companions prepared” for “the last journey”. Each
partner supports the other. Within the emotional and experiential bond of
marriage, she has “schooled [him] in the disciplines of loving”, while he
seeks to share his Christian intuition that “we shall rise again”, while
leading that “last journey” down a valley reminiscent of “the valley of the
shadow of death”. This is undercut by the poignant ending of “The Question”
(on the facing page, made more so by the Scottish/Northern address terms of
their youth:)
…we live, my girl and I,
in dread of a day to come
when lad or lass will be dumb
to question, “How’s my own?”,
for one may no longer reply,
and one will be left alone.
The section of Memorabilia entitled “LOVE and
FRIENDSHIP” of which “Lines for my Lass” is a part, consists of contrasted
poems, some relating to Bill’s first marriage and its breakdown, which
clearly troubled his conscience, some complementing the sequence already
discussed, one addressing a male friend (“Compatibles”), and one dedicated
to “Katherine Bosley, doyenne of churchwardens” (“Farewell
to my Fancy”). All of them reflect a succession of moments and past
realities going back sixty years as well as present awareness. They touch on
many aspects of love and its expression, whether through friendship, shared
experience, delight, sorrow or remorse.
Of the three “confessional” poems that must have been hardest
to write, “Apparitions” represents a haunted conscience, “The Fall of Man”
is a powerful villanelle about wrong-doing (“The sin is not the taking of
the fruit … It is the lies, the lies that follow suit.”), while “Remembering
Dorrie” is even more varied in its explicitness. Nash even uses humour in
the second stanza (“she asked, in that voice of hers / precise as the cut of
a crystal, What is nooky?”), before his admission (“I said I loved her, and
hoped I was telling the truth, / but I was lying, / and she knew full well I
lied”). There is even a dream-reconciliation (“that voice of hers, / the
clear, cool voice, was inflected with forgiveness, / and still the blue eyes
looked at me with love”). The reader feels the “warmth of thought” up to the
very final line and “the ache of being reconciled”.
In powerful contrast, the next two poems (“The Pearshaped
Summer” and “Undeserving Native”) reflect Bill’s second, enduring marriage
to Helen, its shared sorrows and interleaved pleasures, and incidental
adjustments of “archaic masculine habitudes”. Other kinds of friendship are
celebrated in “Compatibles”, where (for example) Nash uses terza
rima to reflect the continued dialogue of a close friendship
between two scholars who were also Navy “messmates”, and in “Farewell to my
Fancy”, a mildly flirtatious poem, involving all three domains of “heart”,
and skittering from the expatriate Anglican congregation of Los Gigantes
back to Bill’s teenage world where “we could have gone to the ‘flicks’ / and
‘necked’ in the one-and-nines”.
The poem that follows (“The Old Spagnoletta”) turns from
whimsical fantasy to the reality of love in old age, and again harks back
through “all my heart has been” to “the boy in me / vainglorious and
eighteen” as he dances with Helen. Reverting to the effects of age on “lung”
and “hip”, the poet admits that his “head is full of prayers / and thoughts of
right and wrong”. This linkage of “head” and “heart” not only deepens the
promise that “love will dance our evening out”, but anticipates “Lines for
My Lass”, where the opening poem, “Noon in the Plaza”, changes the
metaphor:
… now let us drink our Autumn, sip by sip,
Unsay our says and reason with unreasons,
And nose the fragrance at the glass’s rim
Space constraints have obliged us to be highly selective in
choosing and quoting from Bill’s poems. We hope we have done enough to
illustrate the expressive development of individual poems, the cumulative
and contrastive effect of sequences and the immediate, inventive “warmth” of
his choices. This is instrumental to an emotional, imaginative and/or
spiritual engagement with his subjects.
To represent his later verse, we have chosen to focus on
Memorabilia, though we might have ranged further
through Of Time and Small
Islands (2006a) as well as the devotional poetry.
Our concluding example includes both genres. “Dawn at Tamaduste (on the
island of El Hierro, New Year’s Day, 1999)” (Nash 2007: 31) opens with lines
from Bach’s “Christmas Chorale”, “Brich an, du schönes
Morgenlicht …” evoking the sombre clouded half-light before
sunrise. The first stanza uses only one end rhyme:
Waking uneasy, I get up and watch the sea
breaking, laden, dead-leaden, under my balcony.
This dawn, a blackening dread, time-bred, takes hold of me,
heart-fear at the turn of the year for trouble about to be.
