`I Have to Hear Prose to Feel It'

August Kleinzahler, a poet and stylish prose writer, sounds like an adventuresome reader when he touts the charms of Jean-Henri Fabre on arthropods, Gould and Pyle’s classic Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (1896) and Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts. In his Paris Review interview (Fall 2007) he confesses to not being “a big fiction reader,” and says he prefers stories to novels and, implicitly, nonfiction and poetry to fiction:

“I like shorter forms, a lot of bang for the buck, a lot of action in the diction, syntax, sentences. I think a poet works so closely with language that it’s easy to become impatient with the larger, more diffuse structures a novelist needs to develop his material.”

I sympathize, and the sympathy may be rooted in age. Kleinzahler is my senior by three years. In my teens and twenties I was a trencherman of the book shelves, swallowing if not digesting everything, but I’ve lost my iron gut or perhaps my palate has grown more sensitive. Either way, I have little taste for prose padding, the flavorless filler fleshing out most fiction. I don’t think Kleinzahler is dismissing longer forms in general, though he claims to find Henry James “cloying.” I find in James precisely what Kleinzahler is calling for: “a lot of action in the diction, syntax, sentences.” He has interesting and unexpected things to say about a recently dead Irish writer whom I admire, John McGahern:

“His sentences are musically delicious and coherent. I have to hear prose to feel it. The critic Kenneth Cox talked about how language tastes, the vowels and consonants and movement of it in the mouth. One spits out what one doesn’t like. McGahern’s prose tastes delicious. A lot of fiction writers are plot and character driven, and I don’t really care that much about the story or the character, although I do have a soft spot for good description. I like fiction that’s closely written.”

Kleinzahler could be describing fiction writers as different as Bellow and Beckett. Both, like Dickens and Joyce, are delicious. So, even in translation, are Per Petterson, whose Out Stealing I recently read, and the stories of Isaac Babel. In the wrong hands, “closely written” fiction quickly turns precious and purple. Even The Unnamable never dispenses entirely with plot and character. It’s Kleinzahler’s omnivorous spirit I wish to celebrate. Here’s what he says when asked to name prose writers he admires:

“Joseph Mitchell. That’s the kind of writing I really love. I enjoy Liebling’s fight writing. A great enthusiasm of mine is David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film. His other books don’t interest me but his dictionary entries are magnificent. I like compendia. Nicolas Slonimsky’s dictionary of musicians is a favorite of mine. I love many of the old New Yorker writers. Whitney Balliett was one of the great American writers. Conversely I find Roger Angell’s articles about baseball unreadable. Perhaps there’s something arch lurking in the tone, a man of letters slumming. People have a snobbish thing about journalism, but what I love, what I read mostly, is nonfiction. I’m on a Kenneth Tynan jag now. His profiles are heaven.”