We can turn to etymology to understand the origin of the meaning of style—but only at the risk of being seriously misled. The English word style is derived from the Latin stilus, meaning a pointed instrument for writing. It later came to refer to what was done with the instrument—that is, the way words are arranged.* Here’s the misleading part: the concept of style was invented by the Greeks (they called it lexis), and they would never have named it after a writing tool. All ancient notions about putting words together assumed that the primary means of communicating them was speech. Sometimes the words were written down, to aid memory or ensure future availability, but the ultimate means of delivery was oration, not publication. Thus style for both the Greeks and the Romans was a branch of the art of oratory.
The founder of that art is traditionally considered to be Gorgias, a native of Sicily who became ambassador to Athens in the fifth century BCE and who was known for his elaborate figures of speech and hypnotic cadences. He was associated with the school of the Sophists. The name only later picked up the negative connotations by which we now know it, but even at the time, Gorgias’s emphasis on eloquence and persuasiveness, allegedly at the expense of truth, brought him criticism from the philosopher Isocrates, who advocated the study of “eloquent wisdom,” rather than rhetoric, and especially from Socrates and his disciple, Plato. In the dialogues Gorgias and Phaedrus, Plato set up a distinction between truth (the ultimate value) and verbal skill (which will tend to obscure truth). In The Republic, Plato shows Socrates denigrating the very practice of writing; words that are written in stone, figuratively or literally, can manipulate emotions and ideas with near impunity, because they cannot be challenged, and actually obscure or block the path of truth.
These debates took place well over 2,000 years ago, but they have been replayed ever since. On the one side are Socrates and Plato and their heirs, who mistrust language from the start because of the irresponsible way it verges from reality. Words are a necessary evil, they acknowledge—how else could we communicate?—but have to be used cautiously. This camp conceives of the truth as a series of invisible beings who walk through our world; the aim of speaking or writing is to dress these forms with perfectly fitting garments that allow us to see them for the first time. A flamboyant epaulet or a colorful sash would be extraneous, unseemly, and maybe even immoral.
On the other side is the school of Gorgias, which has been less militant and organized and has made its case more by example than by pronouncement. A pillar of its position is that the arrangement of words—that is, style—can be an agent not only of persuasion but of beauty and expression as well. And truth, this side implies and sometimes states, is not as simple a matter as Plato would have you believe. Instead of imagining language and reality as separate entities, they ask us to consider the possibility that neither one can exist without the other.
As was often the case, it fell to Plato’s student Aristotle to mediate between the two positions. He devoted an entire treatise, On Rhetoric, to the subject of eloquence and persuasion; one of its three books concerned itself with style. Aristotle defended rhetoric as not merely a series of ornaments or tricks but instead as an essential part of argument, investigation, and communication. At the same time, his view of style was conservative, emphasizing clarity, transparency, and decorum. Indeed, some of the precepts in On Rhetoric could have come straight from Strunk and White:
Style to be good must be clear…. Clearness is secured by using the words (nouns and verbs alike) that are current and ordinary….
A writer must disguise his art and give the impression of speaking naturally and not artificially. Naturalness is persuasive, artificiality is the contrary; for our hearers are prejudiced and think we have some design against them, as if we were mixing their wines for them….
Strange words, compound words, and invented words must be used sparingly and on few occasions….
A good writer can produce a style that is distinguished without being obtrusive, and is at the same time clear.
Cicero, a Roman and the greatest ancient commentator on rhetoric and style, swung the pendulum back the other way. He claimed that Socrates “separated the science of wise thinking from that of eloquent thinking, though in reality they are closely linked together.” Going further, Cicero called for a union of res (thought) and verba (words); one cannot speak of expressing the same thought in different words, he said, because in that case the thought would be different. Language and style are therefore not a utilitarian vehicle with which to deliver truth or meaning but an essential and organic part of both. And consequently, rhetoric is the ultimate art: “the consummate orator possesses all the knowledge of the philosophers, but the range of philosophers does not necessarily include eloquence; and although they look down on it, it cannot but be deemed to add a crowning embellishment to their art.”
