'They Make Us Sound Like the Ancient Romans'

We can admire writers without learning much about sentence building or wishing to emulate their prose. I’m in the middle of rereading Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, which is slow going even by the standards of a slow reader. The language is identifiably English but elaborate, archaic and sometimes creaky. Published in 1888, it might have been written in either of the two preceding centuries. Surrender to the often-grandiose rhythms and you can be swept along like a surfer riding a wave. But like a surfer, you’ll have to work hard to remember the experience in detail. To ape Doughty’s style would prove fatal. The same is true of other writers whose prose I admire – Sterne, Landor, Henry Green.

From Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) we can always learn something. Her prose is identifiably modern, and always economical, never flamboyant, but you would not confuse it with that produced by those patron saints of minimalism, Hemingway and Beckett. One of the books I’m reading as respite from Doughty is Bowen’s A Time in Rome (1960), which begins like a conventional travelogue and becomes a digressive meditation on many things, especially architecture and the ravages of modernism on city life. She writes a graceful catalog, unlike writers who apply a vacuum cleaner to the landscape. Here is her rendering of the “vertical suburbs” of Campagna:

“[L]ean young skyscrapers jumbled on one another like pyramids of cosmetics or tinted candy – white, lemon, orange, apricot, rose, blue-pink, chalk-blue, henna, pistachio, olive, mulberry, violet. Some ape New York, others Scandinavia. Shiny with glass, honeycombed with balconies spawning flowerpots, these appear to be settings for youthful marriages (rentier).”

And this on the following page:

“[A]n outburst of what looks like Germanic neo-mediaevalism. . . .Gasworks, slaughter-houses, rubbish dumps, cattle markets, an abandoned shooting gallery, a defunct racecourse, duststorms of demolition, skeletal battles of construction, schools, asylums and hospitals, squatters’ villages, marble-works, and other relics of pleasure or signs of progress crop up according to where one goes.”

Such writing has a deceptively casual transparency. Bowen never draws attention to her own virtuosity. Her friend the poet Howard Moss, in a tribute he wrote after her death, has an interesting explanation for the quiet confidence of Bowen’s prose:

“Her amazing vocabulary was partly the result, I think, of her conquering her stutter. She seemed to know synonyms for every word in English. Her celebrated command of language may have begun as an effort to circumvent it, and her wit, in part, derived from the successes and the failures thereof.”

He’s right. There’s a precision about her prose. It never feels desultory. Bowen’s language is suffused with her sensibility. Though unmistakably hers, her prose is not freakish or flowery, and never there just for the sake of showing off. She has a way of setting up a paragraph in which the tail carries, like a scorpion, a sting:

“We the democracies, for instance, are surprised by the stated totalitarian view of us—we are, we learn, given over to luxury, the enslavement of the worker, power-mania, whoring, boredom, imperialism, unseriousness, dyspepsia, blood-lust, insecurity, venality, money-making, sloth, intrigue, competitiveness, terror of wrath to come, servile art, sleeping-pills, hangers-on, sterilizing fantasies, degeneracy. Really, they make us sound like the ancient Romans.”

Parse that paragraph metrically. Read it for rhythm. And remember to smile if not laugh.

[Read Bowen’s novels, of course, in particular The Death of the Heart, and her short stories, but don’t forget Bowen’s Court, described by Hubert Butler as “that wonderful book of social and family history"]