The best style is plain, terse, various, intense and strange.
Short plain words, short plain clauses and sentences, plenty of verbs with plain personal subjects, firm connectives to rivet it together, all galvanized against the rust of cliché. These build a prose which is sturdy and aerodynamic. But it needs imaginative fire to make it fly.
An artist frames a style to give calm sensuous form to an imagined pattern of delirious beauty. It is a way of speaking to the soul through the conduit of the senses.
Thought gives form to the chaos of reality. Language gives form to the chaos of thought. Style gives form to the chaos of language.
An artist makes works of perfect taste by weaving patterns that border on vulgarity, alliterations, puns and plays on words, rhythms and jingles, neat paradoxes and parallelisms.
A great style is almost sufficient on its own to make a great book. And yet some of the greatest books, such as Dostoevsky’s, don’t even have a good style.
Style is to language what beauty is to biology, superfluous but redemptive.
POETRY AND PROSE
1 Poetry
Poetry is not alchemy. It does not work by transformation but by substitution, first of words for things, and then of the most intense words for lazier ones.
A poem is a small formal house that opens on to infinity.
Poets must be sober to execute their elaborate dance, though they may look drunk as they are not just walking.
Shakespeare trips up our blame and outruns our praise. He contains almost all that is worth saying and all the many ways to say it. He is as noble as Antony, as various as Cleopatra, and as shrewd as Enobarbus. Bacon is a plodding Polonius to his quicksilver Hamlet.
The mark of true poets is not what kind of words they use but how they use them. Lesser poets deploy a scented poetic vocabulary, great ones invest their ordinary words with a poetic intensity.
Most poets are dead by forty, though they may continue to live and write for thirty years more. They keep on pumping, though the well has long gone dry. Language has squeezed all the juice out of them, and leaves the dry rind of a life. A prose writer’s prime lasts for a bare twenty years, customarily from when they’re thirty to fifty. And their golden age lasts for as short as seven. After that the mind starts to grind on its own gears. So brief an instant between two eternities in which to catch a timeless world.
2 Concentrated prolixity
Poets concentrate thought and feeling in a prolix form. And the style of their prolixity lends their verse its special complexion. Pope’s is brittle and sententious, Wordsworth’s prosaically sublime, Tennyson’s melodious and plangent, Pound’s hectoring and sentimental.
In poetry it’s the purity of the gold that counts, not the amount of the alloy. Artists are justified by their best work. A parent is as guilty as its worst child. Judged by their average productions, all but a few poets are not much better than average.
Few poets have it in them to write more than fifty top-flight pages. And some, like Virgil, Dryden or Shelley, have in them not much more than fifty lines. A slim passport, but sufficient to earn a place in paradise, or at least to justify a life.
3 Style in poetry and prose
A poem dances to the rhythm of song. Prose strides to the thrust of thought. Prose, like an equation, must press on to its conclusion. Verse, like a tune, returns in each line to where it took off from. It stamps a scheme of sacred, cyclical time on language, which is linear and progressive. That’s why verse is not a good medium for thinking.
Prose transports you to a destination, poetry is the journey.
The errant moon holds sway as the goddess of verse, the stern sun as the cruel god of prose. The vocation of the poet is to enrapture, that of the prose-writer is to undeceive. ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.’
A poem, like Antaeus, springs from the soil. But prose should seem machine-tooled rather than hand-tooled, flawlessly engineered not flawlessly expressive, taut, exact and inhuman. It sounds more like gunfire than music. Each sentence is a storm of steel.
A poem must both mark out its unlikeness from the everyday speech around it and braid patterns of similarity of the sounds and structures within it.
Money is not a kind of poetry, as Stevens claimed. It is rather, as Emerson said, the archetype of prose, cool, colourless and unforgiving, which peels all its statements back to a stark and abstract grammar. Money dissolves illusions, as prose dissolves poetry.
4 The poetry of language
Poetry is the grand sacrament of language, which acts out a rite that each poem makes new. It is poised between revelation and ritual, astonishment and repetition.
A poem is speech most essential and most gratuitous. It shows us words showing us the world. It points inwards to the small perfections of form, and outwards to the immense world of thought.
Electric poetry restores to dulled words their buzzing magnetic pulse.
A poem is a measured ecstasy of language. It is a brief surge of life’s unbound erotic current transmitted through words.
Poetry is language operating at full pressure and highest pitch, overstraining all its sinews till they crack.
Poetry is distilled imagination decanted into words.
Verse is regulated language which would be ruined by too much regularity.
A poem is a choice lexicon classified according to the mad alphabet of uncanny imagination.
A poem sounds like a strange translation from a perfect tongue which the poet had not quite got the trick of, or like a fragment from some lost play.
