When we encounter a natural style, we are astonished and delighted; for we expected to see an author, and we find a man.
—Blaise Pascal
If any man would write in a noble style let him first possess a noble soul.
—Goethe
Style is nothing but the mere silhouette of thought; and an obscure or bad style means a dull and confused brain.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
Write, and after you have attained some control over the instrument, you write yourself down whether you will or no. There is no vice, however unconscious, not virtue, however shy, no touch of meanness or generosity in your character, that will not pass on to the paper.
—Walter Raleigh
The spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes. The triumph is the triumph of style. For it is only by knowing how to write that you can make use in literature of your self, that self which, while it is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous anatagonist. Never to be yourself and yet always—that is the problem.
—Virginia Woolf, on Max Beerbohm
[Good style is] an intimate and almost involuntary expression of the personality of the writer, and then only if the writer’s personality is worth expressing.
—Bertrand Russell
A really good style comes only when a man has become as good as he can be. Style is character…. I think good style is a matter of rendering out of oneself all the cupidities, all the velleities.
—Norman Mailer*
I’ve always admired David Thomson’s writing, even when I don’t agree with it. Researching a biography of Will Rogers, I took special interest in Thomson’s entry on my subject in his quirky and indispensable reference book, A Biographical Dictionary of Film. Thomson opined, “Rogers’ philosophy was reactionary, dispiriting and provincial, despite every affectation of bonhomie and tolerance. It scorned ideas and people who held them, it relied on vague evolution rather than direct action, its fixed smile concealed rigidity of opinion that middle America need not be disturbed from its own prejudices and limitations.”
If I had to pick one word for this position, it would be erroneous. Rogers was a creature of his time and place, as are we all, but his bonhomie and tolerance were real and his smile was natural. And, right, he didn’t advocate “direct action.” Would it have made Thomson happy if the Ziegfeld Follies star and easygoing movie personality had stormed the capitol, a dagger between his teeth and machine guns in his mitts? Yet the kernel of truth in the two sentences is large enough to allow even me to admire their force and fluency. Adjectives get a bad press, but a smart and artful use of them always captures my attention, and Thomson’s triplet in the first sentence is fine. Each epithet gives the thought an interesting turn, most of all dispiriting, an underused and good word. The bit about Rogers scorning ideas and the people who hold them is Thomson’s most supportable point, and he rams it home with some shrewd hyperbole. (More accurate but less forceful alternatives would be disdained or had little interest in.)
Thomson’s writing on cinema and other subjects ranges widely, but a touchstone of his critical style is this kind of bold assertion, arguable but brooking no argument. It infuriates some readers. When a new edition of the Biographical Dictionary came out in 2002, the online magazine Slate ran a “Reader’s Club” feature where three journalists took turns hurling brickbats at Thomson for arrogance, haughtiness, sloppiness, and other crimes. One of them, David Edelstein, wrote, “Even Thomson’s most interesting formulations usually need to be unpacked. There is in his writing a regal sense of entitlement toward both his subjects and his readers. The implication is that we should treat these little essays as knotty poems whose meanings will emerge with careful rereading and scrutiny.”*
Imagine my surprise, then, when I met Thomson in his San Francisco house and found him to be shy, solicitous and about as unregal as human beings get. A head cold had done a number on his voice, but it was obvious that even in the pink, he is no bellower. He explained that he was well aware of the contrast between his personalities on the page and in the flesh, and that in fact he had developed the former as a way of coming to terms with the latter:
Writing has been the form in which something inside me can come out that does not come out as easily in real life. As a child, and up until the age of 18, I stammered very, very badly, to the point of being hardly able to communicate. It had lots of effects. It increased a natural shyness, but as I think most people who stammer find—and I was helped by being sent to speech therapy classes—the condition made me think a lot about words. Stammerers need to know what they want to say, very carefully. They know certain sounds and words that they will have trouble with. They rarely speak spontaneously.
I went to an English public school with twelve hundred boys. It was enormous and terribly intimidating. I was always afraid of making a fool of myself. Emotionally, the wish to be articulate was tremendously important in my youth. The stammer also repressed and made me angry over not being as assertive as I wanted to be, and some of those things have come out in my writing. I don’t stammer now, haven’t for years, but the pleasure, the relief of being articulate on the page, still means a lot.
David Thomson is a poster boy for the Biographical Fallacy: the assumption that you know a person when you know only his or her writing. The fallacy has trapped many commentators over the years, including, Samuel Johnson reports, an admirer of eighteenth-century poet James Thomson: “She could gather from his works three parts of his character: that he was a great lover, a great swimmer, and rigorously abstinent; but, said [Richard Savage, an intimate of Thomson’s], he knows not any love but that of the sex; he was perhaps never in cold water in his life; and he indulges himself in all the luxury that comes within his reach.”
For both Thomsons, reality not only differs from readers’ expectations but is pretty much the exact opposite. That is significant. In an essay on Karl Popper, Adam Gopnik noted that Popper’s system was based on the value and necessity of criticism but that the philosopher had a ferocious temper and was unable to deal with any criticism of himself, no matter how apparently benign. To explain the paradox, Gopnik proposed what he called the Law of the Mental Mirror Image, which he defined as, “We write what we are not. It is not merely that we fail to live up to our best ideas but that our best ideas, and the tone that goes with them, tend to be the opposite of our natural temperament.” In an interview, Gopnik expanded on the idea:
The law may not always be true, but when it’s true it’s profoundly true, and it tends to be the case the more interesting a writer is—bad writers tend to believe that you should tell the truth in simple sentences. The only exception to the rule I’ve ever known among good writers was Brendan Gill, who was exactly the same in person as he was on the page. Otherwise, the most urbane stylists are anxious, inarticulate. One of the funniest people I know is my brother Blake [an art critic for the Washington Post]. But on the page he’s deadly serious. I’m humorless in person but funny in writing. That’s because my brother is relaxed in life and doesn’t need to be relaxed in print. I do.