In addition to defending rhetoric, Cicero codified the discipline. He wrote that the orator “must first hit upon what to say; then manage and marshal his discoveries, not merely in orderly fashion, but with a discriminating eye for the exact weight…of each argument; next go on to array them in the adornments of style; after that keep them guarded in his memory; and in the end deliver them with effect and charm.” And thus he laid out the five faculties of classical rhetoric: invention, arrangement or structure, style, memory, and delivery. A world-class divider, Cicero also named and described the three levels of style: high or vigorous (“magnificent, opulent, stately, and ornate”), low or plain (informal diction, conversational), and middle or tempered (not surprisingly, a blend of the two). He did not favor any of the three but felt that each was appropriate in different circumstances: “He in fact is eloquent who can discuss commonplace matters simply, lofty subjects impressively, and topics between in a tempered style.”
Cicero’s emphasis on versatility suggests a key distinction: in common with all the ancient rhetoricians, he thought of style as one of several arrows in the orator’s quiver, rather than as a distinctive and distinguishing personal means of expression. There was indeed such a manifestation of the speaker’s ethos, or moral character—but it was best seen in another one of the five faculties: delivery, or the performance of the speech. A Renaissance treatise on classical oratory (Thomas Wilson’s The Art of Rhetorique) recounted that Demosthenes, when “asked what was the chiefest point in all Oratorie, gave the chief and only praise to Pronunciation; being demanded, what was the second, and the third, he still made no other answer till they left asking, declaring hereby, that art without utteraunce can do nothing, utteraunce without art can do right much.” So to Demosthenes, the three most important things in oratory were locution, locution, and locution.
Style, as it has commonly been perceived in the modern world, and as it is perceived in this book, is closely related to the classical idea of delivery. In reading strong stylists, one “hears” their cadences, one senses their ethos. That recognition has to do with more than the choice and arrangement of words. Voice is the most popular metaphor for writing style, but an equally suggestive one may be delivery or presentation, as it includes body language, facial expression, stance, and other qualities that set speakers apart from one another.
These are figures of speech now, but once they were literal. Today, texts are written and published and then sent to a global metaphorical library, where readers pluck them from the shelves and read in silence. In the ancient world, a written text was like a play script: only in performance did the words come to life. Silent reading took a long time to become the dominant mode. It was still a rarity in the fourth century AD, when Augustine was surprised by the way Ambrose (the bishop of Milan and another future saint) consumed a book: “When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.”
In the Middle Ages, writing was a craft, one involving not composition but inscription: anonymous scribes copied classic or religious texts, along the way employing their own individual style—the shape of a letter or a characteristic flourish. Then, in a span of about 100 years in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a series of cosmic changes occurred. There appeared on the scene “authors,” such as Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer, who were anything but anonymous and part of whose vocation was to express the glory not just of God but of themselves. Equally radically, they set down their words in the vernacular languages—English, Italian, French—instead of Latin. In 1440, Gutenberg invented the printing press, and the wide distribution of books that resulted meant a change in the character of texts: they could and would be read silently, not listened to. And that development had a bearing on the general understanding of style. With words now confined to books’ pages—not necessarily alive and resonating in the marketplace, square, or church—ethos, emotion, irony, and meaning itself could no longer be expressed through delivery. And so it followed that writers began to pack more figurative language and rhetorical devices—more style, in the generic, rather than personal, meaning of the word—into the choice and arrangement of words.
This dovetailed with the entire project of Renaissance humanism—the exaltation and exploration of all human capacities. The era ushered in a revival of classical rhetoric, with special emphasis on how the artful use of language let man exercise his protean quality: eloquently expressing any idea, using any figure of speech (Renaissance rhetoricians compiled endless lists of them), adopting the cadences and style of any model. It was writing as costume: one could put on any outfit that suited one’s mood that day, and the more flamboyant the better.
