Keeping the balance

In a volume of his posthumously published notebooks (Garder Tout en Composant Tout), Henry de Montherlant remarks: ‘Je ne sais pourquoi nous faisons des descriptions, puisque le lecteur ne les lit jamais.’ Well said, but not quite true; there are readers who dote on long descriptive passages. Alain de Botton for instance wrote recently that the best bits of Proust are the descriptions and passages of analysis. Yet for me these are just the parts of A la Recherche which seem stale, while the characters and conversation remain entrancing.

So I find myself on Montherlant’s side. Devoted though I am to the Waverley novels, my eyes tend to glaze on coming upon long paragraphs describing mountain scenery or the dress and armour of a mediaeval knight, and I resort to what Scott himself called ‘the laudable practice of skipping’.

We are in good company. ‘Damn description, it is always disgusting,’ said Byron, though no mean hand at it himself. ‘Description is always a bore’ was Disraeli’s dandyish view. More surprisingly perhaps Stevenson observed that ‘no human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minuutes, which makes me suspect we hear too much of it in literature’. Yet it’s a rare novel that dispenses entirely with it, though Ivy Compton-Burnett’s come close to doing so. ‘I don’t know if you care for descriptions?’ she asked the novelist Elizabeth Taylor, adding, ‘I don’t.’

Description used to be all the thing. In Cakes and Ale Maugham tells us that the ‘prime’ of his Grand Old Man of English letters, Edward Driffield,

belonged to the period when the purple patch was in vogue, and there are descriptive passages in his works that have found their way into all the anthologies of English prose.