There are many reasons why the person on the page (let’s call him Glen) would be different from the person in person (Glenda). Most people want to put on their best face when they go out in public, and so it follows that Glen will usually be more genial and judicious than Glenda, more modest and more willing to give opponents their due. Glenda will contradict herself, think aloud, use hopefully to mean I hope, and leave half-made points suspended in the air; Glen will neatly tie up each idea and use the king’s English. The contrast is especially striking in the case of novelist Peter Carey. He says:
I’m always in the process of trying to figure out what I think and feel, struggling to express myself in conversation. People who know me, then read the work, are astonished. It’s just beyond belief. As a young man, going to literary dinner parties, I felt very inarticulate, poorly educated, ill equipped to deal with where I was. Writing a novel is suddenly like having ten chances to contend with that dinner party. Writing is a process of elevating oneself; it’s like building a stepladder or staircase to yourself. You end up with someone who’s more eloquent, more intelligent than yourself, and certainly knows more. After I had started to be published, I knew something had changed when people started waiting for me to finish my sentences.
In all prose, the reader develops a sense of a character—the person who is doing all the talking. A special case is first-person essays, narrative or humor, in which that character is shoved on center stage, in the middle of a spotlight. Writers who work in the first person agree that this character is a version or a subset of themselves.
BILLY COLLINS: The person in the poems is fairly close to me. If you’re a novelist, you have to invent many characters. A poet invents one character, the voice you’re going to speak in. It’s kind of a cousin of the real you. It reminds me of a story about a Corkman named Michael James O’Neill, who was notoriously evasive. Someone who was looking for him once asked him if he was indeed Michael James O’Neill. And he replied, “Near enough.” Well, I feel the person in the poems isn’t me, but he’s near enough.
MEGHAN DAUM: I sometimes get accused of being solipsistic. I feel that I’m using myself as a tool to get at something outside myself. There’s a persona in my essays, but I don’t consider that it’s really me. It’s an inquisitor, asking all the questions. She’s more dramatic than me, more vulnerable, more malleable. I’m not as emotional, or flaky. The persona has to be those things to convey experiences, to provide a level of drama. It’s a version of me pitched at a different level. I conceive of some of my essays as stand-up comedy, an extended riff. Readers are so literal, they’re so saturated with memoir culture, that they sometimes get mad at me.
DAVE BARRY: Definitely the person in my pieces is wackier. Sure, I’ve done strange things. I’ve shot Barbies off the roof of the building I work in with a potato gun. I’ve hung upside down on a meat hook. I’ve set fire to a pair of underpants on the David Letterman show. But my life isn’t really wacky. What I often do is take something that is not only an ordinary part of life, like buying a house or renewing my automobile registration, but is actually annoying. Like the house has a problem or there’s a huge line at the Department of MotorVehicles. So when I go to write it, I don’t take out the anger. I turn the anger into something where the reader relates to the frustration, we both see how funny it is.
The reader may come away thinking, “Oh, he must be funny when he’s standing in line waiting to have his car registered.” No. If you talk to me while I’m in line waiting to have my car registered, I’m just as annoyed as the rest of them. I’m probably even more annoyed because I have to get a column in. So, in a sense, you are no more seeing the real me in my columns than you’re seeing the real Jerry Seinfeld when you watch Seinfeld. Everything you see in the column came from me, but there is just much more to me. What people know is a role. It’s a part of me, but I wouldn’t call it me.
There are people who are much darker, like David Sedaris. He has a real, honest humor that is upsetting at times. The things he tells you—assuming they’re true—are the kinds of things I would never tell. He cuts a lot closer—again, assuming they’re true.
ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN: I find essays much, much harder to write than fiction, partly because I’m morbidly private. Both my novels are in the first person, and I think I’ve chosen to do them that way so I can put on a mask. Writing in the third person, even in fiction, is writing about yourself. You have to come out and state things. It’s a struggle. My inclination is always to be invisible, to pretend that I’m uninteresting. It’s almost like an excess of politeness. First-person narrators can be rude.
In my own voice, I come out as way too tentative. I keep saying things like “I think” or “it seems to me,” and I have to keep cutting them out. I’m working on a book review right now, and I have to keep rewriting the point I’m trying to make, so I come right out and say it. I have to keep telling myself that I became a writer because I want to persuade people. The dilemma is to be strong enough to persuade people but still polite enough not to be assaultive.
In one particular way all writers, even McCracken, are less polite on the page than in society. While Glenda will (implicitly and explicitly) pause for responses to her statements, express interest (real or feigned) in what the other person has to say, Glen has no qualms about going on extended monologues. That is all he does, in fact. Shy or subdued people are often drawn to writing, as Thomson was. It allows them to take as much time as they need to formulate what they want to say and then to say it without fear of interruption—it lets them unleash their inner loudmouth. Joan Didion is famous for being shy. She is so shy, she has said, that sometimes, when working as a journalist, she cannot bring herself to start the interview, so that she and the subject just sit there looking at each other in uncomfortable silence. There is not a hint of shyness or diffidence in her writing voice (although it does have a note of “so there!” defiance). I don’t know whether Tom Wolfe is shy or not, but I suspect he is, a bit, and the white suit and the exclamation points are ways of cheering himself on.
