'He Is Not Writing a Poem'

Cultural Amnesia (2007) ranks among the most enduringly entertaining books published in this still-young century. The late Clive James read books like a scholar and wrote about them like an impossibly gifted teenager – that is, with shameless enthusiasm. He was never too cool to get excited about a book or writer. When he enjoyed one, it was as though he had just finished reading it, was still high with readerly elation and wanted to talk about it with anyone who would listen. That he seems to have read everything, in multiple languages, was his gift to us, his readers. When the book was first published, another blogger dismissed it for precisely the quality I find so attractive – James’ eagerness to share his pleasure. He wasn’t dry and humorless enough for this guy – a pleasure-denying species of snobbery. 

I remembered a passage somewhere in the 850+ pages of Cultural Amnesia about the writing of good prose. My half-memory was triggered by something I had read in Sir Thomas Browne, to whom James devotes a chapter. No luck there. I remembered the chapter about Eugenio Montale being particularly rich in good ideas. Again, not what I was looking for. A bit of time-consuming search, with help from Google Books, turned up the passage I wanted, in the chapter James allots to Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg:

 

“A good writer of prose always writes to poetic standards. (One of the marks of poetry in modern times is that the advent of free verse opened the way for poets who could not write to prose standards, but that’s another issue.) The good prose-writer’s standards, however, should include the realization that he is not writing a poem.”

 

One recalls Oscar Wilde’s wisecrack: “Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning; he used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.”

 

Writers who write prose in the manner James is describing – flowery, flatulent, florid – understand neither prose nor poetry. I think of them as graduates of the Thomas Wolfe School of Composition. Rich prose can at the same time be astringent, but that comes only after years of application. Few of us write well from the start. Consider what James implies about the amount of discipline necessary to consistently avoid self-indulgence when writing prose:

     

“It is better to err on the side of too much scrupulosity than too little, but it remains a fact that good writers are occupied with more than language. The fact is awkward; and the most awkward part of it is that for metaphorical force to be attained in a given sentence, the metaphorical content of some of its words—which is an historic content provided by their etymology and the accumulated mutability of their traditional use—must be left dormant.”