Style, rhetoric and creativity in language : in memory of Walter (Bill) Nash (1926-2015) 9789027261953, 9027261954

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Style, rhetoric and creativity in language : in memory of Walter (Bill) Nash (1926-2015)
 9789027261953, 9027261954

Table of contents :
"Warmth of thought" in Walter Nash's prose and verse / Susan Cockcroft and Robert Cockcroft --
Chrysanthemums for Bill: on Lawrentian style and stylistics / Peter Stockwell --
The doubling of design in Walter Nash's Rhetoric: The wit of persuasion / David Stacey --
Riddling: The dominant rhetorical device in W.H. Auden's "The wanderer" / Peter Verdonk --
"My Shakespeare, rise": Ben Jonson's pronominal choices in "To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author" (1623) / Clara Calvo --
Discourse presentation and point of view in "Cheating at canasta" by William Trevor / Mick Short --
Doing and teaching: from Kettle of roses to Language and creative illusion and back again / Michael Toolin --
Fact, fiction and French flights of fancy / Michael Stubbs --
Common language: corpus, creativity and cognition / Ronald Carter --
"Americans don't do irony": cross-cultural perspectives on the pragmatics of irony / Paul Simpson --
Poem. Defunct address / Robert Cockcroft.

Citation preview

Linguistic Approaches to Literature

Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language Edited by Paul Simpson

34

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language

Linguistic Approaches to Literature (LAL) issn 1569-3112

Linguistic Approaches to Literature (LAL) provides an international forum for researchers who believe that the application of linguistic methods leads to a deeper and more far-reaching understanding of many aspects of literature. The emphasis will be on pragmatic approaches intersecting with areas such as experimental psychology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, cognitive linguistics, stylistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, rhetoric, and philosophy. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/lal

Editors Sonia Zyngier

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Joanna Gavins

University of Sheffield

Advisory Editorial Board Douglas Biber

Arthur C. Graesser

University of Memphis

Willie van Peer University of München

Marisa Bortolussi

Frank Hakemulder

Yeshayahu Shen

Donald C. Freeman

Geoff M. Hall

Mick Short

Northern Arizona University University of Alberta University of Southern California

Richard Gerrig

Stony Brook University

Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.

University of California, Santa Cruz

Rachel Giora

Tel Aviv University

Utrecht University

University of Nottingham Ningbo, China

David L. Hoover

New York University

Don Kuiken

University of Alberta

Paisley Livingston

University of Copenhagen

Keith Oatley University of Toronto

Volume 34 Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language In memory of Walter (Bill) Nash (1926–2015) Edited by Paul Simpson

Tel Aviv University Lancaster University

Michael Toolan

University of Birmingham

Reuven Tsur

Tel Aviv University

Peter Verdonk

University of Amsterdam

Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language In memory of Walter (Bill) Nash (1926–2015)

Edited by

Paul Simpson Liverpool University

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

doi 10.1075/lal.34 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2019030624 (print) / 2019030625 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 0430 1 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6195 3 (e-book)

© 2019 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com



In memory of Walter (Bill) Nash (1926–2015)

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction Paul Simpson and Ronald Carter

1

An indicative list of publications by Walter Nash

9

Chapter 1 “Warmth of thought” in Walter Nash’s prose and verse Susan Cockcroft and Robert Cockcroft

11

Chapter 2 Chrysanthemums for Bill: On Lawrentian style and stylistics Peter Stockwell

37

Chapter 3 The doubling of design in Walter Nash’s Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion David Stacey

57

Chapter 4 Riddling: The dominant rhetorical device in W. H. Auden’s “The Wanderer” 77 Peter Verdonk Chapter 5 “My Shakespeare, rise”: Ben Jonson’s pronominal choices in “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author” (1623) Clara Calvo Chapter 6 Discourse presentation and point of view in “Cheating at Canasta” by William Trevor Mick Short Chapter 7 Doing and teaching: From Kettle of Roses to Language and Creative Illusion and back again Michael Toolan

85

101

113

viii Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language

Chapter 8 Fact, fiction and French flights of fancy Michael Stubbs

127

Chapter 9 Common language: Corpus, creativity and cognition Ronald Carter

149

Chapter 10 “Americans don’t do Irony”: Cross-cultural perspectives on the pragmatics of irony Paul Simpson

171

poem Defunct address Robert Cockcroft

193

Name index

195

Subject index

199

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Joanna Gavins and Sonia Zyngier for their help throughout this project and especially for their assiduous and scrupulous attention to the submitted drafts of this collection. The editor would also like to acknowledge the assistance of John Benjamins, and particularly Esther Roth, for their continuing encouragement of stylistics research and for opening up the Linguistic Approaches to Literature series to this volume. The editor and authors of this volume owe a particular debt of gratitude to Frances Nash without whose support this project would not have been possible. The Editor is grateful to SAGE publications, Copyright Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), for their kind permission to reprint (as Chapter 9 of this book) a revised version of an article by Ronal Carter. This article appeared in Language and Literature (1999) Vol 8(3): 195–216. In respect of the primary text covered in Chapter 4, ‘The Wanderer’ is copyright 1934 and © renewed 1962 by W. H. Auden, from COLLECTED POEMS by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. UK and Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights for the same poem are: copyright © [1966] by W.H. Auden, renewed Reprinted by Curtis Brown, Ltd. Permission to use the extract from William Trevor’s ‘Cheating at Canasta’ (Chapter 6) is granted by Penguin Books Limited (Viking 2007, Penguin Books 2008. Copyright © William Trevor, 2007). Finally, every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce material in this collection.

Introduction Paul Simpson and Ronald Carter

Liverpool University / Nottingham University

This commemorative volume comprises ten essays which celebrate the work of Walter (Bill) Nash. Bill Nash was an extraordinary scholar – a classicist, parodist, critic, musician, linguist, poet, polyglot, humourist and novelist. He was as adroit in his reading of the Old Norse sagas as he was in his analyses of the rhetorical composition of everyday English usage, and his published outputs embrace the stylistic, rhetorical, compositional and creative topographies of both language and literature. While accepting of course that ten short essays cannot do justice to such a formidable body of scholarship, the contributions that comprise this volume celebrate Bill Nash’s prodigious offering by covering the academic fields with which he was particularly associated: composition, rhetoric, discourse analysis, English usage, comic discourse, creative writing and the stylistic exploration of literature from the Old English period to that of the present day. All the scholars whose work is collected in this volume have been influenced directly by Bill’s work (and we make no apology for slipping into the informal first name here and elsewhere in this book). Our relationship with Bill has been as friends, colleagues, co-authors or former students – with numerous intersections and overlaps therein – and many of us have followed careers that have been inspired directly by his seminal contribution to the study of style, rhetoric and creativity in language. Bill Nash was born in 1926 in Barrow-in-Furness in the North of England. Coming from this part of the world ensured that Bill, as he himself put it, would “always be a bit of a lefty”. In later years he recorded this early life, both movingly and amusingly, in his memoirs For Old Times’ Sake (2007) and The Day of the Airship (2001). He served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War before completing a degree at the University of Cambridge in English and Archaeology. He held academic posts at Lund University (where he was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1996) and at King’s College, London before taking up a lectureship in English language at the University of Nottingham in 1970. In his early days at Nottingham he pioneered courses in applied language studies for international students in programmes that have since become routine and (he would sometimes sardonically remark) high-revenue currency across nearly all universities in the https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.34.01sim © 2019 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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UK. He was appointed Professor of Modern English Language in the School of English Studies University of Nottingham in 1987. Although nominally a specialist in language studies, he wrote erudite commentaries on, to name but a few examples: old English poetry, medieval madrigals, Donne, Shakespeare, Browning and D. H. Lawrence and, in fact, on texts from almost every period of English literature. Moreover, and underscoring his view that all texts merit close linguistic analysis, he wrote these commentaries alongside analyses of, inter alia, car maintenance manuals, legal discourse, agony aunt columns and even advertisements for shaving cream. His inaugural lecture, a masterpiece of parodic play with conventions, combining his characteristic linguistic exuberance and sense of humour with personal memoir and academic vision, is reprinted by Routledge in the volume An Uncommon Tongue (1992). A quiet man who shied away from academic gatherings and ‘networking’ opportunities, Bill was nonetheless bemused by the world of academia and this backdrop became a creative stimulus for his many skits and parodies. He found parodic opportunities in many facets of academic behaviour, and especially in some academics’ propensity for self-promotion, which was utterly alien to this modest and unassuming man. He understood, but never quite trusted, the ever-increasing audit and business culture of today’s universities. As an academic he was a unique presence who believed that English can never quite be said to be an academic subject. On the contrary, English needed to be underpinned by a balance of studies in language, literature and creative writing and it was therefore always stronger by not focussing too exclusively on any one domain of study. This balance is, of course, reflected in the present volume’s coverage and range. Among many of Bill’s ground-breaking books is Designs in Prose (1980), which presciently anticipated a future now embraced by many departments of English world-wide. The book both shows properties of language in use for aesthetic design and language as an entity with illocutionary designs on its readers; at the same time, it shows in a series of beautifully modulated composition exercises how these stylistic designs can be created by the writer. Bill was always someone who believed that productivity can be turned into perception by a process of active composition and that as a subject English should encourage its students to be more fully subject to the twin imperatives of production and reception. He was always amused by the suggestion that he was one of very few who translated an American university preoccupation with composition into a British university context and he imparted to it a pedagogic practice that connected with traditions in linguistic stylistics and poetics, consistently underlining that textual analysis and textual composition are complementary processes. Another key book is his monograph The Language of Humour (1985) which, since its publication, has made for a significant and lasting step-change in the way we think about comic discourse. Enriched and enlivened