The glorious result of this idea was the plays of Shakespeare, which, more than anything else, are about humankind’s use of language: how it lets people adopt any guise, shapes their actions and ideas, sometimes lets them reach the heights of insight and expression, and sometimes snares them in the cruellest traps. The inglorious result was the phenomenon of writers and speakers who got drunk on their own words, most notoriously John Lyly (1554–1606), the ornate prose of whose two-part romance Euphues led to the coining of the word euphuism—that of which Kingsley Amis accused Nabokov.
The backlash against their excesses was inevitable and forceful. Cicero had yoked together res and verba, thought and speech; post-Renaissance thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Montaigne pulled them apart again. The latter commanded: “Away with that Eloquence that so enchants us with its Harmony, that we should more study it than things.” The Enlightenment, with its conviction that reason could shine a light on truth and Truth, carried the argument all the way back to Plato. John Locke wrote, rather harshly, in 1700, “We must allow, that all the Art of Rhetorick, besides order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat.”
In his 1721 “Letter to a Young Clergyman,” Jonathan Swift brought these ideas to bear on style, which he defined as “proper words in proper places.” The concise elegance of the definition is matched only by the colossal question it begs, to wit, How do you tell when the words and the places are proper? Swift never gives a full answer (in a classic feint, he immediately follows his formulation with, “But this would require too ample a disquisition to be now dwelt on”), but he does implicitly offer a moral conception of style. To him, an excellent manner of expression is not merely an aid in communication and persuasion but a reflection of good character and judgment. Following Aristotle and anticipating Strunk and White, Swift puts forth simplicity, clarity, and humility as the great values in prose:
When a man’s thoughts are clear, the properest words will generally offer themselves first, and his own judgment will direct him in what order to place them so as they may be best understood. Where men err against this method, it is usually on purpose, and to show their learning, their oratory, their politeness, or their knowledge of the world. In short, that simplicity without which no human performance can arrive to any great perfection is nowhere more eminently useful than in this.*
The next swing of the pendulum carries us to a vantage point from which we can see the present. The nineteenth century was the age of the stylist. Like Coleridge with his line from Wordsworth, a reader (and this was also the age in which the reading public reached a truly significant size) could immediately name the author when presented with an unsigned line from Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Macaulay, Walter Savage Landor, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry James, or maybe even a relatively obscure or eccentric writer, such as Charles Doughty or Frederick Rolfe (aka Baron Corvo). The attention to individual style had commercial underpinnings (it was a key part of an author’s self-marketing) and also philosophical ones—the Romantic faith in and emphasis on the irreducible essence and genius of individual human beings. By the 1860s, when George Henry Lewes published The Principles of Success in Literature, style as garb was a fatally passé metaphor, and style-is-the-man was a commonplace: “Genuine style is the living body of thought, not a costume that can be put on and off…. No style can be good that is not sincere. It must be the expression of its author’s mind. There are, of course, certain elements which must be mastered as a dancer learns his steps, but the style of the writer, like the grace of the dancer, is only made effective by such mastery; it springs from a deeper source.”
Flaubert was the century’s most eloquent spokesman for style. He saw it not so much as a vessel for individual expression but as a supreme aesthetic quality, to be valued in and for itself. In an 1852 letter to Louise Colet (which anticipated the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld, a show “about nothing”) he mused, “From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things…. What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the inner force of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air.”
The rage for style culminated in Pater, who saw it as a way to achieve a mystical oneness. In his 1888 essay “Style,” he fairly chanted, “To give the phrase, the sentence, the structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a…unity with its subject and with itself:—style is in the right way when it tends towards that…. Such logical coherency may be evidenced not merely in the lines of composition as a while, but in the choice of a single word.” For strong writers, he concluded, it was a matter of soul: “the way they have of absorbing language, of attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety which makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration.”
