-
About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Last Kind Words, an anthology of poems after Geeshie Wiley’s song, edited by Peter Riley
2. ‘Ghost’ and eight more poems, by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor
3. The Metaphoric Graveyard, a short essay by Alan Wall
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
More below. Scroll down.
4. New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series is more than ten years old! YOU MAY NEVER CATCH UP, BUT YOU CAN START HERE: Peter Riley: Poetry Notes: Winter reading |Alan Morrison: June Haunting | Kallic Distance, explained by Michial Farmer | Thesis: Stravinsky. Part four of Tronn Overend’s comments on Adorno and music | Two uncollected personal poems by Roy Fisher, with comments by Peter Robinson | Anthony Rudolf reviews The Hölderliniae by Nathaniel Tarn (with an excerpt) | The reascent of Spengler’s Decline by James Gallant | Three new poems by Simon Smith | Tom Lowenstein’s poem To the Muses | Michael Hampton reviews Turner’s Loom | Le meutre: the death of Camus, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Peter Larkin: Extract from Trees the Seed |Anthony Howell on Julian Stannard’s Freeing Up | Wanton and two more poems, by Michael Egan | Alan Wall on Melancholy’s black sun | Paul Cohen parses Words and Lies | Bruce Kinzer on Leslie Stephen and the Metaphysicals | Richard Johnson: The Present Dystopian Paranoia | Nights In and two more new poems by Anthony Howell Dreamt Affections, a sequence by Peter Robinson | Freedom and justice at the Warburg by Peter McCarey | A Brexit Fudge by Alan Macfarlane | The poem’s not in the word by C. F. Keary | Peter Riley’s Poetry Notes: An Anthology for the Apocalypse | Diderot: The Curious Materialist, by Caroline Warman | Cambridge and two more poems by Ralph Hawkins | Gerard Manley Hopkins: No Worst There Is None, by Alan Wall | Hoyt Rogers: Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento | Dragon Rock, and two more short fictions, by Umiyuri Katsuyama, translated by Toshiya Kamei | Adorno and the Philosophy of Modern Music: Part three of the essay by Tronn Overend | Michael Buckingham Gray: Back to the drawing board, an extremely short story | Customer. Relationship. Management. A downloadable polemic by Sascha Akhtar | Strictly Scrum: Michelene Wandor on the life and work of James Haskell, flanker | Michial Farmer On Elegance | Telling it for ourselves: Simon Collings on the latest cinema news from Africa | Stephen Wade on the Good Soldier and his creator: The Good Writer Hašek | Six prose poems by Scott Thurston | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy, and ‘Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento,’ by Hoyt Rogers | Jonathan Gorvett, In Djibouti with The Angel of Hulme | An Aural Triptych by Daragh Breen | Immanuel Kant and the origin of the dialectic, the second part of Tronn Overend’s essay on Adorno and music | Three bilinguacultural poems by Changming Yuan | The Optician, short fiction by Cecilia Eudave | (a bean) — fiction by Marzia D’Amico | Stories from The Jazz Age by Aidan Semmens | ‘The London Cage’ and three more poems, by Judith Willson | Manifestos for a lost cause: A sequence of poems by Peter Robinson | Seven new poems by Barry Schwabsky | The poetry of social commitment: Poetry Notes by Peter Riley | The poet as essayist, by Alan Wall | On Gathering and Togethering in Medellin by Richard Berengarten | Two songs by Tristram Fane Saunders | What Heroism Feels Like: Fiction by Benjamin Wolfe | Two poems: ‘Inbound’ and one untitled about Ziggy by Nigel Wheale | Iconoclasm and portraiture in recent fiction by Paul Cohen | The Weimar Republic and critical theory: Adorno on modern music. First in a series by Tronn Overend | From the archive: Art, constantly aspiring: The School of Giorgione by