Poets get nearly as far as the truth. Then they fill the gap in between with blazing words, to disguise that they failed to reach it.
A poem is words that mean more than their meaning.
A great poem is hard to translate into a foreign language, but it is impossible to translate into its native one.
5 The music of words
A poem is speech imagined most passionately and composed most musically. A poem is above all else a piece of verbal music. It builds its frail house of sound to give a lodging to thoughts that will live throughout the ages. It orchestrates words as melody, and conceives the world as metaphor. The poet turns the riot of mundane life to an ordered magic, and the cacophony of mundane speech to an eloquent music.
The unit of verbal music is not the word but the syllable.
As light is both wave and particle, so a poem is both form and content. When heard as form, it is a vocal music, and when looked at as content, it is an intensity of thought.
Poets make an art of strange conjunctions, which they brace with plaited bands of assonance.
Clumsy writers use clattering alliterations, artful ones arrange delicate traceries of assonance. Assonance is the more subtle sister of stiff and strutting alliteration. It is the difference between Swinburne’s with his alliterative jingles and Shakespeare, who is the master of assonance.
The poet paints with lines of consonants and colours of vowels.
Poets compose their music using vowels as their woodwinds and consonants as their strings.
The music of english verse is due in large part to the range of its vowel sounds.
6 The style of prose
Great prose, like the Bible’s, is as impassioned as poetry and as stern as truth.
Prose must be meticulously patterned, as it has no predetermined form, and it must be packed with insights, as it lacks imagination.
Prose may be chiselled in stone, as in the Bible, or curiously carved in wood, as in the elizabethans, or etched on glass with a diamond pencil, as in Chesterfield or La Rochefoucauld, or wrought in tensile, polished steel, like a hard modern style.
The best modern prose was written in the glazed textures and simple shapes of Mies’s buildings, Mondrian’s pictures and Brancusi’s carvings. Like modern building, it is a modular, horizontal art of clean transparent lines.
No one wrote a purer white style or a more rank purple one than Wilde.
Most writing is not prose, as most building is not architecture. And most writers are not writers. They are mere storytellers.
A poem makes a regular music, rhetoric regular structures. A grand piece of oratory is the poetry of syntax. It makes similar in form what is dissimilar in sense by repeating patterns of sounds, words and constructions.
Most poetic prose is doggerel that lacks the excuse of verse.
7 Aphorisms
The world is radically discontinuous and heterogeneous. How then could we set out the truth but in unconnected bits? ‘Aphorisms,’ as Schlegel points out, ‘are the true form of the universal philosophy.’ Only jagged fragments are sharp enough to slice their way through the rough skin of the real, and it’s their fracturing that gives them their serrated edge.
An aphorism must assume much that the writer would be at a loss to explain, and imply much that it would be at a loss to explain. Like a proud lord, it would prefer to be misunderstood than to give an account of itself. And even those of the same author can hardly stand one another’s company without quarrelling.
Hard bright sentences attack like blitzkrieg. They strike with swiftness and focused force, and leave broad swathes of terrain encircled but unsubdued.
A style needs to be tightly organized, to unleash the havoc of new ideas into the minds of its readers.
The aphorist works like a lone and patient sniper, stealthy, precise and lethal. ‘Artillery is still too cumbersome, too complicated,’ Napoleon said. ‘There is yet more to simplify and retrench.’
An aphorism, though uniformed in its crisp impersonality, still reeks of the blood and pain which it is too proud to show.
A maxim blows up like a little stick of dynamite when ignited by the reader’s insight.
If a book asked its readers to stop and think, they would stop reading it straightway.
8 Poisoned pen
A maxim with no malice would taste as bland as a dish with no herbs. Kind sentences caress you, but it’s the cruel ones that stick. A poem, Goethe says, is ‘a kiss bestowed on the world.’ But an aphorism is a bite. And if you don’t feel its teeth, then it most likely won’t leave any mark on you at all. A pungent saying secretes an acid which tries to dissolve the things of time before time can erase it. And it’s this acid that will grave it in your mind.
Aphorisms condense wisdom in pill form, though most of the pills are poisoned.
An aphorism, Kraus says, ‘is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half-truths.’ It packs plausible fibs so tight, that when it detonates, its stunned students think they see the truth in a flash.
A shrewd maxim depicts its victims so accurately, that they fail to make out their own likeness in it. It’s written for those who think that it doesn’t apply to them, so that they can apply it to those who don’t think at all, as satire is, as Swift said, a mirror, ‘wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.’
STYLES
9 Style against matter
The realm of form stands aloof from the realm of truth. Good style is not an echo to the sense. It is its counterpoint. It’s only in kitsch that form strives to mimic its content. In a great work it masters it. It does not pretend to enact what it portrays. Its task is not to display the object more legibly, but to manifest its medium more shiningly.