Introduction 3

by original parodies and pastiches (see further below), this book still remains unsurpassed even after three and a half decades of work in “linguistic humorology” (a categorisation which Bill treated with, let us say, a pinch of salt). And then there was English Usage (1986), a textbook that offers as much today as it did then and which still features as a set text on many English curricula. In the run up to the completion of the manuscript of this book, Bill had had a mild contretemps with a rather prescriptively-minded colleague who had expressed misgivings about starting a sentence with the connective “And”. Predictably, and testament to Bill’s impish and playful side, this happens to be the very connective which he chose to open English Usage. Bill’s work was always lively and accessible, and was suffused with a real enjoyment, and sometimes mischievous mimicry, of its subject matter. As noted, Bill was a consummate parodist and satirist, entertaining friends and colleagues with a constellation of finely tuned ditties and skits. Continuing the long tradition of the kinds of literary hoax promulgated by Mark Twain or Edgar Allan Poe, Bill had the good fortune to discover many “lost” manuscripts from antiquity. Notable among these was his “discovery” of an Old English manuscript written by a South-Saxon called Billig. Other significant finds included the work of Umfrey, a rather suspect poet writing in “Middling English” whose literary preoccupations included ruminations upon “the telefoon”, “the vakum clenere” and everyone’s bugbear, “the hyncumme-taxe”. One comic riff (c. 1970) captures Umfrey’s 14th century-style irritation at building works on the Nottingham university campus: the “drivellynge” of pneumatic drills, and (in the refrain) the maddeningly repetitive speech rhythms of two road-menders, perhaps handling heavy kerbstones (“Huppe, nou I haf hym …”). Much later, and more sombrely, in the seventh poem of his sequence “In a Winter Season”, he brings the parable of the Sower to urgent life: “The arm sweeps broad / in an arc, sending a shimmering rain of seed / to the brattling seminars of birds …”. The rich complexity of this recalls at once the “bickering brattle” of Burns’s field mouse, the etymology of “seminar” – linking it to “seed” – the clash of egos in a scholarly debate, precluding any profit from it, and (perhaps) the aspirational “seed fowl” in Chaucer’s Parlement. In this and the following poem the germination of new seed in “clefts of recipience”, and “borders of the brain” reflects the resilience of soul within matter, and of poetry as its vehicle. In all, Walter Nash wrote over twenty academic books and many more articles across a range of journals. We cannot cover them all in this introduction, so we offer further below an indicative list of his major books. Indeed, Bill’s own remarkable talent for writing and writing about almost all discourses illustrate his endeavour to show creativity at work in different aspects of language use and across all texts types, not simply or only in poetry, prose and drama, the usual site in departments of English. Given this catholic view of writing and his own naturally self-effacing

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personality he would commonly play down his own poetry and memoirs, many of which were written in retirement in Tenerife. This later work shows an old master at work, displaying a facility with the texture of words with which very few are blessed. The chapters in this volume, as we have noted, engage with Bill Nash’s prodigious output, and while the many and varied facets of his work cannot be harnessed in full here, all eleven authors position their contributions at the intersections, the overlaps and the junctions between the triple themes of rhetoric, style and creativity. The first chapter, by Susan and Robert Cockcroft, makes for a fitting curtain-raiser to the volume, not least because it explores, in a more focussed and nuanced way, some of the creative writing outputs – the ditties, parodies and spoofs, for example – that have only been touched upon in this introduction. But with its central focus on issues of rhetoric, Cockcroft and Cockcroft highlight the mechanisms through which Nash engages readers of his prose and verse, and, in an echo of Quintilian, they locate this engagement through the concept of “warmth of thought”. They also demonstrate how the resources of verse are adapted by Nash as a poet, at once confessional and broadly empathetic. Their chapter shows, moreover, how Nash explores the uses and resources of prose in a whole range of genres, as seen in his publications, but particularly in the book touched upon above, Designs in Prose. In a polemical second chapter to the volume, Peter Stockwell takes issue with the seemingly orthodox assumption of much scholarly criticism of literature that any knowledge of linguistics is simply an “optional add-on”. Reminding us of how Nash achieved a seamless integration of critical interpretation, linguistic mastery, and aesthetic sensibility, Stockwell revaluates Nash’s stylistic analysis of an early passage from D. H. Lawrence’s short story “Odour of Chrysanthemums” (1911). Stockwell takes into account the objections to Nash’s approach from critical theorist Peter Barry, before moving on to offer both a general defence of stylistics as modern literary linguistics, and as a recommended (indeed, exemplary) method for the practice of literary criticism. Stockwell also locates the Nash-Barry dialogue historically, noting that some of the ambitions of textual analysts back then required stylistic tools that did not become available in the discipline until much more recently. David Stacey’s chapter, the third of the volume, returns to the theme of rhetoric, offering a much-needed contemporary re-evaluation of Nash’s Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion (1989). Stacey points out that one of the primary achievements of this book is its elaboration of a model of rhetoric that can be used to analyse and understand not just literary but all kinds of persuasive intentions, especially those that involve a degree of ideological deception. More specifically, Stacey identifies the ways in which Rhetoric celebrates, on the one hand, the skill of writers of canonical literary texts, and, on the other, the capacity of “canny” speakers in everyday situations to design powerful schemes of persuasion. He observes how Nash’s approach is to encourage receivers of language actively to take power in rhetorical situations

Introduction 5

by parodying and rewriting, in order to critically understand and creatively revise these schemes of persuasion. Stacey supports his observation with an analysis of a “typically agonistic” Donald Trump press conference. Chapter 4, by Peter Verdonk, begins a series of three chapters which focus squarely on rhetorical and stylistic patterns in particular poems and prose texts. Verdonk’s chosen text is W. H. Auden’s short poem “The Wanderer” (1966). After a preliminary stylistic analysis of patterns in sound, grammar and vocabulary, Verdonk contends that a more satisfactory interpretation of the poem can be reached by locating its language in the phonological and rhetorical arrangements of Anglo-Saxon poetry. He recalls Auden’s fascination with the metrical schemes of this poetry, and with a particular rhetorical device, common to Old Norse and Old English, known as kenning. Verdonk concludes that a rounder and more productive reading of Auden’s “The Wanderer” can be reached when it is informed by knowledge of the rhetorical and stylistic features of its literary precursor. In Chapter 5, Clara Calvo concentrates on Ben Jonson’s poem “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us”. Looking at pronominal choices in particular, Calvo shows how these grammatical patterns link to the poem’s complex ideological substrata. More specifically, she highlights the remarkable density of pronouns and the particular choice of some pronouns over others in the poem. Calvo argues that the rhetorical structure of Jonson’s eulogy, and its individualised pronominal use, suggest that the poem is as much about Jonson’s desire for visibility and self-promotion as it is about Shakespeare. Mick Short’s chapter, the sixth of this volume, analyses shifts in narrative viewpoint in a passage from William Trevor’s short story “Cheating at Canasta” (2007). Short teases out the complex transitions in viewpoint features, showing how Mallory, the story’s focaliser, engages in changing perceptions of, and reactions to, his immediate environment. Viewpoint transitions at the level of narrative style engender parallel shifts in the character’s changing cognitive purview, including memory, response, flashback as well as his internal assumptions and hypotheses. Short shows how a subtle understanding of the passage (and indeed the story as a whole) can enable an appreciation of the quality of the writing, concluding that stylistic analyses help to show not just how we understand literary texts but also why and how, we appreciate them. Balancing theories of style with the techniques of creative writing, in Chapter 7 Michael Toolan concentrates on Nash’s short epistolary novel Kettle of Roses: The Collected Correspondence of Edna Pugh (1982). Toolan employs his own model of High Emotional Involvement (HEI) which inheres in eleven key linguistic markers. These markers, if sharply elevated (or depressed) in a passage, create a particular kind of prominence where the passage as a whole is foregrounded, more arresting, and more emotionally and ethically involving and rewarding. In an illuminating