Cynthia Ozick comes across in print as assured as David Thomson, albeit not as deliberately provocative. That image is deceptive, she says.
I write in terrible fear. When I’m writing fiction, it is really terror. It comes from knowing that there is this ceiling in my writerly DNA, and I can’t ever be E. M. Forster or Evelyn Waugh. The attempt is fear-making, the failure is depressing, and so between the two, it’s rotten. What do I do about it? I hide it. You can’t write with fear showing, and you can’t write with depression showing. You need to construct a mask.
Since 1953 I’ve kept a diary, and I write in it almost every day. It’s a record of humiliation. The voice in it is my speaking voice. It carries all of life in it, all the dross and all the bad feelings, the humiliations, the anger, the envy, all that garbage. I know that is a real voice, and that’s how I discover that all the other voices are constructs or masks. I think all writing is impersonation. In fiction, you’re impersonating a character. In an essay, you’re impersonating a voice that’s certainly part of your being but that’s also better than you are—more sure of things.
In rare cases, the literary persona is shyer than the social one. Junot Díaz says:
When I write raw, it tends to be elliptical, passive. I write around an issue. Something about the act of writing stands in the way of me and my material. I have problems saying what I need to say. That’s odd, because my personality tends to be blunt, straightforward, outspoken. My written personality is nowhere near as dynamic. I have a hundred failed stories in my drawer, and they all have the mark of the writerly person I for some reason need to be.
For this book and previous projects I have conducted in the neighborhood of a hundred in-depth interviews with authors. I also know a lot of writers. And I have sometimes noted an obvious chasm between the person and the persona, either as a function of Gopnik’s Law or through some not immediately apparent reason. But in even more cases, style really does seem to be the woman or man. Russell Baker is modest, intelligent, funny, and skeptical in person; he is modest, intelligent, funny, and skeptical in print. Occasionally—and this is the case with Nicholson Baker, Harold Bloom, Andrei Codrescu, Jamaica Kincaid, John Lukacs, Stanley Crouch, Calvin Trillin, and Greil Marcus among those I’ve interviewed and with John Updike, David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, and William F. Buckley Jr. among those I’ve merely heard on television or radio—it goes beyond such a congruence of attitude and approach to an apparent integration of voice and prose. When you meet and talk with the person, you can almost see the words on the page. Later, reading the work, you feel that the person is in front of you, saying the sentences out loud.
The relationship between the two personalities is, if nothing else, complicated. Like David Thomson, Anna Quindlen stuttered as a child. She also had a terrible lisp. And like Thomson, she became a writer partly to try to compensate for those difficulties. But unlike Thomson, she eventually was able to merge the two personalities. Quindlen says:
I think there’s clearly a link between trying to create a charming, erudite and coherent “voice” on the page and being unable to use your voice easily in real life. In my case there may be a chicken-and-egg effect. I don’t know whether I developed the written voice and then imitated it, once I had speech therapy, or vice versa. But in any case I know that I have a distinctive voice on the page, and that it’s intimately related to my actual voice—that is, the way I speak now. In fact, one of the most constant comments I get when I give speeches is, “You talk just like you write.”
Thomson and Quindlen are hardly alone. Other writers who stutter or stuttered, according to the Web site “Famous People Who Stutter” (http://www.mankato.msus.edu/comdis/kuster/famouspws.html), include Aesop, Arnold Bennett, Jorge Luis Borges, Elizabeth Bowen, Lewis Carroll, Cervantes, Winston Churchill, Margaret Drabble, Steve Erickson, Robert Heinlein, Edward Hoagland, Alfred Kazin, Philip Larkin, Somerset Maugham, Jonathan Miller, Budd Schulberg, David Shields, Nevil Shute, Peter Straub, Kenneth Tynan, and John Updike. I doubt that any of them would regard the speech impediment as coincidental to the vocation they took up. Erickson, an American novelist, has provocatively observed, “A lot of stutterers have become writers. Lately I have begun to wonder if I had it reversed. I have always assumed that a stutterer becomes a writer. Lately I have begun to wonder if the writer becomes a stutterer, if a writer is born a writer—if there is something about the writer from the very beginning that makes him a writer and if that’s what gets in the way of his speech.”
The sort of convergence Quindlen talks about, between persona and personality, is common among actors. The boy born Archibald Leach to working-class English parents had a horribly unhappy childhood and a long, slow professional apprenticeship before the world came to know him as the epitome of what that can only be called Cary Grant. “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person,” he once said. “Or he became me.”
Writers are actors, and they too can become what they perform. Judith Thurman says:
People say my writing gives the impression of naturalness. That is so untrue of me. A friend once said to me, “You don’t have a spontaneous bone in your body,” and he was right. I’m secretive and hard to know, but on the page I give the impression of being warm and easy to know. Over the years, the distinction has narrowed between the pretensions and myself, between the artificial and the natural. I come across as a fairly cultivated European woman of the world; I come from Queens. That polish I sought for so long has been assimilated. I have a good friend in Paris who comes from a cultivated upper-class background. When I met his parents, they assumed I came from the same kind of background. I was delighted and appalled. I was an impostor and it had worked—but I had denied something of who I was and where I came from.