Walter Pater | Seven very, very short fictions by Tom Jenks | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy | Three poems after reading Heine by Tom Lowenstein | Six new poems by Johanna Higgins | Macanese Concrete by Peter McCarey | ‘Leave-taking’, the end of a left-bank affair. By Ian Seed | Peter Riley probes Laura Riding’s many modes and offers his 2020 list of summer reviews |Bibliographic Archæology in Cairo by Raphael Rubinstein | Steve Xerri: Ezra Pound’s life in verse — with two more new poems, one featuring Keats | New Poems by Carrie Etter and Anna Forbes | ‘So, Dreams’ and three more poems, by Luke Emmett | Simon Collings wanders Buñuel’s labyrinth of artifice | Matt Hanson on the Romaniotes in America | For Once, a short fiction by Susana Martín Gijón | Four prose poems by Jane Monson | Jesse Glass and the poetry of ‘ouch’, explained: Pain… | Three poems, one very prose-like, by Claire Crowther | Two new poems by Sandra Kolankiewicz | Michelene Wandor reviews a metro-anthology from London’s twin cities | Simon Collings interviews Jeremy Noel-Tod, anthologist of prose poetry | Alan Wall: How we see now. A Note on Inscape, Descriptionism and Logical Form | Simon Perril: Poems from ‘the Slip’ | Michael Blackburn reviews Byatt’s Odd Angel | Christopher Landrum looks through Chris Arnade’s candid camera at America | Nigel Wheale reviews Ian Crockatt’s translations of the Skaldic verse of Orkney | Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia, in a new translation by Peter McCarey | Anna de Noailles: Thirteen poems in versions by Anthony Howell | Meandering through the Belle-Époque with Anthony Howell | Peter Riley‘s Poetry Notes for Summer 2020 | Three collections of prose poetry: 1.Nine haibun by Sheila E. Murphy | 2.Hurt Detail and two more prose poems by Lydia Unsworth | 3.Ten prose poems, five about men. By Mark Russell | The Latest Event in the History of the Novel by Paul Cohen | Life after life: Viduities, an essay by Alan Wall | As Grass Will Amend (Intend) Its Surfaces, by landscape poet Peter Larkin | More delicate, if minor, interconnections. Poetry by Tom Lowenstein | What Peter Knobler discovered out Walking While White in New York City | Alan Wall reviews Ian Sansom’s autopsy of Auden’s September 1, 1939 | A few very short fictions by Georgia Wetherall | A Play — for 26 Voices by Alice Notley | Four new poems from Credo, Stephen Wiest‘s new collection | Nigel Wheale on the significance and frailty of Raymond Crump | Ottomania! Matt Hanson reports on three new Turkish titles | Cinema: Simon Collings looks into Andrew Kötting’s Whalebone Box | Gowersby. A new puzzle-fiction by Shukburgh Ashby | The Jinn of Failaka: Reportage byMartin Rosenstock | Five Hung Particles by Iain Britton | Three poems from ‘Sovetica’ by Caroline Clark | It’s about time—Boustrophedon time: Anthony Howell is Against Pound | When words fail: Alan Wall diagnoses Shakespeare’s Dysnarrativia | Olive Custance, Lord Alfred Douglas’s much, much better half. By Ferdi McDermott | Three gardens and a dead man by Khaled Hakim | Poems from The Messenger House by Janet Sutherland | Two new poems by British-Canadian poet Pete Smith | Mob Think: Michael Blackburn reviews Kevin D. Williamson’s Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mobs | Natalia Ginzburg’s On Women. The first translation in English, by Nicoletta Asciuto | Alan Wall: Considering I, alone, An interrogation of the isolated first person | Anthony Howell reviews Christopher Reid’s ‘Love, Loss and Chianti’ | Jeremy Hilton: An excerpt from Fulmar’s Wing | Peter Riley: Hakim and Byrne and a spring storm of ‘Poetry Notes’ | Simon Collings with news of African films, including a review of Mati Diop’s Atlantics |Alan Price reviews Anthony Howell’s mind-body reflections | Franca Mancinelli: Pages from the Croatian