How shall I fare? Or fail? Bear body’s frailty,
soul’s harvest of despair? Sly wraith, my enemy,
my Unfaith, shakes, shadows my spirit grievously.
Internal rhymes (“takes”/“shakes”; “fare”/“despair”),
assonance, alliteration reminiscent of Old English verse, and echoes of
Hopkins’s “Terrible Sonnets”, make it “dead-leaden” for the reader. Then the
sun rises:
Soon at the sea’s eastern bound, a serpentine ribbon of light
traces the rim of a cloud. And suddenly firecracker-bright
morning explodes, ocean threshes blue over white,
and the voluble breakers cry with uncompromising voice,
“Weakling! Renegade! Runagate! Stand, for you have no choice.
Love. Work. Pray. Trust in the Lord. Rejoice!
The east lights up, the Morgenlicht of the
“Chorale” suggesting a Chinese dragon festival with gilded paper dragon and
firecrackers exploding, gunpowder’s contribution to joy as well as
destruction. Harvest imagery blends sea and land, preparing us for the
injunction “Work!” in the final line. The lexis is chosen carefully to
suggest the universality of the sunrise across all geographic and cultural
frontiers. The archaic self-rebuke “Runagate!” corrects the balance,
preparing the heart for another year or more. How well this supports the
conclusion to “One Deaf Poet” (Nash
2009a: 54)!
But what of that? Neighbours, I am a poet,
I am an auditorium to myself.
Hooped in the strict confinement of my skull
elated wings of rhythm lunge and dart;
rustles within shape the sonorities
of forms, measures, sounds in permutations
and patterned mazes, seeking, endless, endless,
a resurrection and the hope of heaven.
Thank heaven, I am not deaf, after all.
3.The prose
We turn now to focus on Walter Nash’s prose writings about
language, all of which in different ways provide opportunities for
communicating calor cogitationis to his readers. To attempt
any kind of representative selection from the books and articles Bill
published about the English language throughout his life (despite increasing
frailty), seems impossible. In the end we selected for discussion his only
novel, Kettle of Roses
(1982) and seven language focused texts. Space, however, did not
permit further consideration of his prose memoir For Old Times’
Sake (2007b), which we would recommend strongly.
In the eighties Nash set to work addressing, exploring and
explaining the first principles of good writing in two pivotal texts, Designs in Prose
(1980) and English
Usage (1986). In his preface to the latter, Nash
contrasts the limitations of the prescriptive discussion,
with the “exhaustive (and exhausting)” consequence of the overly
descriptive approach. His own preference was for a
constructive approach, discussing and demonstrating the
range of stylistic choices available to any writer in English. And indeed,
Designs in Prose does just this. Starting from a
detailed examination of the structure and organisation of prose and the
rhetorical effect of sentence layout, we are guided through relationships
between individual sentences and their internal structure, till we acquire
increasing confidence in our choices, from the skill of using left- and
right-branching sentences appropriately, to the mysteries of modality and of
cohesive devices. The full title of Nash’s next book – English Usage: A Guide to First
Principles (1986) – appears to be a conscious echo
of Eric Partridge’s famous Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good
English (1942). Significantly, the subtitles differ, implying
that Partridge’s approach verges on the prescriptive
(“A Guide to Good English”), whereas Nash is more
concerned with showing how language works (“A Guide to
First Principles”). Nash’s Preface to English Usage starts:
“I once had the notion of calling this book a guide for the time
being”, to help “serious students of usage and style … as a
first step towards more advanced studies” and “… to acknowledge my own
limitations”. But then he “became aware of a third sense lurking”, that
“books of this kind … may be called political acts”, associated with “a
favoured, socially stable class of right-thinking people” (1986: xi–xiii). Such awareness of
the political aspects of language study shows how Bill’s own social
experience and values would contextualise his work to the end.
As his linguistic focus broadens, Nash offers a series of
astutely modulated analyses of language varieties and genres, ranging from
The Language of
Humour (1985), and Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion
(1989) to The Language
of Popular Fiction (1990). In The Language
of Humour he explores with fascinated delight how language
communicates humour. His opening chapter starts with the seemingly solemn
heading “Explaining the Joke” in which he inquires whether joke design is
formulaic, allusive or logical. Always sensitive to sound-patterning, Nash
demonstrates how rhythm, rhyme and other aural features work together to
achieve comic effect. Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion is an
accessible and engaging guide to the subject whose main purpose is to
“rehabilitate rhetoric as an ordinary human competence which, through its
power to move and amuse, develops the wit of persuasion” (Nash 1989: ix). This differs significantly from
the more prescriptive approach of Greek and Roman rhetoricians like
Aristotle or Quintilian, and of Renaissance advice manuals on rhetoric,
which advised “how to write and speak well”. Nash’s characteristic use of
humour as a teaching tool is immediately clear in the first sentence of the
first chapter: “I have designs on you, as the tattooist said to his
girlfriend”, thus propounding the scope of rhetoric so adroitly as to make
further definition almost unnecessary (Nash 1989: 1).