Style transmits thought without trying to look like it, and gives voice to the vigorousness of a being who is not of flesh and blood.
We lack the eyes to see the form, and so we guess that it must be a transparent window to its content.
A great line of poetry is made of sound and sense tightly coiled together, but insulated one from the other.
Style is a cold moon. It has its own shape, but must draw its light from the sun of its sense.
Thought is the food, style is the flavour. Ideas nourish you, but words give them zest.
10 Creative tension
A work of art gains its force not from the harmony of its form and matter but from their disjunction. The gap that you must jump to get from the word to the thing makes the adventure so exhilarating.
Form and sense are not one, though imagination makes them seem so. It renders beauty as stark and strange as truth, and makes truth glow with a dark allure.
Imagination is the most arbitrary thing in the world. But the task of the artist is to find a form that makes it seem inevitable. Strong writers make their own strange phrasing of a thought seem the one shape that it could take. A flawless sentence flows like water and stands as stiff as stone.
Style is not a lens through which the artist views the world. It is not vision, but creation.
11 The violence of life, the serenity of style
Art is an unbearable world of truth made bearable by an unblemished world of form. The bleakest vision projects the brightest style, which is the jubilee of art. The sole benediction that artists have to bestow on this hellish world is the transfiguration of their style.
Nature blazes like a heraclitean fire of dynamic violence. Art is a parmenidean sphere of faultless equilibrium and repose. Art is as fierce as a warrior, and as stately as a priest acting out a decorous ceremony for its savage god.
In a lustrous poem, such as Homer’s, the form fights the content, and moves as sedately as the action seethes with broiling violence. The style rests as crystalline and white as the tale steams with a scarlet grandeur of blood and fire.
Thought is the gunpowder, style is the match.
12 Style is not natural
Artifice is art’s nature. To write plainly calls for great artfulness. And to write unaffectedly, you have to forsake nature. You reach spareness by an extravagance of effort.
Simplicity is so foreign to our nature, that we can come at it only by way of an elaborate self-alienation.
Not one thing about writing is natural. And if there were, it would be the lazy conventionality which words each thought in the first stale phrase that comes to mind. Set out to write artlessly or extempore, and you will make a hotchpotch of habit and fashion. But most readers think a style looks natural if it conforms to the commonest catchphrases.
We cling to our customs because we are so listlessly artificial. But we can get free of custom only by becoming strenuously artificial. You can’t foil it by spontaneity but only by forethought and deliberateness.
13 The artifice of style
No literary style is like common speech. It must be more artful, whether too complex and embellished, or too simple and stripped down. Those who think they write as they speak don’t write well, nor do they write as they speak.
Only a seeming artist aims at seeming artless, though to look too artificial is a naive failure of art.
Artists never let themselves go. And they are never more controlled and calculating than when working up their most passionate effects.
The style of a primaeval age is as far removed from nature as can be. Nothing could be more artificial, stylized and hieratic.
Artists need a great deal of practice to appear spontaneous. And they earn vivacity by dint of systematic drudgery. Thus Matisse by joyless toil made designs of radiant vitality and delight. In art free grace must be won by grinding labour. The art may be luxe, calme et volupté, but the process that makes it must be dour, obsessive and tormenting.
The best writing is too simple to be natural. Is there any style more mannered than Whitman’s barbaric yawp?
14 The style of place
Craft your style out of the place that you imagine and the language that is given. A style is a time and place that has found its own shape in words. Artists make works that last by tracing the timeless contours of their age by eschewing its incidental idioms.
True originators shun historicism for anachronism. What do they care for archaeology or antiquarianism? ‘There is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present,’ Picasso judged, ‘it must not be considered at all.’ Rapturous vision makes all things new. The historical sense benumbs the imagination. ‘All beautiful things,’ as Wilde says, ‘belong to the same age.’
Torrid zones such as the Mediterranean have fashioned a limpid formalism. Frosty cities like Paris or St Petersburg have sniffed out a clammy fevered psychology. The shivering north disclosed the sweating secrets of the heart. The warm nude south carved the cool essential forms.
Dialect in fiction should be a strange tribal poetry, as in Twain or Faulkner, not a documentary transcription.
Some writers have shaped a desert style, stark, remorseless and sparse, which lays bare the unadorned lines and planes of the form beneath. It is language pared to the bone. The Bible is a flinty wilderness of burning sublimities, Shakespeare a teeming woodland of boundless imagination.
All spots on earth are fit settings for art, since all are outposts of hell.
15 The style of pride
Pride gives life to form, conceit kills it. Sincerity makes the style of conceit, artifice the style of pride. Presumption and habit pervert taste, pride and premeditation purge it. All that is great we owe to pride, all growth comes from its monsters.
