How carefully to write?
Not a question, I suspect, that’s been keeping you up at night. If you write, you know how to or, at least, how you’d like to. If you read, you judge instantly whether an author’s manner suits. (If neither, my condolences – for reading teaches thought; non-readers, however clever, are condemned to the condition of intellectual brutes.)
It’s a juicy question, though, which, if you dig, gets to the root of human interaction. In how to converse with each other we all have a stake. By we I mean humans. Dogs, Henry reminds me, communicate smoothly and instantly unthwarted by thought.
(If you guess from the foregoing paragraphs I’ve been reading Dr. Johnson, hats off. Susceptible to the contagion of style, I catch cadences as I do poison ivy, by mere proximity. Relocate me to London and in no time my speech is inflected (or infected) by that limey lilt.)
How one writes depends on why, to whom, and when. Academicians – and Strunk and White – to the contrary, there is no right way. Queen Victoria complained about her Prime Minister, Gladstone, “He speaks to me as if I were a public meeting.” Any writer would shudder at such a review.
Sometimes one wants to write unnoticeably. For doggerel, lyrics, jingles, chapter-books, or Trump crowds, one strives to keep the flow simple, not to entrap the reader in the tension of analogy or briar-patch of ambiguity. Thought might derail one’s listeners’ train of thought.
Poets, by contrast, the best of them, sweat to make every word tell, so the simplest gleams as variously as a faceted diamond. I love William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Sixteen ordinary words, twenty-two syllables, and I could gaze at them for hours.
One should write plainly if one doesn’t want words to get into the way of what you’re saying. Shouting “Watch out!” or “Fire!” less is more. Relating a story, as a reporter, biographer, thriller author must, KISS (keep it simple, stupid). A plain style is not inferior if that’s what’s called for. Who doesn’t recoil from fancified journalistic accounts, extolling the reporter’s scintillating self? If you’ve got something to tell me, get on with it, I don’t have all day!
Poets and other word-painters, with nothing fresh to say, must say it freshly to merit your regard. “True wit,” wrote Pope, possibly the wittiest author ever,
is Nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.
This would be my hard lot. With topics as ancient and threadbare as Ecclesiastes, to make our time together pleasant, I’ve got to dress them up. If my bulletin’s urgent, I strip away superfluities; but if we’re just shooting the breeze, an aside here, digression there, joke there, why the hell not?
Fancy writing does not mean snooty or froufrou. It means tousling, nudging, tickling, tugging words, as Jane and I do Henry at bedtime, out of sheer delight. Language is humans’ foremost way of being together. We may sniff less than dogs, flaunt less than peacocks, slither less than snakes, but, man, do we talk!
The best writing establishes a relation. Reading a poem’s the verbal equivalent of having sex, the bond’s so intimate. Dispatching or receiving an account is business-like, buttoned up. I write to amble together, enjoying each other’s company. Frost’s cautious camaraderie is my ideal: “I sh’a’nt be gone long/ You come too.”