In his choice of literary genres to analyse, Nash could be
radical. For example, The Language of Popular Fiction
examines the sort of writing some literary critics might ignore or consider
trivial (e.g. “bodice rippers”, “airport fiction” and “thrillers”). Whether
the story is set in Regency London or a modern office, we are looking at the
“kinds of fiction composed with an eye on Him or Her”, where men wear wigs
(or exquisitely cut suits) and women ball gowns (or exotic swimwear). Nash
resists the temptation to focus on content rather than style, whilst
acknowledging the influence of gender ideologies on writers’ choices. His
main interest, however, lies in the audience for these
sub-genres, and the ways in which popular fiction writers manage plot,
narrative structure, and syntactic and grammatical choices to appeal to
these audiences.
Over the next decade Nash will explore the central mystery of
how creativity in language works, and we can see how his characteristic
“warmth of thought” enables him to recognise the creative process at work in
every kind of text. Language and
Creative Illusion (1998c) and A Departed Music: Readings in Old English
Poetry (2006b) reveal the insightfulness and
richness of Nash’s imagination, whilst also showing readers how to become
better writers themselves. In both books, Bill, having previously delighted
in inventing his own witty examples, turns to literature to show the
integral relationship of grammar and syntax to literary art. The title of
Seeing through
Language (1990), a book co-authored with Ronald
Carter, is “designedly ambiguous”, according to Nash. It seeks not only to
understand the workings of language “as the instrument and channel of
communication”: but it also hints at ways of ‘seeing through’ language when
language is the mask or cover of underlying purposes and and ideologies,
(Nash 1990: 7).
This conceptual world of composition is the context for
Language and Creative Illusion. In the introductory
“Preliminaries: on illusions and creations”, Nash uses Andrew Marvell’s poem
“The Garden” to explore the meaning of creativity. The poem moves from the
delights of ordered nature to an exposition of the inner life, using
resemblance (metaphor), transcendence
(creation of illusion) and annihilation (of the self and
external reality). Language “accredits the [otherwise transitory] creative
illusion” (Nash 1998: 3). Central to all discussion of creativity must be
the reader-writer relationship, argues Nash, whether he is considering
general issues, or analysing a writer’s use of individual features like
grammar or lexis. Aspiring writers are invited to read, learn and explore
their own creativity.
The final text in this group is A Departed Music: Readings in Old English
Poetry (2006b). Written in retirement, this book
reflects Bill’s delight in re-reading texts studied and taught in the past
(as well as in writing poetry himself). His fascination with etymology,
Anglo-Saxon and European history is clear in the poetic translations, the
Postscripts and the Samples. The six thematic discussions reflect both the
key concerns of Anglo-Saxon society, and the important role of the poet or
scop – transmitter of creative illusion.
4.Calor cogitationis in action
Looking for signs of calor cogitationis in the
books Bill wrote during the eighties, we turn to perhaps his best known,
Designs in Prose, published in 1980. The book focuses
initially on the layout and “rhetorical design” of prose, and moves on to
sentence relationships defined by time and place, lexis and the use of
“texture”. Narrowing the focus to word and phrase structure, sentence
organisation and the ongoing writer-reader relationship, Nash concludes by
encouraging the writer to self-monitor his or her creativity. In responding
to his inventive demonstration of a specific linguistic feature, the
aspiring writer becomes part of a creative dialogue. Below is an (invented)
example of prose structure dependent on the subject-led sentence:
The garden party was a huge success. The sun blazed on a green and cheerful campus. Champagne came and went. Strawberries disappeared down a hundred throats. Gowns fluttered. Girls giggled. A porter fell into the chocolate mousse. Gaiety reigned supreme. But then as if to prove the cruel transience of mortal joys, something altogether unforeseen and unreasonable occurred. An enormous green alligator of hideously malign aspect came waddling over the Vice-Chancellor’s lawn.(Nash 1980: 11)
Two surreal events enliven this passage – the porter’s mishap
and the alligator’s dramatic appearance. Both stretch our disbelief, awaking
a corresponding warmth in the mind of the reader, and subconsciously
alerting us to the pattern of syntactic recurrence. (We can also enjoy the
wry and satiric perspective on university Vice-Chancellors.)