Notebook, in a translation by John Taylor |Anne Stevenson: A tribute to Eugene Dubnov | David Hay: Two poems, one in prose | Four poems from ‘Lectio Volant’ by Steve Ely | Seven very short stories by Ian Seed | Advice from all over: Peter Riley on How to Write Poetry | Geoffrey Hill and the Perturbation of Baruch by Anthony O’Hear | Bird of four tongues by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Deirdre Mikolajcik: Abstract Wealth and Community in The Way We Live Now (Trollope Prize) | Nyssa Ruth Fahy on A Less-Beaten Path: Trollope’s West Indian fiction (Trollope Prize) | Blame it on the rain: flash fiction on two wheels, by Michael Buckingham Gray | True love—at 103: Breakfast with Mrs Greystone by S.D. Brown | The last Mantegna: fiction by Michelene Wandor | My first thirty years: A serial by Alan Macfarlane | Quotidian verse: She went to the hospital for an infection. By T. Smith-Daly | Tradition, by Enzo Kohara Franca. ‘My mother’s parents didn’t make it easy for her. In 1938 they immigrated from Sendai, where all men are Japanese, to São Paulo, where all men are Brazilian.’ | Peter Riley: Autumn reviews of new poetry | George Maciunas and Fluxus, reviewed by Simon Collings | The Political Agent in Kuwait, by Piers Michael Smith | Mother child: fiction by Conor Robin Madigan | The marital subtext of The State of the Union, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Swincum-le-Beau, a puzzle-fiction in the spirit of Pevsner. By Shukburgh Ashby | Gibraltar Point and three more poems by Iain Twiddy | Six quite brief fictions by Simon Collings | James Gallant: Puttering with E.M. Cioran | Blind man’s fog and other poems by Patrick Williamson | None of us: a poem by Luke Emmett | Rankine’s uncomfortable citizenship by Michelene Wandor | Languages: A Ghazal by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Seven more poems by Tom Lowenstein | Five poems from ‘Mattered by Tangents’ by Tim Allen | Anthony Howell: Freewheeling through some post-summer reading | ‘Noise’ and three more new poems by Maria de Araújo | A shelf of new poetry books for summer reviewed by Peter Riley in ‘Poetry Notes’ | Film: Simon Collings on Peter Strickland’s In Fabric | Michelene Wandor reviews Helen Dunmore’s Counting Backwards | Mauritius in three voices, by Emma Park | The hidden virtues of T-units and n-grams, by Davina Allison | Peter McCarey reviews W.D. Jackson’s latest Opus | Seven new poems by poet-ethnographer Tom Lowenstein | Anthony Howell: Empyrean Suite, an afterlife collaboration with Fawzi Karim | Christine Gallant reviews Herb Childress’s book on the life of the Adjunct Prof | The talk of The Dolphin, King’s Cross, as reported by Michael Mahony | Franca Mancinelli: Eight poems from Mala Kruna, in translations by John Taylor | A short question: Who will read short stories? David McVey answers | Eavesdropping on Olmecs: New poems by Jesse Glass | Two new poems by Laura Potts | Simon Collings on existence and its discontents in Capernaum | Peter Riley: Reviews yet more new prose-poetry | Anthony Rudolf remembers Turkish poet, novelist and essayist Moris Farhi | James Gallant sheds new light on the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels | Theatre: Third Person Theatre Co., and ‘The Noises’ reviewed by Anthony Howell | A fourth gulp of prose poems from ‘The Dice Cup’ by Max Jacob in a new translation by Ian Seed | Lots more short fiction: A new item by Michael Buckingham Gray and a full half-dozen by Simon Collings | Apollo 17 and the Cartoon Moon: Lunar poetry by James Bullion | Juvenal may be missing his moment: Satire for the millennium by Anthony Howell | Pickle-fingered truffle-snouter: fiction by Robert Fern | April Is the Cruellest Month: London fiction by Georgie Carroll | The Beginning and the End of Art…in Tasmania. By Tronn Overend | Kathy Stevens’s