'They Were Just, and Clear'

“Style means the necessary word. The rest matters little.” 

I sometimes conduct an informal test on a piece of prose that either pleases me or somehow stylistically offends me. In either case, how does the writer achieve his effect? What can I learn from the successful sample? What would I change in the failed passage, if anything, that might improve it? Like many reader-writers, I’m an editor of other people's words.

 

John Ruskin tells us in his eccentric and beautifully written autobiography Praeterita (1885) that when he was a boy his father required him to pack four volumes of Dr. Johnson’s periodical essays in his baggage whenever the family traveled. Instead of complaining, Ruskin approves of the paternal stricture. He writes of Johnson:

 

“I valued his sentences not primarily because they were symmetrical, but because they were just, and clear; it is a method of judgment rarely used by the average public, who ask from an author always, in the first place, arguments in favour of their own opinions, in elegant terms.”

 

I wouldn’t change a thing, and not simply because I agree with Ruskin’s assessment. He identifies Johnson’s customary clarity. I can’t recall a single passage of purple prose in Johnson’s work. That’s not always the case with Ruskin, especially the earlier work, but here every word is in its proper place and “necessary,” to use the criterion mentioned at the top. His final sentence, in a move decidedly Johnsonian, broadens the observation to much of humanity. We all wish to see our precious opinions substantiated, truth be damned.

 

I recently reread Thomas Macaulay’s 1831 review of John Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Macaulay famously concluded it was “immoral” that so great a book should be authored by such “a great fool.” His judgment of Johnson’s prose is comparably misguided and, incidentally, overwritten:

 

“His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite; his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed; his big words wasted on little things; his harsh inversions, so widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old writers—all these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers, and parodied by his assailants, till the public has become sick of the subject.”

 

Is it possible to be mistaken in one’s conclusions while still writing well? Of course. Macaulay is wrong on both counts. His prose becomes a parody of the charges he levies against Johnson. It might be stylistically improved by breaking the one long sentence into several shorter ones. “Big words wasted on little things” is embarrassing in this context.

 

[The passage quoted at the top is from a journal entry Jules Renard made on September 5, 1893. See his Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

'Art Is Distinction: Process Is Not Being'

“The words you see are all there is worth seeing.” 

Adagia are maxims, proverbs, the root of our current word, adage. It entered English from the Latin in the sixteenth century. In one of his pamphlets, Milton refers to “quips and snapping adagies.” Erasmus published the first edition of his Adagia in 1500. It contained some eight-hundred sayings. Later editions totaled more than 4,100 entries. Charles Gullans (1929-93) titled one of his poems, collected in Letter from Los Angeles (John Daniel and Co., 1990), “Adagia”:

 

"Stolid and literal, I take my stand.

Art is decision, not the chance, unplanned

Performance of a trivial vulgar act.

It is selection of the crucial fact.

Though brute particulars still litter sense,

Art’s the suppression of irrelevance.

Life is the constant pressure of the new,

But art, the final judgment of the true,

Measures resistance to inane distraction.

Art is the model of coherent action.

It is not my confusion or confession,

It’s not a gossip’s tale concerning me:

It is the meaning of my history.

It is constructed and can be construed

As proposition and as attitude.

Then art is structure: nothing can be said

Without the order in which it is read.

Art is technique, by which the masters say

That ends are realized in a métier.

Art is distinction: process is not being.

The words you see are all there is worth seeing.”

 

Gullans was composing an apologia for his practice of poetry. Some readers will recognize the spirit of Yvor Winters, with whom Gullans studied at Stanford. There are obvious swipes at so-called “Confessional” poetry and sloppy, sentimental free verse in general. In a 1954 letter to Gullans, Winters wrote:

 

“There are two views of the principles which I have taught you kids: (1) they are correct, in which case they are not my property but are universals and are in the public domain, for anybody to use who has the talent to use them; (2) they are wrong, in which case it is up to you to work out something better.”

 

Gullans dedicated his first collection, Arrivals & Departures (University of Minnesota Press, 1962) to Winters (“magister ludi”). The Bright Universe and Other Poems (Abattoir Editions, 1983) includes “In Memoriam: A.Y.W.,” dedicated to Winters’ widow, Janet Lewis:

 

“It is a smaller island now,

my Captain, that all sheets are set

to the constant gale that takes you,

bending like the pages of a book.