No one who has followed the saga this far will be surprised to hear that all this could not stand. Starting shortly before the turn of the twentieth century, people began chafing at the mystification and glorification of individual style perpetrated by the likes of Pater. Like previous reactions, this was both pendulum swing and paradigm shift, and quite powerful: almost everyone who has essayed the subject of style since the start of the twentieth century has taken the same neo-Aristotelean tack that correctness, clarity, and simplicity are to be prized, and verbal ostentation and self-indulgence to be avoided. At the forefront of the shift was Matthew Arnold, who in his 1880 essay “The Study of Poetry” declared that “the needful qualities for a fit prose are regularity, uniformity, precision, balance.” Samuel Butler, writing in his notebook in 1897, expressed the coming sentiment by using a very old metaphor in a slightly new way: “A man’s style should be like his dress—it should attract as little attention as possible.” Butler went on to boast, “I should like to put it on record that I never took the smallest pains with my style, have never thought about it, and do not know or want to know whether it is a style at all, or whether it is not, as I believe and hope, just common, simple straightforwardness.”
Books and essays explicating this idea became a genre unto themselves; the typical mode was bemused scolding, and a typical structural device the list of precepts or rules. A key early text was The King’s English, by brothers H. W. and F. G. Fowler, published in 1906. The book, which was a precursor to H. W.’s better-known A Dictionary of Modern English Usage of 1926, announces in the preface that “the positive literary virtues are not to be taught by brief quotation, nor otherwise attained than by improving the gifts of nature with wide or careful reading.” What can be taught is the elimination of stylistic blunders and infelicities, and The King’s English is an entertaining catalogue of them, complete with examples taken from major and minor authors and an assortment of periodicals. But before the hall of shame come first principles. Chapter I begins:
Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.
This general principle may be translated into practical rules in the domain of vocabulary as follows:—
Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.
Prefer the concrete word to the abstract.
Prefer the simple word to the circumlocution.
Prefer the short word to the long.
Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.
A reader with a grounding in the classics, or the eighteenth century, could be forgiven for wondering, “Where have I heard that before?”
As the genre developed, the ideas remained the same. What changed were the particular needs and circumstances of the individual writer. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, addressing Cambridge University students in 1913, presumably aware that war was imminent, wanted to link prose style with a muscular and distinctly “gendered” code of character: “Though personality pervades style and cannot be escaped, the first sin against Style as against good Manners is to obtrude or exploit personality…. believe me, Gentlemen—so far as Handel stands above Chopin, as Velasquez above Greuze, even so far stand the great masculine writers above all who appeal to you by means of personality of private sentiment.” Somerset Maugham included in his 1938 memoir, The Summing Up, a long account of the development of his unobtrusive, journalistic style that implicitly served as a defense of or justification for it. “To write simply is as difficult as to be good,” he concluded.
Robert Graves and Alan Hodge wrote The Reader Over Your Shoulder in 1943, a moment, they explain, when prose has been debased by the fast pace and, yes, the bloody racket of modern life. (“Normally, except for those who work in the early hours of the morning, or who live up a long country lane, it is almost impossible to avoid being disturbed by incidental noises of traffic, industry, schools, and the wireless, or by the telephone, or by callers.”) But the descriptions of these circumstances is merely the overture to a familiar argument for clarity (the chapter entitled “The Principles of Clear Statement” is so long it has to be divided into three parts) and stylistic anonymity: “Men of letters usually feel compelled to cultivate an individual style—less because they feel sure of themselves as individuals than because they wish to carve a niche for themselves in literature, and nowadays an individual style usually means a peculiar range of inaccuracies, ambiguities, logical weaknesses and stylistic extravagancies.”
As the title implies, Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”(1946) is concerned mainly with ideology’s baleful effects on style. “Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style,” he writes, and, “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” His proposed solution is, in essence, the familiar one of clarity and simplicity, and he closes with a list of “rules” that precisely mirror the Fowlers’, with additional warnings against the temptations of cliché and jargon. In an essay published the same year, “Why I Write,” Orwell stated, “…one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.”