Of course, style is not the only relevant factor in considering a literary persona. The other is content—what the writer has to say—and this is often more relevant. If we think of novelists as generous or caustic, it’s usually because of what they show or tell us about their characters; we consider essayists smart, foolish or confused because of their ideas; we form our opinion of first-person writers like Bill Bryson on the basis of their accounts of their actions and reactions. But in all cases the style is there all the same, even if it flies under the radar of our attention. Most of the time, it works in tandem with the content. One is not surprised when conservatives write in the cadences and vocabulary of 50 or a 100 years ago, or when radicals break grammatical rules and semantically overreach. People expressing outrage tend to shout; people conveying satisfaction with the world or themselves will likely speak in well-modulated tones. Arnold Bennett observed, “How often has it been said that Carlyle’s matter is marred by the eccentricities of his style. But Carlyle’s matter is harsh and eccentric to precisely the same degree as his style. His behavior was frequently ridiculous, if not abominable.” The form–content link helps explain the connection between the two meanings of the word irony: one referring to a situation (a character in a play planning a vacation on the day after the audience knows someone plans to kill him), the other to a manner of expression (saying “What a swell joint!” at a mediocre restaurant). Reading some writers—Stephen Crane, Kafka, Hemingway, Joseph Heller—we quickly catch on that their expression is other than sincere, and gradually realize this is because they see the world as animated by a cosmic irony.
Sometimes writers consciously or unconsciously exploit a discordance between style and content. Astute journalists know that if their material is funny, poignant, or dramatic, they will most efficiently get the emotion across if they write straightforwardly or even blandly. (And if the content is dull or ordinary, giving it the full symphonic approach can create a nice piquancy.) Donald Barthelme had radical notions about literature, language, and the oddness of the world. His plots, if you could call them that, were surreal. But he communicated all this much more effectively because, sentence by sentence, his prose was precise, immaculate, and correct.*
So: Glen is the personality on the page, Glenda the personality in social interaction. This leaves out a third member of the party—the “real” personality, the core self. The quotation marks are a clue that my omission is intentional. The word personality is derived from the Greek persona, itself a compound of per (“through”) and sona (“sound”), and meaning “a mask worn by actors.” I am sympathetic to psychological conceptions that stress the constructedness and adaptability of personality, and hence the role-playing or mask-wearing function, and to critical conceptions that think of authors as wearing masks and playing roles. As Billy Collins says:
The romantic view is that style is the manifestation of your core. I’m closer to the idea that it’s a set of mannerisms, arrived at through trial and error, that work and give you pleasure. As Frost said, “The fun’s in how you say a thing.”
There’s obviously a long and distinguished tradition in literary criticism of putting authors on the couch and putting their motivations, fears and inner being on the table for discussion. An example (I could have picked any of ten thousand others) is Camille Paglia’s take on Henry James’s late style: “In his Romantic withdrawal from masculinity, James wraps each act or remark in an immobilizing sheath of excess words. The prose is the medium but not the message. It reproduces the density of ambiguous circumstances in which the characters are caught. It is a large, humming, hovering mass.” That is ingenious and, as a description of the prose, irrefutable. But in it dependence on characterizing James’s feelings about masculinity, it is presumptuous and inescapably speculative.
Leaving aside the legitimacy of the approach, it’s unnecessary for the rest of this chapter, which tries to analyze the ways a writing style puts forth a coherent and compelling personality and not to prospect for links between that personality and the writer’s inner being. I will say one thing on the subject: A style will never be memorable or robust without a connection between “Glen”—the personality of the style—and something elemental in the writer. It could be a direct one-to-one correspondence, it could be a Gopnikian mirror image or it could be a complicated transformation that may escape the notice of everyone except the writer him-or herself and some close friends. Ann Beattie says:
The narrative voice often is an interesting improv on the person’s real method of delivery, and sometimes it’s quite close. That is, while Annie Dillard doesn’t talk in compound, complex sentences, she does make bright, unexpected analogues that have major and minor points, with some unexpected observations thrown into the way she’s telling a story. About myself, one thing I’d say is that I think I’m funny. When people meet me and have a conversation or get to know me, they often comment that they are surprised that I’m funny. I can’t stand jokes and find most comedians not at all funny, but I find many other people inadvertently funny. I guess I like to think that in my writing, a big part of what I’m doing is discovering funny things—odd mannerism, turns of phrase—and this is a reflection of the way I am.
But if there is no connection—if the writerly persona is wholly artificial, disingenuous or conventional—the prose will be like invisible ink, vanishing into the air a second after it is read.
I have been speaking about style, and personality, as masks. Let me refine the metaphor and ask you to think of the most lifelike mask imaginable, so lifelike that it doesn’t look like a mask but a real person’s features. So I offer style as countenance, or, in Schopenhauer’s words, “the physiognomy of the mind.” Like a face, a style is partly meaningless as a gauge of character, but partly very meaningful indeed. And although it may seem that one’s style is more malleable than one’s face—in writing, all you have to do is delete a word and replace it with another, as opposed to the fuss and bother of plastic surgery—it is in fact unexpectedly hard to alter. Coco Chanel said, “Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve.” The age milestones are much less precise when it comes to style, but the general progression is the same.
Just as a face is a collection or cluster of features, a style can be seen as a collection of traits. A toy called Pin Art might help illuminate the analogy. You’ve probably seen Pin Art—it’s a small bed of about 2,000 thin nails, each of which can be depressed all the way, partway or not at all. When you press the entire bed with something—your hand, a tangerine, your face—a perfect image of that thing appears on the other side. Literary style works in something like that way. Each of the nails in the Pin Art of style represents a specific quality. And in every style, the pins are pressed (or not pressed) in a particular configuration, creating a unique and unmistakable visage.