Another passage in Designs in Prose is more
personal; Nash is showing the use of time definers as “pegs” and “essential
agents of continuity and cohesion” in the expository structure of a passage.
The example is autobiographical, and the “pegs” are underlined.
The lexis consists of elements of time progression (“career”…
“stagnated”… “waned”… “developed”), assisted by the use of perfect and past
perfect tenses (“had waned”, “had developed”, “kept”, ‘fed” and “has
fallen”), and time relaters (“meanwhile” and “at the same time”, “to
continue the tradition”). These all support the cohesion and coherence of
the text, and invite the reader to empathise with this fortunate if
imprudent young man (see Nash
1980: 36–37).
Our final example is an account of Bill’s father’s life, used
to demonstrate right-branching sentence structure (main clause precedes all
subordinate phrases and clauses):
My father endured the night shift for thirteen years, hating the inversion of his life, lamenting always the loss of good daylight hours necessarily given over to sleep, missing the company of his children, for we were off to school very shortly after he got home in the morning and off to bed an hour or more before he left the house at night. Yet being “on nights” brought him some kind of satisfaction, whether in the comradely sense of belonging to a special club, or because the more reflective types, the reading-and-thinking men, tended to gravitate to the night shift, or because the shipyard at night could at times be a strangely beautiful place.(Nash 1980: 114–5: emphasis added)
Nash points out that in both sentences the main statement of
the situation (italicised here) is followed by a commentary providing
increasingly detailed information. Had either sentence been left-branching,
the reverse would be true, increasing suspense and distracting attention as
the reader tried to retain every detail, until “the finale unmasks the
mystery” (Nash 1980: 115). As he
writes about his father, Bill switches the perspective from academic to
child to parent and back again.
English Usage is a different kind of book.
Later in his Preface, Nash pursues his investigations of usage, and its
links with “a favoured, socially stable class of right-thinking people”. He
suggests that:
Usages have become an almost artificial genre, handing down their encapsulated dogmas, losing touch with usage and users, losing touch with time, stiffly ignoring the need for the social philosophy of language which should irradiate such books.(Nash 1986: 11).
It is immediately clear that the prescriptive approach has
limitations. Nash’s aim is to be constructive first and foremost, and never
to be destructive for the sake of destruction. This strongly positive cast
gives each chapter a vigour and energy that dissolves backward-looking
stultification. Thus, in Chapter 1 (“The Usage Trap”), he insists that
language is not simply “a mere adjunct of genteel nurture” (1986: 3), as over-prescriptivism
implies. In spoken language, usage is a consensus of practice in the
speaking community; in written language, usage is the choice of the
individual and his or her own style. Prescriptivists seek to prevent
language change over time, but Nash cites Samuel Johnson’s firm declaration
that: “To enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are alike the
undertakings of pride” (1986: 5).
For Nash, the joy of language is its individuality, in usages ranging from
his mother’s fantastic neologism “teapotliddous”, meaning “vacuous or inane”
to sociolectal controversies about usage such as “serviette” vs ‘napkin’,
“toilet” vs “lavatory” and “notepaper” vs “writing paper”. Nash cites
Johnson again: “Dr Johnson was right; you cannot fetter a phrase or manacle
a manner of speaking” (Nash
1986: 6).
Subsequent chapters continue to discuss the relationship
between language usage and language change, with perhaps the most helpful
advice for the writer being found in Chapter 3. Unexpectedly, Nash states
that as “A style cannot be made by rule or taught by recipe … some
prescriptions may still be necessary” (Nash 1986: 55) and proceeds to list (with examples) nine
“Prescriptions”, all eminently sensible. These range from Prescription 1
The components of a sentence must be clearly and unambiguously
related to Prescription 9 Try not to be verbose; as a
first principle, choose the familiar and concise before the learned and
expansive. Particularly convincing is the remark “Put no great
trust in polysyllables”! (Nash
1986: 55–70).