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application of the HEI model (which could also be usefully pressed into service for the William Trevor passage covered by Short in Chapter 6), Toolan shows how, in Edna’s last letter in the novel, all eleven categories of the HEI model are very much in evidence. He concludes that Nash sought to modulate, though a variety of sophisticated stylistic devices, the tone and texture of this key stage of his story. Chapter 8, by Michael Stubbs, examines Laurent Binet’s satirical novel La septième fonction du langage (2015). A book which the polyglot Nash would have appreciated immensely, Binet’s novel is a thriller with an absurd plot about a search for a “lost” manuscript which holds the secret of ultimate rhetorical power: the ability to convince anyone to do anything. The characters of Binet include “real people”: two Presidents of France, Giscard and Mitterrand, and many cultural theorists, including Althusser, Barthes, Culler, Derrida, Eco, Foucault, and other members of the intelligentsia who created what Americans called “French Theory”. Stubbs employs various models of analysis, including John Searle’s observations on the logical status of fictional discourse, and contends that, while useful, this approach does not explain in full how readers distinguish fact from fiction, nor indeed how far writers can appropriately go with outrageous caricatures of living persons. In sum, Stubbs shows how the novel provides textual problems which have not been solved by either literary scholars or language philosophers. Chapter 9, by Ronald Carter, is the first of two chapters which are informed, in part, by quantitative methods. Probing the distinction between “everyday” and “literary” language, Carter argues that studies of literary discourse, and of the continuities between literary and non-literary discourse, have tended to focus on written language or on representations of spoken discourse in fictional or dramatic dialogues. This emphasis has made for questionable connections between literature, literacy and the written language because it assumes that spoken language is no more than a less patterned version of written language. Using the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE), Carter shows how verbal inventiveness is pervasive in ordinary talk, and is not only embodied in puns and creative metaphors, and but in imaginative and humorous play with fixed expressions, discourse patterns and even with morpho-syntactic structures. Carter concludes that common, everyday language is far from being either everyday or common – on the contrary, it is pervasively “poetic”. The tenth, and concluding, chapter in this volume, is by Paul Simpson, who probes the common (and perhaps controversial) perception of many in the UK and Ireland that people from North America “don’t do” irony. Stimulated by the type of discussion found in Nash’s The Language of Humour (1985), Simpson interrogates this folk belief by developing a quantitative methodology to capture the ways in which ironic situations are interpreted by people from diverse national backgrounds. In the course of the chapter, Simpson advances a theoretical model of situational irony, while the results elicited

Introduction 7

from the survey shed some light on what people from different parts of the world understand as an ironic situation. While we want each paper in this collection to be erudite and significantly robust as to make a scholarly contribution, we have asked that each chapter be written in a way that is lucid and accessible – a guiding principle which Bill Nash himself held in his own academic writing on composition, humour, rhetoric, and stylistics. Moreover, we have in this collection tried not to be too staid or po-faced in our analyses and interpretations (Bill himself would never have approved) and in consequence we hope that readers of the volume might forgive a little levity or, indeed, gentle irony in places. Most importantly, of course, we hope that the essays assembled here make for an appropriate testimony and appreciation of this inspirational colleague. Finally, we do not want to close this introduction without recording our indebtedness to Bill’s daughter, Frances Nash, and to his late wife, Helen, who survived him for so cruelly short a period and to whom so much of his work is dedicated.

References Nash, W. 1980. Designs in Prose: A Study in Compositional Problems and Methods. Harlow: Longman. Nash, W. 1982. Kettle of Roses: The Collected Correspondence of Edna Pugh. London: Hutchinson. Nash, W. 1985 The Language of Humour: Style and Technique in Comic Discourse. Harlow: Longman. Nash, W. 1986. English Usage: A Guide to First Principles. London: Routledge. Nash, W. 1989. Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion. Oxford: Blackwell. Nash, W. 1992. An Uncommon Tongue: The Uses and Resources of English. London: Routledge. Nash, W. 2001. The Day of the Airship. London: First Century/Cromwell. Nash, W. 2007. For Old Times Sake: Childhood in the 1930s. Sandy, UK: Bright Pen (colophon of Authors Online).

CIT3

An indicative list of publications by Walter Nash

Academic publications Our Experience of Language (1971, Batsford) Designs in Prose: A Study in Compositional Problems and Methods (1980, Longman) The Language of Humour: Style and Technique in Comic Discourse (1985, Longman) English Usage: A Guide to First Principles (1986, Routledge) Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion (1989, Blackwell) Language in Popular Fiction (1990, Routledge) Seeing Through Language: A Guide to Styles of English Writing (with Ronald Carter) (1990, Blackwell) The Writing Scholar: Studies in Academic Discourse (1990, Sage) An Uncommon Tongue: The Uses and Resources of English (1992, Routledge) Jargon: Its Uses and Abuses (1993, Blackwell) Creating Texts: An Introduction to the Study of Composition (with David Stacey) (1997, Longman) Language and Creative Illusion (1998, Longman) A Departed Music: Readings in Old English Poetry (2006, Anglo-Saxon Books)

Creative and autobiographical writing Kettle of Roses (1982, Hutchinson) The Day of the Airship (2001: First Century /Cromwell). East West Risen (2002, Feather Books) Of Time and Small Islands (2006, Beyond the Cloister) For Old Times Sake: Childhood in the 1930s (2007, Bright Pen [colophon of Authors Online]) In Good Faith (2007, Feather Books) Memorabilia: Poems from time to time (2009, Beyond the Cloister)

Chapter 1

“Warmth of thought” in Walter Nash’s prose and verse Susan Cockcroft and Robert Cockcroft Nottingham University

This chapter explores the means through which Walter Nash engages readers of his prose and verse, centring on the concept of “warmth of thought”, which derives from Quintilian. Discussion of the poetry stresses the significance of the word “heart”, especially in personal and religious contexts – and in translation of Horace as representative of the secular tradition. It shows how the resources of verse are adapted by Nash as a poet, at once confessional and broadly empathetic, and how he explores the uses and resources of prose, in a whole range of genres, as seen in his publications beginning with Designs in Prose. Throughout, “warmth of thought” is a dominant characteristic as he enlightens, encourages and entertains both readers and prospective writers. Keywords: calor cogitationis, confessional, Quintilian, religious texts, rhetoric, secular writing, warmth (of thought)



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. https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.34.03coc © 2019 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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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 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



Chapter 1.  “Warmth of thought” in Walter Nash’s prose and verse 13

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:

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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:



Chapter 1.  “Warmth of thought” in Walter Nash’s prose and verse 15

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.

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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):



Chapter 1.  “Warmth of thought” in Walter Nash’s prose and verse 17

…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 …

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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.



Chapter 1.  “Warmth of thought” in Walter Nash’s prose and verse 19

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):

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                          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.



Chapter 1.  “Warmth of thought” in Walter Nash’s prose and verse 21

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

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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)!

Chapter 1.  “Warmth of thought” in Walter Nash’s prose and verse 23



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

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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



Chapter 1.  “Warmth of thought” in Walter Nash’s prose and verse 25

(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:

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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.



