We are living, you and I, through a kind of Counter-Enlightenment. Popularly known as ‘populism’, it is a movement supposedly attentive and responsive to ‘the interests and opinions of ordinary people’. Another word for populism is ‘anti-elitism’. Ordinary people know best; crowds are wise. ‘I love the undereducated,’ said Trump at a rally. ‘We’re the really smart ones.’
Every now and then there’s an urge to apply the same emphasis to the arts; and the most vulnerable is literature – literature in prose. To populists, the novel is especially inviting because it is already the most populist of the forms, the most egalitarian and democratic: it asks for no special tools or training. All you need is what everyone automatically has – a ballpoint and a scrap of paper.
So we saw the anti-Great Books movement, the anti-Dead White Males movement, and the like. In Britain twenty years ago there was a movement that called itself the New Simplicity; it was anti-metaphor, anti-polysyllable, anti-adverb, and anti-subordinate clause. The New Simplicity, I thought, was a secular version of the vow of poverty. Or even the vow of silence.
I confess that I don’t understand the impulse (though I can see that it’s entirely sociopolitical and not at all literary). Do you know any reflexive anti-elitists – I don’t mean the bookish types so much as the rank and file?…Fascinating. Are these anti-elitists, I wonder, feeling anti-elitist, feeling anti-expertise, when they go to the doctor? Or when they board a plane? Or when they hire a lawyer – or an electrician or indeed a hairdresser? Show me a sphere where we exalt the ‘ordinary’, the inexpert, the amateurish, the average.
Well, there’s always that leisure-class boondoggle known as fiction. Here the lit-crit sociopoliticians have found an endeavour so unserious that no one need bother about levels of competence. Who listens to literature? Who cares what it says?
The good reader cares, of course, and listens. And the good reader automatically expects high proficiency – which is achievable by anyone willing to put in the time. It is possible, and pleasurable, to learn more about words and how they go together. If writing is your job, then it’s just a matter of self-respect.
You’re not trying to set yourself up as an exquisite or a mandarin. The modest goal is to leave the reader in as little doubt as possible that you know what you’re doing. As you negotiate this task, you will realise, very early on, that elitism has got to start somewhere. And I think I know just the place.
On the table there are three recent historical studies, all of them by apparently genuine scholars, all of them reviewed at deferential length. The top one (on the American Revolution) tells me, inter alia, that early readers of Jonathan Swift, unused to the genre of satire, must have been ‘gobsmacked’ by A Modest Proposal (which was published in the early eighteenth century); the middle one (on the Third Reich) tells me that Hitler was feeling ‘upbeat’ when he returned to Berlin after a holiday in the Bavarian Alps; the bottom one (on Stalin) tells me that Kaiser Wilhelm I, in delegating foreign affairs to Otto von Bismarck, showed ‘smarts’.
What kind of reader does this kind of writer think he’s pleasing? ‘Smarts’ (for instance) derives from ‘street-smart’, and Kaiser Wilhelm never went near a street in his life; but this writer considers that ‘acuity’, say, or ‘good sense’, would be a wasted opportunity or a missed trick, given the availability of ‘smarts’. I suppose there must be one reader in a hundred who will greet this or any other stop-press colloquialism with an approving leer (and forget about that reader, never mind that reader, you don’t want that reader). And there must be many more, presumably including all the reviewers I read, who don’t mind or just don’t notice.
When the context is historical, you see at once how ruinously these vulgarisms distort the tone. Here, toadying to the contemporary is not just resoundingly anachronistic; it also does violence to decorum, to literary decorum, which has nothing to do with etiquette and simply means conformity of style to content. I resent being told that Hitler was at any point feeling ‘upbeat’, which chummily accords him a human status that was never his. I find this inappropriate. And as for the idea of readers being ‘gobsmacked’ in 1729…
From here a larger lesson follows.