plate of fresh fiction: Everything in This Room is Edible | Boy, a new poem tall and lean by Tim Dooley | Beckett, Joyce, words, pictures — all reviewed by Peter O’Brien | Even more new translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s Dice Cup | Poetry written in Britain’s ‘long moment’: A dialogue and portfolio of work by Peter Robinson and Tim Dooley | ‘Remembering Ovid’, a new poem by Alan Wall | Four new poems by Luke Emmett | Hugo Gibson on Discount entrepreneurship and the start-up accelerator | ‘Half a Black Moon’ and three more new poems by Seth Canner | Martin Stannard’s life-lessons: What I did and how I did it | Anthony Howell on three indelible images left after a season of exhibitions | You good? Anthony O’Hear reviews Christian Miller’s The Character Gap. | Peter Riley on Olson, Prynne, Paterson and ‘extremist’ poetry of the last century. | Three prose poems by Linda Black,with a concluding note on the form | Simon Collings watches Shoplifters, critically | Tim McGrath: In Keen and Quivering Ratio — Isaac Newton and Emily Dickinson together at last | Daragh Breen: A Boat-Shape of Birds: A sequence of poems | Peter Riley reviews First-Person ‘Identity’ Poems: New collections by Zaffar Kunial and Ishion Hutchinson | Marko Jobst’s A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground reviewed by Michael Hampton | José-Flores Tappy: A Poetic Sequence from ‘Trás-os-Montes’ | Nick O’Hear: Brexit and the backstop and The tragedy of Brexit | Ian Seed: back in the building with Elvis | Nigel Wheale’s remembrance of ‘11.11.11.18’| Franca Mancinelli: Maria, towards Cartoceto, a memoir | Tamler Sommers’s Gospel of Honour, a review by Christopher Landrum | Typesetters delight: Simon Collings reviews Jane Monson’s British Prose Poetry | In Memoriam: Nigel Foxell by Anthony Rudolf | David Hackbridge Johnson rambles through Tooting | Auld acquaintances: Peter Riley on Barry MacSweeney and John James | ‘Listening to Country Music’ and more new poems by Kelvin Corcoran | Latest translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s The Dice Cup | Claire Crowther: four poems from her forthcoming ‘Solar Cruise’| Anthony Howell on the lofty guardians of the new palace | War and the memory of war, a reflection by Jerry Palmer | The ‘true surrealist attentiveness’ of Ian Seed’s prose poems, reviewed by Jeremy Over | Antony Rowland: Three place-poems, a response to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Brontë | New fiction by Gabi Reigh | Simon Collings reviews ‘Faces Places’ by Agnès Varda and JR | Ian Seed’s life-long love of short prose-poems | Michael Buckingham Gray’s extremely short story: ‘A woman’s best friend.’ | Simon Collings’s new fiction: Four short prose pieces | Anthony Costello: ‘Coleridge’s Eyes’ were his shaping spirits | Anthony Rudolf remembers poet and broadcaster Keith Bosley | Michael Hampton on Jeremy David Stock’s ‘Posthuman and categorically nebulous art writing’ | Peter O’Brien meets Paulette, Martin Sorrell’s ‘extravagent mystery’ of a mother | Anthony Howell reviews Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory | :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
Contact The Fortnightly.
Books received: Updated list.
-
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
Time Out’s New York listings here.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein. Now running.
In the New Series
- The Current Principal Articles.
- A note on the Fortnightly’s ‘periodicity’.
- Cookie Policy
- Copyright, print archive & contact information.
- Editorial statement and submission guidelines.
- For subscribers: Odd Volumes from The Fortnightly Review.
- Mrs Courtney’s history of The Fortnightly Review.
- Newsletter
- Submission guidelines.
- Support for the World Oral Literature Project.
- The Fortnightly Review’s email list.
