Freddie Fyford

How 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

I 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

If a novelist cannot wirte too well, can he write two well?

steveharris

'Wirte'? Is this a word or has The Specator succumbed, like the rest of the nation before it, to terminal illiteracy?

Ed Lancey

Sad 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

A true wirter knows the importance of slelping.

JohnA London

Ford 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

Has 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

Such 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

"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.