'To Delight in the Words on the Page'

Writing advice is a thankless, usually futile presumption. Prose is so personal a reflection of the writer’s sensibility, and the various tasks it is expected to undertake so numerous, that each bit of counsel carries in its wake a thousand exceptions to the rule. If I say, “Avoid the passive voice,” you will encounter a knot in your next sentence (or my previous sentence) that can be untied only with a deft dismissal of the active voice. Writing is an unending act of tinkering and problem-solving. 

In “How to Write English Prose,” David Bentley Hart dismisses some prominent prose scolds – Orwell, Strunk and White – and for that we can thank him. Writing in conformity to a set of rules – whether a schoolmarm’s or an algorithm’s – is a recipe for dreariness. A good sentence surprises its writer as much as its reader.

 

In my experience, the only way to learn how to write well is to persistently read and write. Read like a writer – attentively, hungrily. Hart supplies samples from some of the best in the language, starting with Sir Thomas Browne and a passage from Ecclesiastes in the King James version. His essay doubles as a mini-anthology of inimitable prose. “Those who read only to be informed and never to delight in the words on the page,” Hart says, “have every right to do so. But do not write for them.”

 

Starting in the last century, Hart notes, writers of English prose gradually adopted “greater simplification and aesthetic minimalism.” Perhaps journalism is responsible, or Hemingway. In some of the latter’s early stories the prose is precise and crystalline, but soon he lapsed into self-parody. I cheered Hart while reading this:

   

“If you were told in school that Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea is a specimen of good writing, disabuse yourself of this folly. It is in fact an excruciating specimen of bad schoolboy prose, written by a man who by that point had, alas, been too often drunk, too often concussed, and too often praised.”

 

Hart admits that the move toward simplification in prose was “a corrective of certain excesses of the past.” If clarity is the writer’s chief goal, stripping things down to essentials is one way to achieve it. However, “on the whole, the result has been a kind of official dogma in favor of a prose so denuded of nuance, elegance, intricacy, and originality as to be often little better than infantile, not only in vocabulary but also in artistry and expressive power—a formula, that is, for producing writers whose voices are utterly anonymous in their monotonous ordinariness.”  

 

Some of Hart’s advice is commonsensical and pragmatic: “Always read what you have written aloud. No matter how elaborate your prose, it must flow; it must feel genuinely continuous. This is not to say one must imitate natural speech; it is only to say that one must try to capture its rhythms. If what you have written is awkward on your tongue, then it is awkward on the page.”

 

Hart himself, however, is often not always the most reliable stylistic exemplar. His prose is too often fulsome. His good sense is compromised by an attention-seeking vocabulary. I too love rare words but try to use them sparingly or for comic effect. Hart can’t resist lush, rarified, archaic language – the literary counterpart to jargon in much technical writing -- and his sentences can read like adolescent showing-off. “Always use the word that most exactly means what you wish to say,” he advises, correctly [though I don't always know what I wish to say until I've said it], “in utter indifference to how common or familiar that word happens to be.” The first part of his sentence is inarguable, but in the latter half Hart reminds me of Edward Dahlberg, who consciously aped some of the seventeenth-century writers cited by Hart --  Browne, Burton, Lancelot Andrewes. The result, even in Dahlberg’s finest books, was often loss of clarity. The reader trips over the rock-like words in his path. He is distracted, sometimes for good.

 

I write this way only after thoroughly enjoying Hart’s essay, despite reservations. He reminds us that writing good prose – like excelling at verse and carpentry – can only be achieved with time, labor and perseverance. It requires love and mastery of a craft. I’m reminded of what Evelyn Waugh told a BBC interviewer in 1953 when asked if he was conveying a “message” in his work:

 

“No, I wish to make a pleasant object, I think any work of art is something exterior to oneself, it is the making of something, whether it’s a bed table or a book.”