Most—if not all—systems of personality evaluation start with a small number of important or elemental traits from which all other traits derive. Aristotle talked about the sanguine, melancholic, and choleric personalities; Nietzsche the Dionysian and Apollonian. Schopenhauer thought the “master traits” were muscular and vital energy, on the one hand, and sensitivity, on the other. Jung’s system (the basis for the Myers-Briggs personality test, still widely used) put forth introversion and extraversion as the essential polar opposites, with thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting as the primary modes of perception. Currently, the most widely applied standard among psychologists is the Five-Factor Model, which categorizes people according to the extent to which they are open to experience, conscientious, extroverted, agreeable, and neurotic.
All of the above are germane to style. So is just about any attribute of human beings. A style can be immaculate or sloppy, pompous or humble, generous or mean, empathetic or egocentric, formal or convivial, elated or depressed, witty or dull, diligent or lazy, self-conscious or reflexive, intelligent or simple, sincere or disingenuous, and so on and on and on.
But it’s possible to funnel these traits into a small number of clusters with special applicability to the peculiar demands and protocols of writing. Henri Morier, in his 1959 book La Psychologie des styles, named eight classes of style, each corresponding to a particular temperament: weak, delicate, balanced, positive, strong, hybrid, subtle and defective. I have no objection to this scheme, but fancy taking my own crack at it, and I offer seven tendencies: competence, iconoclasm, extroversion, feeling, single-mindedness, tension, and solicitousness. Each one is a continuum or scale, and a particular style can be low in it, high in it or somewhere in between. Together, the tendencies make up a style, a profile, a face.
Competence: This is our first impression of writers: Do they know how to put words together? Are they able to say what they mean, punctuate, and spell? If the answer is yes, we file away a sense of efficacy, settle in to listen to what they have to say, and make a mental note to observe their other qualities. If the answer is no, we’re put on our guard. If the author doesn’t quickly offer something of value—humor, information, a good story, a worldview—the reader is more than likely outta here.
Iconoclasm: The key standard for distinctive style. Conformists dress like everyone else, watch the television shows in the top 10, and, at the keyboard, aspire to a transparent middle style. Their prose is neat, proper, and correct—anything to avoid a commotion. They are partial to subliminal clichés—the ones you can comfortably slip into, like a warm bath. But memorable writers, if they have nothing else in common, hear the rhythm of different drummers. In content, that means comprehending realities and making connections that most people don’t. In style, it means giving the reader a bumpy ride: with unexpected words, blunt phrasing, abruptly curtailed sentences or paragraphs, never-ending sentences and paragraphs, or deliberate word repetitions, awkwardness, or flatness.
Some hint, at least, of unexpectedness or irregularity is necessary for a distinctive style. But taken too far, it leads to a style that continuously changes tones and gears, so that readers are unable to get their bearings. This is the country of the avant-garde. When the inclination goes too far—Finnegans Wake is the classic example—it results in a kind a vertiginous quicksand: literary schizophrenia.
Extroversion: To publish one’s words necessitates a certain amount of exhibitionism. Beyond that, people bare themselves and show off to wildly varying degrees. Gnomic prose, short sentences, wide margins, and short books are introverted; verbosity, whether in the form of long words, long sentences, or long books, is extraverted. Some styles shout, and not just the ones that use CAPITAL LETTERS, italics, and exclamation points! Diction, or word choice, is a reliable way to control the volume: words that overstate the case and edge toward hyperbole reveal an extrovert. Short sentences with no qualifications can do the same thing. John Lukacs’s characteristic mode is aphoristic. Pulling one of his books from the shelf at random (Confessions of an Original Sinner) I need to flip pages only twice before I come to: “It is easier to write a first-rate novel than a first-rate history, but it is easier to write a mediocre history than a mediocre novel.” Lukacs comments, “Aphorisms are crystallizations of thought. They are suggestive and the essence of something.” He acknowledges that he’s a sucker for them. “My wife says I don’t have opinions, only convictions. That is an exaggeration.”
A quiet style, in contrast, will qualify, amend, employ the passive voice and many commas, elliptically revolve around the subject, and pursue understatements but not quite to the point of irony. (That’s aggressive.)
Feeling: The classic left brain–right brain opposition is between thought and feeling. Rational styles are hierarchical, logical, orderly, precise, and dominated by nouns. Emotional styles are discursive, impressionistic, gossamer, loose, and dominated by verbs. As described in the last Interlude, women are more likely to have a style that follows the logic of emotions, and men one that follows the logic of logic.
Essay-writing and other forms of nonfiction tend to the rational, and fiction and poetry to the emotional—which is the best way of explaining the huge stylistic difference between Virginia Woolf ’s novels and Virginia Woolf ’s criticism. Any writer in any genre always needs to create a balance between the demands of the two ways of absorbing the world. Judith Thurman says, “Great writing is always a synthesis of feeling and thought. It has the illusion of spontaneity, yet it is very clear: the directness of blurting something out, the refinement of something that’s worked over and over again.”
Single-mindedness: In his book The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin posited two classes of thinkers: the ones who know one big thing (hedge-hogs) and the ones who see many little things (foxes). Style is a good measure, maybe the best, of the way an intelligence encounters the world. Some writers will put down a word or phrase and almost always find that it brings something to mind: connections and implications, possible contingencies and contradictions, and assorted points of varying relevancy. Their style will be a bit on the messy side; the long sentences and paragraphs will be filled with dependent clauses, parentheses, and all kinds of punctuation marks, frequently concluding with a footnote. One thinks of Nicholson Baker, David Foster Wallace, and Dave Eggers—or, going back to an earlier era, of Laurence Sterne and his sprawling novel Tristram Shandy. As these examples suggest, literary foxes will also tend to be incidentally funnier than hedgehogs: their alertness will lead them to puns, wordplay, and sidelong comments. And their inclination to see multiple points of view will lead them to be charitable and authentically empathetic—the critic who rarely gives raves and pans, the columnist who anticipated and respects the opposing viewpoint.