In the last chapter Nash continues to warn of the danger of a
writer being over-reliant on the concept of authority and “Authorities”. He
lists nine pithy “Prescriptions” he has identified. These range from ironic
(From prescription through perplexity to paralysis),
gloomy (Negative Prescriptions), authoritative
(Polonian precepts), philosophical (Received
wisdoms, reduced perceptions), to the
optimistic-with-reservations (Into the future, facing hopefully
backwards) and the ultimate questioning of authorities and
their recommendations (Under which king?). Nash concludes
with his own declaration of putting his trust in a writer who accepts the
“fascinating variety of speech, and the endlessly gratifying difficulty of
writing”. As writers, our capacity to judge and decide for ourselves,
learning from our mistakes, seeking alternatives and making wise decisions
is Nash’s “authority” of choice. (Nash
1986: 129–157).
In his Preface to The Language of Humour (1985), Bill
disarmingly describes his fears that, after writing it, he would never want
to hear another joke, let alone make one.
But, as he remarks, “Such humbug. Not want to hear another
joke? I am more than ever greedy for laughter …”. What he has discovered is
that “I think I know how things are put together; and [if] the penalty of
all knowledge is the loss of surprise”, the implication is that it has been
worth it. Discovering the complexity of the subject, and its kaleidoscopic
nature, he explains to his reader that his focus must be on the
language of humour, giving the linguistic principle
pride of place” (Nash 1985: xi).
He explores the dynamic structure of humour, from witty compression to comic
expansion (“Wit is planted, comedy flowers” 1985:13). He looks at joke design, formulaic
humour, parody, the logic of humour …indeed, everything that makes a joke
work, from sound patterning to syntactic structure. Complaining that
“nothing suffocates humour more swiftly than a thesis”, Nash nevertheless
feels obliged to “explain the joke”, citing Bergson (“the comic does not
exist beyond the pale of what is strictly human”), and adding that “humour
is a specifying characteristic of humanity” (Nash 1985: 1). Social and cultural experience
lies at the heart of humour: the black humour of Victorian comic songs about
infant mortality (eg the early demise of Little Willie and Little Jim)
attempt to reduce the pain by disassociation (Nash 1985: 2):
Little Willie from the mirror
Licked the mercury right off,
Thinking in his childish error,
It would cure the whooping cough.
At the funeral his mother
Smartly quipped to Mrs Brown:
“Twas a chilly day for Willie
When the mercury went down!”.
At the heart of every joke, Nash asserts, is a “centre of
energy”, an indispensable word or phrase acting as its locus or “linguistic
realisation”. This is “the point at which humour is held and discharged”
(Nash 1985: 10). So the phrase
“When the mercury went down” is the grim locus, created by the collocation’s
ambiguity. A modern example of “The Joke as Recital” is the in-house
anonymous masterpiece circulated among administrative staff at the
University of Nottingham some years ago. The narrative gains cumulative
strength as it proceeds. The Vice-Chancellor “Leaps tall buildings in a
single bound, is more powerful than a locomotive … Gives policy to God”. The
Undergraduate “Falls over doorstep when trying to enter buildings, [and]
says look at the choo choo”. But the Departmental Secretary “lifts buildings
and walks under them, kicks locomotives off the tracks … She
is God” ( Nash
1985: 57–58).
We can also recognise this quality of delight in Bill’s use of
comic examples, which range from Three Men in a Boat to the
grim humour of Catch 22 to Sylvester, the cartoon cat. All
appear in the chapter discussing the “factor of likelihood’s role” in the
creation of comic narrative, for anything can happen in a world which
“straddles the frontier of natural law and fabulous licence” and where
“analogies are just strong enough to give passing credence to what is
patently absurd” (Nash
1985: 104).
The final paragraph in the book sums up Bill’s “warmth of
thought”; adding that the language of humour is “powerless without the
speech of humour”, and adding that “we can never know
the bliss of humour until we recognise its voices … until we catch an accent
and are charmed … until the warmth of a companionable tone puts us at ease”
(Nash 1985: 172). These voices
“may be small matter and frivolous; all the jokes, the puns, the paradoxes,
the rhymes and anecdotes … add little to our knowledge and our stature; they
are only human after all”. And then we hear Bill’s magisterial voice: “yet
let us consider, let us affirm as a final word, that these things are a
spume of the mind, out of which images of transcendent loveliness and wisdom
are also born” (Nash
1985: 172).