True pride is simple and succinct. Impudent people presume that all that they say is worth saying. The proud know that they must make good each word that they dare to use. Braggarts are as loquacious as the fastidious are laconic, who are too proud or too modest to explain.
Good taste is a kind of pride, which instils in us a kind of modesty and restraint.
16 The style of shame
Artists draw their energy from their pride, and their taste from their shame. Pride directs, shame corrects. Pride bestows force and exuberance. Shame supplies awareness and restraint. Audacity spurs you to write, and shame schools you to write well. Pride hates to seem conventional, and shame hates to seem eccentric. But when they couple they breed fresh thoughts in foursquare bodies.
There can be no taste or standards where there is no shame. And we won’t put up with standards, because they might teach us to feel shame. So we have democracy to spare us from both.
Shame is the golden inspirer. ‘Art is born of humiliation,’ as Auden said and Van Gogh proved. Shame is the charcoal, which the pressure of thought condenses to the hard diamond of truth.
Guilt and fear dig up the truth, and pride shapes for it a form, which craft refines in line with the inherited canons of taste.
Shy people write as a way to show off without needing to quit their room.
17 Simplify, simplify
Life is rich in incident, but poor in significance. The task of the artist or thinker is to enrich the world by simplifying it.
Simplify your means, elevate your aims.
‘To be simple,’ Emerson says, ‘is to be great.’ Simplicity is the test of great thoughts. ‘When a thought is too feeble to be stated simply,’ Vauvenargues says, ‘it ought to be repudiated.’ Those who don’t have enough matter to write short sentences have to write long ones.
In art simplest is strongest, as the Bible shows. To do justice to large thoughts, you have to keep to the smallest words. Great writers have a power to simplify which finds the most spartan terms for the most sumptuous ideas. ‘Style,’ as Cocteau said, ‘is a simple way to say complicated things.’
The glory of english and the key to its poetry is the wealth of its one syllable words.
What is simple will last longest, since it will coast through time with least drag from the diurnal tides of fact or fashion.
What is truly simple looks unfathomably strange or unbearably dull to our eyes, dazzled as they are by all our intricate novelties.
A perfectly plain style must be perfectly executed, since it has no extrinsic adornments to fall back on.
18 Exactness
An exact style has the abstract rigour of a geometrical figure, not the representational accuracy of a photograph. It crafts precise forms by disdaining slight details. Why should it discuss the pennies that it owes to low fact? It seems neat, since it has trimmed off the roughness of specifics. And it glides, because it meets so little friction from turbulent actuality. It subjects the chaos of real life to the dispassionate canons of abstract form.
Don’t search for the narrowly correct word. Search for the strange and uncontainable one. The right word points to what all the world knows. The wrong word may give you the key to a startling truth that no one has an inkling of. But you have to hunt diligently to find exactly the right wrong word. The exact word crimps your vision, the inappropriate one sets it free to wander. ‘The cistern contains, the fountain overflows,’ as Blake wrote.
In most texts more is lost in the original than is lost in translation. It is those books that are not much worth reading that need to be read in their own language.
19 Detail
Art distils truth, which too strong an infusion of vapid fact would dilute. ‘Our life is frittered away by detail,’ Thoreau warns. ‘Simplify, simplify.’ Like all grand authors, the Lord, when he wrote his holy books, cared more for style than for the literal truth. ‘It is the nature of all greatness,’ Burke says, ‘not to be exact.’ What you gain in exactness you lose in elegance.
Good art has an eye for the telling nuance. Great art cleaves to the abstract and elemental. Good art is detailed, fluent and relaxed. Great art is stark, stilted and hieratic. Good art reflects life. Great art imprints on it its own strange vision. A good writer shows you how life looks and feels. A great one shows you what it means. ‘Art,’ as Aristotle notes, ‘does not detail the outward guise of things but their inward import.’
20 Brevity
You have to keep to a few terse words, if you hope to reveal the vast essential. But we now go too fast and want too much to submit to the strenuous concentration of brevity. And writers have had to grow more and more voluminous, to catch up with our distracted haste.
The best writers, as Renard points out, had few things to say and said them in few words. But most authors lack the patience to find out how little they have to say, since they have such ready means to say as much as they like. ‘Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.’ And the judgment takes place at every act of reading.
Most works, like most lives, would be the better for being shorter. We scribble too much, and live too long. ‘A big book,’ as Callimachus wrote, ‘is a big evil.’ How few great books there are. And how few of a great writer’s books are great books. And how small a part of a great book is a great book. How small a part of a great man or woman is a great man or woman. And how short a part of a great life is a great life. ‘One could say of almost all literature that it is too long,’ as Renard remarked. But what author would not exempt from this stricture their own lapidary works?
