The power of words: how prose can hit you
Some thoughts on how great writers can affect you profoundly in a few words or sentences, encapsulating great themes in a simple phrase
I imagine most writers spend a lot of time thinking about prose style, in one context or another. You should, certainly, first of all to analyse your own, find its weaknesses, see where your strengths are, and how you can make it better. A writer is always improving and learning, and I think very few of us are ever truly satisfied.
I was brought to this thought most recently by a meme, as is so often the way now. It was a quotation from Norman Mailer about Ernest Hemingway. I think it’s fair to say that Hemingway has one of the most famous and distinctive styles in Anglophone literature, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he is more famous for having a particular style than most writers. He wrote in legendarily bare, stark, stripped-down prose, actively rejecting long or obscure words and complex sentence structures, believing they were often a way for lesser writers (which in his case was almost everyone) to conceal an absence of clarity of thought.
Interviewed by Andrew O’Hagan for The Paris Review in 2007, as part of the long-running series “The Art of Fiction”, Mailer had this to say about Hemingway.
He’s a trap. If you’re not careful you end up writing like him. It’s very dangerous to write like Hemingway, but on the other hand it’s almost like a rite of passage. I almost wouldn’t trust a young novelist—I won’t speak for the women here, but for a male novelist—who doesn’t imitate Hemingway in his youth.
You can see clearly Mailer’s ambiguity. He admired Hemingway hugely and was strongly influenced by him, but it was not in Mailer’s nature to be a slavish, adoring fan of anyone and his opinions had to be expressed punchily (sometimes with literal force) and with qualification.
The quotation I saw, anyway, was this, and it turns out to be a citation from The Poet at the Piano: Portraits of Writers, Filmmakers, Playwrights and Other Artists at Work by Michiko Kakutani, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book reviewer for The New York Times. Mailer offered this view of his hero.
Hemingway’s style affected whole generations of us, the way a roomful of men is affected when a beautiful woman walks through—their night is turned around, for better or for worse. Hemingway’s style had the ability to hit young writers in the gut, and they just weren’t the same after that.
The phrase that struck me as “hit young writers in the gut”, because at his best Hemingway was that powerful a writer, someone who could put together words in a way that formed an emotional blow of tremendous power.
While that was rolling around in my weekend brain, I came across a snippet of Raymond Chandler, quoted in an article in The Critic by historian Jeremy Black. I can’t remember when I first read Chandler, though I think it was in my mid- to late teens, and I was bowled over by this high priest of noir. Reading his hard-boiled prose was to see the original of which one had seen countless imitations and parodies, and suddenly to understand them all anew. And yet, and I loved this, it spat, brutal and staccato, from the pen of a man who had grown up in Croydon and been educated at Dulwich College, the school of P.G. Wodehouse and C.S. Forester (and, later, Nigel Farage). Chandler had been a civil servant, incredibly, working at the Admiralty before the First World War, yet his hero, the private detective Philip Marlowe, was the epitome of a tough, laconic, shrewd but ultimately tragic figure.
Remember what Chandler said about heroes of crime fiction in his famous essay for The Atlantic, “The Simple Art of Murder”:
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.
I can’t imagine he honed this style at the Admiralty.
This is a roundabout way of getting to a passage Black quotes, from The Little Sister of 1949 and the fifth of Chandler’s seven Marlowe novels. Here the detective is talking about Los Angeles and how it has changed.
We’ve got the big money, the sharp-shooters, the percentage workers, the fast-dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York… We’ve got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them… Out in the fancy suburbs dear old Dad is reading the sports page in front of a picture window, with his shoes off, thinking he is high class because he has a three-car garage. Mom is in front of her princess dresser trying to paint the suitcases out from under her eyes. And Junior is clamped onto the telephone calling up a succession of high school girls that talk pigeon English and carry contraceptives in their make-up kit.
I read it three or four times, because it’s so dense, so rich, so telling in detail and tony observation, so convincing and atmospheric as a whole as well as rewarding and delighting in its details.
All of this made me turn to the bookshelves and the laptop for examples of sentences, one or two at most, that are laden with impact and deliver that punch in the gut that Mailer talked about. Here are some offerings with some of which, hopefully, you are not familiar, which in my view deliver savage force in a small number of words and still resonate when stripped of their context.
First, more Chandler, an exhausted observation by Marlowe from Playback (1958).
Guns never settle anything, I said. They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act.