Language in Popular
Fiction (1990), perhaps unsurprisingly, is an
example of an academic text which entertains as well as informs. The tone is
set in the Preface: “Because I thought it appropriate to a subject which is
not, after all, the most solemn in the world, it has suited me to frame my
essay playfully, and to indulge in a little stylistic fun” (Nash 1990: xi). The overarching
metaphor structuring the analysis is an imagined journey by air. However, it
is important to recognise that in no way does the reader detect a note of
condescension or contempt for a literary genre enjoyed by so many. The first
chapter starts “Here we all are, in this Land of In-Between. We are
characters in enjoyably bad books, it seems. We are in the right place for
Popular Fiction” (Nash 1990: 1).
In no time Nash is focusing on lexical choice, narrative structure and
gender ideologies in the two major subgenres of popular fiction, the
romantic story (aimed at women) and the male-orientated, action-packed
thriller. He examines in turn the possible roles for the Heroine and the
Hero (see Nash 1990: 4–9). In the
romantic story, Nash identifies three plot variants for Homecoming: first,
the Heroine reaches Home after many misunderstandings are overcome; second,
the Heroine defends her Home, at risk from a rival or her own lack of
perception; third, the Heroine is about to leave Home until some event or
person reveals to her error. The Heroine is also divided between Career and
Home, whereas for the Hero of the thriller, the tension is between the
Heroic Self who “enacts his readers’ gross fantasies of danger and devilry”
(Nash 1990: 8–9) and the
moderating influence of the Organisation which sanctions his violence. Such
plot scenarios sound relatively sober, until we see the cliched repetition.
In each scenario the Heroine either (i) “resists the impulse, feeling in
every fibre of her being” [that her handsome employer is not for her] or
(ii) “resists the impulse with every fibre of her being [to … discover the
truth]” or (iii) “resist[s] the impulse with every fibre of her being [that
the time has come to leave Piers]”. Such linguistic absurdities are only one
example of the style of popular fiction, and it is particularly rewarding to
see how grammar and syntax support these narratives. A wonderful example is
the section on “Syntactic clichés: ‘adverbiality’ and ‘participiality’” in
Chapter 2. Nash has already remarked on the insistent “over-description” of
people, places and events, where nothing is left unmodified. He also
describes a tendency to heighten the action by fronting or pre-posing
adverbial constructions, particularly adverbial phrases expressing manner or
state of mind. Here is an example: “With a disarming grin he pressed a kiss
on her lips” (Nash 1990: 41).
Nash’s prompt, wry comment (“A nice example of the triumph of vivacity over
verisimilitude; try kissing while grinning disarmingly”) is met with the
reader’s laughter, stifled or out loud, depending on where the book is being
read. As we travel from the technological world of the Action hero to the
Standard Ingredients of romantic and thriller fiction (“Faces, places,
fights, embraces”), with Heroines whose prerogative is “to feel” and “know”
and the Hero “whose business is only to take possession of his property”,
i.e. the Heroine (Nash
1990: 107–8), we can only stand amazed at what has been revealed in
the world of popular fiction. “Warmth of thought” can be felt on every
page – there is no unkindness in the laughter, but a kind of respect for the
authors who so elaborately entertain their readers (even if Nash’s
preference is for the understatement of Austen).
This seems to be the right place for a brief digression to
look at Bill’s own venture into fiction, the novel Kettle of Roses (1982; and see
Michael Toolan’s chapter in this volume). The genre is epistolary (though we
only see Edna’s letters to Ivy) and consists of a correspondence between two
school friends who, in their late thirties, are renewing their former
acquaintance. Edna lives with her parents and small son whilst her husband
is in prison for fraud: Ivy is unmarried, and a school teacher who once had
a soft spot for Edna’s brother, Michael. Both live in the North West in a
predominantly lower middle class world. Both women have problems, but whilst
Edna is incredibly open about her complicated family and personal life, Ivy
is initially more reticent. The choice of genre means that we hear Edna’s
voice throughout, and only indirectly Ivy’s. By the end of the novel the
friendship has deepened profoundly, and both have learnt painful lessons
about personal relationships and about themselves. It’s not until the last
letter of the novel, after Edna’s family has survived the death of her
grandfather, a road accident injuring her little boy, her husband’s
chastened return from prison and Edna’s own increased self- knowledge that
she writes to Ivy after a family christening:
and the priest gave [the baby] God’s welcome to this world and this funny old life of ours. And it is funny, isn’t it, so funny and so sad, what, a right kettle of roses, you might say, a big black pot of briars, but still and all such colour, such rare sweet scent – eh, what are we to make of it, my chucky?(Nash 1982: 140)
Nash has created two women, one particularly powerful, the
other less so, gradually engaging the reader’s interest and empathy as the
garrulous, idiomatic correspondence becomes more recognisable and less
caricatured. Nash’s pleasure in creating non-standard idiolect is clear – he
had fun! Yet the tone is kindly and forgiving – and the author’s “warmth”
for his characters clear.
