Authors: Clive James
If language deteriorates in journalism, the damage will be felt sooner or later in writing that pretends to more
distinction. In my time, to take one out of a hundred possible examples, it has become common among cultural journalists to use “harp back” for “hark back.” If
“bored of” should succeed in replacing “bored with” there will be no real call to object, except from nostalgia: “of” does the job at least as well as
“with” and anyway such changes have happened in the spoken language since the beginning. But “harp back” scrambles the separate meanings of “harp on” and
“hark back,” and thus detracts from the central, hard-won virtue of the English language, which is to mean one thing at a time. The solecism gets into the paper because the subeditors
no longer know the difference either, so to see it cropping up in books is no surprise, although a great disappointment. David McClintick’s
Indecent
Exposure
is one of the best books about moral turpitude in modern Hollywood. The constant and unavoidable struggle between creative freedom and the necessity for cost controls, with the
consequent oscillation between daylight robbery and ecstasies of bean-counting precision, could not be better explained. But the otherwise savvy author uses “flaunt” for
“flout,” thereby injuring two words at once: “To Cliff Robertson, Columbia’s reinstatement of Begelman was not only a brazen flaunting of justice, but also a deep insult
to Cliff
personally.” In a single sentence, an author who has convinced you that he could write anything leads you to suspect that he has read nothing. In the normal
course of events, a tactful copy editor might have corrected the error. But by now the barbarians are within the gates, and there seems to be no stopping the process of deterioration even in
America, whereas in Britain the cause is lost irretrievably. Backs-to-the-wall raillery from established authors is fun, but won’t work. As Kingsley Amis acutely noted, the person who uses
“disinterested” for “uninterested” is unlikely to see your article complaining about the point, because the person has never been much of a reader anyway. There is
evidence, however, that writers can read a great deal, among all the best exemplars, and still not take in the power to discriminate on critical points of grammar, derivation, usage, punctuation
and consistency of metaphor. Prescriptive initial teaching probably helps, but the capacity for such an alertness may be more in the nature of an inborn propensity than a possible
acquisition.
The propensity can even appear in hypertrophied form, to the writer’s detriment. A good writer of
prose always writes to poetic standards. (One of the marks of poetry in modern times is that the advent of free verse opened the way for poets who could not write to prose standards, but
that’s another issue.) The good prose-writer’s standards, however, should include the realization that he is not writing a poem. Henry James was not being entirely absurd when he
complained that Flaubert was unable to leave his language alone. (Proust’s qualified praise of Flaubert comes down to the same point.) It is possible to be an admirer of Nabokov while still
finding his alertness to cliché overactive, so that passages occur in which we can hardly see for the clarity: and with James Joyce it is more than possible. Somewhere between Tolstoy, who
was so indifferent to style that he did not mind repeating a word, and Turgenev, who would sooner have died than do so, there is an area where the writer can be economically precise without
diverting the reader’s whole attention to his precision. Lichtenberg would have included that area in his key concept of “the proper distance,” which he thought crucial to the
exercise of reason. Rembrandt, in a reported statement Goethe was fond of, said that people should not shove their noses too close to his paintings: the paint was poisonous.
One drastic side effect of an overdeveloped vigilance is the counterproductive
attempt to make
description answer the totality of observation. In
Troilus and Cressida
, Alexander has a phrase for it: “purblind Argus, all eyes and no sight.”
Attention is necessarily selective: if it were not, we would spend most of our waking hours paralysed by the impact of what we see. The secret of evocative writing is to pick out the detail that
matters, not to put in all the detail that doesn’t. Consider Joan la Pucelle’s lines in
Henry VI
,
Part 1
:
lines which might not be by Shakespeare, but which were certainly written by someone who knew what he was doing.
Glory is like a circle on the water,
Which never ceases to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperse to naught.
In reality, when something makes a splash there is always a
set
of ripples. There can never be just one circle. But the playwright needs only one, so he leaves the others out. If he had been concerned with rendering the natural
event, he would have got in the road of the Homeric simile. The simile, not “the object,” was his object. More than two thousand years before, the same was true for Homer, who could
render an object in passing (the twanging string of a silver bow is rendered in a single onomatopoeic stroke, arguri
oi
o bi
oi
o) and was always hunting bigger game. Ezra Pound, typically, was hammering away at a nail whose head was already flush with the wood. There is the occasional good
writer who is not a good describer, just as there is the occasional good painter—Bonnard, for example—who can’t draw a horse, but in general the ability to register the reality
in front of him is a
donnée
for anyone who writes seriously at all. When Joseph Conrad said the aim of the writer was “above all, to make you
see,” he meant a lot more than what the writer saw in front of his eyes. He was also talking about what was going on behind them: the moral dimension. In the novella
Typhoon
, when the narrator is thrown suddenly sideways, Conrad makes you see how the stars overhead turn to streaks: “the whole lot took flight together and
disappeared.” A scintillating descriptive stroke, but for him not hard. In
Lord Jim
, he makes you see Jim’s shame: much, much more
difficult.