Many great books would be better if they were ten pages long rather than three hundred. But then they would not be great at all.
The writer must be a spendthrift of thought and a miser of syllables.
21 Compression
Even the most frugal style draws from a rich mine of linguistic resources. And even the most opulent style is a deliberate impoverishment of means. As Goethe points out, ‘Mastery is shown in limitation.’ In life luxury is bought with tremendous diligence, in art bareness is. There is, as Yeats wrote, ‘more enterprise in walking naked.’
Rich style is unnatural redundance and unnatural compression. It is at once rigorously sparing and impetuously abundant. Not one word more than is needed, but a whole book more than is wanted. And verse is both the most extravagant and the most concentrated form of speech.
The energy of art both compacts and expands what it works on. It is finely focused yet luminously suggestive.
Good prose is compressed. A good poem is infinite.
Language is a tree that needs much pruning to bear fruit.
Verse and prose are both prone to wordiness, verse by the fluency of its form, prose by the ease of its formlessness.
22 Clarity
Writers know that beauty looks like lucidity. So they polish their style so smooth that it seems transparent, but it’s in fact reflecting back its own opaque effulgence.
Keep clarity to the surface, and let all below breed darkness and ambiguity, heaving monsters of the deep.
The best sentences are so clear that they can be grasped at one reading. But they are so rich that they need to be read over and over before they will yield up all the juice of their meaning.
Every word or phrase is by its nature ambiguous, and the ambiguity is dispelled not by precision of statement but by the redundance and repetition which are built in to language.
23 Intense style
A poem is the manifestation of an intense vision of the world in words that match its intensity.
Some art is charged with a stored potential energy, which strains with a vast pent force, though outwardly mild and sedate. And some has a kinetic power, erupting into excess, gushing and tumbling like a waterfall of delirious volubility, as it does in Milton, Hopkins, Faulkner or Joyce.
Intensity makes one sort of force, and restraint another, and power is manifest in both.
A word gains its force by its repetition or by its rarity.
‘Of two words,’ Valéry counselled, ‘always choose the lesser.’ The vehemence of its vocabulary is not what makes a style intense.
The power of understatement is overrated. A tuning-fork is no match for a sledge-hammer. As Swift noted, ‘Eleven men well armed will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt.’
Young people love striking effects. And so they are prone to mistake vehemence for intensity, and intensity for profundity.
24 Deluxe style
‘Plain living and high thinking are no more,’ as Wordsworth said. How could we write well, when we don’t wish to live well? We want to live luxuriously and hectically, so how could we write thoughtfully and unpretentiously?
A prose that has been scoured of stale phrases would seem dull to most readers, who have grown used to their gloss and smoothness. They find it flat, if it doesn’t pop and fizz with newly bottled clichés. But writing that tries to match vernacular verve and liveliness dies soonest and smells worst.
People don’t just fail to avoid clichés, they go out of their way to find them, considering them the smartest form in which they could frame their thoughts.
You can learn as much from some bad writing as you can from good. Or if you can’t, at least it’s not as hard to find.
Climaxes have their place in fireworks, not in art. Strong works of art, such as Shakespeare’s plays or Paradise Lost, fade out on a quiet note.
25 Out with the adverb
Adjectives tint the plain face of beauty with cosmetics, adverbs scent it with a false fragrance. A healthy sentence should smell of nothing but its own clean form. Those who have little to say work up its effects with colourful qualifiers. They use sheaves of words as vain italics to lend emphasis to their hefty ones which they don’t trust to speak loud enough on their own.
Only authors who pay no heed at all to their style, and those, like Pater, who seem to pay no heed to anything else, have found how to write execrably.
26 Cannibal style
Some writers, such as Babel, Céline or Houellebecq, have fashioned a cannibal style, brutal, lean and agile, at once savage and tender, like Pollock’s paintings or the Rite of Spring. As Dickinson wrote, they ‘deal their pretty words like blades.’
The artist needs all the traits of a cunning hunter, a fatal grace, a fierce elegance, a cold playfulness, cleanliness, and stealth, patience to wait for the right moment, nimbleness when it comes.
With regard to timing, an artist, like a soldier, has to master five skills, frugality of time, which abridges, modulation of time, to shift speed, exactitude and fitness, to time each thing right, deceit of time, to wrong-foot opposition, and an eventual submission to time, which knows how and when to end it.
Good prose, like champagne, should be both astringent and mildly intoxicating. Too little acid, and a style lacks tang, too much, and it will curdle. ‘Take it, and eat it up, and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.’