A typical Marlowe assessment of his life from 1940’s Farewell, My Lovely.
I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance. I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.
I make no apologies for admiring the brutality of muscular American prose, even if—because?—it’s not wholly like my own natural style. Hemingway was, of course, the master and could devastate his readers. The Sun Also Rises (1926) tells the story of hard-drinking, star-crossed lovers Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, between whom the profound adoration is clear but doomed by circumstances. The closing lines are simple, direct and heartbreaking.
“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
You don’t recover from that in a hurry.
That sense of crushing, inexorable fate and our helplessness in the face of it reminded me of a snippet from my dearest book, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992). In the first few pages, the narrator, Richard Papen, makes a remark which seems almost casual but comes to define him.
I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
Calm, undramatic, offhand, but it reveals so much about the way in which the events which are to follow have shaped him. He reflects on roads less travelled, perhaps ruefully, but is not bitter or angry, just resigned and accepting.
In everyday life I am not lacking for cheerfulness, I hope, but I think it is fair to say I am more deeply affected by depictions of unhappiness and loss than joy and fulfilment. A few years ago, one of my fellow editors at CulturAll, the digital arts and culture journal I helped set up during the pandemic, challenged us to think of romantic moments in art, and I started writing and found that those which came to me most readily were almost all tragic.
I turned most instinctively to Graham Greene. His style is not as spare and bleak at Hemingway or Chandler, and he could be very funny, but at his soaring best he is, in a way which reflects his Englishness, his Roman Catholicism and perhaps his wartime intelligence work, fatalistic, downbeat and stoical. I love so many of his books but I think the saddest, certainly the most claustrophobically doomed and bleak, is The Heart of the Matter (1948), which tells the unhappy tale of Major Scobie, a colonial official in West Africa. He is married to the introverted, withdrawn Louise and, though he does not love her, he feels responsible for her despair.
Early on, we see Scobie’s impending moral collapse prefigured, but it is also clear that he is fundamentally kind and humane, motivated by a generous spirit but seeing his world in stark and damning terms. He agrees not to report the captain of a Portuguese ship he searches for a hidden letter, acting with mercy not for a bribe, which he refuses, but out of human charity. But he knows where this leads.
They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.
No good deed is unpunished in Greeneland.
I do remember when I first read Sir Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989). I was travelling around the country on research for my doctoral thesis in the furnace-hot summer of 2003, and had been to Reading and then come to Winchester. I was sitting in a pub in the centre of the city and devouring the slender novel, and I neared the end: Stevens, the butler at Darlington Hall, had been to visit the former housekeeper Miss Kenton, married and by then Mrs Benn. The two had been, without it ever being articulated, in love years before, during the war, but she explained to Stevens that she was making the best of her life, even if she perhaps regretted marriage. She could not, therefore, return to Darlington as Stevens had hoped. At that point, narrating the story, he allows himself a brief expression of emotion, a momentary lapse in restraint.
I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed—why should I not admit it?—at that moment, my heart was breaking.
The raging sweep of sorrow and loss compressed into those few sentences left me gasping. That English is Ishiguro’s second language makes the economy, the mildness but the huge underlying power, even more astonishing.
One more then enough. I am an unapologetic fan of Sally Rooney, who seems unfashionable to like in some circles. I think she is a writer of quite extraordinary power, perception and lyricism, and her first two novels, Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), moved me deeply. Her third, 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, perhaps didn’t hit quite the same heights but contains some heart-rending observations.
Early in the book, Alice Kelleher and Eileen Lydon, university friends trying to adjust to adulthood and professional lives in Dublin, have quarrelled but reconcile, thinking longingly of the simplicity of their student days. Alice is the more successful and Eileen the more troubled and sensitive, but it is Eileen who puts her arm around Alice to comfort her. “If things are different, can we still be friends?” Alice asks, meaning if they could reshape the world to their satisfaction. Eileen responds without hesitation.
If you weren’t my friend I wouldn’t know who I was, she said.
That simple thought struck very deep, summing up so much about the bonds of very close friendship and its place in our psyches, our very construction of our selves. Yet Rooney can concentrate so much in a few quotidian words. That is power.
I listened to the audobook of Sally Rooney's 'Normal People' and sadly, I just wanted to clash their heads together(the two main protagonists). Maybe it's my age. She is a good storyteller but is fearless about creating unlikeable characters (so not unlike Donna Tartt - I loved The Secret History).