Chapter 1.  “Warmth of thought” in Walter Nash’s prose and verse 27

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

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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



Chapter 1.  “Warmth of thought” in Walter Nash’s prose and verse 29

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

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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



Chapter 1.  “Warmth of thought” in Walter Nash’s prose and verse 31

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 selfknowledge 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

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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. i. COMPASSIONATE DWM, 39, Ph.D., likes bikes, hikes, tykes, prefers light jogs, friendly dogs, casual togs; seeks free thinking, reasonably fit, non-materialistic partner. ii. 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



Chapter 1.  “Warmth of thought” in Walter Nash’s prose and verse 33

“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.

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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.

References Brown, C. (ed.). 1932. English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Butler, H. E. (ed and trans). 1920–22. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 4 vols. (Loeb Classical Lib­ rary). London: Heinemann. Carter, R. A. & Nash, W. 1990. Seeing through Language. Oxford: Blackwell. Cockcroft, R. 2005. Who talks whose language? George Herbert and the reader’s world. Lan­ guage and Literature 14 (3): 245–258.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947005054480 Cockcroft, R. & Cockcroft, S. M. (with Hamilton, C. & Hidalgo Downing, L. 2015. Persuading People: An Introduction to Rhetoric, 3rd edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Fairclough, H. R (ed and trans). 1929. Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica. Loeb Classical Lib­rary. London: Heinemann.



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Michie, J. (trans and introd). 1967. The Odes of Horace. (Penguin Classics). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Nash, W. 1980. Designs in Prose. London: Longman. Nash, W. 1982. Kettle of Roses. London: Hutchinson. Nash, W. 1985. The Language of Humour: Style and Technique in Comic Discourse. London: Longman. Nash, W. 1986. English Usage. London: Routledge. Nash, W. 1989. Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Nash, W. 1990. Language in Popular Fiction. London: Routledge. Nash, W. 1997. Nobis Natus. Nondum Print. Nash, W. 1998a Hesperides. Nondum Print. Nash, W. 1998b. A Death in Judea. Nondum Print. Nash, W. 1998c. Language and Creative Illusion. London: Longman. Nash, W. 2000a. Waking Late. Shrewsbury: Feather Books. Nash, W. 2000b. A Heart Prepared. Shrewsbury: Feather Books. Nash, W. 2000c. For a Change, Confessional Verses. Nondum Print. Nash, W. 2002a. Rainshowers and Church Doors. Shrewsbury: Feather Books. Nash, W. 2002b. Quintus: A Roman Mosaic. Nondum Print. Nash, W. 2003. The Pearshaped Summer. Shrewsbury: Feather Books. Nash, W. 2006a. Of Time and Small Islands. St Leonards-on-Sea: Beyond the Cloister. Nash, W. 2006b. A Departed Music: Readings in Old English Poetry. Hockwold-cum-Wilton: Anglo-Saxon Books. Nash, W. 2007a. In Good Faith: Devotional Poems. Shrewsbury: Feather Books. Nash, W. 2007b. For Old Times’ Sake: Memories of Childhood in the 1930s. Gamlingay: Authors On Line Ltd. Nash, W. 2009a. Memorabilia: Poems from Time to Time. St Leonards-on-Sea: Beyond the Cloister. Nash, W. 2009b. Recent Intelligence: A Sonnet Cycle. St. Leonards-on-Sea: Beyond the Cloister. Partridge, E. 1942. Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English. London: Hamish Hamilton; reprinted Penguin Books, 1963. Quintilian 1922. Institutio Oratoria, 4 vols. Butler H. E. trans. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass and London: Harvard University Press. Robbins, R. H. (ed). 1955. Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sprague, A. C. (ed). 1965. Samuel Daniel, Poems and A Defence of Ryme. Chicago and London: Uni­versity of Chicago Press. Stockwell, P. 2002. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Thurber, J. 1983. [1933]. The dog that bit people. In My Life and Hard Times. New York and London: Harper and Brothers. CIT018

Chapter 2

Chrysanthemums for Bill On Lawrentian style and stylistics Peter Stockwell

Nottingham University

This chapter on a short story by D. H. Lawrence revisits a key stylistic account of the text by Bill Nash, which was criticised both specifically and as a general representation of stylistic practice. The chapter addresses those criticisms, differentiating those that are misplaced from those that might have had a reasonable basis. It claims that many of these older objections can be addressed by more recent innovations in the discipline, and in fact that Nash prefigured some later literary linguistics, though he lacked the tools to develop his solutions at the time. In this analysis, these innovations are drawn from the broadening of stylistics to encompass matters that would previously have been regarded as extra-linguistic, in the form of a cognitive poetics. Keywords: D. H. Lawrence, viewpoint, texture, resonance, subliminal effects, attractor, critical theory

1. Literature and linguistics Every piece of literary criticism of any literary work in any culture from any period of human history would be better if more rigorous attention were paid to its language. The same could be said of any analytical account of any text, but it is a particular oddity of the scholarly criticism of literature that any knowledge of linguistics has often been regarded as an optional add-on. In his published work and by the example of his life, Bill Nash achieved a seamless integration of critical interpretation, linguistic mastery, and aesthetic sensibility that remains a testament to a fully holistic literary linguistics. In this, he was ahead of his time. Developing a series of observations originally published in Nottingham Linguistic Circular in 1977, Nash (1982) presented a case study of modern stylistics in which linguistic patterning, discoursal framing, and aesthetic effects were linked together: the account focused on an early passage from D. H. Lawrence’s (1914) short story “Odour of chrysanthemums”. In the preface to the original edition of NLC, the editors https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.34.04sto © 2019 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Christopher Butler and Nash himself outline how this “short account of a passage of Lawrentian prose emphasises the necessity of determining a textual and thematic structure as a framework of reference for the location of stylistic devices” (Butler and Nash 1977: 2). The chapter Nash (1982) polished for wider publication stands not only as an example of stylistic analysis, but also as an attempt to set out the wider parameters of what a fully integrated rhetoric of literary criticism should look like. On a website themed around “Odour of chrysanthemums” (http://odour.nottingham.ac.uk), Nash’s (1982) chapter appears alongside some early comments on the story by Ford Madox Ford (1937: 70–2), and is followed by a critique not only of Nash’s chapter but of stylistics in general by Peter Barry (1985). Barry’s criticism of stylistics is a theme in his work, further developed in Barry (1988) and in his literary theory textbook (there are four editions – 1995, 2002, 2009, 2017 – though each tends simply to add chapters, and the “Stylistics” section has remained fairly consistent: page numbers here refer to the 2002 edition). In this chapter, I would like to revisit Nash’s stylistic analysis, and Barry’s objections to some of it, in order to clarify the current and persisting value of stylistics. It is useful, I think, to identify both where and why Nash was correct, and where Barry’s criticisms had some foundation. It is also important to locate their dialogue historically, in order to show that some of what Nash was trying to do was very much of its time, and some of his ambitions required stylistic tools that did not become available until much more recently. Like Nash’s original account, my aim is to offer a general defence of stylistics as modern literary linguistics, and recommend the method as the exemplary practice for literary criticism. 2. Stylistics and some familiar objections In a move that Barry (1985) criticises for being randomly selective, Nash (1982) presents the opening passage from “Odour of chrysanthemums”: The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the



