Robert Stewart, Outside Language

Literary Review, Spring, 2004 by Thomas E. Kennedy

Robert Stewart, Outside Language. Missouri: Helicon Nine Editions, 2003.

Robert Stewart's elegantly slim book of essays is, as he says in his prefatory definition of the genre, an attempt at "some elucidation that might or might not be beyond our reach ..."; to entertain without any embarrassing attempt to please; to venture on "a journey (that) is spiritual, as is any human, willed attempt to move through the world with attention and joy."

Attention and joy are the foundation and craft of this delightful book--as well, I might add, as caring. Whether writing about his Sicilian grandmother and aunts, his Uncle Joe, the plumbing trade to which he was apprenticed with his journeymen father and grandfather, or about language, art, literature, about "the abundance of public suffering that swirls through the city," about Christ, computers, the structure of a bridge, a disappointed, rejected contributor to the magazine he edits, or something as simple and disconcerting as a stranger coughing in your face, Stewart writes with an untrumpetting, uncompromising affection for his fellow humans that distinguishes his prose.

There is also a good deal of humor, especially concerning the Sicilian family--the grandmother who screams, slaps, then offers a warm, fresh meatball, "Mangia"; the enormous uncle at Christmas dinner who wolfs an enormous plate of elbow macaroni but cannot manage the last tiny piece ... And there is argument as well. To the computer monger's disdain for linearity, he responds, "... print has never been any more linear than the mind behind it." Against his own observation that, "At some point in their careers, many artists begin to notice that people don't want to be annoyed," he juxtaposes Umberto Eco's "... art deliberately frustrates our expectations in order to arouse our natural craving for completeness" and his own conclusion on the danger for an artist of coming "too much to want to please people ..." To writers tempted to genuflect to political "correctness" with incorrect usage and those who, out of ignorance or despair, would annihilate the comma, he gestures to the crafts of construction, of building things that last, of the skill of joining, linking and sealing parts that become a whole, even if they are to be buried under the fundament.

The admiration of such skill is also reflected in the arresting cover photograph by Robert Powers of the first bridge across the Mississippi River, engineered by James Buchanan Eads in 1874, whose "typography of stone and cable ... syntax of sediment and sandstone" achieve not only the aim of spanning the water, but with it, lasting beauty, majesty and mystery. Good intentions do not do the job; it takes steel and granite, rivets, hex nuts and craft to bridge the distance from shore to shore, from writer to reader.

Perhaps best known as a poet, a teacher and editor of New Letters magazine, Stewart brings all three disciplines to the creation and construction of these essays. "Beauty has syntax," he writes, "glory a grammar. Though sometimes we fail to understand the language of that beauty, we go to art because we hope to be struck with light." Here we find despair as "the imposition of a single truth" and the merging of sick lungs and a treeful of crows into a single metaphor that goes beyond the language that forges it. And "Outside Language," Stewart writes, "which is where metaphor delivers us, is where we go to translate the ineffable."