'Like the Clothes He Wears'

“There must be in prose many passages capable of producing a particular kind of aesthetic reaction more commonly identified with poetry.” 

For some of us, this is self-evident. Dull, clumsy, tin-eared prose is at least as painful and offensive as its counterpart in poetry. Some prose writers are simply incompetent. They’re like backward children fumbling with Play-Doh. Others dismiss attention paid to crafting prose as being merely effete. I found this particularly true among journalists. Just throw words against the wall and see what sticks.

 

The passage above by the poet Donald Justice is from his essay “The Prose Sublime.” He adds a witty subtitle: “Or, the Deep Sense of Things Belonging Together, Inexplicably.” Justice published it in the Michigan Quarterly Review in 1988 and collected it in A Donald Justice Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (1991). He continues:

“[T]he reaction to prose as to poetry proves in experience to be much the same, a sort of transport, a frisson, a thrilled recognition, which, ‘flashing forth at the right moment,’ as Longinus has it, ‘scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt.’”

 

Justice explicitly dismisses “purple prose” and the “self-consciously experimental”; namely, Gertrude Stein and Finnegans Wake. Histrionic prose is self-indulgent and attention-seeking. It forgoes clarity – the writer’s obligation to the reader – and substitutes showing off. When I think of an example of what Justice is advocating, I think of the poet J.V. Cunningham, who is also masterful writer of prose. Take “The Journal of John Cardan” (1961), collected in The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham (2024). His prose is unsentimental and written with laser-like focus:

 

“So we save ourselves from the sentimental death of the hearts, and at the same time protect ourselves from engrossment in our wayward wishes. For a man must live divided against himself: only the selfishly insane can integrate experience to the heart’s desire, and only the emotionally sterile would not wish to.”

 

And this: “No dignity, except in silence; no virtue, except in sinuous exacting speech.”

I remembered Justice’s essay when rereading Henry Green’s “Apologia,” his 1941 reading of Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), collected in Surviving: The Uncollected Writings of Henry Green. Justice explicitly dismisses Doughty, along with Water Pater, as producing “prose that aims to be poetical.” Here, I disagree with Justice on the virtues of Doughty’s prose. It is unusual and eccentric but utterly convincing in context. Green writes:

 

“A man’s style is like the clothes he wears, an expression of his personality. But what a man is, also makes the way he writes as the choice of a shirt goes to make up his appearance which is, essentially, a side of his character. There are fashions in underwear, for the most part unconscious in that we are not particularly aware of how we dress. . . . [W]ith Doughty the man’s integrity is such that he writes on his own, if the dates were not available it would be hard to say when.”