the Life of Language

The Life of Language is Christabel LaMotte’s name for the necessity of writing: words are not an ornament or a temporary occupation but the means by which she lives, makes a home, and sustains herself. In her correspondence with Randolph Henry Ash, the phrase joins an account of artistic vocation to a challenge to assumptions about what a woman can create.

The phrase and its context

LaMotte introduces the Life of Language while explaining why she persists in writing to Ash. She says his apparent unawareness—whether genuine or assumed—of what a woman is capable of gives her something to hold onto, like a well-rooted bush grasped by someone falling down a precipice. She then relates how she sent a small selection of poems to a great poet, whose courteous reply judged them pretty but irregular and decorously imperfect. He offered only moderate encouragement, treating poetry as something to occupy her until she acquired “sweeter and weightier responsibilities.”

LaMotte rejects the implication that those presumed future responsibilities should displace her writing. Ash, she says, understood her very phrase, the Life of Language, and recognized that words had been her whole life. The episode makes the phrase an argument as well as a description: the need to write cannot be reduced to an idle pastime awaiting a more socially approved purpose.

Writing as necessity and sustenance

LaMotte figures this need through a spider carrying a huge burden of silk that it must spin out. Silk is simultaneously the spider’s life, home, safety, food, and drink; if it is attacked or pulled down, the creature can only make more, spin afresh, and design anew. The image makes writing at once productive labor and the condition of survival. It also refuses to make artistic persistence merely gentle: the spider may be patient, LaMotte says, but it may also be savage. It must spin, or die of surfeit.

The comparison gives creative autonomy a material and bodily dimension. Writing is not presented as an accomplishment added to life after other duties are met; it is the activity through which LaMotte maintains a life of her own. The possibility that her work may be attacked or dismantled does not cancel the necessity. It calls forth renewed making.

A shared language, not a borrowed voice

Elsewhere in the correspondence, Ash admits that imagining LaMotte’s work tempts him to make it concrete in his own mind, even as he recognizes that such speculation risks encroaching on her originality. He describes himself as an author of monologues trying clumsily to construct a dialogue, and acknowledges that he is lending his voice to a living woman as he habitually lends it to dead writers. His unease gives the Life of Language a relational significance: mutual understanding can open a conversation between poets, but it must not become a claim to speak for the other.

LaMotte’s account marks the difference between being heard and being appropriated. The unnamed poet’s reply recognizes her poems only within limits and imagines her serious responsibilities elsewhere; Ash, by contrast, understands the phrase she uses for her vocation. Yet LaMotte’s emphatic account remains her own: she explains her need through her chosen image of the spider, insisting on a voice that cannot be substituted for another’s judgment or borrowed speech.

Form and significance

The phrase emerges in a letter that reflects on the uncertain boundary between writing and speech. LaMotte calls writing to Ash “write written speech,” a strange mixture of kinds, and wonders what a true dialogue would be if it depended on the recipient’s willingness. The letter form allows intimacy without guaranteeing an answer; her declaration of creative necessity therefore takes place within a medium that can invite understanding but cannot compel it.

The Life of Language gathers these tensions into a compact account of authorship: writing is solitary labor, yet it seeks recognition; it offers shelter, yet may be attacked; it is patient, yet can be savage. Most decisively, it opposes the idea that a woman’s poems are merely provisional. For LaMotte, words are not preparation for life. They are among the conditions that make life possible.