Chapter 2. Chrysanthemums for Bill 39

rough grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black head-stocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up. The engine whistled as it came into the wide bay of railway lines beside the colliery, where rows of trucks stood in harbour. Miners, single, trailing and in groups, passed like shadows diverging home. At the edge of the ribbed level of sidings squats a low cottage, three steps down from the cinder track. A large bony vine clutched at the house, as if to claw down the tiled roof. Round the bricked yard grew a few wintry primroses. Beyond, the long garden sloped down to a bush-covered brook course. There were some twiggy apple trees, winter-crack trees, and ragged cabbages. Beside the path hung dishevelled pink chrysanthemums, like pink cloths hung on bushes. A woman came stooping out of the felt-covered fowl-house, half-way down the garden. She closed and padlocked the door, then drew herself erect, having brushed some bits from her white apron. She was a tall woman of imperious mien, handsome, with definite black eyebrows. Her smooth black hair was parted exactly. For a few moments she stood steadily watching the miners as they passed along the railway: then she turned towards the brook course. Her face was calm and set, her mouth was closed with disillusionment. After a moment she called: “John!” There was no answer. She waited, and then said distinctly: “Where are you?” “Here!” replied a child’s sulky voice from among the bushes. The woman looked piercingly through the dusk. “Are you at that brook?” she asked sternly. For answer the child showed himself before the raspberry-canes that rose like whips. He was a small, sturdy boy of five. He stood quite still, defiantly. “Oh!” said the mother, conciliated. “I thought you were down at that wet brook–and you remember what I told you –” The boy did not move or answer. “Come, come on in,” she said more gently, “it’s getting dark. There’s your grandfather’s engine coming down the line!” The lad advanced slowly, with resentful, taciturn movement. He was dressed in trousers and waistcoat of cloth that was too thick and hard for the size of the garments. They were evidently cut down from a man’s clothes. As they went slowly towards the house he tore at the ragged wisps of chrysanthemums and dropped the petals in handfuls along the path. “Don’t do that – it does look nasty,” said his mother. He refrained, and she, suddenly pitiful, broke off a twig with three or four wan flowers and held them against her face. When mother and son reached the yard her hand hesitated, and

40 Peter Stockwell

instead of laying the flower aside, she pushed it in her apron-band. The mother and son stood at the foot of the three steps looking across the bay of lines at the passing home of the miners. The trundle of the small train was imminent. Suddenly the engine loomed past the house and came to a stop opposite the gate. The engine-driver, a short man with round grey beard, leaned out of the cab high above the woman. “Have you got a cup of tea?” he said in a cheery, hearty fashion. It was her father. (Lawrence 1914: 281–4)

Nash’s analysis is principally a careful stylistic explanation for the sense of alienation and isolation that he feels in the characters while reading the story. His is a general reaction that is evidently very common (see the overwhelming majority of reader-responses at Goodreads 2017), and, as with stylistics in general, the objective is not so much to produce a new or eccentric reading but to account as clearly as possible for predominant readings which exist in the world. The opening passage is selected because it sets up the scene and over-arching mood of the whole story, which develops as the woman’s husband’s body is returned home to her from a mining accident. In the course of the narrative, as the woman and the miner’s mother clean and prepare the corpse, the wife comes to realise her own isolation and failed relationships. Nash explores the narrative structure of the story, the way that perspective shifts especially in this opening scene, the relative agency and descriptions of the woman and her son, and their relationship to the setting and landscape. He illuminates the tonality of the setting “as a psychic shadow-partner to the human world” (Nash 1982: 117). He draws out, admirably for a short analysis, the rich details that Lawrence includes that accumulate into what most readers agree is a powerfully resonant study of alienation, loss and regret. Much of the analysis is concerned to show how the detailed stylistic texture builds up into an overall sense of polyvalent discomfort, and a feeling that the relationships and conclusions of the episode are complex and subtle. Barry’s (1985) criticism of Nash’s procedure focuses on four main points: stylistics is selective and overly micro-analytical; stylisticians produce no new or startling readings; stylistics cannot justify the leap from linguistic evidence to interpretation; and matters of linguistic structure are treated as if they had inherent meaning. These are criticisms that Barry has also made more generally about the discipline, so I will consider them both in response to Nash’s original account as well as in relation to the field overall. Firstly, Barry complains that Nash displays a lack of literary sensitivity when his selection of a single passage neglects the narrative dynamic flow of the rest of the story. Nash extracts the passage reproduced above for the obvious reason that it is the opening of the text and so is relatively constrained for readerly context. It sets the scene, both physically and tonally. He closes the passage at the line,



Chapter 2. Chrysanthemums for Bill 41

“Suddenly the engine loomed past the house and came to a stop opposite the gate.” Nash justifies this by identifying a shift in viewpoint and topic that moves from engine – miners – cottage – chrysanthemums and then reverses the sequence to create a symmetry with the engine that defines the opening. Barry suggests that Nash identifies symmetry across the passage arising from his own selective observation, and that this pattern is then circularly used to define the end of the passage. He makes a particular point that the exclusion of the “cheeriness” of the last lines that I have included in the excerpt above leads Nash to a “misreading” (Barry 1985: 57) that is more negative than it should be. This criticism derives from a general flaw in objections to stylistics that posit an exclusive distinction between objectivity and subjectivity. Barry claims that stylistics is subjective and idiosyncratic because it is not absolutely objective; it therefore rests on the very intuition that it claims to reject. However, these are false contraries, and modern stylistics certainly does not reject intuition. To my mind (and apparently for Nash too), the passage excerpted above represents an identifiable setting for the story, in which a narrative viewpoint tracks the scene by zooming in and out of perspective as the steam-engine moves closer and then stops. There are many elements of scene-setting and the establishment of world-building in the passage (some of which are identified by Nash), but the point of articulating these explicitly is to invite a reader to recognise them as reasonable observations about the text. The appeal is not to an objective parsing of the text but to an intersubjective recognition. Alongside the objection to the articulation of pattern-recognition, Barry more generally dislikes the micrological detail of stylistic analysis: the excerpt is then analysed as if it were poetry rather than prose, for [Nash] searches out patternings and recurrences which are like those found in lyric poetry and provide him with “a framework of reference for stylistic features” ([Nash 1982:] 112). This transfer of a poetic method to the analysis of fiction is of dubious validity.  (Barry 1985: 52)

Again, here, there is a confusion of the activity of reading (naturally) and the practice of literary analysis. Of course no one normally reads in as much detail or with such a degree of intensity as Nash, or any other stylistician. The patterns that are brought to awareness by linguistic description are laid bare so that others can see the craftedness of the literary work. Cumulatively, all of these details amount to the overall artistic achievement of the object. They can either be seen as a careful examination and appreciation of the object itself, or as stylistic components that operate at a subliminal level of awareness but nevertheless accumulate into a definite impression: the micro-texture of a reading which is mentally organised into a macrostructural representation that constitutes the effect in the reader. Either way, the analyst is trying to account for and value the source material for naturalistic

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reading. Neither does this method imply that authors are sort of super-stylisticians before the fact, as Barry elsewhere suggests. Commenting on analyses by Fowler (1966) and MacCabe (possibly 1984, 1985 or 1988, Barry doesn’t bother to reference the example here), he writes: Literary meaning, this suggests, goes down to the very roots of language and is reflected at the level of grammar and sentence structure. Hence, no aspect of language is neutral; the patterns of grammar and syntax, morphemes, and phonemes are all implicated in literary meaning. Again, I think there are difficulties with this as a general argument: for instance, it seems to make authors into intuitive genius figures who instinctively “know” the content of modern linguistics.  (Barry 2002: 213)

The final point here is an astonishing non-sequitur. Good writers do instinctively have a feel for their language (not for linguistics); their intuitive senses are distilled mainly subconsciously from the culture that they largely share with their readers. The task of the stylistician is to elucidate as professionally as possible all the elements that contribute to a writer’s output and a reader’s engagement with their works. When Freeman (1996), for example, observes the mechanics of conceptual metaphor in King Lear, he is not claiming anything about Shakespeare’s attendance in his cognitive linguistics class, but he is pointing out a powerful matter of rhetoric that connects the use of English across four centuries. Barry also seems here to deride the idea that “no aspect of language is neutral”. Well, no aspect of language is neutral, as the last four decades worth of critical discourse analysis and linguistics have demonstrated with an exhaustingly huge body of evidence. Barry’s textbook of critical theory sets stylistics apart for rejecting the relativism of other critical theories in favour of a positivist outlook on language. This is because it responds to our current best understanding of language and mind, not to an outdated and discredited pseudo-Saussurean notion of linguistic arbitrariness [see Stockwell (2017: 35–48) for a rehearsal of the origins of this error]. The principal characteristic of linguistic meaning, we now know (thanks to cognitive linguistics), is its iconicity. Indeed, “the patterns of grammar and syntax, morphemes, and phonemes are all implicated in literary meaning” (Barry 2002: 213). Aspects of formal structure always have meaning, and often in literary texts their significance is foregrounded in a variety of stylistic ways. Elsewhere, Barry (1980 and 2002: 19–20) scornfully derides the similarity between stylistic practice and F. R. Leavis’s (1955: 143) notion of “enactment”, which can be seen as an impressionistic version of the effects of linguistic iconicity. Leavis developed the term specifically arising from a discussion of D. H. Lawrence, but the idea that a literary text presents patterns that can be regarded iconically as being aligned with its theme or key interpretation is a notion that has found a widespread application



