by James Wood
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The philosopher Bernard Williams was exercised by the inadequacy of moral philosophy.6 He found that much of it, descending from Kant, essentially wrote the messiness of the self out of philosophical discussion. Philosophy, he thought, tended to view conflicts as conflicts of beliefs that could be easily solved, rather than as conflicts of desires that are not so easily solved. One example he used, in his book Moral Luck, was that of a man who has promised his father, after his father’s death, that he will support a favored charity with his inheritance. But the son finds that, as time goes on, there is not enough money for him to fulfill his promise to his father and also look after his own children. A certain kind of moral philosopher, wrote Williams, would decide that one way to resolve this conflict is to say that the son had good reason to assume, as a tacit condition of the inheritance, that he should give money to the charity only after more immediate pressing concerns, like his children, were taken care of. The conflict is resolved by nullifying one of its elements.
Williams thought that Kantians had a tendency to treat all conflicts of obligation like this, whereas Williams was interested in what he called “tragic dilemmas,” in which someone is faced with two conflicting moral requirements, each equally pressing. Agamemnon either betrays his army or sacrifices his daughter; either action will cause him lasting regret and shame. For Williams, moral philosophy needed to attend to the actual fabric of emotional life, instead of talking about the self, in Kantian terms, as consistent, principled, and universal. No, said Williams, people are inconsistent; they make up their principles as they go along; and they are determined by all kinds of things—genetics, upbringing, society, and so on.
Williams often returned to Greek tragedy and epic for examples of great stories in which we see the self struggling with what he called “one-person conflicts.” Curiously, he rarely if ever talked about the novel, perhaps because the novel tends to present such tragic conflicts less starkly, less tragically, in softened forms. Yet these softer conflicts are not the less interesting or profound for being softer: consider—just to pluck one kind of struggle—what extraordinary empirical insight the novel has given us into marriage and all its conflicts, both two-person (between spouses) and one-person (the lonely individual suffering inside a loveless or mistaken union). Consider To the Lighthouse, so moving in part because it is an account not of a brilliantly successful marriage nor of an incandescently failed one, but of an adequate one, in which struggles and little compromises are daily enacted. Here, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay walk in the garden and talk about their son:
They paused. He wished Andrew could be induced to work harder. He would lose every chance of a scholarship if he didn’t. “Oh, scholarships!” she said. Mr Ramsay thought her foolish for saying that, about a serious thing, like a scholarship. He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn’t, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did.
The subtlety lies in the picture of each side disagreeing, but wanting nonetheless the other to remain the same.
Of course, the novel does not provide philosophical answers (as Chekhov said, it only needs to ask the right questions). Instead, it does what Williams wanted moral philosophy to do—it gives the best account of the complexity of our moral fabric. When Pierre, in War and Peace, begins to change his ideas about himself and other people, he realizes that the only way to understand people properly is to see things from each person’s point of view: “There was a new feature in Pierre’s relations with Willarski, with the princess, with the doctor, and with all the people he now met, which gained for him the general goodwill. This was his acknowledgement of the impossibility of changing a man’s convictions by words, and his recognition of the possibility of everyone thinking, feeling, and seeing things each from his own point of view … The difference, and sometimes complete contradiction, between men’s opinions and their lives, and between one man and another, pleased him and evoked from him an amused and gentle smile.”7
Language
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The poet Glyn Maxwell likes to conduct the following test in his writing classes, one apparently used by Auden. He gives them Philip Larkin’s poem “The Whitsun Weddings,” with certain words blacked out. He tells them what kinds of words—nouns, verbs, adjectives—have been omitted, and how they complete the meter of the line. The aspiring poets must try to fill in the blanks. Larkin is traveling by train from the north of England to London, and as he watches from the window, he records passing sights. One of these is a hothouse, which he renders: “A hothouse flashed uniquely.” Maxwell excises “uniquely,” telling his students that a trisyllabic adverb is missing. Not once has a student supplied “uniquely.” “Uniquely” is unique.
