Unstylish style in Vanity Fair.

Vincenzo Barney and the constraints of elegance.

I suppose most writing could always be better. Unless you’re Nabokov

lol or Samuel Johnson

Or Walter pater. Who are the top five English prose stylists?

This snippet from a discussion I had with James Marriott (you can guess which one I am) lead us to the question of whether prose style existed before Flaubert and Wilde, and if so what it means. As James said, “it sounds odd to describe the best prose of the seventeenth century as stylish. Is Shakespeare stylish? The word is too small.”

Perhaps we can distinguish between style and stylish. Stylish is a nineteenth century word, meaning, essentially, conforming to fashion, or, “noticeable for ‘style’.” Style is a much older word, meaning “The manner of expression characteristic of a particular writer (hence of an orator), or of a literary group or period.” It can indicate “clearness, effectiveness, beauty, and the like.” (OED)

In this sense, we can say that Shakespeare is not stylish, as such, he is not noticeable for his style, nor for his adherence to stylistic fashion, but rather for the uses of style of which he is capable. Shakespeare can write in many styles. Martin Amis once said of V.S. Pritchett, his “style answers to the shape and direction of his thoughts—and to their fertile swiftness.” So with Shakespeare, but with a vaster creation.

What we call stylish comes from the aesthetic movement: from the twin sources of Flaubert and Wilde flow the whole river of modern stylish writing. This is why, when I asked Claude, and asked on Notes and Twitter, almost all the answers I got about who were the top five English prose stylists named twentieth century authors. Orwell Didion, Waugh, Wodehouse, Nabokov, and so on.

There is something that unifies these writers, and so many more, some common assumption that style means polished, lapidary, whether plain or ornate. Elegance, pared to directness; steel painted as wood; the rococo in plain dress. Indeed, the old distinction between plain and ornate styles has perhaps come to be the new distinction of simple or complex, elegant or purple. It is now unstylish to use too many commas, to write with grandiloquence, or to allow sentences to uncoil like tangled rope. All of those things can be part of a style, though, which is why Martin Amis is so widely praised among modern writers.

Styles are everywhere, but not all styles are stylish. When thinking about which writers are the best stylists, it is thus tempting to list modern names of those who have exemplified the various modes of aesthetic stylishness.

Take the recent Vanity Fair article about Cormac McCarthy, written by Vincent Barney, which opened with the sentence: “I’m going to tell you about the craziest love story in literary history.” The wide-spread disdain this article received amount to it not being stylish. This is not the accepted mode. (Some say it sounds like Gossip Girl, some say it sounds absurd; but I think it is a fairly classic journalistic style, grossly misapplied; when you are trained to find television references everywhere, then, yes, this will read like the opening line of an episode of Sex in the City.)

This is the same thing Amis said of Pritchett (albeit, Amis admired Pritchett): “Pritchett’s prose has little time for the guidelines of elegance.”

Those guidelines are currently a strict combination of the plain, the simple, and the smart. We want our writing to be circumspectly grand. “Verb enrichment” is quite acceptable. Hammy metaphors are not. The rugged excesses of the Vanity Fair piece are de rigueur, which is why the objections were not merely moral (the celebration of McCarthy’s grooming) but aesthetic (the prose is frilly, and thus déclassé). Vincenzo Barney’s prose has spilled voluptuously outside the guidelines of elegance.

In Slate, Dan Kois called it “the weirdest, most frequently nonsensical, most floridly overwritten story to appear in a legitimate magazine since … maybe since the heights of New Journalism in the 1970s” and complained about the “the overwhelming sentence-by-sentence purpleness of his prose.” That is an instructive comparison: the New Journalism definitely had style, but it is no longer stylish, if it ever was.

Here’s the opening paragraph of a David Foster Wallace essay for comparison.

The best metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo’s Mao II, where he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (i.e., dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer’s trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebrospinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention.

This is, to modern eyes, if not contemporary ones, morally objectionable, or at least a period piece that lacks sensitivity: to compare the writing of a novel with the suffering of a child! Wallace says the “damaged-infant trope is perfect because it captures the mix of repulsion and love the fiction writer feels for something he’s working on.” Some may call this is a forceful form of truth-telling, but it is kin to Barney’s glamorising prose. All style has a moral purpose, known or unknown to the writer, and this modish writing reveals an insufferable preference for metaphor above human dignity. If you think it’s bad being a novelist, try being the poor child.