- The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.
- The Initial Prospectus of The Fortnightly Review.
- The Trollope Prize.
- The Editors and Contributors.
- An Explanation of the New Series.
- Subscriptions & Commerce.
-
By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
.
Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
-
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
.
Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
.
European populism? Departments
Subscribe
0 Comments
On Elegance.
By MICHIAL FARMER.
.
WHEN I TAUGHT college English, I developed an enormous and comprehensive rubric—sixteen criteria, each with five possible scores—so as to avoid having to assign a “holistic” score to any student’s paper. The idea was to keep a paper’s grade from being unduly influenced by subjective factors like my feelings about its author or its position in the assembly belt of tedium that is paper grading. Even the most comprehensive rubric can’t entirely escape subjectivity, of course. If nothing else, a subjective consciousness decided what factors were most important in designing it. But having to fit one’s subjective impressions into more or less objective categories protects teacher and student alike from the tyranny of emotion. Most of my criteria were relatively self-explanatory—unity, grammar, evidence, and so forth—and all of them featured detailed explanations. But there was one criterion, worth five percent of the paper’s grade, that was vaguer than the rest. Here are the grading explanations for the fifteenth criterion, “Elegance”:
Originally, this criterion was called “Sentence Variety” and had to do, much more straightforwardly, with the student’s ability to mix complex sentences with simple ones. That technique was easy to grade. But I grew tired of it rather quickly, and, seeking a way to introduce a bit more subjective wiggle room into my grading, replaced it with “Elegance,” which is so reliant on the notion of beauty that it could serve as an easy way to add points to papers I enjoyed reading—and to remove them from ones I didn’t.
Elegance is a hallmark of writing at the highest level, but not the only one, and it can’t substitute for vision or originality or insight.
Reflecting on it now, however, it seems to me that elegance is a hallmark of A-level writing—A-level because it is not essential for a writer’s getting her point across (as unity, argument, and evidence are) but because it pushes a person’s prose to a higher level, one that it’s not fair to expect all writers, especially student writers, to attain. If a student paper in a stack of student papers is pleasurable to read, even odds are that elegance has something to do with it. But it’s not a necessary standard, either: prose can be transcendent for any number of reasons, some of which are actively at odds with elegance. I have in mind, for example, the writing of Joyce or Faulkner, which sweeps the reader away forcefully without displaying much elegance. So elegance is a hallmark of writing at the highest level, but not the only one, and it can’t substitute for vision or originality or insight. It’s a good thing, even a great thing, but it’s not absolute, and a writer who depends on it too strongly risks being seen the way Harold Bloom (wrongly, in my opinion) saw John Updike: “a minor novelist with a major style.”
NOTE: In The Fortnightly’s online template, illustrations are thumbnails with captions or onward text links embedded. To enlarge an illustration, click on it. To read a caption, hover over the illustration. To play an embedded video in a larger size, click twice.
But what is it? The criteria I gave on my rubric don’t shed any real light on it; all they really say is that, like pornography, I know it when I see it. And the books about writing on my shelf don’t mention elegance at all. The word doesn’t appear in the index of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style—appropriately enough, given that journalists mostly value clarity over elegance in their prose. Likewise, Jacques Barzun doesn’t mention it in Simple and Direct, and probably considered it a form of unnecessary flourish. William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, a modern classic, doesn’t mention it either, although he spends a few pages on the related concept of eloquence, which he claims “runs on a deeper current” than mere simplicity. “It moves us with what it leaves unsaid,” he writes, “touching off echoes in what we already know from our reading, our religion and our heritage. Eloquence invites us to bring some part of ourselves to the transaction.” That’s a helpful category, but it’s not exactly what I mean by elegance, which I take to be less participatory and perhaps a bit more objective.