Rhetoric: The Wit
of Persuasion (1989) is an extremely useful book
offering the reader a practical view of the ancient art of persuasion.
Recalling Nash’s statement, “If I have an aim, it is to rehabilitate
rhetoric as an ordinary human competence” (1989: ix), we anticipate a book which will enable
us to use rhetorical skills knowingly as well as inadvertently. For
persuasion is certainly at the heart of every human exchange, written or
spoken, deliberate or unconscious. The moment we address another person, we
want them to listen to us, do something for us, respond in some way or
other – and vice versa. Awareness of audience is at the heart of every act
of communication, and Nash explores in more detail the calor
cogitationis which we would argue characterises his own
achievements as scholar, poet and novelist. He describes Quintilian’s
emphasis on writing as a heuristic process of “choosing, evaluating,
revising and learning as a result of revision” and comments “the knowing
comes from the doing” (Nash
1989: 214–15).
Nash explains further: “To over-write, to manufacture
expression in elaborate excess of content, is tasteless, and is condemned as
‘frigid’”. This is in contrast with Quintilian’s ‘warmth of thought’ which
evokes a corresponding ‘warmth’ in the reader or audience. Further to
Quintilian and Cicero’s view, Nash adds that “Aristotle traces ‘frigidity’ of
style to four principal causes: the use of too many compound words: the use
of strange words, the excessive use of epithets and the injudicious use of
metaphors” (Nash 1989: 215).
He links “rhetoric as distraction” with the rhetorics of
entertainment, instruction and performance, the connection being that in
each the persuader is consciously seeking to persuade his/her audience or
auditor by his/her rhetorical skills and to evoke a corresponding “warmth”
of response. Useful strategies for achieving this will include strong
patterning (including repetition, listing, asyndeton) as well as rhythm,
alliteration and assonance and syntactic parallelism. Two examples of this
“rhetoric of pleasure” (Nash’s phrase) appear below, taken from the personal
page of The Weekly, a Seattle week end supplement.
- COMPASSIONATE DWM, 39, Ph.D., likes bikes, hikes, tykes, prefers light jogs, friendly dogs, casual togs; seeks free thinking, reasonably fit, non-materialistic partner.
- BEAUTIFUL, BOUNTIFUL, buxom blonde, bashful yet bawdy, desires masterful, masculine, magnetic male for friendship, frolic and future. Forward photo and facts. (Nash 1989: 72)
Both advertisers are looking for a partner; both use asyndeton
and sound patterning: both “show a humorous awareness of the game [they] are
playing”. Nash does not laugh at them or at their aim; he analyses their
individual strategies of rhyme, alliteration, antithesis, asyndeton,
incrementum, modification, suggests their intended effect, and commenting on
the playful tone, and concludes that “The primary impulse seems to be to
enjoy performing”. (Nash 1989: 74)
This “warmth of thought” expresses a genuine need for companionship beneath
the glittering surface of hyperbole.
In his sympathetic discussion of Austen’s fictional strategies
in Northanger Abbey (Nash 1989: 161–65), Nash invites his reader to share the
author’s mockery of contemporary conventions in popular fiction. Noting
Austen’s powerful defence of the serious novel, he observes that “by the
time the closing pages of the book are reached, the author has persuaded us,
and herself, to look at her characters as real people in a real world … The
distance between author and characters no longer exists” (Nash 1989: 164). The novel is no longer “literary
spoof” but social comedy. Austen in her last sentence, remarks “I leave it
to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this
work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial
disobedience” (Austen 1818, cited in Nash
1989: 165). Nash points out that “even at the end, when …we seem
to know what our position should be, the subtlety of her rhetoric, its
capacity for evading what might have been the issue, is such that we can
never be wholly sure where this author stands” (Nash 1989: 165). His delight in Austen’s skills
reflects again Quintilian’s prescription for achieving “warmth” in the
audience.