To re-emphasise: never use any phrase that bears the taint of the second-hand. All credit to whoever coined no-brainer and (I suppose) to whoever coined go ballistic and Marxism lite and you rock and eye-popping and jaw-dropping and double whammy and all the rest of them. Never do it – not even in conversation. Never say (let alone write) You know what? or I don’t think so or Hello? or Hey (jocularly, as in ‘But hey, we all make mistakes’). Even in a quite handy-looking little tag like anytime soon you can hear the bleats and the cowbells. Don’t write, don’t say, and don’t think Whatever (this is probably the most counter-literary item in the entire lexicon).*1 Shun all vogue phrases, shun all herd words; detect them early on and shun them. Been there, done that, took the selfie, got the T-shirt…
Clichés have in their time put in some honest toil for the canon – Evelyn Waugh’s foreign-correspondent journalese in Scoop (‘The body of a child, like a broken doll’), the placid but maddening catchphrases in the cabman’s shelter in Ulysses (‘the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat’). These are venerable clichés, solidified by time. The clichés of the moment are evanescent; even in the impoverished lodgings of platitude they are mere transients.
In a work of fiction, ‘gobsmacked’, ‘upbeat’, and ‘smarts’ could achieve decorum – just about and not for long – if put into the mouth of a minor character, a representative (in Saul’s phrase) of ‘the mental rabble of the wised-up world’. Such speech would lose its threadbare legitimacy in a year or two, and the character would himself become an anachronism.
So cleanse your prose of anything that smells of the flock and the sheep dip. Your prose, obviously, should come from you, from you yourself – purpose-built, and not mass-produced.
‘The hidden work of uneventful days’…That’s Saul’s marvellous evocation of the subconscious, the subconscious hard at it, trying to clarify and modulate. And it also evokes the process of writing, writing something long: writing a novel.
John Banville has described the mental atmosphere of composition as a dreamy or a dreamlike state, and so it is. And yet Banville intended no paradox when on another occasion he said with some vehemence, ‘The most important thing? Energy, energy, energy.’ Abstraction combined with exertion, producing a thrilled and thwarted tingle, like an ungratified need to sneeze; it is the tingle of creative life. That sensation, that feeling of pregnant arrest, was what Saul, at the last, was mourning.
Bellow Sr, Abraham Bellow, who died in 1955, always described Saul as a desperate sluggard, the only son ‘not working only writing’. Not working? From Augie March:
All the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done…[I]n yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.
‘It’s the same idea, isn’t it,’ I said to Rosamund. ‘The hidden work of uneventful days.’
‘This time given the bravura treatment,’ she said. ‘But it’s the same idea.’
We had the book out on the kitchen table at Crowninshield Road. Rosie was nearby, of course, and so were Rosamund’s parents, Sonya and Harvey. It was April 2005, just a few days – a few uneventful days (the quiet visits to the synagogue, the quiet procession of friends and neighbours dropping off cooked meals, mostly stews or thick soups, in tureens and engraved samovars) – after the funeral.
Phoebe Phelps is about to revisit us, but before we open the door and let her in…You know, every now and then, as I age, I discover a fresh refinement in ‘the complex symbol’, which is also the complex reality – meaning death.
It’s like this. There I am, staked out in the Boca Raton hospice; until recently I was retching and whimpering away with some brio, but now I’m in the Critical Care Unit and trussed up with tubes and pumps and catheters. I imagine that Elena, Bobbie, Nat, Gus, Eliza, and Inez were all there, all round about me. But they’re not. Together with my brothers and my friends and everyone alive whom I have ever loved – they’re in mid-air on a chartered jet, coming to Florida to say their goodbyes. And halfway through the flight (JFK to West Palm Beach), the plane suffers what they call a failure cascade, and by the time it crosses from South Carolina to Georgia it has no hydraulics, no flaps, no spoilers, no reverse thrust, and no brakes.
I have entered a light coma and my vital signs are flickering, and the plane is busy dumping fuel just east of Savannah as it prepares to ditch at, say, Brodie Air Force Base, a few miles north of the Sunshine State (also known, remember, as the Seniors’ State). Brodie has a runway of 12,000 feet, and they need twenty, thirty…As my medical team applies the jump leads, hoping to hot-wire me for a final half hour, the plane comes yawing through the lower air, smashes down on the Brodie tarmac, tears along its length, bursts through the barricade of foam, bubble-wrap, and bouncy castles, shinnies up the grassy knoll at the far end, and explodes.
So they die at exactly the moment I die.
In actuality, needless to say, I die and they live, and are bereaved of me. But I am bereaved of them – all of them, all my loved ones, all my pretty ones.