STYLE AND SELF
27 The masks of style
Style apprentices artists to wisdom and tranquillity. And yet they prove wise or serene only in their style, which is the better self that they don’t care to become in life. Like Poe or Baudelaire, they are content to camp out in a grimy sty, while they build their gorgeous palace of art next door. An artist is glad to swap the thin fictions of life for the imaginative superabundance of art. A clean bright work can be founded only on the filth and squalor of a life.
False style is an involuntary confession of our flaws. True style is a deliberate atonement for our mean virtues.
Style is the best of all that we cannot be.
28 The inferior stuff of self
Only those who have no more promising stuff to work on would make it their aim to fashion a self. A saint aspires to self-denying subjectivity, an artist to an impersonal selfishness. Saints effect their miracles by faith, artists create theirs by form. A person is subjective but not singular, art is individual but abstract.
Style is pose not personality. Only a maladroit style is ‘the man himself,’ a grab-bag of accidents, counterfeitings, lapses of taste, thefts, conformity and caprices, bad lessons badly learnt. I hope my style is nothing like me, so ugly, stupid, vain and cowardly.
Style is what an artist has in place of a soul.
If living is our great work, as Montaigne claims, what clumsy and incompetent artists we must be. And yet we are as pleased with the hash we have made as God was on the sixth day of creation. Since each of us is the fashioner of our own life, what a masterpiece it must be.
We form our style out of what we most admire. But what we most admire is the whitewashed image of our own heart mimicking the tired idols of our time. And so all that we forge is kitsch.
29 Self is not the source of style
We don’t write well, because we write as we speak or as others write. We try to express our own personality or to mimic their manner. But true artists shape their style by not being themselves and yet being like no one else.
A supreme artist, like a master criminal, leaves the fewest fingerprints. It’s the bunglers whose smudge can be found all over the scene.
Strong artists don’t work to realize their personality. They surrender to their medium so as to actualize all its possibilities. If they succeeded in expressing their self through their art, they would be failing their art.
Good style does not come from within. You must build it up slowly from without by painstaking daily practice.
People are in such haste to find a style of their own, that they rush straight into copying others.
Literature is an ardent expression of estrangement, a mocking expression of wonder, a sane expression of delirium, a scrupulous expression of depravity, and a lucent expression of bewilderment. ‘The finest things,’ Gide notes, ‘are those that madness prompts and reason writes.’ The tale of every frenzied Ahab is told by sober Ishmael.
30 To reveal art and conceal the artist
Artists don’t aim to show who they are through their art. They aim to replace themselves with their art. They bear no more resemblance to their work than the machine bears to its output. What’s the point of creating, if what you make is no better than what you are? ‘To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim,’ as Wilde showed. But to conceal art and display the artist is the aim of kitsch. True artists flaunt their art in each line and tone. Vain performers strive to hide their art and make it look accessible, as a trick to glue their watchers’ gaze to their own shabby dramatics.
Only clumsy daubers spill their soul on the canvas.
An artist is a philistine who happens to have a knack for fabricating works of art. Their art grows less where they try to be more than that, as Delacroix and the romantics show, whose pictures and music were debauched by literature.
Art is a long vanishing, and artists put up a style to charm our eyes while they disappear. Style is the personality of art, which they build up by dismantling their own.
31 The style of happiness
‘Only in work,’ wrote Delacroix, ‘have I felt altogether happy.’ Out of their pain artists make their work, and out of their work they make their happiness, and this sets them free to go on working. In its mellow autumn they harvest the fruits sown in less settled weather. ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy,’ as the psalmist sings. They may learn by suffering, but they can make no use of what they’ve learnt till they’ve found peace once more. The stings of life may school them, but what they glean from them is a lesson of delight.
Sad days leave wounds, glad ones leave works. Delight purges artists’ style, and perfects their disenchantment. Misery dins their ears like a pelting tempest, but in joy’s halcyon calm they can hear the soft voice of reason and inspiration. When they gain their happiness and slough off their illusions, they grow free to turn their back on the world’s work and do their own.
Some writers, like Beckett, have had their style scoured by desolation, and some, like Emerson, have had theirs burnished by happiness. Sorrow grinds your style smooth, and joy polishes it to a high finish.
IRONY
32 Irony
The world wants so much and so little from you, that the best way to meet it is with cheap irony.
Irony upholds true seriousness in the face of the self-serving solemnity of the frivolous world. It is the revenge that the free play of the mind takes on our regnant moral code.
Irony doubles and disguises the self, imagination fashions new ones. It is imagination’s adolescence. Its task is to wean you from the literal, the didactic, the earnest and the personal. Sterne is the foremost ironic imaginer, as Shakespeare is the foremost poetic imaginer. Poetry multiplies its perspectives by means of metaphor, prose does so by means of irony.