What saves Wallace from being “purple”, “florid”, in the same manner as Barney, is the long-reaching influence of Joyce, not just visible in “hydrocephalic”, “cerebrospinal”, but in the fashioning of an epic simile, the unshrinking description of a physical reality usually demurred. This may not win much approval now, but it is a good example of a “missing-link” in the continuity between the approved elegance of stylish prose and the de rigueur styles of other fashions. How different, really, is Barney’s prose to this?

If this was once stylish, all it surely has now are the vestigial marks of a former style. Barney is noticeable for his style because it is unstylish; all fashions become ridiculous.

Kois said Barney was “so determined to make his mark on the literary firmament that he eclipsed his subject’s story with his own writing style.” Why this is much more noticeable when the writing style is outside the currently approved guidelines should be obvious. We approve the stylish, not all styles; we know what we like, and we like what we know. Barney told Kois, “the style I was most trying to steal from was, and I hope this pisses a lot of people off, Martin Amis.” This surprised Kois, but should not. Amis’ style is no longer within the guidelines, just as Pritchett and Wallace are not. He, too, was vulgar.

To Amis, Pritchett was old-fashioned, resistant to the odd mix of Joyce-and-simplicity that came to dominate the new aestheticism. (Despite his reputation, Amis used many a cliche: love striking like lightning, and so on.) But Amis was a more acute critic than practitioner. He can now be seen as full of his own floridity. Barney says, “In the unsung Zone of Interest, Amis records the greatest phraselet in the English language, “glueyly asquirm.””¹ The current constraints of elegance are enforced by admirers of Amis who have forgotten just how purple he could be.

Here is the Barney describing lightning, something Kois singled out.

It’s monsoon season, and lightning bobs and weaves in the corner of your eyes all day like floaters. There are three separate storms to the south, delicately wind-tilted on the horizon. Lightning races them in a stitchless thread, and to the north rain shimmers through the sheerest rainbow, stamped perfectly horizontal against the mountains like the execution line on a document.

You might wince at how far outside the mode of elegance Barney has gone here, but consider these two descriptions of lightning from Amis. First from Yellow Dog:

Beyond, arthritic feelers of lightning were lancing out, sideways, upwards, forming coastlines with many fjords. There was a repeated jumpcut effect, and shifting blocks of nightscape.

And second from London Fields:

They drove through veil upon veil of scalding heatmist. The sky pulsed blue, blue, blue. Whereas the cyclones and ball lightning in Yugoslavia and Northern Italy had even made it on to the pages of Keith’s tabloid.

It’s not so hard to imagine how Amis’s over-heightened, heavy-water Joycean-concentrate, which often has the feel of the Flaubert-Wilde style expounding manically after a forty-eight hour binge, became such a strong influence of what is deemed to be Barney’s unstylish style.²

So when we ask who are the best prose stylists, it will be instructive not to dwell too much on what is stylish. All styles fit some purposes; all moralities are better adapted to certain styles. The best stylists are the writers who bring particular styles to perfection, inventing, as they do so, ways not just of writing, but of arguing, perceiving, expressing, thinking. The modern division between style and argument is a new and silly one.

Johnson wrote in the Adventurer:

Some read for style, and some for argument: one has little care about the sentiment, he observes only how it is expressed; another regards not the conclusion, but is diligent to mark how it is inferred; they read for other purposes than the attainment of practical knowledge; and are no more likely to grow wise by an examination of a treatise of moral prudence, than an architect to inflame his devotion by considering attentively the proportions of a temple.

How many readers read like this today! Johnson’s mockery, though, was gentle. These are the motives and the cues for reading (along with a few others)³ and it is no waste of time to read. What Johnson relies on is the unity of style and argument. This is what Barney’s detractors all came close to expressing.

Who then can we name as the best stylists? The question is provocative. But some names stand out.

Tyndale is essential: few did more for the development of the plain style in English. His Bible translation forms the basis of much of the KJV. You know his phrases from your childhood: Our Father, who art in heaven; let there be light; the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. There is a whole mode of expression in English that is essentially Tyndalean.

After Tyndale, Johnson. What Tyndale did for the plain style, Johnson did for the ornate. He took the work of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and brought it to its limit.⁴ Johnson’s periodic sentence, full of parallelism, became the foundation of Carlyle’s writing, who in turn was the foundation of Dickens, who in turn, well, you see the point. Johnson was a strong influence on Austen, too. In all of these inheritors, we can see the strong relationship between style and morality.

