Style- the Art of Writing Well

by F L Lucas

  A great part of the writer’s problem, then, is how to catch the ideas that creep forth in the stillness, like magic mice, from their holes. Here I suspect that the dog’s method is less effective than the cat’s. ‘Wise passiveness’ may succeed better than impatient rush and pounce. No doubt the artist or the thinker may carry his day-dreaming to excess, so that it becomes a vice – Balzac called it ‘smoking enchanted cigars’. But it pays, I think, to meditate a good deal, both before beginning to write, and at intervals while writing. The processes of creation may refuse to be bustled. The writer’s reverie with a cigarette by the fire may not be as wasteful as Balzac suggests. It may not only turn paper into smoke; it may also turn smoke into paper.

  But besides the Unconscious there is a second important master to be served – the conscious, critical Reason. Otherwise one wanders into the bedlam of the Surrealist. And it is important that neither conscious mind nor unconscious should usurp on the domain of the other. ‘Render unto Caesar … ’

  On the one hand, the Unconscious may breed happy ideas in incubation. Therefore it needs time to incubate. Therefore it is usually undesirable that a writer should be hurried or worried, hectically overworked or hectically dissipated. But this incubation need not always involve indolence – change of occupation may do better. Thus Scott found that it suited him to have a dozen irons in the fire at once. Metternich told Varnhagen von Ense that he could not concentrate on a problem day after day; he left it to work in him by itself, and got his best ideas in the middle of other occupations – eating, driving, ordinary talk. Others have gained their most illuminating thoughts on a subject while reading about another subject quite irrelevant; or again an inspiration for Chapter Ten may present itself as the writer toils at Chapter Two. It is often as if the Unconscious were a wayward child, playing truant when it is called, then offering help unasked. In other words, Muses are often coquettes.

  But the suggestions of the Unconscious should be seized as soon as offered – or, as Samuel Butler phrased it, one must ‘put salt on their tails’. For what the Unconscious thus unaccountably gives, it can as unaccountably take away again – often beyond recall. It will be remembered how Pope could mercilessly drag a poor domestic four times from bed on a freezing night to note inspirations that rose like apparitions from the dark. Similarly the eccentric Duchess of Newcastle kept a servant ready to take down her nocturnal inspirations: ‘John,’ she would cry, ‘I conceive!’ The soberer Bentham, again, would write with a green curtain beside him, where he pinned his stray notions on scraps of paper, like butterflies.

  But luckily not all good ideas insist on arriving at the wrong moment. They may also, when a writer is in the vein, be called forth by the rush and excitement of composition; just as the excitement of conversation may stimulate a talker to wit or wisdom that he would never have hit on in hours of solitary thought. [316] It follows that the process of composition should, if possible, have some rush of excitement about it – not remain too slow, cold, calculated, and self-critical. For this is not only chilling; it may lead the more conscious side of the mind to cramping interference. In tennis, to play with gritted teeth and tense concentration may merely stiffen the muscles: once the necessary reflexes have been formed by practice, it may work far better to use one’s head to think where to put the ball, but leave it to one’s body how to put it there. And so some have found (again like Scott) that their swiftest compositions were their best; and have gained inspiration from printers’ devils rapping at their doors. This may arise partly from the challenge of working against time; partly from the stimulus of feeling that their words would be before the world within a few days, instead of after a year or more; but partly also from the lack of leisure to be hypercritical. For by taking too much thought a man may, not add, but even subtract, a cubit from his literary stature.

  Such tense self-consciousness was one of the weaknesses of our eighteenth-century poets – even Gray. They tended too much, while they wrote, to let their other, critical selves gaze with freezing eyes over their shoulders. What would Society say? Similarly in her later writing Fanny Burney seemed, paradoxically, to know less of life as an experienced woman, than she had known as a spontaneous girl; while her style degenerated into a false and lumbering Johnsonese.

  For the orator, again, self-criticism may prove more crippling still. De Tocqueville attributed his failure in speaking to his habit of listening to himself, instead of being carried away. Other speakers have been known to do best on some occasion when they happened to have lost their carefully composed manuscripts: for now they had no time to think too much. In Parliament, above all as a debater, Charles James Fox seems to have been, in the phrase of his opponent Pitt, ‘a magician’; yet he never prepared a speech; but his James II, written ‘drop by drop’, with a purism that carefully restricted itself to the vocabulary of Dryden, remains today only a name. ‘Tom Birch’, said Johnson, ‘is brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand, than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties.’ And of his own most successful work, The Lives of the Poets, Johnson records that he wrote them ‘in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work and working with vigour and haste.’ [317]

  Therefore it seems that a writer may often gain by writing at high speed. It is rash to do so for long at a time; but he should perhaps often write in spurts. Flaubert’s method was, on the contrary, a slow elaboration, like Gray’s. For writers with their temperament no other way may have been possible. None the less Flaubert’s letters, which must have been written faster and more freely, often seem to me better, even as style, than some of his more laboured work. (And, more important, I have heard a Frenchman say the same.) Therefore I suspect that in general it may answer better to follow the practice of Virgil who, we are told, would write a number of lines rapidly in the morning, then lick them into shape, as a few perfect verses, in the course of the day.

