Word Tamer

By Gerald Clarke

THOUGHTS IN A DRY SEASON by Gerald Brenan Cambridge University Press 177 pages; $14.95

The only thing wrong with this book of delights is its title, taken from T.S. Eliot's Gerontion: "Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season." Despite the calendar, which says he is 84, Gerald Brenan has a luminous mind and an ageless talent. His collage of quotes, aphorisms and observations, in the style of Cyril Connolly's short masterpiece, The Unquiet Grave, deserves a permanent place on the night table. Opened at random, it will provide a refreshment, and occasionally a shock, on nearly every page. Brenan can sometimes be wrongheaded, but he is never dull.

"Imagination," he says, "means letting the birds in one's head out of their cages and watching them fly up into the air." His own birds wing off in a hundred different directions. Writing of life in general, he notes: "We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure." On belief: "Religions are kept alive by heresies, which are really sudden explosions of faith. Dead religions do not produce them." And, "Miracles are like jokes. They relieve our tension suddenly by setting us free from the chain of cause and effect." Love receives a whole chapter. "When the coin is tossed, either Love or Lust will fall uppermost. But if the metal is right, under the one will always lie the other." The attachment of marriage is "a stream that, after a certain length of time, sinks into the earth and flows underground. Something is there, but one does not know what. Only the vegetation shows that there is still water."

Though he has lived in and written about Spain for nearly 60 years, Brenan was an active member of the Bloomsbury group, and he is at his most pungent when he talks of writers and writing. Of modern verse he complains, "Sometimes I feel that there is a faraway country where much of the English poetry that is printed today was originally written. Our poets, without knowing the language well, translate it into that universal idiom known as translatese. Hence its lack of poetic rhythm, its inability to leave the ground. And when our poets do know how to write verse, they often pitch their tone very low as if to assure us that their lines will require no emotional response." Lytton Strachey, recalls the aphorist, once told him that Horace could not be a good poet because everything he wrote was a platitude. "This is the Romantic view of poetry, for in fact it requires a very great poet to make platitudes come alive, since they are sentiments we once felt but, through the dulling of our minds by habit, have ceased any longer to feel."

Few have conveyed more eloquently the task of actually sitting down and putting words on paper: "Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain." And few have expressed more simply the pleasures of that word tamer. "Every writer and artist wonders what in the world people of other professions can find to live for. This is the great advantage they possess, which more than makes up for the little they usually earn." The words may jump and snarl, snap and bite when Brenan sits down at his own desk. But when they march onto his page, they almost always perform marvelous and original tricks. -- Gerald Clarke

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