'I Have Thus Played the Sedulous Ape'

Robert Louis Stevenson in “A College Magazine” (1887) describes a writerly practice that makes a lot of sense: 

“Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality.”

 

More good advice that I’ve never taken. Over the years I’ve parodied the style of certain writers, usually in homage, not condemnation, but otherwise it never occurred to me to consciously ape another writer’s way with words. When I covered jazz for a newspaper, I shamelessly borrowed the stylistic tics of Whitney Balliett, but that was because I loved his prose and worked hard to filter through it my own way of looking at things. Only one reader recognized the indebtedness and he was a jazz drummer. Stevenson writes of his practice.

 

“I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of part”

 

Now that I think about it, I did, on one occasion in high school, ape another writer’s style, teetering just short of plagiarism. For a brief spell in tenth grade, I lacked the antibodies that make one immune to the gush of Thomas Wolfe’s purple prose. I was the perfect age to be infected by Look Homeward, Angel and wrote a “prose poem” titled “November.” The only thing I remember about it is likening the color of the sky to pewter. I wrote it in the eponymous month and by the time it was published in the school literary magazine at the end of the academic year, I was embarrassed by the damn thing. Stevenson goes on to catalog the writers he copied:

 

“I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to [Étienne Pivert de Senancour’s] Obermann.”

 

What a stew of styles. Like most good writers, Stevenson was a good reader, learning something from all, even if the lesson involved what to avoid. In The March of Literature (1939), Ford Madox Ford seems to have this passage in mind when he writes:

 

“[T]his writer can well remember the time when Robert Louis Stevenson was roundly styled un-English because he announced himself as playing the sedulous ape to Sir Thomas Browne. That was because the English critic, disliking all the arts, was filled with disgust at the idea that another form of art should be forced upon his attention.”

 

What I’m most enjoying while reading Stevenson systematically is the music of his prose. His rhythms are wonderfully seductive when they don’t tip over into self-conscious parading of cleverness. He knows how to sinuously structure long sentences. Ford writes elsewhere in The March of Literature: 

 

“It is to be remembered that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for piano of Debussy.”