  There are, indeed, limits to this. It may not answer at all well to write a first draft so quickly and carelessly that it needs to be not merely polished, but totally recast. For this not only wastes time; it is sometimes curiously difficult, once a piece of writing has been started on the wrong lines, to obliterate the memory of it, and begin afresh. Once the metal has cooled in the wrong shape, it may prove unexpectedly hard to remelt and remould. Gray, himself a slow writer, warned Mason against this danger of too-rapid first drafts. [318]

  On the whole, however, I think Johnson was probably wiser in urging that one should learn to write well by writing fast than Quintilian in advising, on the contrary, that one should learn to write fast by writing well. A Chinese connoisseur of painting put it more tersely still: ‘Thinkee long. Work chop-chop.’

  This does not of course mean that one should paint a whole picture, or write a whole book, at express speed. It is usually wiser to leave intervals for meditation and incubation; as a chick emerging from its egg alternately struggles and rests, struggles and rests. It merely means that a given passage is often better written fast and not one word at a time, with pauses to seek inspiration from the ceiling, or sustenance from gnawing one’s pen.

  Further, where hard thinking is needed it may often be better done before a man sits down to his desk. The students in the Bardic Schools of medieval Ireland (eleventh to fifteenth centuries), who – unlike some more modern poets – underwent six or seven years’ hard training in their art, lay all day abed in darkened cubicles to compose; in the evening, lights were brought and then they wrote down their poems. Similarly, in a very different world, James Brindley, the canal-engineer (1716–72), when grappling with some difficult problem, would retire to bed to find ideas. For the mind may meditate best when the body is relaxed and the other world shut off. ‘Thinkee long. Work chop-chop.’

  To sum up what I have said so far, a good many of these principles are embodied in the practice of Kant. He let his imagination work on a subject beforehand, but read works on quit
e different topics, such as stories or travel-books. He set a high value on sudden ideas (‘dasjenige, worauf man sich am wenigsten präpariert, ist das naïvste’) and carefully noted them down. Then he would read his notes, sketch his scheme in short sentences, and write ahead. If new ideas occurred during this process, he quickly left a space with a note of them, then pressed forward. [319]

  But if I suggest the need for giving the less conscious levels of the mind their chance by long incubation and rapid writing, it is not that I wish to minimize the share of the conscious reason. On the contrary, with Jane Austen, I feel that ‘to be rational in anything is great praise’. Our century has produced only too much tipsy literature. I much prefer Rossetti’s ‘fundamental brainwork’ – first of all, before incubation begins (for the unconscious mind may fail to work seriously unless the conscious mind has worked seriously first); and again during actual composition. Unless he indulges in free association and automatic writing, or is carried away by ‘poetic fury’, or is drugged like Coleridge over Kubla Khan, the writer needs to keep his head as well as use it. For instance, it sometimes proves easier to write freely at night; but the results are apt, like fairy gold, to reveal themselves as withered leaves in the cold light of morning. For though at night the invention is sometimes more fertile, that may be only because the judgement is then drowsier. Just as alcohol does not really stimulate the brain, but merely drugs the part of it that acts as a censor.

  But it is, above all, in the final stage of revision that the conscious, critical reason can play its most dominant part. A work may have been composed with happy ease, or with intoxicated ardour; but now comes the time – for writers that can do it – to view the result with cold detachment. [320] After Sainte-Beuve had drafted each of his Lundis, he would hand it to his secretary and say, ‘Lisez-moi en ennemi.’ [321]

  The vital importance of this last stage, especially for style, is seldom realized by the general public. But it is here that some truth emerges from Buffon’s paradox: ‘Le génie n’est qu’une grande aptitude à la patience.’ [322] No doubt there are writers who revolt at revision – such as Shakespeare, or Dryden (in this, the reverse of Pope), or Byron who, if he missed his first spring, went growling back to his jungle. [323] But those who refuse to revise may pay dearly – though, of course, they may be rich enough to afford it. Even in Shakespeare there is plenty of ‘sad stuff’; Scott’s style is uneven; Trollope’s, [324] undistinguished. Indeed, I can think of no constantly perfect stylist who has not laboured like an emmet.

  Here I am not thinking so much of the toilsome apprenticeship needed to acquire a style – of Demosthenes five times copying out all Thucydides, or of Stevenson composing careful pastiches of older authors; of Buffon saying at seventy, ‘J’apprends tous les jours à écrire’, [325] or of Goethe’s, ‘At length after forty years I have learnt to write German.’ [326] I am thinking rather of the endless rewriting done, even by established writers, to an extent that the public little guesses – of Plato’s variant versions of the first words of The Republic, or Ariosto’s of the first line of Orlando.

  In fine, there is much to be said for the principle ‘Write in haste; and revise at leisure.’ And revision is usually best when one has had time to forget what has been written, and comes back to it with fresh eyes.

