‘Yours truly saying with an invisible voice’: W. S. Graham's Smalltalk

Abstract

Glou. I haue a Letter guessingly set downe²

Say you want to send a letter. Easy: sign, seal, deliver (it's yours/theirs). But also say you're a poet, and one that's given close – occasionally obsessive – attention to the troubles of communication, and you understand language, even at its most off-handedly practical, as an obstacle as much as a vehicle. W. S. Graham is such a poet, and, for him, posting a letter was no simple matter. His poem ‘Letter X’, for instance, designates such a text ‘Our obstacle in common’, run through with personal signature but subject to the same stumbles as any written word.³ The contours of genre – the line that separates and connects letter and poem – are routinely pressed upon and disturbed by his writing: he treads tentatively along the fraught hyphen of a poem-letter, simultaneously blurring and keenly sharpening their distinctions. Or else, their forms get complexly imbricated, as letters suddenly delineate, becoming, for a turn, verse; or, elsewhere, poems take on the formal qualities of epistle, confusing the varying registers and timbres of private or public voice. As Angela Leighton puts it, ‘the urgent sense of an addressee is never far from Graham's poetic consciousness’.⁴

Graham, in other words, was well versed in letters and vice versa. And the letter is a form worth complicating, because, as Hermione Lee writes, ‘If you are using a letter in a biography, you must recognize the dangerousness of enlisting such a performance, and you must have some idea of what the performance entails’; and that ‘Of course literary autobiography can be read just as data of the life; but it is also evidence of what mattered to the subject, and a form of self-dramatisation or disguise’.⁵ Graham's genre-skipping words increase such dangers considerably, because his forms of ‘self-dramatisation and disguise’ extend to his most personal – and, as we'll see, most heartfelt – interactions. So, this article wishes to think through the problem of Graham's minute deceptions and micromanagement of his friends and readers, and how this occurs in his letters and letter-like poems. I'm terming this way of writing, of using the letter's unassumingness to enact kinds of control (both personal and critical), Graham's smalltalk – and Graham's talk can be small to the point of vanishing altogether.

So, the implicatory force of a speech-act, however tiny, is at least in part established by breaking unwritten rules and using unuttered ways of speaking that guide our personal social dependencies. Graham will often carry across letter-chatter, as well as the generic features of a missive, into his poetry. By tacking back and forth like this, and by redrawing their edges as overlaps, he makes the social formalities of letters into a pointed structure of verse. He employs a classic sign-off in his poem ‘Wynter and the Grammarsow’, whose title partially addresses his painter-friend Bryan Wynter: ‘Yours Truly saying with an invisible voice’ (NCP, p. 187). This ushers in the language of letters into the poem's world, and in doing so gently disturbs the discreet categories of both modes of writing, as well as sound and sight. There is an unreadable absence to the printed voice, the missing intonation, gesture, social context that becomes the implicature we retroactively place: ‘saying with an invisible voice’. Like Pyramus, we might be confused about the voice we see, because there it is, in print. But the invisibility hides in plain sight: ‘Yours truly’ being one of those habits of writing we know all too well, a transparency of expression by its nature avoiding obscurity, a feature so common that we scarcely acknowledge its presence. Graham presents this see-through voice (parodically mirroring a letter's usual classification as a more ‘open’ text) in a different contextual light, asking us to read the gaps of social niceness. What is now true with this sign-off is hard to determine, ‘those facts’ of the page and those of the people writing them become less and less clear, a ‘self-dramatising or disguise’ conjured from airy talk, in a way of saying something for nothing.

It isn't surprising that such crossovers occur; Graham was a delightful and delighted letter writer. Nor is it unimportant that one of his first jobs was writing the Lord's Prayer on a postage stamp: a place in which address and deliverance co-habit in almighty miniature. (‘Amen’, in fact, comes from biblical Hebrew and means ‘truth’ – the original ‘Yours Truly’.¹³) Stamps, like smalltalk, like stock phrases such as ‘Yours Truly’, take up space and serve a practical purpose, getting us to where we need to be; they aren't designed, usually, to arrest undue attention. Writing the Lord's Prayer on a stamp would break several of Grice's equivalent conversational maxims, for example under QUANITY: ‘Do not make your contribution more informative than is required’.¹⁴

Indeed, Graham elides these different kinds of expression as things that both require careful reading. And here we can see how a letter's peculiar and perhaps impossible tense (written presently with a future voice in mind to tell you of the past) becomes for Graham, in various ways, a site of translational performance: translation of letter-speak into poetic diction, transmission of illocutionary force in the mind of the receiver, as well as a kind of self-translation, a rereading of one's old letters and poems. Within this translational space, which will not yield to apprehension for long, Graham harnesses dual conditions of deictic surety and sudden aporia, and through linguistic carelessness (which is, of course, always careful) he brings to light those features of writing that so often go unnoticed but form a vital part of the auditory and readerly imagination.

