Can a novelist write too well?
Allan Massies asks whether a novelist can wirte too well
At least a couple of times, probably more often, Anthony Burgess declared that Evelyn Waugh wrote ‘too well for a novelist’. ‘Sour grapes’ you may say, remembering that in his own novels Burgess often wrote in clumsy and slapdash style, and that he was perhaps himself a better reviewer than novelist. But it wasn’t just sour grapes. There was an argument behind the opinion. He believed that writing a novel ‘should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey’.
Compare [he suggested] Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End with Waugh’s Sword of Honour. Ford is often clumsy; his sentences stutter; deliberate banalities jostle with brilliant felicities; the prose is struggling to cope with the mysterious and unpredictable. Waugh’s book . . . is created, as it were, out of a known position — that of orthodox Catholic morality — and the style — witty, terse, controlled — corresponds.
These are fair judgments, even acute ones. One wouldn’t dissent from them. They don’t, however, quite make Burgess’s point; or rather, the point is clear, but may not convince. I have sympathy with the suggestion that the novel should be a voyage of discovery for writer as well as reader, though of Ford’s novels The Good Soldier is perhaps a better example of this than Parade’s End. One follows its narrator through the twists and turns of the story as he strives to understand why it turns out as it does. Burgess preferred to take Parade’s End because he thought that Sword of Honour ‘very nearly does for Waugh’s class and generation what Ford’s undoubtedly did for his own’; an interesting judgment, yet not necessarily relevant to the style of either novel. Comparing the two one might say that Waugh was rather surer of what he thought, and more secure in his beliefs, than Ford; and that the style reflects this difference.
There is after all no good reason why the novelist shouldn’t have settled opinions, a fixed point of view, and even deliver himself of lapidary judgments. One wouldn’t call Jane Austen’s style exploratory. Her prose never struggles ‘to cope with the mysterious and unpredictable’. She knows what she thinks, and has weighed her characters, finding some admirable and others not. Sometimes indeed she may lay a snare in which to trap the unwary reader. How many, on first meeting Wickham in Pride and Prejudice find him agreeable and persuasive, and sympathise with his account of the wrongs done him, only to have this view severely corrected by the author? Waugh does the same. The reader, like Guy Crouchback himself, is likely to be charmed by Ivor Claire in Officers and Gentlemen, the middle novel of the Sword of Honour trilogy. But Waugh already knows what the reader will discover only later, that there is a selfish rottenness in Claire which will lead him to behave badly in Crete.
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Freddie Fyford
June 12th, 2008 11:30amHow telling that Burgess should affect an attachment to this kind of mimetic fallacy.
A stumbling clumsiness of style at best is just another style, after all, not a badge of sincerity or exploration.
At worst, it's sheer laziness.
NorthBriton
June 12th, 2008 12:34pmI think you are a little unkind to Burgess. He was certainly a good, and often very generous, reviewer. However his novels are enormously entertaining and give proper scope to his vitality and creativity. Try "Nothing Like the Sun", the Malayan trilogy or the Enderby novels.
Richard Robinson
June 12th, 2008 3:34pmIf a novelist cannot wirte too well, can he write two well?
steveharris
June 12th, 2008 9:38pm'Wirte'? Is this a word or has The Specator succumbed, like the rest of the nation before it, to terminal illiteracy?
Ed Lancey
June 12th, 2008 10:07pmSad to see you drag poor old Burgess out of his grave in order to throw stones at him. I'm sure you could have outlined the same point (whatever it was) without having a go at AB.
John A London
June 12th, 2008 11:51pmA true wirter knows the importance of slelping.
JohnA London
June 13th, 2008 12:09amFord was a hardworking and much underrated genius, Waugh a highly-talented amateur. Burgess doesn't rate on the scale at all.
Maugham - 'plainest and most clichéd style'?? Read his autobiographical work, the short stories. If I managed respectable best-sellerdom, a villa in the South of France and a sybaritic lifestyle out of that 'plain and clichéd' style, that'd do me fine.
As for James, the prose becomes more tortuous because he wasn't writing, he was speaking, dictating to an amanuensis, as he paced around the room. Try to read and understand the opening sentence of 'The Golden Bowl' (there's a comma missing and one misplaced) and you see what's gone wrong there. Irritating, but the flow and psychology of the book is so compelling, those prissy mannerisms don't stand in the way.
Edward Barnard
June 13th, 2008 7:38pmHas Mr Massie gone off Somerset Maugham ? I thought he used to like him. Perhaps he has not read Maugham's 'The Summing Up' and, in particular, his thoughts on the importance of 'lucidity, simplicity and euphony' in good prose.
Evelyn Waugh himself, in this magazine in 1939, speaks of his respect for Maugham's 'mastery of his trade'. Maugham was the only living writer, Waugh felt, 'under whom one can study with profit.'
Nice article, anyway, as usual.
Daniel Miller
June 17th, 2008 10:00pmSuch an interesting article!
But with this point: "There is after all no good reason why the novelist shouldn’t have settled opinions, a fixed point of view, and even deliver himself of lapidary judgments."
I side with Burgess. What is the point of writing at all, if it comes down in the end to a police operation?
Emma Darwin
August 25th, 2008 6:53pm"To my mind only that style which draws attention to itself and distracts from the matter is intolerable. But here too others disagree, finding rich pleasure in, for instance, Nabokov."
I enjoy Nabokov, so I suppose I would disagree with this. One of the possible pleasures of reading fiction is to delight in the language itself: it's the equivalent of enjoying the brushwork in a painting. If it adds to the overall power of the work for us, we enjoy it, if for us it works against what the other elements are doing, we say it's distracting or even intolerable. All good writers work very hard to find the balance between means (language, brushwork) and end (character, storytelling) that suits what they have to say, though readers may not agree that they've got the balance right.