We don’t think in language, and it’s just a conceit to talk of words precisely mirroring thoughts. But for some writers it can be a very strong conceit. V. S. Naipaul, a fox whose fastidious, unsparing style does reflect the way he sees the world, once defined style as “essentially a matter of hard thinking.” When the interviewer commented that Naipaul’s prose had become “more structured, your sentences more syntactically involved,” the writer replied: “I think this represents the way one thinks…. It is also becoming harder to make simple, straightforward statements. One always wants to go back, to correct, to qualify. One is saying more difficult things as well.”
“Foxness,” with its awareness of implications and connections and exceptions, is clearly related to what is popularly known as intelligence. That doesn’t mean all hedgehogs are dummies. Some, in fact, are geniuses—but of the plowing-through, blinders-on variety, the sort who would work through the night and forget to go to sleep. Quite a few are rock-ribbed conservatives, bleeding-heart liberals, or ideologues of some other stripe. Whatever their affiliation, they will generally write straight ahead, moving from one point to the next with no detours, their figurative finger raised high in the air. If they do attempt humor, the results will not be pretty.
Writing in the style of a hedgehog even when you’re not can be effective, both stylistically and therapeutically. Raymond Carver, who struggled with alcoholism, once said, “If your life is in shambles and chaos, there’s the desire to exercise some kind of control. And I think maybe I was doing that in the prose of the stories which I tried to make so precise and exact. It was some arena, some place on the map where I could exercise complete and total control.”
Either style can be taken to excess. Citing David Shapiro’s book Neurotic Styles, linguist Robin Tolmach Lakoff has written that Shapiro’s “basic determinant of style was the mode of attentiveness”; the obsessive is transfixed by detail, whereas the hysterical person sees the universe as a large undefined blur. Verbally, the obsessive will burrow deeper and deeper into, and eventually be paralyzed by, detail. The hysteric will rage from the rooftops, making grand statements about the forest but not noticing the trees.
Tension: Style reflects attitude. There are as many attitudes as there are writers, but most (if not all) can be grouped along a continuum—absolute contentment on one end, extreme agitation on the other. Contentment can show itself in a near transparent style (E. B. White), as well as in a smug or self-satisfied one (George Will). In both cases, the style communicates that the writer is pleased with the essential order of things. As Richard Lanham observes, this mode can be cultural as well as individual. “Styles conceived, like the British Empire, in a fit of absence of mind, tend to be noun styles,” Lanham writes in Analyzing Prose. “The ‘is + prepositional phrase’ formula, at least in our time, seems to come naturally.”*
Discontent troubles the stylistic waters. When a writer is consistently ironic (like Kurt Vonnegut or Joan Didion or the late Dickens) or terse (like Hemingway) or biblically grandiloquent (like Faulkner) or speaks so much in any particular cadence that we cannot ignore it, we sense that something is the matter. There is an edge. The mode of expression is the means of delivering a brief against the world. Faulkner said in a 1944 interview, “I can write prose as simple as anybody, but when you’re trying to say, well, that desires and dreams are in the final scoring incompatible, you have to have between you and the reader a kind of veil that forms the mood and the color, that sets the fact that life is studded with pain, and to seek it is to expand one’s agony in a way, I suppose.”
Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a memoir about the early death of Eggers’s parents, which left him to raise his young brother, has been accused of being gimmicky and precious, what with its endless digressions and self-consciousness about its own workings. Defending it, James Surowiecki wrote in Slate, accurately, “I thought all the stylistic gambits reflected something real, which was the struggle to find a way to say something that really, you don’t want to have to say: These people are dead, and I am not.”
Sometimes Eggers’s style permits his resentment and grief and everything else to pour out more or less directly. At other times he, like Vonnegut and Didion and Hemingway and Faulkner (to an extent) expresses it through indirection. I would characterize this manner of utterance as irony. Irony is an over-and often misused word, and, in the introduction to the paperback edition of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers devotes a long section, in tiny type, to slamming everyone who invoked it while discussing the book.* But his writing is ironic. In the introduction he defines irony as “the use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.” The opposite to is sarcasm, a special form of irony, and indeed not much present in the book. The different from is the kind of irony most often evident today. It is a sort of speaking in quotation marks, the self-conscious adoption of a tone not natural to you: like taking a mask and holding it a foot in front of your face. Think of David Letterman saying the word beverage or a phrase like “the Nabsico Company’s fine products”; Letterman is referring to a beverage, and he isn’t trying to say that Nabisco makes crummy cookies, but he is being ironic nevertheless. Eggers uses this sort of irony often, to good effect. In describing his and his brother’s Frisbee game on the beach, he writes, “We look like professionals, like we’ve been playing together for years. Busty women stop and stare. Senior citizens sit and shake their heads, gasping. Religious people fall to their knees. No one has ever seen anything quite like it.” Whether Eggers likes it or not, that is irony, and one effect is the reader’s sensation of a certain attitude in the narrator.
According to Cynthia Ozick, it was Kafka who introduced a generalized irony into twentieth-century writing. She says: “After Kafka, you can’t be without irony. You can’t be a thinker without irony. You can’t have any influence without irony. You can’t write a contemporary essay without irony. And you definitely cannot write contemporary fiction without irony.”
