I stopped writing because I was repeating myself,” Dashiell Hammett said. “It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.”
Hammett’s comment (made in a 1956 letter) suggests a dilemma. On the one hand, one wants to have a distinctive style: the mark of a Grub Street hack, after all, is the ability to change, chameleon-like, so as to blend in to whatever publication or genre is offering an assignment. On the other hand, as Hammett recognized, a strong style brings with it a set of difficult questions. Will the style, forged to meet the needs of a particular personality at a particular time of life addressing particular themes and demands in a particular genre, still be effective the next time out? And if so, how long will the magic last? Maybe most important, how are you expected to figure out that it’s time to make a change?
These questions confront all serious writers. Because they are so thorny, the path of denial and persistence, with its sad attendants—mannerism, calcification, predictability, and self-parody—will always beckon. John Steinbeck said, “When a writer starts learning his craft everything is difficult and everything is fresh. Once he develops the technique, the technique starts choosing the subject matter. Pretty soon you know how to trick the audience. You are no longer the master of your own work.”
There is a also a danger in changing too much: It seems clear that the more distinctive, idiosyncratic, self-conscious, or deeply felt the style, the greater the danger. Hemingway’s style was all of those things. When it appeared, it seemed a kind of miracle—original, eloquent, and absolutely compelling. But before long it became a burden. Its need for care and feeding retarded his growth as a writer, and its booming footsteps drowned out whatever he might have had to say. By the end of his writing career, Hemingway was a shell—an encrusted style behind which lay pretty much nothing.
John Middleton Murry wrote that in Henry James’s late books, “technique began to assume a life of its own.” What had occurred, Murry thought, was “hypertrophy of style. It has a sort of vitality; but it is the vitality of a weed or a mushroom, a vitality that we cannot call precisely spurious, but which we certainly cannot call real.”
I have in front of me a just-published (in 2003) book by Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century. In the preface he writes:
I like this book, and I especially like the title, which pretty well sums up the foul nature of life in the U.S.A. in these first few bloody years of the post-American century. Only a fool or a whore would call it anything else.
It would be easy to say that we owe it all to the Bush family from Texas, but that would be too simplistic. They are only errand boys for the vengeful, bloodthirsty cartel of raving Jesus-freaks and super-rich money mongers who have ruled this country for at least the last 20 years, and arguably for the past 200. They take orders well, and they don’t ask too many questions.
Thompson wrote that way in 1973, too. Then his self-conscious (not quite to the point of self-mocking), drug-fueled hyperbole and paranoia was sulphurous, funny, and perfectly appropriate to the times. Today, though one can admire him for sticking to his guns, in two senses of the phrase, the spectacle is a bit embarrassing. Everything changed and he is still fulminating, like the guy who keeps shouting after the music stops.
Another pioneer of the “new journalism,” Tom Wolfe, put more thought and effort into devising a second act to his career. It is hard to imagine a style and a period as well-suited to each other as were Wolfe and the 1960s. It was an outrageous decade, and every italicized word and exclamation point of Wolfe’s prose communicated outrage—sometimes delighted outrage, to be sure, but outrage nonetheless. Inevitably, the moment ended, and Wolfe was canny enough to change gears when it did. After The Right Stuff (published in 1979, but many years in the making, and a chronicle of the astronauts of the early 1960s), he spent a decade or so issuing polemics on modern art and architecture and other scandalous manifestations of contemporary culture. Then he turned to fiction in the form of two best-selling page-turners, Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full. Though traces of the old Wolfe are visible in them, the volume is toned way down. Style is not the main means of communication (and object of admiration), as it was in his early work, but an instrument to serve the purposes of plot, character, and societal mise-en-scène.