Chapter 2. Chrysanthemums for Bill 43

in stylistics (Müller and Fischer 2003, Willems and De Cuypere 2009). We now know that iconicity is one of the most powerful mechanisms of literary power and resonance. Nash is criticised for the “curious habit of treating grammar literalisticly” (Barry 1985: 57). Elsewhere, Barry complains: The critic’s contention is that the effects are achieved, at least in part, by a miming or echoing of the sense by the syntax. He believes that the underlying inchoative structure of the verbs constitutes “a kind of syntactic pun … again reinforcing a structural pattern in the poem’s language which makes processes … out of states” ([Freeman 1978] p. 88). But this central contention that “the poem’s syntax and its semantics interact perfectly” is irredeemably subjective, because, for one thing, there are no proper criteria for determining the semantic values of syntax.  (Barry 1988: 180)

In fact, both systemic functional grammar and cognitive linguistics take as a founding premise the notion that syntax and semantics cannot be completely distinguished, and both have a symbolic value. Langacker’s (1987, 1990, 1991, 1999, 2008) Cognitive Grammar can be regarded as a decades-long project of elucidating the “proper criteria” and principles for their inter-relation; it will be drawn upon in the analysis later in this chapter. In fact, most of Barry’s errors (in 1985: 57–8) derive from the fact that he does not understand the difference between semantic and pragmatic meaning, nor the functional effects of active/passive agency, nor the different types of process that predicates can manifest. To give one example, Nash notes “one fine stylistic touch” in the Lawrence passage, in which instead of “she hesitated” we read her hand hesitated. There is a shift of initiating agency from the whole person to a part, the hand, which is treated as though it had an independent will. This device expresses in a very telling way her division against herself, her alternations of voluntary act and involuntary response, and her reluctance to admit any feeling of tenderness about her marriage. It betrays a vulnerability which we might not suspect in a tall woman of imperious mien. .. with definite black eyebrows. (Nash 1982: 112)

Barry (1985: 57) says that the effect “exists in the grammar only”, dismissing the point since he thinks that grammar is merely meaningless formal structure in a text. In systemic functional grammar, the stylistic choice in the predicate manifests a process (“hesitates”) that can be construed by a reader either as a material action intention or as a mental process that indexes an emotional stance. The polyvalence is tonally suggestive, of course. In Cognitive Grammar, the perspective of this shift from “his mother” to “her hand” constitutes a zooming of attention that serves to focus readerly construal on the “wan flowers” of the delicate chrysanthemum. In

44 Peter Stockwell

the context of the story and its title, the symbolic importance of this subtle piece of foregrounding is surely important to notice. Barry’s central dissatisfaction with Nash and stylistics in general is a repeat of Fish’s (1973) complaint that stylistic practice moves from linguistic description to interpretation by leaping over the “hermeneutic gap”, and failing to define the relationship between evidence and conclusion. Others have resolved this question at length (see Toolan 1996, Stubbs 2005, O’Halloran 2007), but the fundamental validation that connects textual evidence to interpretation lies in the appeal to recognition in the reader. A stylistician sets out, as clearly and articulately and precisely as possible, a set of features in a text that seem to be significant; and the reader of the analysis is implicitly invited to evaluate whether the claims seem to correspond with their own intuitive response. In much recent stylistic practice, these validations have further been triangulated with empirical support from cognitive linguistics, reader-data, psycholinguistic measurements such as eye-tracking, and corpus linguistic framing. In the last of these, the language system as a whole is drawn on, using computational power, to understand the cultural usages of linguistic elements; these generalisms are then specified back towards the individual reader in that culture. Stylistics does not presume an ideal reader (as Barry 1988 claims) as a sort of imaginary psychologically omniscient being, but generates a sense of an idealised reader, distilled from the linguistic practices and patterns of the language system at large, and evidenced by corpus techniques. Corpus stylistics generalises the problem of subjectivity by raising the evidence from massively intersubjective data. 3. Updating the stylistic analysis In his wider work, Barry (2002) elaborates his criticisms of stylistics as a discipline. He includes “Stylistics” as a section in this literary theory textbook, alongside critical approaches such as Marxist criticism, Cultural materialism, Feminist criticism, Ecocriticism, and so on. Oddly, he has a separate section on Narratology, though this field and stylistics seem to me now so closely linked that they can be regarded as a single over-arching area, with shared approaches of method and principle, and overlapping personnel (such as Toolan 2001, Herman 2003, Fludernik 1996, and Bell 2010, among many others). He also misses the point in the Lawrence analysis where Nash (1982) makes narratological points, possibly because he does not see comments on narrative development as part of stylistics. This was debatably true at the time, but is certainly not the case now. The section on “Stylistics” (Barry 2002: 203–21) begins by asking whether stylistics is “a theory or a practice?” The



Chapter 2. Chrysanthemums for Bill 45

discussion does not actually address the question, instead suggesting that there is little difference between stylistics and either New Criticism or close-reading, and that stylistics is merely a terminologically-saturated version of liberal humanism. Barry clearly thinks stylistics is a critical theory by including it in his best-selling book, though he notes that it is rather different as a practice from those other critical theories. The claim that stylistics is principally a method can be seen in the fact that it could work in the service of almost all of the other theories in the book. Nash’s (1982) analysis could fit within the frame of a number of critical theoretical approaches to D. H. Lawrence. Over and over again, Nash (1982) points to key stylistic patterns, explaining them carefully in order to offer them to a reader for recognition and use. Of course, he could only draw on the state of linguistic description as it was available to him at the time. Barry, similarly, had those resources, though he appears less informed on matters of linguistics than Nash. So what was Barry (1985) right about in his early criticism of stylistics? Some of his points are true, but are not the criticism he thinks they are. He correctly notes that stylistic “rules” are not predictive of literary interpretation, though he has the method the wrong way round here: readings already exist, and the job of the stylistician is to account for their textual origins. He rightly notes that scholarly knowledge of linguistics is not necessary to produce an insight, but imagines this is a criticism only because he confuses professional analysis with natural reading. He suggests stylistics is a critical theory because it defines and generates a canonical set of literary texts. This was probably true in the 1960s and ‘70s, where stylisticians preferred linguistically deviant poetry texts as affording a richer ground for interesting exploration, but the stylistics certainly of the last three decades has been characterised by its diversity of genre, culture, and style. Barry (1988) criticises stylistics for searching for universals that are in fact not generalisable. The example he cites (Holloway 1979) attempts to apply transformational-generative syntax to poetry, and in this respect Barry’s objections are well-judged. Stylisticians realised around this time that TG could not be used for stylistics, principally because it was not particularly interested in surface realisation: it is a sign of the progressive nature of the discipline that TG was almost completely abandoned by subsequent stylisticians. Indeed, stylistics has proven itself progressive in the sense that its commitment to the best current understanding of language and mind necessitates a constant re-evaluation of the most apt analytical methods. It is not surprising that Nash, writing at the end of the 1970s, was not yet able to avail himself of some of the insights which have developed in linguistics and cognitive science since then. In the “Odour of chrysanthemums” analysis, he was attempting to capture a full tonal and thematic sense of the story. His aspiration is captured in this diagram, reproduced from the earliest version of his analysis.

46 Peter Stockwell

Diagram

Intuition Perception of linguistic/stylistic devices

Awareness of non-literary sign systems etc. 