The reader will note that all of the above examples are from England. Briefs appeared with less frequency in the United States, whose citizens were less protective of the language and had not invested several centuries debating these issues. However, Americans, with their Puritan and agrarian heritage, have always had a thing for muscular plainness and periodically made cases for its linguistic equivalents. As early as 1650, in his History of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford wrote that his goal was “a plain style with singular regard unto the simple truth in all things.” The most prominent and eloquent nineteenth-century exemplar of the creed was Thoreau, who preached,
Steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one’s own style, both of speaking and writing. If he has worked hard from morning till night, though he may have grieved that he could not be watching the train of this thought during that time, yet the few hasty lines which at evening record his day’s experience will be more musical and true than his freest but idle fancy could have furnished.
Mark Twain’s literary ventriloquism should not obscure the fact that he was a purist when it came to the English language. According to his famous 1895 screed, most of “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” stem from Cooper’s not employing (in Twain’s words) “a simple and straightforward style.” When Twain’s essay was published, William Strunk had already been teaching at Cornell University for four years. He self-published the first edition of his Elements of Style in 1918.
In their own way, Ernest Hemingway, H. L. Mencken, and Harold Ross (who founded the New Yorker magazine in 1925) all issued stylistic critiques of current usage and habits. Hemingway, adapting lessons he had learned from Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, fetishized plainness, in sentence structure, (absence of) metaphor, and vocabulary. Mencken’s masterpiece, The American Language, published in 1919 and regularly revised and updated over the next 30 years, was dedicated to exposing the euphemisms, vogue words and linguistic idiocies his countrymen were inexplicably drawn to. Ross was devoted to Fowler’s Modern English Usage and edited the New Yorker with a fanatical zeal to keep its pages pure of solecism, cliché and “indirection”—Ross’s term for prose that tries to slip in meanings in an implicit or suggested way, instead of laying them out one by one. Perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps not, Mencken, Hemingway, and the New Yorker all had unmistakable styles.
To grossly generalize, Americans truly warmed to the theme after World War II, just as the English seem finally to have gotten the point. The galvanizing agent in the United States was evidently the arrival on the scene of Rudolf Flesch, who emigrated from his native Austria in 1938. Flesch wrote a doctoral dissertation about readability and in 1946 expanded it into a book, The Art of Plain Talk. The great appeal to Americans of this and Flesch’s subsequent works—The Art of Readable Writing, The Art of Clear Thinking, How to Be Brief, and so forth—was that they broke the issue of writing and style down into a formula and thus made it seem scientific. Flesch and his progeny also wrote with a Dale Carnegie, Kiwanis Club breeziness, full of italics and direct address, that made achieving a good style seem nothing fancy, just good business sense. It was so simple! To arrive at the “reading ease” score of a piece of writing, you multiply the average sentence length by 1.015, multiply the number of syllables per 100 words by .846, add the two figures, and subtract the sum from 206.835. (I am not making this up.) The result will be on a scale from 100 (easy) to 0 (exceedingly difficult). Thoreau would be pleased to learn that a passage from his work gets an 83 (“easy”); the Gettysburg Address is graded 70 (“fairly easy”), and a paragraph from a life insurance policy gets a-12. This nonsense at least provided a novel route to a familiar message, which in Flesch’s words was the “simple style—the style that meets the scientific tests of readability—is the classic style of great literature…. If you start to analyze what style is, the only possible general rule is that the reader must be able to understand what the writer says; and the surest way to that is simplicity.” Flesch was silent on nature of the general rule when the writer is trying to say something subtle and complicated.*
Flesch led the way to Strunk and White, and, as described in the Introduction, Strunk and White led the way to the current consensus that style equals clarity, simplicity, and no mistakes.
Why was this story told so incessantly in the twentieth century? A few factors are apparent. Perhaps the most cogent and sensible book ever written about style is Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, published in 1938. One of Connolly’s lasting contribution to the debate is a one-word designation for prose that does not strive for the classical virtues of simplicity and clarity. He called it Mandarin. “It is the style,” he explains, “of those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs, and one which is always menaced by a puritan opposition.” Against this, Connolly describes the disparate revolts of a wide variety of “colloquial” writers or realists, influenced by journalism and the talking pictures; he includes among them Hemingway, Maugham, Orwell, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Christopher Isherwood. Perhaps uniquely, Connolly sees both the good and the bad in the Mandarin style, and appreciates that it goes in and out of fashion. Against the prevailing wisdom, that “style seems something artificial, a kind of ranting, or of preening,” he bluntly states that “there is no such thing as writing without style.”