Elegant music is not naïve any more than it is simple: these composers knew suffering and despair as much as or more than any of us, but their compositions rise above it…
Part of the problem with defining elegance in prose is that, unlike other criteria, it is not exclusively or even primarily rhetorical. Eloquence, for example, can be applied to other disciplines only analogically. Not so elegance, where the analogy rests with rhetoric itself. Perhaps when we say that writing is elegant, we mean that it resembles a ballerina in some way. In fact, elegance seems to me to be primarily a musical term, and a particular kind of music: the music of the late eighteenth century, the string quartets of Haydn or Mozart, in which each instrument is perfectly balanced and contributes to a whole that is, improbably, greater than the sum of its parts. Or think of Duke Ellington’s music, born out of the sufferings of generations of black Americans and turning that unutterable pain into something that transcends it but does not forget it. No one could call Haydn or Mozart or Ellington simple; their music is full of flourishes and detours, however expertly controlled. But it has what we might call a simplicity of affect, which I think accounts for the tremendous, almost supernatural, feeling of goodwill that it imparts to the listener. The heirs of these musicians—be they the Beethoven of the Appassionata sonata or the Coltrane of Giant Steps—have their own tables of virtues but largely lack the elegance I’m talking about. (That’s not an insult. Remember, elegance is a value in art, but it’s not a necessary value, and transcendence comes in all sorts of flavors.) Elegant music is not naïve any more than it is simple: these composers knew suffering and despair as much as or more than any of us, but their compositions rise above it, and invite us to follow them.
I keep returning to spatial metaphors, and it’s not coincidental. Elegance is typified by its graceful updrafts, by aid of which artist and audience alike ascend like hawks into the air without even, as it were, flapping their wings. I think this is what Italo Calvino was getting at when, in his unfinished Six Memos for the New Millennium, he identified lightness as a major quality of the art of the future:
Calvino gives us more opposites for elegance to reconcile. Lightness does not exclude heaviness but incorporates, then transcends it. The tightrope walker does not so much avoid the empty space to her left and right as she incorporates them both into her body, then walks straight between them. The hot-air balloon ascends not by jettisoning its cargo but by bringing it alongside itself.
This reconciliation of opposites seems to me an essential quality of elegance. Inelegant speech is full of opposites, too, but it lacks the savoir-faire to balance them. I think of the 1974 Rankin-Bass cartoon ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, which features a pompous small-town mayor who is enamored of fifty-cent words but who can’t put together a whole sentence with them. “You may build your clock, Mr. Trundle,” he bloviates at one point. “And may the enchanting tones of its melody soar to the pinnacle of celestial heights where—oh, heck, get started.” The humor of the scene comes from the bathos of the man aiming for elegance and shooting himself in the foot instead. The ballerina slips on a banana peel and careens into the other dancers. The tightrope walker loses her balance, falls of the rope, and lands on a clown delicately eating crème brulée.
As with many other aesthetic phenomena, there can be no hard and fast rules for elegance; it always exists as instantiated in particular pieces of writing…
Because literary elegance is so connected with the experience of the reader, it is also finely tuned to the demands of the moment, and in this sense it is closely associated with manners, which, as Emily Post puts it, “are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others.” Elegance assumes the intelligence and good will of the reader and strives to meet them with the same qualities. This means that elegant prose doesn’t talk down to the reader, as advice about simplicity sometimes does. But neither does it try to show off. Elegance is about creating something beautiful, with an appropriate level of complexity and filigree, to delight and perhaps, if necessary, to lightly challenge the reader. As with many other aesthetic phenomena, there can be no hard and fast rules for elegance; it always exists as instantiated in particular pieces of writing, just as manners always exist as instantiated in particular situations—even if it means transgressing established norms.
There’s a story you may have heard that demonstrates this point nicely. A man has been invited to a fancy dinner party. He’s never been to one before, and he doesn’t know what the array of accoutrements laid out on the table in front of him are for. His hostess is horrified on his behalf when he picks up the small bowl meant for washing one’s fingers before the dessert course and delicately drinks the water out of it. But informing him of the purpose of the finger bowl, either out loud or privately, would surely embarrass him. So she picks up her own bowl and drains it. What was a faux pas becomes a means of making her guest feel at home. She breaks a rule of etiquette, but in doing so she preserves the higher etiquette of the situation. In the same way, elegance is not necessarily about maintaining a high tone throughout. The moment might call for a break.