Wolfe’s shift is an example of something that happens in many writers’ careers, when they consult a roadmap, put on the directional and make a stylistic turn. Rarely is it a hairpin turn or radical shift; Hemingway doesn’t become Faulkner, and Faulkner doesn’t become E. B. White. Instead, the writer bears right or left—the kind of adjustment a sailor makes when he realizes he’s drifted off course. In his book The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of Artistic Change, psychologist Colin Martindale asserts that the evolution of both artistic traditions (say, French poetry) and individual artists’ working lives is a function of the pursuit of “increasing arousal potential.” That is, when a poet, composer, or artist begins to feel that he or she or all his or her contemporaries are saying the same or similar things in the same or similar ways, there is a conscious or unconscious realization that it is time to make a change.* Martindale unearths a fascinating 1650 quotation to this effect from Thomas Hobbes:
For the phrases of poesy, as the airs of music, with often hearing become insipid; the reader having no more sense of their force, than our flesh is sensible of the bones that sustain it. As the sense we have of bodies, consisteth in change and variety of impression, so also does the sense of language in the variety and changeable use of words. I mean not in the affectation of words brought newly home from travel, but in new, and withal significant, translation to our purposes, of those that be already received; and in far fetched, but withal, apt, instructive, and comely similitudes.
Martindale puts forth two ways artists deal with this challenge, one of which, suggested by Hobbes, is stylistic change. The other is a change in content: what Martindale calls “deeper regression,” a kind of Jungian channelling of “primordial” themes and images. He constructs sophisticated computer programs and impressive graphs showing that this indeed is what happened to Shakespeare, Dryden, Rembrandt, Beethoven, Wordsworth, Yeats, and Picasso.
Writers themselves, naturally, don’t put the matter in quite these terms, but often from what they say you get a similar idea. Raymond Carver, who made his name with his spare short stories, told interviewers that with “Cathedral” and subsequent works were “fuller, more generous somehow” than what had come before: “I went as far as I wanted to go with reducing the stories to bare bones minimum.”
From the beginning of his career in the 1950s through the early 1980s, Harold Bloom was a high academic critic, writing such abstruse books as The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, and The Breaking of the Vessels. In 1982, he took on the task of writing the introductions for the Chelsea House series of literary classics, intended for high school students. He estimates that over the next six years, he wrote about 400 of them (he has since done hundreds more), and, he says, the experience had a profound effect on the subsequent books he has written for adults, such as Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, How to Read and Why, and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. Bloom says: “It changed my writing. I forced myself to de-esotericize myself. It probably taught me how to write. I have made the conscious effort to write in a more straightforward and accessible way. I go out of my way every time I write a book to make clear that I don’t want a single academic to read it.”
Writers can take two or more such turns in the course of a career. Two chapters ago, I quoted Margaret Drabble on how she came to write her early novels in the first person. For her fourth book, Jerusalem the Golden, in 1967, she made a shift. Drabble says: “I just thought it was more adult to write in the third person. I found writing in the first person quite easy, and obviously you can’t go on doing what is easy all the time. And I did find it quite difficult, to begin with, because of the problem of having to impersonate other people.”
But eventually, the third-person style Drabble forged seemed inadequate to the challenge of confronting the social changes of the 1970s and 1980s. She says:
I just looked at The Needle’s Eye [1972], the very last paragraph—it’s a paragraph of such heart-rending optimism—and I just couldn’t believe that I could have written such a thing. It’s a scene where the character is in a part of working-class London and she’s covered in red paint, all battered, and it’s a sort of symbol of the joys of the common life. Absolutely no irony at all—a pure moment of faith and hope. You really couldn’t write that now, because urban life has deteriorated beyond any hope of getting better. Things are more angry, detached. I can’t use that voice; that voice is gone. I can only use it when I think of things that have nothing to do with the contemporary world. Otherwise, you have to put in irony, you have to put in a sense of failure or a sense of anger.
Drabble’s solution, beginning in her next books, The Realms of Gold and The Ice Age, was to infuse her prose with a little of that irony, in the form of what she calls “the dismissive or subversive voice.” It’s a distinctive tone that periodically appears in her fiction, in the form of rhetorical questions, present-tense verbs, direct address to the reader, experiments with point of view, and admissions of authorial uncertainty. In her 1995 novel The Gates of Ivory, she tells of two characters, Robert and Esther,
sitting in a backstreet sandwich bar, drinking black coffee from thick white cups and sharing a cheese and pickle roll. What are they thinking about? From here, it would be hard to say. Their heads incline seriously together, and they are deep in conversation amidst the clientele of van drivers and motorbike dispatch riders. Are they discussing the inflated prices of British Impressionist paintings? Are they planning a trip to the École Française d’Extrême-Orient, or to the Queen of Novara at Pallanza? Are they speaking of Robert’s ex-wife Lydia Wittering, who has broken an arm playing polo? Are they speculating about the rumoured arrival of Simon Grunewald? Are either or both of them having an affair with the mysterious woman in white? Are either or both of them thinking of Stephen Cox?
