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.”