Whose prose is being described, and by whom?:
“[T]here is a vigorous
unacademic spontaneity about his style, with its sudden detours and lunges, its
thick peppering of jokes and reminiscences. His later books especially are like
huge monologues—interior monologues, almost. Everything reminds him of
something else, and the free associations come tumbling out.”
You might think Burton and
his Anatomy of Melancholy, but for the reference to “later books.”
Burton wrote only one. Browne? Still several centuries too early. Joyce? Even
Beckett? Good guesses but, sorry, no. A little earlier. In other words,
somewhere between the late-seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Here’s
another clue, by the same writer, about the same writer:
“[E]ven by the standards
of his book-soaked contemporaries, [his] prose is remarkable for being such a
tissue of quotations and allusions, half of them unidentified or unexplained.”
And another:
“His own single-mindedness,
his stamina, his fly-paper memory, put him in a powerful position; even though
his pose of omniscience may have been something of a journalist’s trick, the
amount of information which he did have at his disposal is staggering.”
No cheating, please.
[John Gross in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969) is describing a type now extinct, representing a species unknown to contemporary readers: George Saintsbury. “Throughout his career,” Gross writers, “he waged a noisy war against theoreticians and system-builders.”]
8 comments:
Liebling?
I’ll take a flier and guess George Gissing.
I don't suppose it is, but much of that would fit George Meredith...
I came to this too late to join in the guessing, but to be honest the revelation came as a complete surprise. Until then I almost wanted to say Samuel (Erewhon) Butler, but no: he had his share of journalist's tricks; but he surely lacked -- more: disdained -- the pose of omniscience.
George Saintsbury (1845-1933). His "A Short History of English Literature" (1898) is so well-written that it was still being reprinted and used by colleges and universities into the 1970s. By "short," by the way, he means about 800 pages of small print. But it's good!
I know little Saintsbury, but one statement of his has stayed with me (this is from memory, so the wording is only approximate): "Nothing pains me so much as the contempt with which people treat second-rate writers, as if there is room in life only for the first rate."
It reminds me a bit of Chesterton's dictum, "Any job worth doing is worth doing badly."
The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. That is a good book. Jus read it over the last year. -nathan
I actually guessed this, right before the paragraph with the answer, because last week, when deciding whether to read "A Child of Eve," I read Saintsbury's article on Balzac in the 1911 Britannica. (my guesses started with Bellow, then Chesterton, but the "pose of omniscience" narrowed it down).
Years ago, when I was trying to figure out if I was missing much by not reading lots of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, I read what Saintsbury had to say (in a book whose title I forget) about that vast subject. His quick answer was something like no, not missing much by not reading lots, but also yes, missing much by not reading them at their best ----, and he even specified when other playwrights - Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and a couple of others, were working at a Shakespearean level, in their own style, of course....)
Off topic, thanks for your interesting and well-expressed opinions.
Back on topic, there was a writer who said something like "We are too kind to books, we will read a bad book with gratitude if it has only a few passages (or similes) of true value" - I would love to find the actual quote. Impossible to find by word-search on the internet - no way to search because the only word I am sure of in the quote is "books", and even that word might have been "novels" in the original quote.....
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