Whatever the text of the subtext of their conversation, here, from this side of the smeared plate with its scribbled legend of sandwich fillings, they seem united, intent.
Drabble says:
It’s as though there’s some kind of person in me who wants to say something quite harsh at certain points. It almost pops up of its own accord, as though there’s some person in me who can’t bear it anymore and wants to say something quite unkind or sharp.
It’s getting more pronounced as I get older, I think, this sort of detached aggression. It’s a bit of aggression towards the reader as well, at times, a mixture of an invitation to collaborate and a slight belligerence. A sort of “If you don’t like it, well, go read something else” attitude I sometimes feel.
It is quite possible, of course, to make more than just a few shifts in style in the course of a career—to go whole hog and elevate constant change into an aesthetic principle. Robert Louis Stevenson, in his essay “A Note on Realism,” put this forward as the mark of a true Artist. He noted that the process of creating a style requires “extreme perplexity and strain.” As a result,
artists of indifferent energy and an imperfect devotion to their own ideal make this ungrateful effort once and for all; and, having formed a style, adhere to it through life. But those of a higher order cannot rest content with a process which, as they continue to employ it, must infallibly degenerate towards the academic and the cut-and-dried. Every fresh work in which they embark is the signal for a fresh engagement of the whole forces of the mind; and the changing views which accompany the growth of their experience are marked by still more sweeping alterations in the manner of their art.
Had Stevenson lived another decade, he would have been around for the start of an artistic career that proceeded in exactly that way: Pablo Picasso’s. Stanley Crouch says: “The length of Picasso’s shadow crossed other art forms. He was once asked what style he was after. He said, ‘God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things.’ What Picasso was saying was that he would prefer to be like a deity.”
It’s not necessary to aspire to those heights to see the appeal of continually reinventing one’s style. Norman Mailer, whose books vary wildly in tone and technique, took a utilitarian view, saying in an interview, “Preserving one’s artistic integrity is not nearly so important to me as finding a new attack on the elusive nature of reality. Primarily, one’s style is only a tool to use on a dig.” As was noted earlier, Jonathan Raban makes a concerted effort to fashion a distinct “strategic persona” and style for each book. He says:
One of the reasons I so admire William Golding is that he didn’t just write ten versions of Lord of the Flies. Each of his books might almost be by a different author, though there’s a guiding intelligence and passion in each of them, and there is a line of Christian theology that runs through them that’s Golding’s own. But people could never quite get the measure of Golding because he surprised his readers with each book, and now he’s remembered largely as a one-book man.
The downside of this kind of approach, as Raban suggests, is in the area of marketing. Stylistic zig-zagging dilutes the brand. David Thomson says, “One of the things that gets in my way is that I keep changing the voice. It damages my career prospects. There’s no sense of picking up an author we can trust.”
Writers who are distinctive but not head-turningly so rarely make noticeable stylistic shifts. They are the stronger essayists and journalists and critics and historians, and the fiction writers in the realist tradition—say, an Anne Tyler or a Nick Hornby—who, though no less insightful or artful than their ostentatious colleagues, are more interested in story and character than in language. Their style is a reflection not of an aesthetic strategy but of a perspective on the world. Common sense tells us that men and women change over the course of a lifetime, and psychologists confirm it. One recent study looked at personality change in a group of adults who had been periodically surveyed over four decades and observed visible difference in every one of the 20 traits measured.* And if a writer’s interests, inclinations and reactions are different at 60 than at 30, that cannot help turning up in style.