Connolly describes the Mandarin style’s reign in the nineteenth century, when its “last great exponents” were Pater and Henry James, and he has a plausible explanation for why James’s late novels, with their tortuous sentences and endless strings of metaphors, went virtually unread. James’s early works
reached a small leisured collection of people for whom reading a book—usually aloud—was one of the few diversions of our northern winters. The longer a book could be spun out the better, and it was the duty of the author to spin it. But books got cheaper, and reading them ceased to be a luxury, the reading public multiplied and demanded less exacting entertainment, the struggle between literature and journalism began. Literature is the art of writing something that can be read twice; journalism what will be read once, and they demand different techniques. There can be no delayed impact in journalism, no subtlety, no embellishment, no assumption of a luxury reader, and since the pace of journalism is faster than that of literature, literature found itself in a predicament. It could react against journalism and become an esoteric art depending on the sympathy of a few, or learn from journalism, and compete with it.
What Connolly recognized was a fissure between “high” and “low” writing. It had existed for a long time but until, roughly, the time of Henry James, it was always bridgeable. That is, writers were encouraged to produce essays and poems and novels and books of history; their audience was both the reading public (a group of modest size and fairly homogeneous education and sensibility) and posterity—or, as it would later be known, “art.” As the twentieth century proceeded, it became apparent that wide readership and artistic distinction were, except in rare cases, mutually exclusive. The stylistic reformers wanted to knock some sense into literature and writing in general so that they could hold their own in these fast-paced times.
But reformers like the Fowlers, writing in the early decades of the century, didn’t know the half of it. Ever since Gutenberg, the written word had been the only way of communicating to a substantial number of people; it thus held a privileged position in any discourse about communication. That is, when you talked about the expression of ideas, you talked about writing. (Painting, sculpture, and music reached comparatively tiny audiences and weren’t really about ideas anyway.) One by one, all the new media of mass communication colonized the Earth in the twentieth century: photography, many kinds of sound recordings, radio, silent and sound film, television, the Internet. As each one emerged, it struck writing with a new body blow; the cumulative effect was devastating. By the end of the century, few people read extensively, fewer still could write well, and hardly anybody had any interest in a debate about the proper role of style. No wonder, then, that a Robert Graves, an E. B. White, a Jacques Barzun, or a William Zinsser would successively take a look at the once mighty, now increasingly quaint, discipline, proscribe flights of fancy and “style,” and prescribe a return to basics.
There was a concurrent and parallel history of writing in the twentieth century, of course—a body of work to which the strictures of the reformers did not and could not apply (but for which they occasionally expressed their impatience or disdain). This was the stuff on the other side of the fissure, the work of the heirs of Henry James, otherwise known as literary modernists. Proust, Stein, Pound, Eliot, Kafka, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett made no attempt to make things easy for the reader and weren’t interested in journalism of any kind; they didn’t even allow themselves to think about sales. (The alternatives: starvation, an inheritance, a day job, a spouse with same, or, in the second half of the century, tenure and Oprah’s Book Club.) And so the neo-Aristoteleans were content to let this group labor in a gilded ghetto of high prestige and few readers. These writers were intently interested in style, but not quite in the same way as the nineteenth-century Mandarins had been. That is, far from seeking a “signature style,” novelists like Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf and poets like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot strove to forge a different style and form for each succeeding work, the better to suit its particular artistic needs and their own urge to “make it new.” If you consider a selection of their contemporary heirs—say, novelists Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Banville—you will observe the same assumption that every book is a thing apart, requiring a distinct formal and stylistic strategy.
