But there was one hope left, a glimpse of the old code and toughness, of salvation lubricated in all its pistons by desperate successful perspiration, a “local boy who made good” for every American locale (because he can rest in none), RICHARD NIXON steam-engining down the track, somehow un-derailed by history, cheered by those hoping he could reestablish the copybook maxims he lived by—though his type is fading now (become “forgotten”), he went on regardless, did not spare himself, this churning engine that knew-that-it-could (rack-it-ty-tack), knew it would (racky-rack) run the track’s happy length, clack off on that endless dreamed roadbed that—ended. Grass on it.
It’s tempting to discuss the sentence structure of this passage from Nixon Agonistes by Garry Wills; but the technique is so similar to our previous excerpt from Catch-22 that I’ll leave it alone. Instead I’ll discuss (briefly) the passage’s remarkable word pictures.
“RICHARD NIXON” makes a metaphor with typeface; the rest of the sentence tells us that Nixon is to be equated with a train, but without the caps we imagine Nixon (flesh and blood) jogging over railroad ties. The capital letters impress the image of a train car, with great block letters on the side. They simultaneously inspire awe, quite similar to indignant nouns and adjectives in revolutionary pamphlets (INDIGNANT NOUNS and ADJECTIVES).
The second picture is aural: “this churning engine that knew-that-it-could (rack-it-ty-tack), knew it would (racky-rack).” Wills turns an ethic into an image by way of parenthetical ideophones; the phrase is the sound, and the sound, in turn, is the engine. It’s imperfect onomatopoeia; imperfect only because Wills resorts to nonsense words to get the sound he needs (racky-rack). As a classics Ph.D., Wills must have known perfect onomatopoeia, and perhaps bemoaned its difficulty in English. The technique (conveying the sense of words by their sounds) was named by the Greeks and brought to perfection, I think, by the Romans. One of the most beautiful passages from The Aeneid goes:
Hunc circum innumerae gentes populique volabant,
ac velut in pratis ubi apes aestate serena
floribus insidunt variis et candida circum
lilia funduntur, strepit omnis murmure campus.
You think Wills did well to fit two word-pictures in one paragraph? Virgil packed three word-pictures in two lines of poetry. You need to read Latin to spot the first two (they’re visual, and slightly more subtle than RICHARD NIXON), but anyone can appreciate the last one, a picture in sounds: strepit omnis murmure campus. Say it aloud several times, maybe with a little bit of an Italian accent, like this:
strepit om-nis mur-mur-ay cam-pus.
(That’s where the accents fall in the line’s meter… just trust me here.) Can you guess what Virgil is describing? Here’s a hint: om, mur, cam… hum, hum, hum… buzz, buzz, buzz…
Bees! “The whole field hums with the murmur.”
Garry Wills probably was probably thinking more of Watty Piper than the poet Virgil while he was writing knew-that-it-could; but I suggest the classics connection because I don’t think Wills could have written that paragraph without the heightened sensitivity to language that comes with an education in ancient tongues. In my opinion, the best thing a writer of English can do, besides read English and write English, is to study Latin; to spend a little time with each word on the page; to comprehend the combined effects of their sound, order, and origin; and lastly to use that understanding to compose elegant, imaginative English.