But the change is evolutionary, not revolutionary. If it has a shape, it is a gentle curve, like a banana. Discerning critics will notice a shift, but it may escape readers and even the writers themselves, except for reflective moments when they pull down old books and tearsheets and put themselves in shoes they long ago discarded. John Lukacs says, “The most important thing is that I’ve gotten more Anglo-American—more terse, more direct, more condensed. Now it’s too condensed. There’s a loss there, because it probably escapes more people, but what can I do?”
As with other elements of style, change and continuity are to some degree beyond the writer’s control. John Updike says:
I usually begin a new project excited by the idea of not sounding like Updike—Rabbit, Run, for instance, was an attempt to provide a prose more freewheeling and uninhibited than that in my New Yorker stories, which in general have an en brosse quality, sticking up in little points. When I began to write Rabbit, Run in the present tense, it was a conscious effort to escape the me who writes in the past tense and tends to get mired in elaborate backwards-looking syntax. With Rabbit and his subsequent brothers, there was little looking back, just an impressionistic momentum and a fresh grasp of the language; lots of sentences that would be ordinary in past tense take on a hasty poetry in the present, even the “he says” expresses something different.
And so forth, story to story, book to book. The Mandarin explosions of A Month of Sundays and The Coup sought relief from the drab Rabbit terrain. In Seek My Face, I tried to write the way Jackson Pollock painted, in long stringy loops.
Nevertheless, there will be a sameness due to the limits of a single personality. One’s effort as an artist is to extend those limits as much as possible. When I read my old prose, usually aloud before audiences, I am aware of phrases I would not use now, things I have forgotten I ever knew, imitations of Proust and Henry Green that would not be so naked now, but in general I am comfortable. Like a real voice and body, changes occur—but organically, within one identity.
Not infrequently, a writer’s evolution is away from style—toward putting less emphasis on manner and more on matter. The urge for differentiation and self-display lessens, replaced by an urge to get to the heart of things. Stanley Crouch says, “The farther along I go, the less I know if style is important at all. In Moby-Dick, it’s almost as if Melville is saying, ‘You don’t need a style, you only need an objective.’ In Ulysses, the argument of the book is with style.” And Tobias Wolff says:
I used to be much more confident in my judgments, both moral and aesthetic. The edges got worn down. As a young writer, I used to talk about style in isolation: Hemingway’s style, Conrad’s style, Nabokov’s style—the way they put sentences together. I’ve come to realize that we have to grow into these things. I’m looser in my approach to it. When I write, I try to listen for something that’s more natural to me. I’m 56, and for better or worse, I have this voice. When it sounds unnatural, I change it. Making a conscious attempt at “style” could dislocate the tone from my natural timbre.
The precise nature of the development is less important than that it should happen at all, and in an organic fashion. Like a shark, a writer has to move to stay alive. After a long stint as a critic for the Village Voice, with frequent contributions to the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the New Republic, James Wolcott joined the staff of Tina Brown’s New Yorker in the early 1990s. He says that after his first few pieces appeared,
people said, “You’re not you yet.” I didn’t know what to say to that. A lot of people seem to want you to write the way you did when they first discovered you. That would mean you hadn’t changed in twenty years or so, which would not be so attractive. I look back on earlier pieces of mine and think they were too jokey. Certain all-out attack pieces I used to do, I feel it’s too easy.
Sure, there are writers who write the exact same way they did when I first read them. That seems so stunted and narrow. The effect they have is someone who loves to hear himself talk and never goes any deeper than that. They write as if they’re holding forth at a cocktail party, basically telling you how brilliant they are and not listening to a word anyone else says.
It’s possible to have an opposing stance: that having mastered or perfected a style, the writer has the prerogative to cling to that style—for-ever, if so desired. Billy Collins says:
Dickinson, Donne, Whitman—they all do the same thing over and over again. If you end up repeating yourself, that’s a small price to pay for a distinctive style. And as readers, in our hearts we like the repeaters best of all—they’re playing a song we recognize. As for me, if my style doesn’t develop at all, if I end up playing the same tin whistle, that won’t bother me at all, as long as I can keep writing “A” poems.