For Ozick, it ties in with “an approach to the world” she learned from her father, an immigrant.
He used that Yiddish phrase, “Amerikanerge-born,” American-born, to show a lack of irony, a naïveté. He brought this European dark knowledge that we who are born here are innocent of. Luckily enough, we don’t have the troubles that go with it. Yesterday, I was talking to someone from Kiev, who’s been here no more than five years. Even now, she shakes her head with a little smile and says, “You don’t know anything.” That was my father’s half-smile.
Gish Jen is also the child of immigrants (from China in her case), and irony is also everpresent in her work. Jen says:
Some things are constant in my voice, and in the way I see things. There’s an alertness to discrepancy, to irony. In Mona in the Promised Land, the number of words that can be put into quotation marks is astounding. I tend to stand outside events and language. Irony is my middle name. It can turn into humor, but it doesn’t always. People say that I’m funny. But as a person I’m not a barrel of laughs. What I’m really interested in [is] incongruity, the huge discrepancies between what we are and what we are supposed to be. Lionel Trilling, talking about the origin of the novel, said Cervantes was about the contrast between reality and illusion. And reality and illusion was funny for Mark Twain. I would add that the great new ground is migrancy. That’s my territory.
When I started writing, in 1986, it was before multiculturalism. There was only one Asian-American novelist, Maxine Hong Kingston. It was widely recognized that someone like me could only write artifact, not artifice. Once a day, someone would say to me, “You must be writing an immigrant autobiography.” (When it comes to Asian-Americans, people have no compunctions about expressing prejudice.) This was actually helpful to me. It was what Philip Roth calls “an amiable irritant.” In my first book, Native American, you hear the big No. No, I am writing fiction. I am an American writing a novel. I will not be pigeonholed. The first word of the novel is No—the first word you see is actually the second word. There’s the voice; already I am myself.
Roth says he spends a lot of time looking for “one live sentence.” For me, the process of writing is looking for where the “no” is. It’s looking for something irreverent in a time that’s so fucking reverent.
For Harold Bloom (who grew up with his immigrant parents in the East Bronx, near the Ozick family’s home), a sense of antagonism leads not to irony—Bloom is among the least ironic of writers—but to a sort of Whitmanesque fervor. He says:
My style comes from an oppositional stance. I started out as a fierce revivalist in the ’50s of the romantic poets and the whole romantic tradition, which the New Criticism had almost destroyed. My writing style always had to be antithetical or adversarial, because I was arguing passionately against something. And then in a long second phase, I was arguing passionately against people with whom I was associated and were my personal friends but who had gone over to Derrida and French post-structuralism. Now in the third phase I’m arguing strongly against politicizing, this thing I’ve dubbed the school of resentment. I like to say that I’m a true Marxist critic, following Groucho rather than Karl: Whatever it is, I’m against it. That produces necessarily a fiercely personal, rhetorical style. Sometimes I know it is pitched too high, which I know is rhetorically dangerous. It asks a great deal of the reader. I write very personally, I write very directly. And, you know, I always remember what Gertude Stein said: “One writes for oneself and for strangers.”
Solicitousness: This is a big one, because it points up the main way stylistic personality differs from real-world personality. The latter is a continuous presence in an individual’s life. Awake or asleep, alone or in company, the personality is functioning. Literary personality exists only in the act of writing, which implies the act of reading, which implies someone else. This trait concerns the attitude toward that someone else, the reader. Sometimes, it’s a matter of explicit acknowledgment or address (“Reader, I married him”). Most of the time it is implicit: a function of style.
Northrop Frye wrote in The Well-Tempered Critic:
A piece of continuous prose, whatever its tone, looks at first sight like a dictatorial form in which there is a one-sided and undisturbed monologue proceeding from the author. Looking more carefully, however, we can see that in adopting an expository form the author is really putting himself on a level with his reader, with whom the continuity of his rhythm keeps him in a point-for-point relation. If a writer wishes to suggest a kind of aloofness; if he wishes to suggest that it is the reader’s business to come to him and not his business to come to the reader; if he wishes to suggest that there are riches in his mind which his actual writing gives no more than a hint of, he will have to adopt a different kind of prose style.
If stylistic traits correspond to facial features, this one is the eyes. Writers who are unaware of or uninterested in readers are like people who do not look at you when they’re speaking to you; their eyes are directed at the horizon, glazed over. The syndrome can have sundry results in writing, none of them good. Murkiness, flatness, clumsiness, and awkwardness all convey an implicit disregard, even a contempt, for the reader. Thus four prepositional phrases in a row or a word repeated three times in a paragraph feels like an affront. In his essay “On Style,” Schopenhauer wrote:
As neglect of dress betrays want of respect for the company a man meets, so a hasty, careless, bad style shows an outrageous lack of regard for the reader, who then rightly punishes it by refusing to read the book. It is especially amusing to see reviewers criticizing the works of others in their own most careless style—the style of a hireling. It is as though a judge were to come into court in dressing-gown and slippers!
Frye felt that a disregard for the reader led to what he called “bastard speech,” and as one reads his description of it, the work of numerous published authors comes to mind:
Genuine speech is the expression of a genuine personality. Because it takes pains to make itself intelligible, it assumes that the hearer is a genuine personality too—in other words, wherever it is spoken it creates a community. Bastard speech is not the voice of the genuine self: it is more typically the voice of what I shall here call the ego. The ego has no interest in communication, but only in expression. What it says is always a monologue, though if engaged with others, it resigns itself to a temporary stop, so that the other person’s monologue may have its turn to flow. But while it seeks only expression, the ego is not the genuine individual, consequently it has nothing distinctive to express. It can express only the generic: food, sex, possessions, gossip, aggressiveness and resentments. Its natural affinity is for the ready-made phrase, the cliché, because it tends to address itself to the reflexes of the hearer, not to his intelligence or emotions.