Irony is the bee’s sting, imagination is the honey.
Irony is mock modesty that we use for real mockery.
Self-knowledge strips you of all your decent self-deceits. So what can you use to clothe your naked soul but a few rags of irony?
The most adroit ironists, like Flaubert, don’t tone down idiocies but pump them up, till they balloon and burst.
33 Artifice not authenticity
Life deserves no more than your artifice, and art deserves no less. An artist who held to frankness would be like a sailor who hugged the shore. They must put out on the deep sea of dissembling. Insincerity, which others use as a permit to cheat, for an artist is a passport to imagine.
The poet affirms everything, but believes nothing. Sincerity makes art small. ‘The truest poetry is the most feigning,’ as Shakespeare wrote. Candour would make a plausible actor, but an inept artist. Dickens, Emerson commented, was ‘too consummate an artist to have a thread of nature left.’ A writer such as Hemingway who gives pride of place to authenticity ends up acting the role of a smug poseur. The task of the artist is to ward off authenticity with artifice, sincerity with irony, and spontaneity with care and labour.
34 Sincerity is the enemy of style
When the romantics made up their minds that the aim of art is to express the whole self, artists were sure to become virtuosi, performers, showmen, celebrities, hawkers of their own sensibility.
Scrupulous style is a calculated hypocrisy. ‘All profound things love masks,’ as Nietzsche said. The mind that discovers loves to hide. A creator must put up a curtain of form to elude earnestness and tell the truth.
Poets need not be sincere in their feelings, as painters need not be sincere about pigments and brushstrokes, but they must know how to use them.
There is a bad poet in each of us, and it comes out when a true poet would be lost for words.
35 The ironist exposed
If you use irony to put others off the scent of knowing you, you must, like Hamlet, earn the right to your irony by knowing yourself. Some people know how to mask their self, yet don’t know the self which it is their aim to mask.
My irony, like my sincerity, conceals me from myself. And, like my self-concealment, it reveals me to others. I use it on the assumption that I know my real self and that I’ll be able to obscure it from others. But instead I bare it to them and obscure it from my own sight. We erect a screen of irony to conceal us, and don’t see that all our deformities are projected on it.
We try so hard to hide from others, that we lose ourselves. And though proud of our ability to see through all pretences, we end up hoodwinked by our own evasive postures. ‘We are so used to disguising ourselves from others,’ La Rochefoucauld says, ‘that in the end we disguise ourselves from ourselves.’
What literary private now isn’t kitted out in the regulation camouflage of world-weary irony? Trust in its cover, and you’ll wind up lost in a wilderness of appearances.
Some people spoil their talk by larding it with too much irony, as some cooks spoil a dish by adding too much salt.
Ironists are like those teasers who refuse to tell you a secret but love to keep hinting that they have one.
36 Satanic style
God is in earnest. Bright Lucifer is an ironist. That’s why he was hurled out of heaven, and how he survived.
The devil’s name in literature is legion. Most of its great characters are his avatars.
Irony is an aggressive game of cold power which is played by those who feel aggrieved that they have none. It is a feint to draw in its enemies and lay them open to attack.
Irony is the revenge of the witty and impotent on the dim and self-important, who are therefore too dull to feel its sting.
Self-mockery is the sly magnanimity of the powerless. And mercy is the disdainful mockery of the victor.
Some people use deference as Socrates used self-derision. They lure their dupes into a trap that will lay bare their fatuity more starkly. And fools may seem self-abasing, since they lack the sense to be anything but foolish.
CHARACTER
37 Character is not personality
Great characters have three traits, awareness, menace and vulnerability. They know their hearts so well, that they are a danger to themselves and others. Milton’s Satan is their prototype, a fiend redeemed by verbal fire and impassioned intellect.
Art has characters, the world must make do with personalities. And character is to personality what art is to life. Character is imagination, personality is cliché. Character makes music. Personality makes noise, striking and vivacious, but random, meaningless and repetitious. A figure on a narrow stage may display more depth and breadth in three hours than most of us do in all our years. How little we cram into our long and hectic lives, but how much they bring to light in a brief existence in words. We have nothing to say, and it takes us seventy years to say it.
Great characters don’t have great motives. But they are greater than their motives. Real people interest us by their knotty and recondite intents, grand characters by the eloquent sense that they make of their dire plight.
Those who have no life but on a flat page or stage lead the fullest life of all. And those who tenant the dream of fiction are able to wake to the truth, since they alone can bear its harsh luminosity.
38 Great characters are poets
The great imagined characters are not personalities but poets. Each is a fragment of the poetic mind, of which the poet is a yet lesser fragment. Writers don’t feel what a real lover, prince or madman feels. They take on these roles as masks to voice the thoughts that no lover, prince or madman would conceive. And they use words that no lover, prince or madman would use. They fashion characters who have earned our ears.