The only consolation I can see in this is that there won’t be any time to miss them and wish they were here.
The end of a sentence is a weighty occasion. The end of a paragraph is even weightier (as a general guide, aim to put its best sentence last). The end of a chapter is seismic but also more pliant (either put its best paragraph last, or follow your inclination to adjourn with a light touch of the gavel). The end of a novel, you’ll be relieved to learn, is usually straightforward, because by then everything has been decided, and with any luck your closing words will feel preordained.
Don’t let your sentences peter out with an apologetic mumble, a trickle of dross like ‘in the circumstances’ or ‘at least for the time being’ or ‘in its own way’. Most sentences have a burden, something to impart or get across: put that bit last. The end of a sentence is weighty, and that means that it should tend to round itself off with a stress. So don’t end a sentence with an –ly adverb. The –ly adverb, like the apologetic mumble, can be tucked in earlier on. ‘This she could effortlessly achieve’ is smoother and more self-contained than ‘This she could achieve effortlessly’.
Literary English seems to want to be end-stressed. Maybe it’s the iamb. With the exception of Housman and not many others, the meter of serious poetry is ti-tum.
A longlasting sonic charge is packed into any word that directly precedes a punctuation mark – most especially a full stop. Look at this quote from Updike’s final collection of stories, My Father’s Tears (published posthumously in 2009):
…Craig Martin took an interest in the traces left by prior owners of his land. In the prime of his life, when he worked every weekday and socialised all weekend, he had pretty much ignored his land.
So we have ‘…his land’ full stop, and then ‘…his land’ full stop. The word preceding a full stop is invested with treacherous stamina: as a result, ‘land’ and a fortiori ‘his land’ are effectively unusable for at least half a page – until the sonic charge wears off, and the ear forgets.*2
For a whole other order of inadvertency, contemplate this: ‘The grapes make a mess of the bricks in the fall; nobody ever thinks to pick them up when they fall.’ (The most ridiculous thing about that sentence, somehow, is its stately semicolon.) And what follows here is not a sample quatrain of Updikean light verse:
ants make mounds like coffee grounds…
except for her bust, abruptly out-thrust…
my bride became allied in my mind…
polished bright by sliding anthracite…
No, not poetry, not doggerel. Those are just four separate snippets of deaf prose.
Ian became friends with John; they corresponded, and Mr and Mrs McEwan went to stay with Mr and Mrs Updike in Massachusetts in the late-middle 2000s – anyway not long before the death. And what was Updike’s destined mood? You can tell from My Father’s Tears, which contains a fair amount of life-writing, that the ‘uncanny equanimity’ Updike once laid claim to was in the end replaced by mild but unalleviated depression. And did Updike know he was losing his inner ear? Clearly not, I would say. How else could the clangers quoted above survive the two or three rereadings he must unavoidably have given them?
In 1987 I spent most of a summer day with Updike. We started off in the enormous cafeteria at Massachusetts General Hospital (where he faced a minor procedure that was belatedly postponed). At one point I asked if he would mind a brief interlude in the smoking section, and he said, ‘Not at all. I envy you. I quit.’ He quit in his early thirties. But oncologists call lung cancer ‘the long-distance runner’, and it came for him in his mid-seventies.
Literary talent has perhaps four or five ways of dying. Most writers simply become watery and slightly stale. In others the subtraction is more localised and more conspicuous. Nabokov lost his sense of moral delicacy and reserve (the last four novels are heedlessly infested with twelve-year-old girls). Philip Roth lost the ability to imbue his characters with a convincingly independent life. Updike lost his ear – his mind’s ear; he forgot how to use it in the formation of his prose…
The body, on the other hand, confronts a multiplicity of exit routes. And Updike’s lungs remembered, and neither did the cancer forget.
*1 I know an American teenager who holds up the thumbs and index fingers of either hand – forming the shape of a W – to spare herself the effort of saying Whatever. This in its way is self-parody of considerable wit.
*2 The sonic charge is strangely uneven when it comes to common prepositions and other nuts and bolts. ‘With’, ‘to’, and ‘of’ – these are almost instantly forgotten by the inner ear. But ‘up’ (perhaps flexing its status as an adverb) has real staying power. It takes two or three hundred words before the mind forgets an ‘up’.