the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings

The intolerable wrestle with words and meanings is a phrase Dennis Tremlett borrows from T. S. Eliot to convey how Nathan Oliver worked with language. It gives literary form to Tremlett’s portrait of a difficult but illuminating writer, and to the close attention that shaped their twelve years of working together.

Wording and Attribution

Tremlett recalls Eliot’s words, “Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings,” and says they seemed absolutely right for Oliver. The phrase is not presented as Oliver’s own description of his work: it is Tremlett’s literary frame for understanding him. Its emphasis on wrestling suggests effort rather than effortless inspiration, while “words and meanings” joins the craft of composition to the pursuit of what language can reveal.

Tremlett’s Experience of Oliver

The phrase gains force from the mixed particulars of their working relationship. Tremlett says Oliver was not easy to work for, could be impatient, and did not make a confidant of him; nevertheless, he did not resent that distance. He had worked for Oliver for twelve years and calls them the best years of his life, describing the daily presence of the work as a privilege. His account holds difficulty and gratitude together rather than treating devotion as proof that Oliver was personally easy.

Tremlett had begun as a freelance copy-editor, mostly working for Oliver’s publisher, after illness had made it difficult for him to find more regular employment. Oliver noticed his meticulousness after he copy-edited one of Oliver’s books, then hired him full-time and paid for evening classes in computer skills. Against that history, the Eliot phrase evokes not only Oliver’s private struggle with composition but also the exacting editorial labor through which Tremlett came to know his work.

The Contrast with Henry James

Tremlett sets the phrase within a comparison to Henry James. Other people called Oliver the modern Henry James because of his long, complicated sentences, but Tremlett rejects the comparison as incomplete: he thought James’s sentences obscured truth, whereas Oliver’s illuminated it. The contrast clarifies what Tremlett hears in the “wrestle”: complexity matters not as display but as a means of bringing meaning into view. The phrase therefore expresses Tremlett’s particular judgment of Oliver’s literary achievement, not a general claim that difficulty alone makes writing truthful.