Looking Smart
The novelists I like most do not write as they should. They write in every way that I was told not to. W.G. Sebald can take a page to finish one sentence. László Krasznahorkai’s sentences are multiply parenthentical, full of complexes. He can write a novella in a sentence. These novelists got away with it and I did not dare.
Mind you, it is no guarantee. There are novelists I do not care for, who (I think) write badly. Will Self’s vocabulary seems self-indulgent to me. Wole Soyinka’s reputation must be the reason that no-one dared edit down Chronicles From The Land Of The Happiest People On Earth.
Pupils in my childhood English lessons were meant to keep it short. Concision was the watchword; Orwell was the man. Language should be like the pane of glass, & c. You should see through it, and not marvel at it. The model for writing was political, if not journalist’s, prose.
Each piece got more than one ‘pass’, and it was not what you put in: it was what you took out. These were the days when you could still expect students to do a ‘rough draft’ and make a ‘fair copy’; when they did not imagine that they would write the perfect piece in a single flourish. One teacher even had us rewrite Bernard Levin’s articles from The Times.
Later I read Hemingway and realised that by repeated tides of short sentence structure whole atmospheres could be layered on. Taut, direct language could create far deeper feelings. It was like a film I saw of Peter Howson painting. Howson did not draw at first, at all. There was no preliminary sketch. He built up the layers; the detail, he added later.
Yet to read Krasznahorkai is like listening to one of the best university tutors I ever had. What appears to be rambling is actually the natural rhythm of generous expression from a well-stocked mind. Perhaps, to be happy reading it, you need to be prepared to be immersed. You cannot go to writing like this and expect to remain in control.
As time passed, the same old tutor got different reviews, from succeeding generations. He went out of style. An undergraduate from a younger generation once told me that this tutor had been terrible. An eminent historian, he had lacked exam focus. (My tutor’s critic has gone on to senior ranks in secondary schools.)
Reading for information has become the paradigm now. The reader is in control. Gimme the data: quick! The reader wants what they want. Journalists write what will sell. Just hand me the executive summary. What? No, I didn’t; but I read the reviews of the book.
In fact, all this is symptomatic of a deep reluctance to think — and it breeds the suppressed hysteria of compliance. Thinking may fail; it will certainly take time. Instead, I would rather just be told. Cut to the chase. Tell me what to do. I want to maximise the time which is money, so that I can spend that time at leisure. I want to be able to buy the books on my shelf that I will not be reading. I want to wear them like bling. Even my leisurely reading time must cut back, to make more free time to shop expensive books in.
Perhaps the difficult authors come back as niche objects. They are like the Celts’ gold torques, advertising the magnificence of the person who could command someone to spend a year making each thing. They are like volumes of difficult Marxist theory, photographed for Twitter — or like those second-hand and daunting inch-thick books, with the previous owner’s ink marks dense in the margin all the way to page 10. By tweeting that I am reading W.G. Sebald, I declare my aspiration that one day I shall finish his book.
As for teachers, they should be as nimble as domestic staff, serving up the answers on a plate.
By the way, working in a public school once, I received an anonymous letter from a coward that informed me I was a pseudo-intellectual: well, tonight I went to hear Fractus in the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival and came home to read Krasznahorkai. Tant pis!