Bill’s last two books, Language and Creative
Illusion (Nash 1998c)
and A Departed Music (Nash 2006b), show in different ways how he continues to
demonstrate Quintilian’s principles further, in his encouragement of
creativity in others and in his own writing. “Creative illusion” is the way
for those who are neither musicians nor artists to capture their own
“creative vision” in language, forging a dialogue between the writer’s
“movement of mind” and and the reader’s textual “interpretation”. In the
chapter on speech in writing, he chooses a passage by the humourist James
Thurber, in which Muggs, the “big burly, choleric [family] dog” is described
in a comic mix of formal and informal lexis:
we suddenly had mice, and Muggs refused to do anything about them. They were so friendly that … when my mother entertained at dinner … she put down a lot of little dishes with food in them … so the mice would be satisfied with that … Muggs stayed out in the pantry with the mice, growling to himself – not at the mice, but about all the people in the next room he would have liked to get at. Mother slipped out to the pantry once to see how everything was going. Everything was going fine. It made her so mad to see Muggs lying there, oblivious of the mice … that she slapped him, and he slashed at her, but didn’t make it. He was sorry immediately, she said. He was always sorry, she said, after he bit someone, but we could not understand how she figured this out. He didn’t act sorry.(Thurber 1983: 191, cited in Nash 1998: 37)
Nash admires Thurber’s “apparently inexhaustible gift of
elegantly translating ways of speaking into styles of writing”, and points
out that the “artful talkativeness” suggests a “recital”, and amplifies the
spokenness of the written narrative. He concludes that “all comic writers …
are rhetoricians” who share an amused consciousness of “writing as speaking
as writing” – “an illusion compounded of illusions”. Here we feel the
“warmth” of Nash’s astute interpretation of Thurber’s methods and enjoyment
of his writing (Nash 1998c: 38–41).
Other chapters in Language and Creative
Illusion provide invaluable insights for the tyro writer. In
Chapter 2, Nash compares Thomas Gray’s Elegy written in a Country
Churchyard with J. S. Bach’s Die Kunste der
Fuge. The chapter is entitled “Gray’s grammar: or the intricacy
of simple music”, and having compared the linguistic structures of Gray’s
poem with Bach’s “grammar of rhythms and sounds and note-values” in musical
counterpoint, Nash regretfully tells us:
I do not wish to abandon my intuition that there is a grammar of the baroque in poetry which may be compared with the syntax of baroque music; but in the end, I perceive, the musical design has a sovereignty, and autonomy, an inevitability not granted to the poet’s textual procedures.(Nash 1998c: 99)
These careful dissections of the “creative illusion” in two
art forms reveal the vivid presence of aesthetic delight and “warmth of
thought” as its own reward.
At this point in his career, Bill’s attention was becoming
more focused on writing his own poetry. A Departed Music: Readings in Old English Poetry
(2006b) is a kind of swansong to prose. The book is a last loving
glance at the worlds in which he achieved and maintained mastery, from
etymology and philology to the history of Anglo-Saxon society, its battles,
social hierarchies, customs and traditions.
Here are some poems, written in a language we no longer speak … in times that were not so much worse than ours, though they seem far worse, by people as miserable or as happy, as serene or impassioned, as pragmatic or idealistic as we are inclined to be.(Nash 2006b: 7)
The book is structured in several parts: ‘translations’ with
contextual and stylistic commentaries (“The Poetry Business”; “Of Cruel
Battle and the Fall of Kin”; “Exiles and Lamentations”; “Rulers of the
Darkness”; “Avenger and Redeemer”); another (“Tunes on a Broken Lyre”) on
Anglo-Saxon poetics; “Postscripts” (notes on “Ship design and Frisian
seamen”, “Marram grass” and “Tempering a sword”); more notes and
commentaries on “Poetics, Wisdoms, Elegies, and Heroics (Samples)” and a
Bibliography. The chapter headings convey a sense of darkness dominating the
world of Old English poetry. But elements of joy remain, which Nash
recognises and delights in, such as the gift of the scop,
the master-poet, “a little term for a large calling, the vocation of one who
lives among kings and captains, bearing witness to heroic fame and tragic
destiny” (Nash 2006b: 9); the
influence of Christianity on poets like Caedmon and the anonymous authors of
the Riddles; and the richness of Anglo-Saxon prosody, and its “departed
music”. Judith’s song after the death of Holofernes perfectly communicates
the “warmth” of Anglo-Saxon poetry for Nash:
For which, to God be the glory, forever and ever,
who made the wind, the sky, the stars, the great deeps
and the tumbling streams besides, and the joys of heaven,
through His benevolence.(Nash 2006b: 103)
We would argue that Quintilian’s calor
cogitationis entirely characterises Bill Nash’s writing,
whether literary, scholarly, instructive or poetic. It is matched by the
warmth of heart and of the imagination of this most distinguished, most
loved and much missed man.