Naive Strength: The Bloomsbury Ballerina
Naive language strength most often appears when a novice speaker - someone who hasn’t learned the clichés yet - takes a swing at putting something subtle or elusive into words. It helps not to be tongue-tied by self-consciousness.
There’s much of it in children’s speech. These are from working-class children in Nottingham, from a collection aimed at a sentimental market but with gems that deserve better (Nanette Newman The Little Book of Kids’ Talk 1999):
When my mummy’s cross she talks with a nasty smack in her voice (girl, 5)
I went swimming but my body kept wanting to drown (boy, 7)
All my clothes have had other people in them (boy, 7, presumably used to hand-me-downs)
I want to dance but my feet won’t let me (girl, 6) .
And a similar naive creation can happen with adults in conducive situations - this was overheard in Oban (on http://www.overheardeverywhere.com/archives/category/scotland/, accessed 9.9.22):
Guy 1: Neil, you okay? Are you drunk?
Guy 2: Nah, I'm fine. I've just taken all the effort out of walking.
The ‘Bloomsbury ballerina’, subject of a biography with that title (Judith Mackrell 2008) , was Lydia Lopokova, a leading Russian ballerina who had danced with Nijinsky and Massine and who became the lover and then the wife of the economist John Maynard Keynes. So becoming a peripheral associate of the Bloomsbury set, which regarded her, especially at first, with a starchy if not downright snobbish disdain that sat a little awkwardly with the set’s bohemian cred.
E.M. Forster, though - another Bloomsburyite - was so taken with the rumbustious originality of Lydia’s English that he said that every word of it should be recorded (Richard Shone London Review of Books 23.6.22) . He was right. Her native disinhibition, wrestling with what was probably her third language, isn’t enough in itself to account for that wealth of naive strength: there was also a sensuously alert appetite for life, pushing a wry and sharp-eyed attention.
Her letters to Keynes are rich with that home-made strength. Some samples, all from the three years leading up to their marriage in 1925 (Lydia and Maynard, eds. Polly HIl & Richard Keynes 1989 - all non-standard spelling and grammar is sic.; some quotes condensed):
To-day spring is so strong that gives me spring-fluids. I feel weakness in the body.
How logic are my reasonings, I stroke myself with pride and look into mirroir.
I am alone just now, the ‘bizareries’ of life descend on me also. I put crosses on your constructive forces of to-morrow.
I possess enormous gossips in my bosom.
Poor Vaz. His hand was damaged. The window lost control while he was closing it and for 4 minutes he suffered immensely.
How gay it was this morning. Gordon Square appeared to me a la Cezanne. Everything seemed ripe, brisk and fine.
Florrie arrived with the full glory of an automobile and brought me apples and caviar.
Anrep’s wife Helen was there, shingled, painted, hideous and French.
What a soft pale day it was, even fog was lovely.
Beautiful paper, beautiful pen, one could go far with such ingredients and build nest of intelectual order.
Of course the fledgling naiveties became selfconsciously playful, but lost little in the process. These are from her many sign-off's to Maynard, all from a single month in which she wrote to him at least 21 times:
I blend my mouth and heart to yours
I kiss your eyes. I see they look at me
I want to be gobbled from head to foot just now
I detain infinitely your warm wet kisses
I want to be foxed and gobbled abundantly. It is only half a life here, says the fountain pen to the metronome.
I warm my lips to yours, they feel very red
I place melodious strokes all over you. Maynard, you are very nice
And much of the early naive poetry was there to the end - this in here eighties and approaching her final dementia (Mackrell 424):
[Nijinsky was] potty. His soul had holes in it, but when he danced then his holes were healed, and then he became alive and he was not unhappy any more.