Who else? Bacon for the style of the English essay and of scientific writing? Browne for the Baroque style that was still extant in Orlando and Brideshead? Milton for the polemical style? Austen for the precise style? Cranmer for the prayer book?

Many wish to crown Wodehouse, but he is surely an instance of the period, a latter Dickens-crossed-with-Pater, a low-comedy Wildean. Orwell is ever praised for his plain journalistic style, but who can claim it was never done before or that it sets a new standard? Surely, as Johnson said of Swift, Orwell said what he had to say and that is an end of it. Wilde should be given high honours, as he is a source for so much of what became stylish later. Emerson and James perhaps did things no-one else can claim. The life-writers are often my favourites: Walton, De Quincey, Douglass, Angelou.⁵ Nabokov might be the choice of those who do not love the older writers.

But this long argument will never be done. Some enjoy the style of excess, some do not. Each has their limits. Johnson:

The two classes of persons whom you have mentioned, don’t differ as to good and bad. They both agree that Swift has a good neat style; but one loves a neat style, another loves a style of more splendour. In like manner, one loves a plain coat, another loves a laced coat ; but neither will deny that each is good in its kind. (Life of Johnson)

The accepted bounds of elegance now are all for neatness, but the splendid has its place too.

1. I have not read The Zone of Interest, but this is the offending passage, which seems to be hideously relevant to the McCarthy story.

All right in Berlin or Munich, no? But there they were in mannerly Rosenheim, with its parks, its cobblestones, its onion domes. Everybody could tell that friend Kruger was making a swine of himself with his childish ward; and it pains me to say that Hannah, for her part, was no less brazen — ach, she could barely keep her tongue out of his ear (her fingers fidgety, her colour hectic, her thighs glueyly asquirm).

2. (James Marriott suggested to me that Amis tried to marry Dickensian lavishness to “the Nabokovian fetish for the highly polished detail.” Hence the frequent feeling that his prose is the linguistic equivalent of a manic gargoyle. I think that’s right.)

3

Some are fond to take a celebrated volume into their hands, because they hope to distinguish their penetration, by finding faults which have escaped the publick; others eagerly buy it in the first bloom of reputation, that they may join the chorus of praise, and not lag, as Falstaff terms it, in "the reward of the fashion."

Some read for style, and some for argument: one has little care about the sentiment, he observes only how it is expressed; another regards not the conclusion, but is diligent to mark how it is inferred; they read for other purposes than the attainment of practical knowledge; and are no more likely to grow wise by an examination of a treatise of moral prudence, than an architect to inflame his devotion by considering attentively the proportions of a temple.

Some read that they may embellish their conversation, or shine in dispute; some that they may not be detected in ignorance, or want the reputation of literary accomplishments: but the most general and prevalent reason of study is the impossibility of finding another amusement equally cheap or constant, equally independent on the hour or the weather. He that wants money to follow the chase of pleasure through her yearly circuit, and is left at home when the gay world rolls to Bath or Tunbridge; he whose gout compels him to hear from his chamber the rattle of chariots transporting happier beings to plays and assemblies, will be forced to seek in books a refuge from himself.

The author is not wholly useless, who provides innocent amusements for minds like these. There are, in the present state of things, so many more instigations to evil, than incitements to good, that he who keeps men in a neutral state, may be justly considered as a benefactor to life.

4. Boswell:

“The style of Johnson was, undoubtedly, much formed upon that of the great writers in the last century, Hooker, Bacon, Sanderson, Hakewell, and others ; those “Giants,” as they were well characterised by a great Personage, whose authority, were I to name him, would stamp a reverence on the opinion.”

Also,

When Johnson shewed me a proof-sheet of the character of Addison, in which he so highly extols his style, I could not help observing, that it had not been his own model, as no two styles could differ more from each other. — “Sir, Addison had his style, and I have mine.” — When I ventured to ask him, whether the difference did not consist in this, that Addison’s style was full of idioms, colloquial phrases, and proverbs; and his own more strictly grammatical, and free from such phraseology and modes of speech as can never be literally translated or understood by foreigners; he allowed the discrimination to be just.

5. Amis said Pritchett used semi-colons like Dickens, as parenthesis; De Quincey does that too.

The pains of poverty I had lately seen too much of; more than I wished to remember; but the pleasures of the poor, their consolations of spirit, and their reposes from bodily toil, can never become oppressive to contemplate.