A writer knows that there are no objective words for describing an objective world. Neither of the two exist. You may reduce subject and style to their simplest combination and still not arrive at forming a standard sentence containing the truth and only the truth—that is, a truth that you cannot demolish or deepen. Naturally if in this simplifying process you pass a certain limit, you merely lapse into tautology, as for instance “wet water,” where you extract and display a certain character which at the same time remains contained in the drawer of the noun, which reminds me of that local small-town museum where I was shown the skull of the local bandit when he was a child and his skull when he was a man. Wet water is mere nonsense,—but as soon as you try to make it into a sentence, adding the least you can do as the verb “is,” then you are making this statement with a definite purpose, say, teaching a child the idea of quality for what it is worth or else transcending tautology by actual experience: for instance: water is wet only if you are not completely in it. A naked Malay groping for pearl-oysters at the bottom of the sea cannot be called and cannot feel “wet” and so water is not always wet and there was no tautology in the initial sentence. This shows that as soon as you touch, no matter how slightly, the simplest word-thought, it wriggles; it is already alive, it is yours. “The water is cold” is already a platform for a breathtaking leap into the unknown. If you leave it at that, it looks objective enough, with no personal style or personal idea; but just because it lacks any definite spirit and application it does not contain a single grain of meaning. You have to say what water you mean and instantly your world, your style of thought, comes into being. You are criticizing a bath in a French boarding house, but on the other hand you may be looking at a picture and explaining why you feel that the artist has not quite rendered the temper of that tropical bay: the water is cold. Now all the implications and applications that you unavoidably have to make, when taking, as we have been doing, an idea of almost absolute simplicity, this implication and application and all the other imps and apples of your fancy form around it and infuse into it your personal style. It is also obvious that so-called form [and content] are one. An egg is an egg whether you eat it or not. The intonation of “the water is cold,” when speaking of your bath, is different from the intonation of the very same words when you are referring to a picture in exactly the same proportion as the differences between the two subjects; indeed, it is the difference. Intonation and the position of your main idea in the sentence are the essential characters of style. Choice of words does not mean style, any more than the proverbial mixture of delicious ingredients makes a girl. A good method, if one’s memory is docile, is to read a couple of pages of some good writer and then try to write down at once as many of his word combinations as can be remembered. A little practice will show that even if the exact words cannot be remembered the lilt, the intonation of the survivors and the extras, the general pattern of those wrong words in the right places—and the very feeling you have of this or that being wrong—will tell you a great deal about the author’s personal style.
You should also notice the counterpoint of style, the relationship between the arrangement of words in a sentence, of sentences in what Flaubert called “le mouvement” (which may or may not correspond to a paragraph) and the arrangement of such mouvements in the chapter if there are any chapters. The correspondence between these arrangements will be found to reveal a personal element of style.
There can be no personal style of writing without a personal vision of the world. The mere fact that you see or feel a certain association between two details of life, which escapes other people, will naturally correspond to a personal association of words. The deeper your power of discovery, the keener you feel the novelty of the world around you, the more Eve you are and the less serpent, the firmer you refuse to have your world limited by the association of things in terms of usefulness or habit,—the more individual your prose will be. A ready-made world unavoidably leads to the ready-made word, or worse still to the ready-made intonation, for in certain associations the stalest expression, the most hackneyed word may suddenly glow with new life or with a life it once had.
To acquire true style is impossible without having creative genius, and more people have it than is generally thought. Most children have it, many young people, very few men of settled habits and conventional tastes. On the other hand many a person who can at a moment’s notice produce a triolet or hash any given subject into rhyme, or is praised by his or her friends for writing such perfectly lovely letters, is generally much more hopelessly removed from ever becoming a creative writer, than the one who emphatically denies any literary knack, but will experience that authentic, that unmistakable shiver of creative response when getting to the passage where King Lear recalls the names of Goneril’s pet dogs.
An uncle of mine, a sporting gentleman of the old school, having returned from his first visit to Venice, was asked how he had liked it; Well, he answered, the beer was dreadful. This is already a phenomenon of style, and something far more poetic in the personal creative sense of poetry than many a retrospective swoon full of gondoliers.
As the preliminary mental process of artistic development requires first the complete dislocation of the given world and then a re-creation of it through the connection of hitherto unconnected parts, and as this process exactly corresponds to the process involved in actual literary composition—for I repeat style of vision and style of writing are really one and the same thing—as it is so, we must pay special attention to the verbal dislocations and verbal associations contained in a writer’s creative prose. The dislocations refer to new strange-looking positions and intonations of words so that the reader who likes his fiction comfortable is annoyed and even appalled by finding all the objects displaced and some of them gone, but a more curious mind will soon discover that there is a definite order in the system of these gaps and odd perches—and this order is a characteristic of the author’s individual style. Likewise the verbal associations, the comparisons, the metaphors and other dragon-like creatures whose labels have got rather mixed up since the days of solemn rhetoricians, may impress one as tomfoolery or lunacy as did for instance that beautiful word-connection in Gogol: the sky was the shade of that kind of cloth which is used for the uniform of soldiers, those good helpful and necessary fellows, whose only fault is a fondness for liquor. What had the liquor to do with the sky? queried the critics. Everything, for this was Gogol’s unique and harmonious world.
I have spoken of intonation. There is also rhythm, which is another thing—and perhaps the least telling, as it is often connected—especially in the case of quite first-rate, but not super-class writers—with the general rhythm of prose in the period they live.
So to sum up: there is no impersonal style or impersonal world; the most primitive sentence comes to life the moment you handle it in your personal way. Water is not always wet, two plus two does not always make four and when water is turned into wine, the artist wants to know what sort of water, what kind of wine,—and this is meant very seriously.
* “Style,” draft lecture notes, corrected holograph, LCNA box 10, folder 17. Apparently by summer 1941, for VN’s creative-writing class at Stanford.