`But Quirky, My God!'

It’s bracing and probably healthy to watch as one’s enthusiasms – in this case, esteemed writers – get roughed up by critics and readers of proven wit and learning. Admiration is not abject worship, and a great writer can always take the heat. After all, I love Joyce despite Finnegans Wake. Here’s Fred Chappell, in a 1992 interview, on one of my favorite poets:

“Wallace Stevens, who thought very strongly about poetry and felt strongly about it, writes the most illogical essays in the world. They make no sense. They’re wonderful from sentence to sentence, but the paragraphs don’t make any sense. So one should learn to write logically. I must say, in regard to Stevens, that the material that he wrote for his insurance work doesn’t make any sense either. I read a talk about insurance that is included in his Opus Posthumous. It made no sense whatsoever. It was nice and empty.”

It’s reassuring to have one’s inadequacies affirmed. I’ve never been able to figure out what Stevens was going on about in most of his essays. In this, he reminds me of Emerson. Judged by the sentence or phrase, Emerson crafted some of the grandest prose in the language. But ask me to paraphrase “The Poet,” and I’m blank.

James Lees-Milne (1908-1997) was an English historian, especially of architecture, and voluminous diarist. Each volume of his published diary takes its title from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” In 1996, Lees-Milne published a collection of profiles, Fourteen Friends, including “Henry Yorke and Henry Green.” That represents one person, by the way, for the author of Loving was a Yorke by birth. Lees-Milne writes of Green’s prose style:

“It is always staccato, enigmatic, and maddeningly elusive. One episode slides into another. The reader is perpetually brought up against blank walls. At the finish of every novel the story is unresolved, and the reader is left in the air. In venturing these criticisms I do not mean to imply that Green’s style is a bad one. Far from it. Quite apart from being – to employ a pedantic term – sui generis, it is seldom strained. It is damnably direct, colloquial and powerful. But quirky, my God! Moreover, and this is why I persevered in reading everything he wrote, the novels contain poetry of a morbid kind. They are embellished – if that is the right word – with passages that take the breath away, passages that could be extracted from the book without in the least affecting the book’s theme.”

Lees-Milne’s reservations about Green’s work sound oddly like some of my reasons for enjoying it so much.