 

“Farewell, old Voyager, farewell

ever, aye, as your taut ship skims

the swift, dark torrent, ceaselessly

driven by your hard argument

 

“onwards through foam, to continents

unmapped, wherever shelved and shoaled,

whatever reefs guard the smooth, blue

passages to land, if rudder,

 

“sextant, star, and compass be true.”

 

Winters died in 1968. His given name was Arthur Yvor Winters. Go here to read eulogies for Gullans after his death, including those by friends and fellow poets R.L. Barth, Turner Cassity and Timothy Steele.

 

[The quoted letter can be found in The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.]

'Robinson Crusoe Is a Gentleman'

“This day proving wet, we should have passed our time very uncomfortably, had we not found in the house two chests of books, which we eagerly ransacked.” 

Some time in the mid-sixties I was home alone on a rainy day. It was a summer afternoon. Self-conscious adolescent boredom was nagging me. I didn’t want to watch television. What would have been on? Game shows? Soap operas? I looked at the bookcase in my room, uncertain what to read or even if I wanted to read. For some reason I chose Robinson Crusoe, which I had already read at least once. I laid on my bed and read most of Defoe’s novel that afternoon. Even at the time I was surprised that the story sustained me, that it so thoroughly held my attention and enabled me to forget my boredom. It remains among the books I have most often read.

 

Dr. Johnson famously said: “Was there ever any thing written by mere men that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress?” (The opposite of what he said of Paradise Lost: “None ever wished it longer.”)

 

The enduring appeal of Defoe’s masterpiece, first published in 1719, is rooted in a common fantasy: If I were marooned on a desert island, how would I survive and what sort of world would I create? You can see how this would appeal to a bored adolescent. Robinson Crusoe remains essentially an excellent adventure story for boys and girls of any age. Like an earlier hero, Odysseus, Crusoe is cunning, courageous and resourceful – the image of ourselves we entertain in reveries. He is also frightened and despairing – precisely our true selves, at least on occasion. I most admire Crusoe’s competence and self-reliance. He gets things done. The best gloss on the story I know comes from an unlikely source – Shirley Robin Letwin’s The Gentleman in Trollope (1982):

 

“What defines a gentleman is a way of being in any circumstances. Even alone on his island, Robinson Crusoe is a gentleman. He reveals a gentleman’s attitude to his plight in his unfailing respect for the humanity of himself and all men; his ability to appreciate the treasures of civilization; his efforts to refashion them for new circumstance; his readiness to build new skills on old; his learning to recognize and repent for his sins; his determination to give his days an orderly shape, to reconcile himself to his misfortune and endow his life with what grace and contentment he can manage.”

 

The passage quoted at the top is taken from the September 3, 1773 entry in James Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785).

'My Taste Is Rather Boringly Conventional'

Readers often ask interesting questions. One wrote on Tuesday to say he enjoyed the “great variety” of writers and books I write about at Anecdotal Evidence. “I don’t see a consistent theme or genre or even a nationality,” he says. “Nothing you would choose to blog about would surprise me.” That’s reassuring. I like variety and don’t like to repeat myself too often. Then he asks questions I’ve never asked myself: “How would you define your taste? What do all the books and writers you like have in common?” My immediate, honest, unrehearsed answer: You got me. 

I’ve never looked for a grand unifying theory of anything. (One of the reasons I’ve lost most of my earlier interest in Coleridge.)  I have a tolerance for inconsistency in writers and humans in general, but I also have prejudices that I can’t defend critically. I try to avoid bald-face snobbery, though it creeps in. And these prejudices have changed over time, which seems to me a natural progression. Taste, like other aspects of maturity, evolves. Once I liked science fiction. Now I don’t. Once I loved Thomas Pynchon’s novels. Now I don’t. That doesn’t imply that I think readers of sci-fi or Gravity’s Rainbow are cretins. What I’m describing is growing up. Human personality is dynamic and protean. It’s always changing yet remaining identifiably the same – us.

