`Clarity, Individuality, Beauty of Writing'

Dr. Oliver Sacks edited The Best American Science Writing 2003, and in his introduction he describes the avalanche of printed matter, specialized and popular, from the Journal of History of Neurosciences to The Atlantic Monthly, that buries his desk. Serious readers will share his mingled sense of satisfaction and alarm. Here’s how he decides what to read:

“An omnivore, yet selective, a sort of filter-feeder, I will extract intellectual nutrients from the articles as I extract nutrients from my dinner. Every so often, however, I am arrested by an article because it contains not just new information but a highly individual point of view, a personal perspective, a voice that compels my interest, raising what would otherwise be a report or a review to the level of an essay marked by clarity, individuality, beauty of writing.”

When I approach a known literary quantity, a writer whose work I already enjoy and respect – say, William Faulkner – I’m likely to be a less discriminating filter-feeder. I’ll read most anything by Faulkner, at least once, even ingesting a little grit (in Faulkner’s case, A Fable) for the sake of the nutrition-rich krill. Yet faux-Faulkner, second-hand Faulkner that is hardly more than pastiche – Cormac McCarthy, for instance – is pure grit. His highly stylized murk is more pretentious than one of those productions of Richard II in Wehrmacht uniforms, and more tedious.

Sacks rightly singles out “clarity, individuality, beauty of writing” as the qualities he looks for, even in journalism. Nit-pickers will argue that all three qualities are highly subjective, and of course they are, but any sensitive reader recognizes them when he sees them. I’m thinking about this because of a generous (in length, in thoughtfulness) e-mail Dave Lull sent me on the subject of William James and Jacques Barzun, among other things. Dave read a bit of James some years ago, and concedes “the impressive style of James’s writing,” but has since felt no urge to return to his work. The difference between us – Dave and I – may be that I will pursue style, at least for a while, for its own sake. I don’t think of style as a manner imposed arbitrarily on language – as in Cormac McCarthy – but as the sound of a sensibility. It expresses an inimitable stance toward the world. It’s not a given, and it can’t, strictly speaking, be learned. As a writer becomes acquainted with himself, grows into who he is, he sooner or later will exude style in language. Here’s how Barzun puts it in A Stroll with William James:

“James achieved ecumenical expression, as other have done, by tireless revision and rewriting. A wording that really exhausts the author’s intention comes only from an effort that exhaust’s the author, too.”

And this:

“Whether in spoken or printed prose, the forward movement that makes it attractive comes from the author’s offering his thought not as made but as being made. In possessing that quality, James’s style is the perfect mirror of his philosophy, where `what really exists is not things made but things in the making.’”