Structural level 1 Plane of articulation

Structural level 2 Plane of information

Response to aesthetic patterns in art generally (Nash 1977: 72)

Here Nash is trying to make the tools of contemporary linguistics work to capture the “intersection” or “intermeshing” of textual patterning at the discourse level with readerly knowledge, experience, feeling and response (as he articulates it in Nash 1982: 120). Subliminal “intuition” is both central to this scheme and related by feedback with the other elements. By “plane of articulation”, he is trying to gesture towards a stylistically-driven discourse analysis of the sort that was only just emerging at the time (see, for example, Stubbs 1983, Brown and Yule 1983); by “plane of information” he is trying to grasp the schematic cognitive knowledge that a reader brings to a literary text, including a sense of how characterisation or symbolism work. This latter level was not fully systematically developed until the rise of cognitive poetics two decades later (Stockwell 2002). By this time, such literary framing was part of the systems that Nash presents as being further distanced from the centre of his scheme: non-literary contextual knowledge and aesthetic matters of feeling, value and significance. We might now fold all of these concerns into an integrated text-world theory approach (Gavins 2007), or an account drawing on schema poetics (Cockcroft 2002). Within literary linguistics, the domain of what is encompassed as a purely “linguistic” matter has expanded significantly since 1982 to include much of what Nash aspires to here: It is important to realise that the reader’s intimations of the patterning of a text may be guided by clues other than linguistic. A literary text has a total power of appeal which is to be described in terms of semiotics or aesthetics, including some aspects of linguistics, rather than of a strictly and exclusively linguistic model. In certain respects a text may be similar to a picture, in that it has an iconographic programme (this could, indeed, be said of the Lawrence passage); or it may have something in common with music, say, in its repetitions of a Leitmotiv, or even with mathematics in its modelling of some principles such as that of binary alternation. All these things may be described in linguistic or quasi-linguistic terminology, but they are not in the strictest sense proper to linguistics. The point is perhaps obvious, yet it is one that linguistic stylisticians do not always readily concede.  (Nash 1982: 119, original emphasis)



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The “total power of appeal” of a literary work is a composite of textual patterning, readerly experience and expectation, cultural framing, and interpretative effects, all of which are now amenable to stylistic analysis broadly conceived (see Gregoriou 2008, Lambrou and Stockwell 2010, Simpson 2014, and the historical progression throughout Carter and Stockwell 2008). We can return to the Nash analysis with some of these new insights into the cognitive stylistic texture of the Lawrence story. Much of his stylistic account attempts to describe the correlates of mood, theme and ambience – the resonant aspects of the text that his linguistic tools could not capture very well, and that Barry finds dissatisfying or incomplete. Nash is also handicapped by the lack of a general account that combines local texture, narrative patterning and readerly involvement, needing the sort of cognitive discourse grammar that was not available until more recently (see Harrison et al. 2014). The opening passage to “Odour of chrysanthemums”, as provided at the beginning of this chapter, sets up many of the most resonant elements that make the story so powerful, evocative and memorable. The term resonance here is used in the cognitive poetic sense first proposed in Stockwell (2009a, 2009b) and developed and applied by Giovanelli (2013) and McLoughlin (2016): the means by which a literary text manipulates readerly attention in order to evoke feelings and impressions that persist in the mind after the reading is over. The attention-resonance model draws heavily on Langacker’s (2008) Cognitive Grammar, together with insights from the cognition of attention (see Styles 2005, 2006) and gestalt psychology (see Ellis 1999). Briefly, a textual element can be regarded figurally as a mental “attractor” if it is perceived as having one or a combination of the following effects: newness currency: the present moment of reading is more attractive than the previous moment agency noun phrases in active position are better attractors than in passive position topicality foregrounded subject position confers attraction over grounded object position empathy human speaker > human hearer > animal > object > abstraction definiteness definite > specific indefinite > non-specific indefinite activeness verbs denoting action, energy, violence, passion, wilfulness, motivation or strength brightness lightness or vivid colours being denoted over dimness or drabness fullness richness, density, intensity or nutrition being denoted largeness large objects being denoted, or a very long elaborated noun phrase used to denote height objects that are above others, are higher than the perceiver, or which dominate noisiness denoted phenomena which are audibly voluminous abnormality aesthetic distance from the norm (beauty/ugliness, danger, dissonance).  (after Stockwell 2009a: 25)

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Across a reading of a text, attractors are sustained or occluded by newly refreshed figures as the reading moves on, accumulating into an overall attentional sense of the impact of the work. The first half of the list above would traditionally be considered “linguistic” matters and the second half more impressionistic, meaningful or world-related matters. Taking a principled cognitive poetic view of attractors means that the distinction between syntactic form and meaningfulness, for example, is rendered relatively unimportant here. So it seems to be the case, documented in the work cited above, that readers’ attention is attracted by syntactic agency as well as by phrases which denote noise, for example. There is a continuity across linguistic representation and bodily simulation; and this observation is a foundational principle of cognitive linguistics. An exploration of the subtle manipulations of readerly attention across the Lawrence passage reveals both consistent thematic patterns and complex undercurrents. The most obvious effect, perhaps, is the animation of the industrial landscape. This is achieved by a set of stylistic patterns that might lead a reader to profile a sense of human empathy and wilfulness in normally inanimate objects. A full shift from object to human along the empathy scale would involve a thorough personification of the landscape; however, what happens in the opening to “Odour of chrysanthemums” is much more subtle – just enough to give a subliminal flavour of animation and wilfulness. The steam engine, for example, receives an unusually high level of definite specification in the opening sentence: “The small locomotive engine, Number 4”. It is the agentive topic of a repeated predication “came clanking, stumbling”, and it is figured strongly against a specified ground “from Selston” and “with seven full waggons”. There is even a numerical increase from “4” to “seven”, including from the single numeral to the physically larger word on the page. Each time the engine is mentioned, it is combined with a prepositional phrase “with” – this is an image-schematic structure that is used when objects are enlarged: “with seven full waggons”, “with loud threats of speed”, “with slow inevitable movement”. Several of the lexical choices associated with the engine are drawn from the human domain: “stumbling”, “threats”, “thumped”, “whistled”. In context, the profiling of the engine is also achieved contrastively by grounding and diminishing other elements, most notably here a woman standing by: “The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge”. The “trucks” are placed in active topic position and specified definitely, and are then post-modified so that the subject takes up half the length of the sentence here. The multiple object that is the trucks is itemised as each one passes by (this is “sequential scanning” in Langacker’s (1987: 245) scheme), so that the trailing sequence iconically matches the slow passing of the train. By contrast, the woman who has just been (indefinitely) introduced (“A woman”) is reduced down to a



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single unmodifiable pronoun (“she”). She has been cumulatively rendered static (“walking … drew back … held … watched”) to the point at which she “stood insignificantly trapped”. She disappears at that point and is never seen again. Even as she is diminished, the surrounding objects are more definite than her: “the railway line … the hedge … the footplate … the engine … the trucks … the jolting black waggons … the hedge”. On close inspection, this sentence appears to track the woman’s viewpoint and experience as the trucks thump past her; the feeling of being “trapped” is hers; and they are seen to “curve away” from the point where she is standing. However, at this point, the diminishment and disappearance of this woman from the text is mirrored by the fact that the viewpoint leaves her perspective, and instead picks up and cinematically follows the train once again. Again, the landscape is profiled with definite articles to make a reader more readily lose sight of the woman: “the coppice … the withered oak leaves … the birds … the scarlet hips … the track … the dusk … the spinney”, and so on. The effect is also to make the landscape one that is presumed familiar and part of prosaic experience. The profiling of the engine and de-profiling of people are also aligned with agency for other aspects of the industrial landscape in the passage. So other items, both natural and artificial, in the landscape receive highly active, fast, bright or anomalous verbal processes: as well as the engine stumbling, threatening, thumping and trapping, the colt “outdistanced it”, the gorse “flickered”, the withered oak leaves “dropped”, the birds “pulling at the scarlet hips” “made off ”, the dusk “crept”, the smoke “cleaved”, the fields were “forsaken”, the fowls “abandoned their run”, and so on. The last few of these move even further along the empathy scale towards anthropomorphisation, with flames “like red sores licking”, black “head-stocks” are “clumsy”, “the winding engine rapped out” “its little spasms”, and the engine “whistled”. Note too that many of these align with noisiness and danger. There is similarly an up/down symbolic orientation that is a correlate of height and largeness: the engine “came clanking” towards our viewpoint “stumbling down”, the withered oak leaves “dropped”, the smoke “sank”. Even the place name has a downward feel: “Underwood”. Contrastively the woman is “walking up” and away from us, and the miners are “turned up” by the machine. Almost all of the objects of industry and nature in the first paragraph are definite, and the only indefinite is “a woman”. When the miners appear they are instantly faded from perspective, dispersed “single, trailing and in groups” and turned “diverging” into “shadows”. The second major paragraph attaches human characteristics that prefigure the corpse later in the story: “the ribbed level”, the cottage that “squats”. A “large bony vine clutched” “as if to claw down” the roof, and the chrysanthemums are “dishevelled” “like pink cloths”. There are even formulations such as “the marshy strip that led”, “the pit-bank loomed up”, “rose the tapering chimneys,” and “round the brick yard grew … primroses”. These are all examples of fictive motion (Talmy 2000) that are