 

If I had to give a one-sentence definition of my taste in literature, I would say it has to be well-written. I understand how nebulous and subjective a quality that is. I don’t like sloppy indifference to style. Neither do I like the flowery stuff, style as mere gingerbread. My idea of a great stylist in prose is Max Beerbohm. In poetry, J.V. Cunningham. Two utterly different sorts of writers.

 

Joseph Epstein published the essay “Such Good Taste” in the Spring 1993 issue of The American Scholar and collected it in With My Trousers Rolled (1995). As usual, Epstein is sensible and often speaks for me:

 

“That one’s taste is best revealed by one’s enthusiasms seems very intelligent, too, except that I am not at all sure I can define my taste by my own enthusiasms. I not only have a fairly strong inconsistency, in my view a happy inconsistency, of taste--I am one of those people who can watch a professional football game in the afternoon and then go off to a chamber music concert in the evening--but in so many realms my taste is rather boringly conventional.”

 

My bent exactly, except I detest sports. (See what I mean?) I suggest my reader seek out Epstein’s essay. Yes, he speaks for me except when he doesn’t. Humor is notoriously personal. Don Rickles cracks me up, leaves me helpless and tear-stained. Not so for many others. As you would expect, Epstein is good on humor:

 

“Nor does my taste always seem coherent. Take humor. I find Henny Youngman very funny. But I also love Max Beerbohm, who, among other knockout remarks, once, considering Freud, said: 'They were a tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses.' W. C. Fields can also do the job for me. I am not above caving in at slapstick: a Buster Keaton walk into a wall, say, or an Oliver Hardy fall through a floor. But then I also think Henry James a very funny man.”

'On the Plains of Poland'

On August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed to the secret non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Germans invaded Poland from the west nine days later, on September 1, 1939. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by October 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. 

In one of those curious historical coincidences, on September 2, 1939, Whittaker Chambers, then working as a writer-editor for Time magazine, met with assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle at his home in Washington, D.C. Chambers revealed his own background as part of the Soviet spy network, which included officials within the Roosevelt administration. He named names: Alger Hiss, among others. Berle was skeptical. He reported Chambers’ revelations to the president, who dismissed them. Berle then shared what he had heard with the FBI, who interviewed Chambers in March 1940, and again in 1942 and 1945. The FBI took no action. In Witness (1952), called by Hilton Kramer "one of the few indispensable autobiographies ever written by an American -- and one of the best written, too," Chambers describes what happened next:

 

“I had had to hurry from my office at Time magazine to the airport to catch the six o’clock flight for Washington. I fastened my safety belt, chewed my gum, lay back and closed my eyes. The great plane took off into the serene evening sky of September 2, 1939.

 

“On the plains of Poland, at the same moment, a new day was awakening the Polish nation to terror and insane distress as cavalry tried to turn back, with lance and rifle, a new force in the history of war and men—the German Panzer divisions.

 

“In Moscow, a few days before, Stalin, with a tigerish grin, and a more reserved Ribbentrop, had signed the pact that made Nazism and Communism allies. By the same scratch of the pen, Stalin had unloosed upon mankind, for the second time in two decades, the horror of world war."

    

Chambers had worked as a spy for the Soviet Union from 1932 until 1938, when he broke with communism. On August 3, 1948, Chambers testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He described the spy network at work in the late 1930s, including Hiss’ role. Though the statute of limitations on espionage had expired, in his second trial Hiss was convicted of perjury and sentenced to two concurrent five-year terms in federal prison and eventually served three and a half years.

 

For further context, I suggest reading Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars (Basic Books, 2017), concentrating on Chap. 19, “The Dead,” pages 463-499. Hanson tallies the carnage suffered by every nation. Poland stands out:

 

“[B]y war’s end, Poland would suffer between 5.6 and 5.8 million dead, the highest percentage of fatalities (over 16 percent) of a prewar population of any participant of World War II.”

