YOU AREN'T ON OATH AT A PARTY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1052, 23 October 1959, Page 8

YOU AREN'T ON OATH AT A PARTY

by

Dennis

McEldowney

HE Party, such as it was, had got under way before I arrived. There was already a haze in the room and people sat around dimly with glasses in their hands, The hostess bustled me "Now," she said, "you haven’t met James Sayers, have you? You'd have a lot in common, I know you would." She looked around and discovered that James Sayer’s flank was already occupied. "Do you mind?" she said, and with a gesture of her finger she removed this guest from her chair. The dispossessed scuttled away into the fog with a startled upward glance, and spilt some of her drink on the carpet. I took her vacated chair. I was now too close to James Sayers to have a comprehensive view of him. All I could see at first was the red and uneven skin of his face, the pits and bumps. In some of the hollows hair lurked, having escaped the razor, but he was for the most part respectably shaved. When I could reduce this mass of uneven skin to a face I found nothing startling in it. The hair around it was gingery, the ears small, the eyes pale, and the spectacles rimless. There was nothing for it but to hope for the best; which I would have been prepared to do if I had not lately read his poems. I recalled the rows of little dots where the feeling became too intense for expression, I recalled the sentiments, so infinitely in tune with nothing in particular. I wondered what to say. But ome started. "I’ve heard a lot about you," he said. He had begun the conversation with a mechanical phrase, and as if he had put a penny in the slot, out popped another from me. "That remark always makes me feel nervous," is, I regret to recall, what I said. I give him full marks for the :

fact that he didn’t follow it up. Instead he said: "Betty’s been trying to keep this place clear for you for the last hour. I’m afraid she wants to make history by bringing together two geniuses or genii." He laughed, but did not seem to any of the qualms I was feeling. "Well, you never know," I said. I was surprised to hear myself say it, and so early in the evening, too. I resolved to be more careful. "TI can’t imagine you’d find anything to interest you in my little things,"

he said, "but I’ve been wanting for a long time to thank you for your book." I wasn’t exactly enchanted by this, coming from him, There are some people from whom praise is an embarrassment, The thought of having written something they would enjoy is enough to make you look at yourself with a jaundiced eye. Nevertheless I went on listening while he told me he had read my book twice, the first time at a sitting, the second time more slowly to savour the style. And I reflected that perhaps I was being a little hasty in dismissing his opinion; that because a person writes bad verse he is not necessarily disqualified as a critic. He may have a blind spot about his own work and yet be able to see that of others quite clearly. There have been instances

of it in the past, I was sure, although I was not able on the spurt of the moment to recall any actual names. I began to hope it was so with James Sayers for he was not only continuing to praise my book, becoming quite animated about it indeed, but he was giving the most praise to those parts of the book which I was sure myself were the best. "But I didn’t think," I said, "that I’d expressed myself clearly enough in the second to last chapter. I don’t know if readers grasped my meaning. I’m sorry now that I didn’t do something about it at the proof stage but I was too close to it then to see it clearly." "J didn’t have any difficulty with it," he said. "I don’t know what you intended to convey, but if it was what you did

convey to me it would have been & crime’ to meddle with it." Then there was a pause and he finished what he had in his glass, while I watched him and felt friendly. He had evidently said what he had to say about my book: the natural deyelopment in the conversation would be for me to say something about his. The more I thought about it the more I thought it would be churlish not to, There is,no harm in a few kind words to a pleasant person. One is not speaking ex cathedra at a party. "I’ve just been reading your poetry," I said. "That does surprise me," he said. "I’d be interested to know what you thought of it, if you thought anything. Don’t pull your punches-TI can take it." "I thought," I said, choosing my words, "there was great intensity of feeling behind it." "I’m pleased to hear you say that. That’s the impression I most want to convey. In my opinion, most poets nowadays tend to be emotionally inhibited." Inhibited! I thought. What about those little dots? But what I said was, "I gather you think most of your contemporaries are too cerebral," "That’s precisely what I do think. Why can’t they be content once in a while just to feel?" "Why, indeed?" I said. Our host came around with a bottle and gave Sayers a refill and when he had attended to that he turned back to me. His pocked skin had begun to glisten. "You know," he said, "I’m enjoying this party a lot more than I thought I would. Plenty of people have told me they like my poems, in general terms, but most of them are totally inarticulate. It’s refreshing to talk to a person with some literary perception now and then. I’ve had a few hard knocks from the academic critics, as you know." | "Haven’t we all?" I said. "They sometimes object to my use of points de suspension,’ he said. He said it as an isolated statement, but he obviously hoped it would lead somewhere. Cravenly, I obliged. "I must confess to a prejudice against them myself," I said. He looked a little downcast, while trying to look merely interested. "But,’ I went on, "after all, rules are made to be broken and a good writer can get away with anything. For example there’s usually nothing more maddening than a novelist who keeps forecasting © the catastrophes that. are going to happen a few chapters further on, "The had-I-but-known school | of fiction’ a friend of mine calls it. But Dostoievsky does it all the time, and because it is Dostoievsky you accept his tight to do it." What possesses me to babble on like this? I wondered, but Sayers seemed to be enjoying it. "In my use of it," he said, "it isn’t merely a typographical device. It’s a direction to the voice of the person reading the poem. I don’t know if you remember how I end a poem to a thrush: "I heard his cry of wonder, and I ce), pier aod des "J remember it well," I said. "If it weren’t for the points no one would read or even see that line ag it ought to be seen." "Few of us,’ I observed, "realise the importance of punctuation." Fortunately at this point, just as I was beginning to wonder how much longer I could keep up the farce, he tired of his work and went back with new vigour to mine, And I was even more convinced that, incredible though it might seem, he was perceptive, This (continued on next page) \

(continued from previous page) started my mind on quite a new tack. I began to wonder if his work could really be as bad as I had thought. I de-_ cided to have another look at it when) I got home. I realised I had never read it with anything approaching real atten-_ tion-it is so fatally easy to like only what one habitually likes, and to close’ the mind to someone who may be saying something entirely new. Especially if, superficially, there is something about it which raises one’s hackles. While I was meditating on this possibility Sayers was continuing to talk of my book and I went on listening with growing interest for several minutes more. Then I saw a shade of tiredness draw across his eye. "Have @ potato crisp," he said, | And he looked as weary then ag I must have looked when I had been try-: ing to think of more nice things to say about his verse. *T’d rather have @ stuffed olive? I gaid,