'It Shows Unmistakably What You Are'

Too often style is judged filigree applied after the house is built. It’s cosmetic, inessential to the building’s structural integrity. Can a poor or indifferent stylist be judged a good or great writer? An obvious test-case is Theodore Dreiser. His Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy are powerful stories clumsily told. I can’t imagine rereading either novel but scenes stick with me after decades, which can’t be said about hundreds of other novels I’ve read. 

“Not to detect a man’s style,” Michael Oakeshott writes, “is to have missed three-quarters of his actions and utterances; and not to have acquired a style is to have shut oneself off from the ability to convey any but the crudest meanings.”

 

I’m reminded of journalists I’ve known, and many pulp writers, for whom words seem like an annoyance. They have to be arranged in some sort of order, but what an impertinence. A reader is almost tempted to judge the morals of so crude a writer. It feels like a defect of character.

 

Then there’s the writer who is all style, without discernable substance. One thinks of William H. Gass. The Anglo-Russian novelist William Gerhardie writes in Memoirs of a Polyglot (1931): “A writer’s style is the measure of his personality, and cannot be acquired consciously. It shows unmistakably what you are: gives you away for what you are.” Some stylists – Jonathan Swift comes to mind -- can be recognized from a single sentence in a blindfold test.  

 

[The Oakeshott passage comes from “Learning and Teaching” (The Voice of Liberal Learning, 1989).]