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Nietzsche laments, in Beyond Good and Evil: “What a torment books written in German are for him who has a third ear.” If prose is to be as well written as poetry, novelists and readers must develop their own third ears. We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality. We must proceed on the assumption that almost all prose popularly acclaimed as beautiful (“she writes like an angel”) is nothing of the sort, that almost every novelist will at some point be baselessly acclaimed for writing “beautifully” as almost all flowers are at some point acclaimed for smelling nice.
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There is a way in which even complex prose is quite simple—because of that mathematical finality by which a perfect sentence cannot admit of an infinite number of variations, cannot be extended without aesthetic blight: its perfection is the solution to its own puzzle; it could not be done better.
There is a familiar American simplicity, for instance, which is Puritan and colloquial in origin, “a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to the essentials,” as Marilynne Robinson has it in her novel Gilead. We recognize it in the Puritan sermon, in Jonathan Edwards, in Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, in Mark Twain, in Willa Cather, in Hemingway. These are the obvious examples. But that same simplicity is also always present in much more ornate writers like Melville, Emerson, Cormac McCarthy. The stars “fall all night in bitter arcs.” “The horses stepped archly among the shadows that fell over the road.” These lucid phrases are from McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, respectively, books whose prose is often fantastically baroque. Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead achieves an almost holy simplicity; but this is the same writer whose earlier novel, Housekeeping, abounds in complicated Melvillean metaphor and analogy. Is the following passage from Gilead an example of simple or complicated prose?
This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven—one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning. My grandfather’s grave turned into the light, and the dew on his weedy little mortality patch was glorious.
Weedy little mortality patch—how fine that is.
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Prose is always simple in this sense, because language is the ordinary medium of daily communication—unlike music or paint. Our ordinary possessions are being borrowed by even very difficult writers: the millionaires of style—difficult, lavish stylists like Sir Thomas Browne, Melville, Ruskin, Lawrence, James, Woolf—are very prosperous, but they use the same banknotes as everyone else. “Vague squares of rich colour” is the simple little formulation He
nry James uses to describe Old Master paintings seen from a distance in a darkened room in The Portrait of a Lady. How precise, paradoxically, is that “vague”! Aren’t these exactly the best words in the best order? “The day waves yellow with all its crops.” That is Woolf, from The Waves. I am consumed by this sentence, partly because I cannot quite explain why it moves me so much. I can see, hear, its beauty, its strangeness. Its music is very simple. Its words are simple. And its meaning is simple, too. Woolf is describing the sun rising and finally filling the day with its yellow fire. The sentence means something like: this is what a field of corn on a summer’s day will look like when everything is blazing with sunlight—a yellow semaphore, a sea of moving color. We know exactly and instantly what Woolf means, and we think: That could not be put any better. The secret lies in the decision to avoid the usual image of crops waving, and instead, to write “the day waves”: the effect is suddenly that the day itself, the very fabric and temporality of the day, seems saturated in yellow. And then that peculiar, apparently nonsensical “waves yellow” (how can anything wave yellow?), conveys a sense that yellowness has so intensely taken over the day itself that it has taken over our verbs, too—yellowness has conquered our agency. How do we wave? We wave yellow. That is all we can do. The sunlight is so absolute that it stuns us, makes us sluggish, robs us of will. Eight simple words evoke color, high summer, warm lethargy, ripeness.
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In Sea and Sardinia, Lawrence describes the short legs of King Victor Emmanuel; but he refers to “his little short legs.” Now, in some technical sense, there is no need to have both “short” and “little” in the same sentence. If Lawrence were a schoolboy, his teacher would write “redundant” in the margin and remove one of the adjectives. But say it aloud a few times, and it suddenly seems inevitable. We need the two words, because they sound farcical together. And short does not mean the same as little: the two words enjoy each other’s company; and “little short legs” is more original than “short little legs,” because it is jumpier, is more absurd, forcing us to stumble slightly—stumble short-leggedly—over the unexpected rhythm.