 

Part of the explanation for the slaughter is that Poland capitulated, though never surrendered, to both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union in little more than a month. Between September 1 and October 6, 1939, the country suffered some sixty-six thousand fatalities. “Poland alone,” Hanson writes, “lost more of its citizens than all the Western European nations, Britain, and the United States combined.” He continues:

 

“Poland was the laboratory of Nazi barbarism, given that it was the site of over 450 German extermination, concentration, labor, and prisoner-of-war camps. It was both the first country attacked by Hitler and the first to have its citizens—both Jews and Slavs—targeted for mass extinction. . . . The Holocaust accounted for the greatest number of Polish deaths, given that the prewar Jewish community of Poland—10 percent of the population—was the largest in the world at somewhere around 3.5 million persons. Scarcely over a hundred thousand Polish Jews survived the German extermination efforts. The six most infamous extermination camps of the Holocaust—Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka—were all in Poland.”

 

In praise of the Poles, Hanson writes: “Polish resistance fighters usually fought the Nazi occupation in a far more muscular fashion than their Western European counterparts, provoking a commensurately fearsome German response.”

'How Very Like a Red, Red Rose'

The stuff starts as white powder at the bottom of a one-gallon plastic jug. Add lukewarm water to the line, shake vigorously. Add a thoughtfully included “flavor packet” – lemon-lime, my favorite – to make it “palatable.” Chill. Drink eight ounces every fifteen minutes until the jug is empty. The label calls it “Gavilyte-G Solution 4000ML.” Catchy. Included on the list of possible side effects:

“Very bad headache. Throwing up blood or throw up that looks like coffee grounds. Black, tarry [!], or bloody stools. Bleeding from rectum or rectal pain. This drug may cause you to be dehydrated or have electrolyte problems. Rarely, this may be severe or deadly.”

 

And I volunteered for this. The label says, “No REFILLS.” Barbara Loots in “Colonoscopy: A Love Poem” (Windshift, Kelsay Books, 2018) finds something to celebrate in this most humbling of medical procedures. With apologies to Robert Burns:

 

“My love is like a red, red rose.

I know because I’ve seen

the photographs inside of him

projected on a screen:

 

“the petal-like appearance of

his proximal transverse,

his mid-ascending colon

like a rose’s opening purse,

 

“appendiceal orifice,

a bud not yet unfurled —

Oh, what a pleasing garden is

my true love’s inner world!

 

“How very like a red, red rose

his clean and healthy gut.

I love my laddie all the more

since looking up his butt.”

'How Magnificent the Language!'

Fifty-one years ago I was working as a clerk in Kay’s Books in downtown Cleveland, perhaps the best job I ever had though my six-day-a-week paycheck never topped the double digits. One of the stockrooms in the basement was situated under the bar adjacent to the bookstore – the Domino Lounge. You could hear patrons talking and dancing, the juke box, running water and flushing toilets. Here was kept the overstock of such paperback imprints as Noonday, Vintage and Signet. I see from the date I wrote on the front endpaper that on August 30, 1975 I purchased The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne, edited by Norman J. Endicott as part of the Anchor Seventeenth-Century Series. Along with Rasselas, Pascal’s Pensées and Ulysses, it is the most heavily annotated and underlined volume I own. 

I pulled down the Browne collection recently after rereading Dr. Oliver Sacks’ essay “On Libraries.” He recalls his love of the Queens College library at Oxford:

 

“[I]t was in the stacks that I found and fell in love with all the works of Sir Thomas Browne—his Religio Medici, his Hydrotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus (The Quincunciall Lozenge). How absurd some of these were, but how magnificent the language! And if Browne’s classical magniloquence became too much at times, one could switch to the lapidary cut-and-thrust of Swift—all of whose works, of course, were there in their original editions.”

 

He’s right: “how magnificent the language!” One would be a fool to imitate Browne’s deliciously lush English but Sacks is right to think of Swift as a sort of prose antidote to Browne. Sacks continues:

 

“While I had grown up on the nineteenth-century works that my parents favored, it was the catacombs of the Queen’s library that introduced me to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature—Johnson, Hume, Pope, and Dryden. All of these books were freely available, not in some special, locked-away rare books enclave, but just sitting on the shelves, as they had done (I imagined) since their original publication. It was in the vaults of the Queen’s College that I really gained a sense of history, and of my own language.”

 

The same effect for me resulted not from a single place but from many libraries and bookstores, across several decades.

 

Sacks died on August 30, 2015 at age eighty-two.