♦
LET’S LOOK A little closer at a few examples of elegant writing, so we can try to pick out the qualities that might make them elegant. I want to start with the famous opening passage of A Tale of Two Cities:
What’s immediately obvious is that this sentence literally reconciles opposites by a series of antitheses, growing progressively more intense—the repetition of season turns into the specific pair of spring and winter—until Dickens cuts it off just as it begins to grow tedious. We expect him to use these antitheses to create another antithesis, between the French Revolution and the early decades of Queen Victoria’s reign, but he does the opposite, stating the virtual identity of the two eras. The true antithesis is between the author (and the readers pulled alongside him by the force of his rhetoric) and the commentators who would deny the similarities. The sentence is a model of control and construction. In the hands of a lesser writer, it would be too long, too cute in its repetitions, but Dickens maintains his control of language throughout, and the result is a passage that is not merely perceptive about its author’s social and political situation, but immensely pleasurable as a reading experience.
The one section of the passage that hasn’t aged well is Dickens’s little dance around the word hell, which is apt to sound overly cute to twenty-first-century ears. But it was surely elegant in 1859, an attempt to avoid saying a word that would offend many of his middle-class readers, and its sourness more than a century and a half later demonstrates the degree to which elegance requires attention to one’s audience.
Here’s another passage that makes elegant use of antithesis, from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative:
Like Dickens’s, Douglass’s prose becomes more complex as the passage goes on. It puts the lie to Twain’s famous advice: “When you catch an adjective, kill it.” Would anyone sincerely prefer “an evil to be shunned” to “a great evil, to be carefully shunned”? To be fair to Twain, he did follow his advice with, “I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable.” But the elevation of simplicity and directness to the greatest hallmark of style is as limited as all other writing guidelines. Douglass’s autobiographies are a sort of incarnated argument for the value of reading and the evil of disallowing it to slaves. Thus his argument is served by a certain ornateness in his prose, which is among the most elegant of the nineteenth century. But this ornateness is never mere ornament, but always in service of that intrinsic argument. And Douglass’s writing is still perfectly clear; its elegance, as elegance always does, reconciles opposites.
Sometimes this reconciliation is structural, too, as in this passage from Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn:
This depressing description enacts the strange motions of time that it describes. It begins with two short, slow sentences that demonstrate the degree to which Marcia’s life lacks speed. Then, all of the sudden, it speeds up, with the long sentence in which Marcia sits in the dark listening to the radio, until we are at the end of the paragraph, the end of the chapter and Marcia can’t remember anything that she’s done.
I love this description of middle-class conformity from Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case”:
Here too, Cather’s elegance makes an implicit argument. Paul must be set apart from his upbringing in bourgeois Pittsburgh, and it is specifically his taste for the finer things in life that sets him apart. Cather’s prose communicates Paul’s “loathing” for his hometown indirectly as well as directly, its structural repetitions reproducing the monotony of life there without ever themselves becoming monotonous.
Elegance, indeed, frequently bestows a kind of grace upon a milieu that largely lacks it. No one does this better than John Updike. In this passage from Rabbit, Run, Harry Angstrom tries to explain his personal mysticism to Jack Eccles, an Episcopalian minister:
There’s absolutely no sense in which this is simple writing. It is, in fact, three sentences expertly pressed together: (1) the description of Harry’s internal state; (2) the description of the world he’s standing in; and (3) his own description of the nature of the universe. This third sentence interrupts the second one, and undermines it to some degree; the idea that some divine force lurks in the depressing suburban landscape would be funny if there were any trace of mockery in Updike’s irony. The first sentence, meanwhile, ties the other two together, showing us the internal motion that allows him to recognize (or project; Updike doesn’t make it clear) that divine extraordinary in the hyper-ordinary. And Updike accomplishes this effect, or so it seems, effortlessly.