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We cannot write about rhythm and not refer to Flaubert. Of course writers before him had agonized about style. But no novelist agonized as much or as publicly, no novelist fetishized the poetry of “the sentence” in the same way, no novelist pushed to such an extreme the potential alienation of form and content (Flaubert longed to write what he called a “book about nothing”). And no novelist before Flaubert reflected as self-consciously on questions of technique. With Flaubert, literature became “essentially problematic,” as one scholar puts it.1
Or just modern? Flaubert himself affected a nostalgia for the great unself-conscious writers who came before him, the beasts of instinct who just got on with it, like Molière and Cervantes; they, said Flaubert in his letters, “had no techniques.” He, on the other hand, was betrothed to “atrocious labor” and “fanaticism.” This fanaticism was applied to the music and rhythm of the sentence. In different ways, the modern novelist is shadowed by that monkish labor. It is a difficult inheritance, in some ways imprisoning, and we must escape it. The rich stylist (the Bellow, the Updike) is made newly self-conscious about his richness; but the plainer stylist (Hemingway, for example) has also become self-conscious about his plainness, itself now resembling a form of highly controlled and minimalist richness, a stylishness of renunciation. The realist feels Flaubert breathing down his neck: Is it well written enough? But the formalist or postmodernist is also indebted to Flaubert for the dream of a book about nothing, a book flying high on style alone. (Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, originators of the nouveau roman, were explicit about crediting Flaubert as their great precursor.)
Flaubert loved to read aloud. It took him thirty-two hours to read his overblown lyrical fantasia, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, to two friends. And when he dined in Paris at the Goncourts’, he loved to read out examples of bad writing. Turgenev said that he knew of “no other writer who scrupled in quite that way.” Even Henry James, the master stylist, was somewhat appalled by the religious devotion with which Flaubert assassinated repetition, unwanted clichés, clumsy sonorities. The scene of his writing has become notorious: the study at Croisset, the slow river outside the window, while inside the bearish Norman, wrapped in his dressing gown and wreathed in pipe smoke, groaned and complained about how slow his progress was, each sentence laid as slowly and agonizingly as a fuse.2
So what did Flaubert mean by style, by the music of a sentence? This, from Madame Bovary—Charles is stupidly proud that he has got Emma pregnant: “L’idée d’avoir engendré le délectait.” So compact, so precise, so rhythmic. Literally, this is “The idea of having engendered delighted him.” Geoffrey Wall, in his Penguin translation, renders it as: “The thought of having impregnated her was delectable to him.” This is good, but pity the poor translator. The translation is a wan cousin of the French. Say the French out loud, as Flaubert would have done, and you encounter four “ay” sounds in three of the words: “l’idée, engendré, délectait.” An English translation that tried to mimic the untranslatable music of the French—that tried to mimic the rhyming—would sound like bad hip-hop: “The notion of procreation was a delectation.”
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Yet even if Flaubertianism casts a permanent shadow over the development of style in fiction, our sense of what is musical in style constantly changes. Flaubert feared repetition, but of course Hemingway and Lawrence would make repetition the basis of their most beautiful effects. Here is Lawrence, again, in Sea and Sardinia:
Very dark under the great carob tree as we go down the steps. Dark still the garden. Scent of mimosa, and then of jasmine. The lovely mimosa tree invisible. Dark the stony path. The goat whinnies out of her shed. The broken Roman tomb which lolls right over the garden track does not fall on me as I slip under its massive tilt. Ah dark garden, dark garden, with your olives and your wine, your medlars and mulberries and many almond trees, your steep terraces ledged high up above the sea, I am leaving you, slinking out. Out between the rosemary hedges, out of the tall gate, on to the cruel steep stony road. So under the dark, big eucalyptus trees, over the stream, and up towards the village. There, I have got so far.
Lawrence is leaving a Sicilian house at dawn, and heading for the ferry: “I am leaving you, slinking out.” This is his farewell to all that he has loved there. The passage might as well be an example of simplicity as of musicality. Its complexity, such as it is, lies in his attempt to use his prose to register, minute by minute, the painful largo of this farewell. Each sentence slows down to make its own farewell: “Scent of mimosa, and then of jasmine. The lovely mimosa tree invisible.” First you smell the scent, then you see—or apprehend—the tree. After that, the path. Sentence by sentence.