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common metaphorical forms, but in this passage they take on significant animation by being clustered together and aligned with the industrial landscape. A passage such as this by another writer might distinguish between industry and nature, but Lawrence has the natural elements subsumed into the grimy industrial scene, and the words for natural objects are almost always modified with negative lexis: “raw afternoon”, “withered oak leaves”, “rough grass”, “dreary fields”, “tarred fowl-house”, “ashy sides”, “stagnant light”, “raspberry-canes that rose like whips”. The birds give up the trees for the man-made tarred fowl-house, which even sounds foul. The pond is not a village green pool but a “reedy pit-pond”. The apple-trees are “twiggy”, the cabbages are “ragged”, the chrysanthemums are “dishevelled” “ragged wisps”. The scene thus sets up a tone, mood and emotional disposition in which objects are invested with symbolic value. The setting is largely dimmed down (“flickered indistinctly”, “black waggons”, “the dusk”, “red flames”, “stagnant light”, “black headstocks”, “like shadows”, “a low cottage”). This dimming and down-ness increases just before the main character appears: “low cottage”, “three steps down”, “claw down”, “the garden sloped down”, “half-way down the garden”. With her appearance there is a contrastive raise in height (she “drew herself erect”, also with agency) and brightness (“white apron”). The character-description that follows aligns several attractors: height (“tall woman”), definiteness (“definite black eyebrows”), and her agency and activeness increases clause by clause: “She was”, her hair “was parted”, “she stood steadily watching”, “she turned”. The double mention of “black eyebrows” and “black hair” ties her to the industrial scene, but there is a final clear zooming in of attention onto her face, and then onto her mouth, and then she speaks. As readers, we are clearly being set up tonally for the story, and focused towards the woman’s interior feelings. However, this move is gradual, and the opening passage is entirely a slow, inexorable inward movement towards the woman’s consciousness. Mid-way, we are outside her perspective: from outward appearance, the boy’s trousers are “evidently cut down from a man’s clothes” (Lawrence 1914: 283), but the woman who probably did the alteration knows that already. We don’t arrive in her mind until the very end of the extract: looking up at the “engine-driver, a short man with round grey beard”, she knows “It was her father” before we do. From then on, the first section of the story largely consists of direct speech, where the characters tell us what they think. Only at the end of this section do we again slip into her consciousness: “Meantime her anger was tinged with fear” (Lawrence 1914: 292). Part II of the story increases our access to the woman’s feelings, though initially with some distancing and vagueness: “Elizabeth’s thoughts were busy elsewhere” (Lawrence 1914: 298). However, the end of the story finds us thoroughly inside Elizabeth’s mind, as she contemplates her husband’s dead body and feels the distance that has always been between them.



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Where the opening of the narrative is highly concrete in its objects, and several of those items are heavy with symbolic value, the closing of the narrative is relatively abstract: Elizabeth looked up. The man’s mouth was fallen back, slightly open under the cover of the moustache. The eyes, half shut, did not show glazed in the obscurity. Life with its smoky burning gone from him, had left him apart and utterly alien to her. And she knew what a stranger he was to her. In her womb was ice of fear, because of this separate stranger with whom she had been living as one flesh. Was this what it all meant–utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living? In dread she turned her face away. The fact was too deadly. There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had taken her, they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now. He was no more responsible than she. The child was like ice in her womb. For as she looked at the dead man, her mind, cold and detached, said clearly: “Who am I? What have I been doing? I have been fighting a husband who did not exist. He existed all the time. What wrong have I done? What was that I have been living with? There lies the reality, this man.”–And her soul died in her for fear: she knew she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met nor whom they fought. And now she saw, and turned silent in seeing. For she had been wrong. She had said he was something he was not; she had felt familiar with him. Whereas he was apart all the while, living as she never lived, feeling as she never felt. (Lawrence 1914: 307–8)

In the opening, perhaps only the word “disillusionment” stands as an abstracted emotion; here at the close we find “the obscurity”, “Life”, “apart”, “alien”, “intact separateness”, “deadly”, “wrong”, “reality”, “soul”, “fear”, and so on. Across the whole narrative, the woman first emerges from the industrial landscape and gradually takes active control of her surroundings, but by the end her agency is turned inwards. By the close of the story, in the extract above, she is presented with reflective agency (“looked up”, “she knew”, “she saw”) against reified abstract nouns. These nouns are reified by being grounded (“in the obscurity”, “In dread”, “There lies the reality”, “in the dark”) or by metaphorical shift towards objectification (“Life with its smoky burning”, “ice of fear”). The story ends altogether with “fear and shame”, “grief and pity”, “agony” and “horror”, and the final paragraph: At last it was finished. They covered him with a sheet and left him lying, with his face bound. And she fastened the door of the little parlour, lest the children should see what was lying there. Then, with peace sunk heavy on her heart, she went about making tidy the kitchen. She knew she submitted to life, which was her immediate master. But from death, her ultimate master, she winced with fear and shame.  (Lawrence 1914: 310)

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There are several elements in the closing of the story that point to shifts that are subtle: the presence of fire and ice as metaphors for ambivalent feelings; the literal darkness and the figurative darkness of unawareness; they had come together but as “two isolated beings”. The movement across the entire story represents a gradual, subtle, ambivalent alienation. This makes Nash’s interpretation not a “misreading” (as Barry (1985: 57) would have it), but an incomplete account which he did not have the means to articulate in its rich complexity. Barry suggests Nash misses the ambivalence in the story, but in fact Nash notes in Elizabeth how the subtle passives, for example, express in a “very telling way her division against herself, her alternations of voluntary act and involuntary response” (Nash 1982: 112) – patterns of ambivalence that are fully realised by the end of the narrative. 4. Towards a stylistics of subliminal effects I suggest that a great deal of the story’s resonant power derives from the subtle and incremental manner in which these ambivalences are figured, occluded and backgrounded across a reader’s profiling of the text. Nash’s initial identification of a sense of alienation in the story is necessarily a recognition that alienation is an ambivalent emotional response: the feeling requires a sense of what is lost as well as the fact of the loss. While his contemporary stylistics could not quite capture the subtlety in this, our current understanding of the field allows us a greater degree of sensibility. The purpose of this sort of stylistic analysis is to render explicit some of the most significant subliminal effects that a text might offer to a reader. One objection to the notion of subliminality would simply be to deny that those effects are real, and of course when dealing with matters of subconscious effects, such a criticism is difficult to refute absolutely. However, the stylistician can only note features which are actually available for profiling in the first place – this is the only location for textual objectivity. Further, though, the stylistician must then offer an account that finds a sense of recognition in a reader, and an analysis that chimes with a reader’s own intuitive senses. Chrysanthemums themselves have multiple cultural meanings. In Europe, they tend to be funeral flowers, though this exclusive symbolism seems a late 20th century development: settlers to America and Australia developed a tradition that regards chrysanthemums as Mother’s day flowers (“mums”), or symbolising birth and joy. In Eastern tradition, the flowers are meditative and symbolic of happiness. When Lawrence was writing, their symbolic value was not entirely settled, and could be seen as having several of these meanings. They bloom late in the summer, and turn brown swiftly after picking. The odour of chrysanthemums is primarily defined by a combination of eucalyptol, pinene and camphor (Surburg et al. 1993),



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a complex of fragrances which people find it difficult to ascertain. Common responses appear to discern very close associations on the borderline between both attractive and repulsive senses of heady sweetness and decay (Sell 2015): the flowers themselves have an inherently ambivalent scent. Perhaps it was this subconsciously resonant intuitive sense that led Lawrence to place chrysanthemums so significantly in the story, and perhaps it was this resonance in Nash’s sensibility that pushed him towards a desire to be more precise about Lawrentian literary style. Our task is to take up this ambition, with better tools and understanding, towards a stylistics of subliminality.

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