Some styles are patently pompous and arrogant, almost baiting the reader as they force one assertion after another on the reader. And some styles—J. M. Coetzee’s, for example—are parsimonious, holding the reader at arm’s length by systematically withholding connections and emotion. Difficulty is more, well, difficult. Some subjects or arguments are complex, knotty, and abstruse, and it would be impossible to do them justice in “readable” prose. But it’s obvious when a writer has not made his or her best effort, or, indeed, any effort at all. Jargon does the work of explanation, sentences barrel on to the vanishing point and the overall impression is of exclusionary obfuscation.
A solicitous writer always seeks eye contact and maintains a respectful bearing. Schopenhauer says that a writer must be “careful to remember that thought so far follows the law of gravity that it travels from head to paper much more easily than from paper to head; so that he must assist the latter passage by every means in his power.” The minimal courtesies an author can offer are clarity and brevity, so the reader will not have to expend excessive labor and time. The next steps on the ladder include transitional words and phrases (as if leading the reader by the hand from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph), direct address, use of the first person (when I acknowledge myself, I am implicitly acknowledging you), and a general tendency to second-guess a reader’s reaction: defining or explaining possibly unfamiliar words and concepts, and replying to anticipated questions or objections. Hazlitt said that one of the main strategies of his “familiar style” was, “after stating and enforcing some leading idea, to follow it up by such observations and reflections as would probably suggest themselves in discussing the same question in company with others.” It’s the same notion that Michael Kinsley is getting at when he says, “When I read columnists like Charles Krauthammer, who’s a good friend of mine, and George Will, who’s his model—I feel they’re saying, ‘I’m here to tell you what the answer is, and I have contempt for anyone who feels differently.’ I hope I write with a different attitude: something like ‘I hope to convince you of this,’ or, ‘Let’s think this through together.’ I want to make an argument rather than a pronunciamento.”
Billy Collins is so aware of audience that he has opened or ended every collection he’s published with a poem about the reader. “Lyric poetry is an isolated speaker talking to himself or herself, and overheard by the reader,” he says. “The reason I read out loud as I’m writing is that I can’t process unless I think someone is accepting it.”
The very act of publication is significant in terms of a writer’s stance toward readers, Judith Thurman says: “You’re giving something to someone. It’s an old-fashioned thing—offering someone something that you’ve worked hard on, so that it has become precious.”
Kenneth Burke wrote, “In its simplest manifestation, style is ingratiation.” Some styles always have a smile on their face, and their natural mode is performance. Rather than merely offer a fact, an insight, an action, they will present it in a glittering package: a joke, a metaphor, a pleasing alliteration. They give the impression, sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, of wanting readers’ approval or fearing their abandonment. James Wolcott says:
To me writing has always been communication. If it’s not, you don’t need to publish it. The contract I have in mind with my reader is “I promise not to bore you.” I’ve also always been aware that writing is a commercial transaction. People are buying the paper, the magazine. You’ve got to give them something for their time and money. You can’t simply preen. I’ve heard novelists say things like “I write for myself.” If that’s true, you wouldn’t publish. You’d just set it in a drawer somewhere. But you’re writing to be read, you’re writing to be heard.
Like Wolcott, Clive James matches his erudition and provocative insights with consistently entertaining prose, but he is careful not to serve too rich a dish. He says:
I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting. The best reason not to overdo the hoopla, then, is that the result would lack interest: an excess would be even worse than a deficiency, because it would look nervous, and nervousness, in prose as in seduction, repels. Otherwise, I try to make every sentence as attractive as the first.
As James says, being oversolicitous can sometimes make one appear nervous or desperate. Oversolicitous writers overuse the second person, transitions (as if the reader always needed a helping hand from thought to thought), or puns, which have the appearance of humor but are rarely funny. In a 1979 essay, “Stylistic Strategies Within a Grammar of Style,” Robin Tolmach Lakoff asserts that “the basic determinant of personal style” is a speaker’s perception of the relationship between him-or herself and a listener. (Lakoff is referring to speech, but her model works for writing as well.) As the relationship moves from minimal (for example, someone writing a legal notice) to maximal (an e-mail between lovers or best friends), the “communicative strategy” proceeds, in Lakoff ’s terms, from clarity to distance to deference and finally to camaraderie. A person’s or a culture’s style is defined by the particular matching of the style to the relationship—for example, how close a friend needs to be before the camaraderie mode is taken up. And, adapting Lakoff ’s framework to the subject of this book, a mark of a noticeable or distinctive style might be a strikingly unconventional matching: using formal language in a love letter or referring to the readers of an academic paper as “you guys.”
For each of the seven scales, there’s a certain zone of expectation—a place where “transparent” writers congregate and presumably look right through each other. Styles that are close to one or the other pole begin to attract readers’ attention. And styles that are all the way to one side seem odd, or maybe even pathological. Robin Lakoff, for example, associates a too-quick move to camaraderie with the narcissistic character, who, she writes “is desperately concerned with his reception by others and therefore must feign interest in others.”
Normally, writers with extreme tendencies will mute them in the process of revisions; others, however, will retain or even exaggerate them. Writers of this kind face one of two prospects: a life of rejection notes and marginalization, or the hope that somewhere along the line, an editor, critic, or reviewer will decide they are a genius and start the ball rolling.