I want to wander down one more historical path before returning, permanently, to practical matters. The twentieth century saw the rise of literary criticism as an academic discipline. And in the long effort to shift criticism from Victorian impressionism to a more scientific stance and stature, style was always a reliable specimen to put under the microscope. True, the New Critics, who dominated the field, took pains to avoid “the biographical fallacy” and so would customarily focus on works rather than authors. But there was a healthy line of critics who were willing to take a more personal approach, so one could discuss personal prose style in these decades, but—in contrast to the nineteenth century, when it was a vital topic of public discourse—only as it pertained to a dead or “canonical” writer. I hasten to say that this led to some prime stuff. For instance, William Wimsatt’s 1941 The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson not only describes Johnson’s style elegantly and precisely but also analyzes the ways it related to Johnson’s character and themes. (“Johnson’s inversion is intrinsically an expressive word order,” Wimsatt writes at one point. “It is part of his inclination to logic, his interest in the pattern of premises and conclusion, which sometimes sacrifices the quality of his premises. It happens not to be idiomatic in English; it is idiomatic in some other languages.”) The subfield of “stylistics” emerged in the 1950s and became so popular that Louis Milic’s 1967 bibliography listed 534 articles and books published in the preceding 17 years. That doesn’t even count all the articles that would appear in the journal Style, which was founded in 1967. Milic and other practitioners borrowed terminology and techniques from linguistics (which helped stylistics’s stature as science), including complicated computer-aided means of quantifying style. (I quote at random from a 1976 text: “We cannot properly consider [Phillip] Sidney’s habits of modification without first observing that he is the least nominal writer of our four. Figure 6.11 compares Sidney, with a mean total of 629 nouns per sample, with the control writers, who average a total of 711 nouns per sample.”)
Today, in university English departments in the United States and the United Kingdom, stylisticians are few and far between and tend to be approaching retirement. What happened? In a word, post-structuralism. Perhaps the most influential of many influential ideas of the deconstructionists and other theorists who emerged in France in the 1960s was that “privileging” writers, as the Romantic tradition had done for more than 150 years, was a grave mistake. All they were doing, after all, was unconsciously inscribing power relations in society and other circumstances beyond their control. That being the case, wasn’t it silly for critics to sit at their feet endlessly describing their attributes, one of which was style? One might as well analyze a magazine advertisement or a comic book, and, in fact, the deconstructionists did so. In a famous 1968 essay announcing “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes marked the passing by using a new word for (not the writer but) the “scriptor” of (not books but) “texts”: “the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing…. There is noother time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.” The scriptor doesn’t write the text, in other words; the text writes the scriptor. The following year, Michel Foucault closed his essay “What Is an Author?” with a quotation from Samuel Beckett: “What difference does it make who is speaking?” Cultural studies, gender studies, queer studies, the new historicism, postcolonial studies, and the other sub-disciplines that have dominated the academic study of literature since the 1970s take widely varying approaches but agree on one thing: Style is not the man. It is not even the woman. It is, rather, the manifestation or symptom of core trends or truths next to which the personal projects of individual authors are puny and irrelevant.
Stylistics lives on as a subdivision of linguistics, and in an endeavor that has been termed “literary forensics” or, in deference to its number-crunching proclivities, “stylometrics.” The prime practitioner is Donald Foster, a professor of English at Vassar, whose first book argued, on stylistic evidence culled from a computer database, that an anonymous 1612 poem, “Funeral Elegy by W. S.,” was in fact by William Shakespeare. Foster became a celebrity in the wider world in 1996, when he accurately fingered Joe Klein as “anonymous,” the author of Primary Colors. His evidence was numerous stylistic similarities between the novel and Klein’s journalism, including the habit of forming adjectives by adding a y to nouns, as in dorky, slouchy, and cottony. Subsequently, Foster was consulted by investigators in the Unabomber, Olympic bombing in Atlanta, JonBenet Ramsey, and anthrax-letter investigations. All this gave his stylometrics a certain sideshow quality, as if he were living out a real-life spinoff of the old Quincy TV series. This sense was furthered in 2002, when a competing scholar, based on his own stylistic analysis, “proved” that the actual author of “Funeral Elegy by W. S.” was dramatist John Ford, and Foster conceded the point.
