…So please forgive my silly posturings
This is an excerpt from a letter to Lydia, Kathleen’s mother, from the same period (1970s). It begins:
“You are wrong to feel abashed about your earlier letter or apologize for it as silly. I should be the one abashed for having assumed that pseudo-schoolmasterly tone in my reply. But you understand, I’m sure, that I was just sneaking a currish dig at the Quakers — with whom I too would morally stand up and be counted if it came to that [a curious thought, if it came to that], but who sometimes seem to have relaxed their minds out of the complacency of having once and for all settled the distinction between right and wrong. Oops, there I go again, lecturing, hammering home my periods with my fist on the lecturn. You have reminded me that I ought to be more discriminate in my selection of tone, in the strike of my posture. The debating club style I used in some of my recent brawlsome letters with Leon must have seemed a little preposterous because so stagey, so unlike the way I might speak if I were actually present. It is as if I were substituting some actor for myself. It is a funny problem one comes up against trying to devise a plausible style. It’s like the problem of animating a golem [Jewish Folklore. a figure artificially constructed in the form of a human being and endowed with life.] After all, the ordinary pace of one’s mind is at first quite different from the laborious concreteness of forming deliberate, indelible sentences. At first, the pattern of the mind’s movement and its self-expression is so remote from that obtaining in the normal stream of experience that there is no personality yet existent to give the style or pattern of oneself to the written word. That is why people often sound either too artificial or too primitive in their letter-styles. I fall among those who seem to artificial, too affectated. Affectation works in combination with parody, but when someone seems like he’s asking you to take him seriously and then strikes some attitude worthy of Roscius [a Roman actor], this gives you your suspicions. Leon hits the nail on the head when he uses words like ‘pedantic’ and ‘orotund’ in describing my tendencies. ‘That toney effigy in frozen music, horned and terrible…’ and other whoppers of such ilk as gave Taylor his fame [???]. Believe me, I’ve been tryin’ to ease up on the wind pressure, but it’s no easy matter. My style has something of the aftermath of a Mexican dinner with every variety of bean paste. I’ve ried to furl in the Ciceronian scrollwork and unmask my manner; but one gets carried away, you know. It’s like when I was sampling those hats from the hatchest as the tottish version of myself [I once heard Bob say that Lydia's earliest memory of Bob, then her son Paul's playmate, was sitting by himself in a kindergarten type environment, while all the other kids were busy with sports or each other, trying on hats!] — all these things knit into an overarching pattern. Trying out readymade hats when I should be in pursuit of my own authenticity, be my soul’s own skullcap. So please forgive my silly posturings…”