And meanwhile the darkness is changing as the day breaks, which is why Lawrence repeats his word “dark.” In fact, every time he repeats the word, the word has changed a little, because each time Lawrence changes what he attaches the word “dark” to: very dark—dark still—dark the—dark garden—the dark, big eucalyptus trees. Repetition is not really repetition after all. It is alteration: dawn light is slowly dissolving this darkness. At the end of it all, the writer has done no more than get onto the path: “There, I have got so far.” This could be a description of the movement of the prose, too. So near, so far. So little, so much.
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Listen to the operation of an intensely musical ear in one of the greatest stylists of American prose, Saul Bellow, a writer who makes even the fleet-footed—the Updikes, the DeLillos, the Roths—seem like monopodes. Like all serious novelists, Bellow read poetry: Shakespeare first (he could recite lines and lines from the plays, remembered from his schooldays in Chicago), then Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, Hardy, Larkin, and his friend John Berryman. And behind all this, with its English stretching all the way back into deeper antiquity, the King James Bible. A river, seen as “crimpe
d, green, blackish, glassy,” or Chicago as “blue with winter, brown with evening, crystal with frost,” or New York as “sheer walls, gray spaces, dry lagoons of tar and pebbles.” Here is a paragraph from his story “The Old System,” in which Isaac Braun, in a high state of agitation, rushes to get his plane at Newark airport.
On the airport bus, he opened his father’s copy of the Psalms. The black Hebrew letters only gaped at him like open mouths with tongues hanging down, pointing upward, flaming but dumb. He tried—forcing. It did no good. The tunnel, the swamps, the auto skeletons, machine entrails, dumps, gulls, sketchy Newark trembling in fiery summer, held his attention minutely … Then in the jet running with concentrated fury to take off—the power to pull away from the magnetic earth; and more: When he saw the ground tilt backward, the machine rising from the runway, he said to himself in clear internal words, “Shema Yisrael,” Hear, O Israel, God alone is God! On the right, New York leaned gigantically seaward, and the plane with a jolt of retracted wheels turned toward the river. The Hudson green within green, and rough with tide and wind. Isaac released the breath he had been holding, but sat belted tight. Above the marvelous bridges, over clouds, sailing in atmosphere, you know better than ever that you are no angel.
Bellow had a habit of writing repeatedly about flying, partly, I guess, because it was the great obvious advantage he had over his dead competitors, those writers who had never seen the world from above the clouds: Melville, Tolstoy, Proust. He does it very well. Notice, first of all, that the rhythm of the passage never settles down. Bellow gets a list going, with a repeated “the,” and then suddenly drops “the” halfway through: “The tunnels, the swamps, the auto skeletons, / machine entrails, dumps, gulls, sketchy Newark…” The effect is destabilizing, agitating. (Thus even this passage is a version of free indirect style, striving to capture or mimic Isaac Braun’s flustered anxiety, his eye failing to retain things seen through the bus window.) And in sentence after sentence the world is captured with brimming novelty: Newark seen as “sketchy” and “trembling in fiery summer,” the jet “running with concentrated fury to take off” (a phrase that with its unpunctuated onrush itself enacts such a concentrated fury), New York which, as the plane tilts, “leaned gigantically seaward” (say the phrase aloud, and see how the words themselves—“leaned gi-gan-tic-ally sea-ward”—elongate the experience, so that the very language embodies the queasiness it describes); the dainty, unexpected rhythm of “The Hudson green within green, and rough with tide and wind” (“green within green” captures very precisely the different shades of green that we see in large bodies of cold water when several thousand feet above them); and finally, “sailing in atmosphere”—isn’t that exactly what the freedom of flight feels like? And yet until this moment one did not have these words to fit this feeling. Until this moment, one was comparatively inarticulate; until this moment, one had been blandly inhabiting a deprived eloquence.