It is better to err on the side of too much scrupulosity than too little,
but it remains a fact that
good writers are occupied with more than language. The fact is awkward; and the most awkward part of it is that for metaphorical force to be attained in a given sentence, the metaphorical content
of some of its words—which is an historic content provided by their etymology and the accumulated mutability of their traditional use—must be left dormant. Our apprehension of the
Duchess of Gloster’s mighty line in
Richard II
, “Thou show’st the naked pathway to thy life,” would be blunted, rather than
sharpened, if we concerned ourselves with the buried image of a naked person instead of with the overt image of an unprotected path, and our best signal for not so concerning ourselves is that
Shakespeare didn’t, or he would have written the line in a different way. (Simultaneity of metaphor becomes a feature of his later plays, but the complexity which is almost impossible to
understand at first hearing—and surely, as Frank Kermode boldly notes, must have been so at the time—would not be worth picking at if we gave up on our conviction that Shakespeare
himself must have understood the strings before he tied the knots.) To make an idea come alive in a sentence, some of its words must be left for dead: the penalty for trying to bring them all
alive is preciousness at best. If such preciousness is not firmly ruled out by the writer, there will be readers all too keen to supply it. In modern times, critics have earned a reputation for
brilliance by pushing the concept of “close reading” to the point where they tease more meaning out than the writer can conceivably have wanted to put in; but it isn’t hard,
it’s easy; and the mere fact that their busy activity makes them feel quite creative themselves should be enough to tell them they are making a mistake.
With the majority of bad writers the question never comes up. As Orwell points out in his indispensable essay
“Politics and the English Language,” they write in prepared phrases, not in words, and the most they do with a prepared phrase is vary it to show that they know what it is. Usually
they are not even as conscious as that, and their stuff just writes itself, assembling itself out of standard components like a spreading culture of bacteria, except that most of the components
are too faulty to be viable. Our real concern here, however, is not with the writing too bad to matter, perpetrated by writers who have nothing in mind except to fill a space. What troubles us is
the writing imbued with enough ambition to outstrip its ability. It faces us with the spectacle of
a failed endeavour. Somewhere back there, we wanted a world in which
everybody would be an artist. Now we are appalled when the duffers actually try. But there is still some point in striving to provide, by precept and example, the kind of free training that the
veteran Fleet Street literary editors used to dish out as part of their jobs. When suitably trained, a decent writer edits himself before the editors get to him. An outstanding creative talent is
always an outstanding critic, of his own work if of nobody else’s. Pushkin lamented the absence of proper criticism in Russia not because he needed help in judging his poems, but because he
wanted to write them in a civilized society.
Eugene Onegin
is a miracle of lightness in which every word has been weighed. When Pope called genius an
infinite capacity for taking pains, that was what he meant. The greatly gifted have almost everything by nature, but by bending themselves to the effort of acquirement they turn a great gift into
great work. Their initial arrogance is necessary and even definitive: Heinrich Mann was right to say that the self-confidence of young artists precedes their achievement and is bound to seem like
conceit while it is still untried. But there is one grain of humility that they must get into their cockiness if they are ever to grow: they must accept that one of the secrets of creativity is
an unrelenting self-criticism. “My dear friend,” said Voltaire to a young aspirant who had burdened him with an unpublished manuscript, “you may write as carelessly and badly as
this when you have become famous. Until then, you must take some trouble.”
It is a common failing of all people with little talent and more
learning than understanding, that they call more on an artistic illustration than a natural one.—LICHTENBERG,
Aphorismen
Lichtenberg was late to the game with this manifold idea, although he might have been the first to get
it into a nutshell. Shakespeare’s clever dolts, spouting their studious folderol as if it were wit, provided a lasting measure of how erudition can drive out sense.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
offers not the only, merely the mightiest, confrontation between brain-sick bookmen, as Don Adriano de Armado and Holofernes spend
four-fifths of the action warming up for the showdown in which they bury
each other with verbiage. (“They have been at a great feast of languages,” says Moth,
“and stolen the scraps.”) In play after play, the typical encounter between two or more such zanies is a disputatious colloquium in which each participant levitates on a column of hot
air. A hallmark of Shakespeare’s people of substance is never to do the same except in jest. Iago, wise when not jealous and “nothing if not critical,” scorns “the bookish
theoric” whose talk is “mere prattle, without practice.” Clearly Iago speaks for Shakespeare even as he plots against Othello. Ben Jonson’s plays teem with mountebanks who
raid the tombs of scholarship while picking the pockets of the suckers. The great playwrights infused our language with a permanent awareness of the difference between desiccated eloquence and
the voice of experience. English empirical philosophy began in the inherited literary language. That was how the English-speaking nations, above all others, were armed in advance against the
rolling barrage of ideological sophistry in the twentieth century. The Soviet craze for assembling a viewpoint out of quotations from Marx and Lenin reminded us of men in tights defending the
indefensible with chapter and verse.
Even without Shakespeare (supposing that such a precondition were possible) subsequent English literature would have been
well populated with satirical examples to ward off casuist flimflam. In Restoration comedy, the division between true wit and false turned on the same point: true wit might have contributed to a
new book, but false wit was always quoting an old one. Molière’s typical scam artist talked like a library, but Molière on his own was not enough to inoculate the French
language against the pox of learned affectation. The English language had the benefit of repeated injections. The
folie raisonnante
that ruled Swift’s
flying island of Laputa was fuelled by book learning, and Thomas Love Peacock, the great student of the connection between high-flown diction and mental inadequacy, made post-romantic
nineteenth-century England the focus of the topic: just as Peacock in real life undid Shelley’s vegetarianism by waving a steak under his nose when he fainted, so Peacock in his quick-fire
novels riddled the inflated language of romantic soul-searching. In Peacock’s crackpot masterpiece
Melincourt—
one of a whole rack of strange
books, it stands out by being even stranger than the others—that compulsive classicist the Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub, poised on a high rock with
Lord Anophel Achthar as they
both face imminent death, quotes Aeschylus in the original Greek and Virgil in the original Latin, while Lord Anophel curses him in the original English. (Peter Porter, himself a mighty quoter,
though a sane one, has a soft spot for the Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub.) The idea—an idea built into the English language over centuries of comic richness—is that learning and knowledge must
be kept in balance. In
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, Shakespeare’s King of Navarre summarized it in advance when he commended Biron: “How
well he’s read, to reason against reading!”