This potential triviality might be funny because it's so inappropriate, disregarding, here, what some might call the proper tone of bereavement; but the implication is that Wynter would understand – or more simply get – this subtle way of speaking better than we ever could, and it causes the humour's heart to break. In a sense, the poem formalizes the rhetorical character, as it later states, of ‘Speaking to you and not’ – as we already know, Graham ‘hate[s] having to say anything which needs saying’ – or, in full, ‘Speaking to you and not / Knowing if you are there / Is not too difficult. / My words are used to that’ (NCP, p. 258). These words have gotten more ‘used to’ things now, though they retain the well-known strangeness of a person's sudden disappearance. What one is ‘used to’ – something either that repetition has made familiarly tolerable or coldly deadened – also shades into its own imperfect past: addressing what used to be. Simultaneously ‘Speaking to you and not’ is an oddly comfortable mode for Graham, and describes, at once, sending a letter and writing an elegy, enveloping these weirdly similar forms of address. This is to say, the ‘Speaking to you and not’ might be an address to the dead, a place in which ‘to’ means nothing, but also friends will often talk and say nothing at all, a conversation in which it is more about the sweet exchange of voices, the air of implication, and a shared silent history, than anything else. It is with the gap between skimming and reading that he weaves a serious part of his verse-texture, as well as a theory of elegy.

All of this shows letters to be importantly imaginative encounters and ambiguous objects of knowledge, minimal surfaces that extend indefinitely beyond the reader's reach, even as they come to hand. Griffiths writes of a letter by Keats that ‘the closeness of the imaginative activity Keats asked of his brother and sister-in-law to what is asked of a reader now preserves an intimacy with his writing across the time since the letter was sent out’.²⁵ And this is similar to the ‘imaginative activity’ Keats once described in a letter: ‘it would be a great delight to know in what position Shakespeare sat when he began “To be or not to be” – such thing<s> become interesting from distance of time and place’.²⁶ ‘Interesting from distance’ is also an interest in distance, and both Keats and Griffiths highlight that imaginative intimacy might increase over space and time. Getting to know a poet (as a poet and not a friend) is, then, a strange activity of gauging the space between us.

‘Dear Bryan Wynter’ performs in reverse what Stanley Cavell writes of pieces of art: ‘They mean something to us, not just the way statements do, but the way people do’.²⁷ What is important for ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’, and our reading of it, is the art of poetry and the art of friendship are found in pieces: the pain is levelled as partial, one-sided, missing its usual conversation-partner. And this is a pain (though a slightly different one) for the critic, too, because it appeals to an over-active imagination. This is perhaps where implicature becomes shaded with the risky edge of illocution, which is what Quentin Skinner thinks ‘lies at the heart of literary-critical procedures’.²⁸ Illocution was famously noticed and unfolded by J. L. Austin and John Searle, and was defined by the former as the ‘performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something’.²⁹ This literary-critical heart, however, watches carefully over its own imagination, and will forever brink uneasily on making something and someone up by trying to make more visible the invisibilities of voice. Graham knows this, and fuels his elegy with it. It is a little like asking for money: similar uneasiness (and uneasy similarity) exists in making such financial requests and a greedy elegy. ‘Or am / I greedy’, Graham writes, ‘to make you up / Again out of memory?’ (NCP, p. 258). To an extent, he was used to the dangers of such conjuring-acts, and worried about them, writing to Wynter's widow shortly after he died, ‘You mustn't think I am eccentrically making a thing of Bryan dying. It is only me writing to you, suddenly being struck by the realization of his absence’ (NF, p. 289). This gives some insight as to why the poem is so intensely un-eccentric; again, ‘it is only me writing to you’ – that's the point, not all this greedy (and dodgy) elegy-making; let's be serious by keeping it light. [M]aking a thing of Bryan dying’ betrays a nagging guilt through a nagging rhyme, unavoidable or irresistible, that we are sounding too clearly our meaning, that maybe I too am eccentrically making a thing of Wynter's death.

So we must engage in sensing out and sometimes placing illocutionary force in texts, and part of this imaginative game-playing is built up from the idea of what Graham was, as an idea that sits alongside his texts, felt as much in an off-hand remark as an ars poetica. ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’ has the lines ‘I would like to think / You were alright’. On ‘were’ the present tense wilts, and also alludes to the first thing people regularly say to each other on meeting: ‘How are you?’ A question which might only demand a serious reply if it's the last thing you're saying. Now, for Graham, it's ‘It was all fine, wasn't it? We didn't waste our time talking about money?’ You may like to think so. You have to think so. But his awareness of this tension drives this poem as well as many of his others and is perhaps what makes them unusually and especially moving. He uses smalltalk to trouble over smalltalk, on the verge of vanishing altogether, and the intense feeling of privacy this creates fuels the elegy's success and the critic's sense of transgression. The poem, I think, is gilded with guilt of a kind that is scarcely acknowledged, and so particularly serious. That very specific regret felt at the passing of a close one: that there were always more nothings to say; or that ‘those facts’ put over a page were the real waste of time.