A god or a great literary character must be more or less insane and yet possess an irresistible discursive authority.
Character makes itself by what it makes. The best ones, like the authors who give them life, are makers and not moral beings. What makes them interesting is not the events that have shaped them but the words which they shape.
39 Shakespeare, master of character
Shakespeare made hundreds of poets, but not one lifelike personality, just as he wrote thousands of lines of great verse, but not one that would sound natural in day-to-day talk. He doesn’t inhabit the souls of real types. He multiplies himself to make unlikely imaginers. With ungrudging egoism he makes all his figures prodigal imaginers like himself, endowing them with a matchless articulate force. Unlike the demiurge who made this maimed world, he shaped nothing that fell short of his best gifts. He is beyond compare, not because he knew how to portray a credible cobbler or knight, but because he didn’t deign to bring on stage a persona who lacked the power to frame unsurpassed verse. And it was not by empathy with his fellows but by mastery of form that he made such miracles of feeling language.
Shakespeare’s aim is not to make us feel that his puppets are real people. That’s the job of cheap movies.
Falstaff is ebullient comic humanity made flesh and words. So how could he be anything but a monster of inhuman and selfish malignity?
40 Shakespeare’s heroes of language
The one action that Shakespeare’s heroes excel in is grand talk. His men and women of action are men and women of words. Hamlet is their model, because he’s all talk. And what his lovers love is language. His dark masters, such as Edmund or Aaron, are adepts not of crime but of language. Like him, they are not ingenious but imaginative, great poets not great plotters. Their best achievement is their bright words, not their black devilry, as the real witchcraft of his tricksters, such as Prospero or Puck, is not their cheap sorcery but their rich poetry. They think and speak compellingly about it, but the mischief or magic that they do is showy and rudimentary.
Shakespeare’s art grew to ripeness, not as his characters grew more like real people, but as they grew more like true poets, though the live poet of the Sonnets may be one of the least of them. Lear outshines Richard, not because he is a more convincing king, but because he speaks a more comprehensive poem.
41 Character is more than story
It costs an author no pains to ascribe to their characters whatever traits or acts they please. But they must prove their thoughts and words by producing them. They tell us what their puppets do, but they must show us what they think and say. Their one accomplishment that can’t be shammed is their gift for speaking great words.
The persons in pulp fiction are memorable for what they do. The persons in a great fiction are memorable for what they say. Thus Conrad summed up the genius of Kurtz, ‘He had something to say. He said it.’ Hamlet is not a man too paralyzed to act. He is of all characters the one most energetic in the sole kind of action that is germane to a literary persona, the forming of memorable phrases. A great literary character is a puppet which, like its creator, has been made to speak words which will live.
42 Character is style
Personality becomes character where thought catches articulate fire. Like Cleopatra, all their other elements they give to baser life. The most solid and indelible characters are words, mere words. So they can no more be paraphrased than a poem. Both they and their framers have just as much power as the airy speech that they use. They are more than anything else a voice, an emanation of language.
Character is the verbal play that is surplus to their role in the plot. And so they are always double, insincere and ironic. They know that they are just playing.
In life chance and temperament mould style. In art style gives shape to character.
43 Character and narrator
Each supreme work of fiction must have room for at least one genius. But in most of them the sole one is the narrator, since the only kind of mastery that a writer knows or esteems is the one that can write. Balzac the commentator overbears his creatures. All the force in his novels is his own. Austen has more wit than Elizabeth Bennett, more insight than Emma Wodehouse, and more spirit than Fanny Price. Ishmael’s diabolic eloquence overmatches Ahab’s diabolic questing. Proust’s personages are dwarfed in the vast apartment of his sensibility. Dostoyevsky may be the one author who made his characters more capacious and articulate than his narrators. This may also be the reason why there have been no more than two great dramatists, Shakespeare and Ibsen.
Any literary form that is designed to present the workings of a mind, be it dialogue, soliloquy, internal monologue, free indirect discourse or stream of consciousness, is as engrossing as the mind that it purports to present.
44 Character is not in the details
A great character is unencumbered with the minutiae that comprise live men and women, their daily round, partialities and loathings, frowsy opinions, kin and credentials, or the patched-up identity that they hug. Writers don’t assiduously individualize them with the shallow tics, quirks and habits that mark a person of flesh and blood. Yet we still seek to know them as we would a real man or woman. So we add these cheap traits back in, as if we were infusing them with more depth, since this is the sole kind of depth that we see in life.
Great writers give us few clues as to the physical appearance of their figures, not because they want to leave us free to visualize it, but because it is of no account. They don’t tell us what they look like, they show us what they think and say.