♦
The best poetry is so expertly elevated that it doesn’t seem to have been written at all, as if it emerged…from the clear, crisp waters of the collective unconscious.
THAT SEEMING EFFORTLESSNESS is, I suspect, a necessary part of elegance. Think back to our ballerina. If we see her visibly struggling to contort her body in time to the music, we will be less impressed with her feat, even as we recognize that it’s still beyond our own abilities. And yet it is only a seeming effortlessness. The ballerina spent hundreds of hours in the studio learning to make her grace look like it comes naturally to her. So elegance involves a sort of studied effortlessness, what the Italian Renaissance courtier and writer Baldesar Castiglione calls sprezzatura, “a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless.” It thus requires a tremendous labor—the ballerina’s punishing rehearsals, Flaubert’s hours spent on a single sentence, Douglass’s literal life-or-death struggle to learn to read and write—which is immediately hidden from one’s audience. Elegance is showy and impressive, but it appears to be merely tossed-off. We must simultaneously be struck by its complexity and convinced that we could also do it without much effort, were we so inclined. This may be why we so many of us believe we can be poets: the best poetry is so expertly elevated that it doesn’t seem to have been written at all, as if it emerged, unbidden and fully formed, from the clear, crisp waters of the collective unconscious. The poet hides her learning and her labor alike under the elegance of rhythm and rhyme—or, failing those tools, under line and verse themselves. The seams don’t show. Elegance is like origami; when we first see it, we are struck by the beauty of its many delicate folds. But when we try to replicate them, our own paper crane looks more like a ridiculous shoebill stork.
Ultimately, I was right to put elegance at the upper limits of the A-level of my rubric. Good writing, even great writing, does not require it, and to expect college students, who have not yet had the requisite hundreds of hours of practice, to exhibit it would be patently unfair. (A “generally ugly” paper, after all, could receive a 97, and I probably gave three 100s my entire decade of teaching.) And then there is some truth to the idea that elegance can be taught only to a certain extent, that the truly elegant writers have a natural gift just as surely as the truly great athletes do, and that it’s unreasonable to expect just anybody to perform at that level. (But it still demands practice and training!) My point is that writing guides, in their praise of simplicity, are missing out on something transcendent in writing. But then, their job isn’t to teach people to write transcendently, only to write better. Simplicity is a kind of stay against false elegance, against the humiliation of the ballerina’s breaking her leg as she falls off the stage. But it’s no substitute for the real thing, which produces a feeling that can’t be produced any other way.
♦
WORKS CITED
Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” John Updike: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1988, pp. 1-7.
Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the New Millennium, translated by Patrick Kreagh, Vintage, 1993.
Castiglione, Baldesar. The Book of the Courtier, translated by George Bull, Penguin, 1976.
Cather, Willa. “Paul’s Case.” Early Novels and Stories, edited by Sharon O’Brien, Library of America, 1987, pp. 111-131.
Crider, Scott F. The Office of Assertion: An Art of Rhetoric for the Academic Essay. ISI Books, 2005.
“Definition of Etiquette.” EmilyPost.com
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Penguin, 2003.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Lector, 2019.
Pym, Barbara. Quartet in Autumn. Plume, 1992.
“Topics of the Times.” The New York Times, 25 December 1939, p. 22.
Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. Fawcett, 1996.
Zinsser, William. On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. Harper Perennial, 2016.
♦
Michial Farmer is the author of Imagination and Idealism in John Updike’s Fiction (Camden House, 2017) and the translator of Gabriel Marcel’s Thirst (Cluny, forthcoming). His essays have appeared in Front Porch Republic, PopMatters, and America Magazine. He lives in Atlanta.
Related
Publication: Tuesday, 10 November 2020, at 17:24.
Options: Archive for Michial Farmer. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.