So it has come to pass that personal style is generally abused, ignored, marginalized, or subsumed under a definition of style that is more or less its opposite. How odd, then, that so many current writers have such strong, distinctive, and affecting styles! I hope that by now, the truth of that statement will be apparent. If not, all I can do is direct the reader to the names of the authors interviewed for this book, and happily throw out a couple of dozen more: Roger Angell, Paul Auster, Saul Bellow, Roy Blount Jr., William F. Buckley Jr., J. M. Coetzee, Joan Didion, Maureen Dowd, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier, Elizabeth Hardwick, Seamus Heaney, John Irving, Molly Ivins, Garrison Keillor, Stephen King, Anthony Lane, John le Carré, John Leonard, John McPhee, David Mamet, Lorrie Moore, Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, Grace Paley, Annie Proulx, Philip Roth, Ron Rosenbaum, David Sedaris, Zadie Smith, Calvin Trillin, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, and Tom Wolfe.
The disconnect is bemusing but not ruinous; clearly, discourse has not crippled practice. But the time is ripe for style to reclaim its full meaning. It should be possible, in other words, to absorb the points of the Strunk-and-Whiters, on the one hand, and the post-structuralists, on the other, and still construct a brief for personal style.
In the 1930s, perceiving an analogous incongruity, Cyril Connolly made the case that it was possible to have it both ways: to take the best from the Mandarins and from those who had revolted against them. Connolly’s conclusions provide such a sensible model—and such a good specimen of his own splendid style—that they are worth quoting at length:
For a book to be written at the present time with any hope of lasting half a generation, of outliving a dog, or a car, of surviving the lease of a house or the life of a bottle of champagne, it must be written against the current, in a prose which both makes demands on the resources of our language and the intelligence of the reader. From the Mandarins it must borrow art and patience, the striving for perfection, the horror of clichés, the creative delight in the material, in the possibilities of the long sentence, the splendour and subtlety of the composed phrase.
From the Mandarins, on the other hand, the new writer will learn not to capitalise indolence and egotism, not to burden a sober and delicate language with exhibitionism. There will be no false hesitation and woolly profundities, no mystifying, no Proustian onanism. He will distrust the armchair clowns, the easy philosophers, the prose charmers. He will not show off his small defects, his preferences or his belongings, his cat and pipe and carpet slippers, bad memory, clumsiness with machinery, absentmindedness, capacity for losing things, ignorance of business, of everything which will make the reader think he wrote for money. There will be no whimsy, allusiveness, archaism, pedantic usages, wrong colloquialisms, or sham lyrical outbursts….
From the realists, the puritans, the colloquial writers and talkie-novelists there is also much that he will take and much that he will leave. The cursive style, the agreeable manners, the precise and poetical impact of Forster’s diction, the lucidity of Maugham, last of the great professional writers, the timing of Hemingway, the smooth cutting edge of Isherwood, the indignation of Lawrence, the honesty of Orwell, these will be necessary, and the touch of those writers of English who give every word in their limited vocabulary its current topical value….
But he will not borrow from realists, or from their imitators, the flatness of style, the homogeneity of outlook, the fear of eccentricity, the reporter’s horror of distinction, the distrust of beauty, the cult of a violence and starkness that is masochistic….
What I claim is that there is action and reaction between these styles, and that necessary as it was, and victorious though it seems, the colloquial style of the last few years is doomed and dying. Style, as I have tried to show, is a relationship between a writer’s mastery of form and his intellectual or emotional content. Mastery of form has lately been held, with reason, to conceal a poverty of content, but this is not inevitable, and for too long writers have had to prove their sincerity by going before the public in sackcloth and ashes, or, rather, a fifty-shilling suit and a celluloid collar. Now the moment has come when the penance is complete, and they may return to their old habit.