  La Bruyère took ten years to write his Caractères; and nearly ten more to revise them. La Fontaine, seemingly so simple and so idle, revised indefatigably.

  Pascal, it is said, composed his eighteenth Provinciale thirteen times; [327] Buffon made eighteen drafts of his Époques de la Nature, and Xavier de Maistre seventeen of his Lépreux. Chateaubriand polished and repolished his Mémoires over a period of thirty years. Tolstoy’s long-suffering countess copied out for him seven times the vast bulk of War and Peace; and he would send telegrams to change a word. No wonder his great works left him in a state of collapse. Virginia Woolf wrote parts of The Waves twenty times. Anatole France liked eight proofs. Balzac, for all his feverish haste, might go as far as twenty-seven. Indeed, he boasted that, if there were a million lines in his Comédie Humaine, they must have cost him two francs apiece in corrections (say £80,000, when the pound itself had a very different value from today). Obviously this passion for perfection can degenerate into a mania. Rousseau would run from his attic to recapture a note and revise it; Paul-Louis Courier would make seventeen drafts of a letter. [328] But, in general, the lesson is clear – good writing is often far harder work than most people suppose.

  Yet I notice that most of my pupils feel it a hardship if I suggest that they should make even one rough draft of their essays. Clearly they cannot, as Horace advises, keep them nine years before bringing them out; but it is optimistic to think one can write well without a tenth of the pains that it has cost even the masters. After all, no less labour is often needed to excel in other arts. Giardini, when asked how long it took to learn the fiddle, replied, ‘Twelve hours a day for twenty years.’ Paganini would practise the same passage for ten hours running. Leonardo would walk the length of Milan to change a single tint in his Last Supper. Monet painted a haystack eighty-three times. On many subjects an easy style may be one of the very hardest things to produce. ‘Naturalness,’ says Anatole France, ‘is what is added last.’ Or in the words of Michael Angelo:

  What one takes most pains to do, should look as if it had been thrown off quickly, almost without effort – nay, despite the truth, as if it had cost no trouble. Take infinite pains to make something that looks effortless. [329]

  One has also to remember that revision is a means not only of polishing, but also of compressing. For perfect brevity – I need not repeat my praises of it – can seldom be had without long filing and cutting. Quintilian spoke the truth: ‘A pen may be just as usefully employed in crossing out as in writing.’ Kipling, who kept some of his short stories from three to five years, shortening them annually, had a special method for this, which he called ‘the Higher Editing’. ‘Take of well-ground Indian Ink as much as suffices and a camel-hair brush proportionate to the interspaces of your lines. In an auspicious hour, read your final draft and consider faithfully every paragraph, sentence and word, blacking out where requisite. Let it lie by to drain as long as possible. At the end of that time, re-read and you should find it will bear a second shortening. Finally, read it aloud alone and at leisure. Maybe a shade more brushwork will then indicate or impose itself. If not, praise Allah and let it go, and “when thou hast done, repent not”. ’ [330]

  In principle this seems to me most sound; but in method, too elaborate. Kipling may have felt a natural partiality for Indian ink and the hair of camels; but why delete the first version so irrevocably? One may wish, in places, to restore it after all. Therefore I would suggest that it would be more practical, though less poetical, to revise with humble pencil and rubber, and leave all this painting to pictorial artists.

  It is only honest, however, to add that all such heroic efforts may in the end be worse than wasted. One’s second thoughts – or one’s twenty-second – are not always best; and too much revision may only sacrifice happy spontaneity for a tired correctness. Isocrates polished his Panegyric for ten or fifteen years; but Isocrates remains a minor writer. Cardinal Bembo made his manuscripts migrate through sixteen portfolios in turn, revising them at each migration from one to the next; it sounds a marvellous system; yet, somehow, it seems not to have brought the diligent cardinal much immortality. Again, the final versions of Wordsworth’s Prelude, for instance, or FitzGerald’s Omar please many readers less than the earlier versions they replaced. [331] Whether truly or not, it was said of the excellence of Sainte-Beuve’s Lundis, ‘il n’a pas le temps de les gâter.’ [332] And Pope made a similar comment on Addison, who was a great corrector, except in his Spectators.

  Therefore it is important, not only to revise, but to know when to stop revising. Personally, I take it as a warni
ng-signal when I find myself deleting what stands in the last revision, and reinstating what stood there in the last but one; then one had better give over.

  So far I have been thinking mainly of creative literature and, in that literature, of the element of style. But there is another problem that seems worth briefly considering, since bad management here can have disastrous effects on style as well. I mean documentation. A critic or scholar, for example, even a novelist or poet, may need to master a large body of facts. In practice, I come across this particular problem most in advising research students; but it is of far more general application.

  Now the first impulse of the conscientious writer may be to assume that he should pore through everything written on his subject, before he puts pen to paper. Thus Flaubert relates on 25 January 1880, that he has devoured over one thousand five hundred books for his Bouvard et Pécuchet. (In the end he was to read some two thousand. ‘Cette surabondance de documents m’a permis de n’être pas pédant.’ [333] I doubt it.)