Re: words, words, words

    You may well be right, Daniel, that the greatest geniuses,
    the Shakespeares & Dickens, are less concerned with
    le mot juste than with simply trying to channel the torrent
    of their ideas.

    It's very much a matter of personal predeliction & mine
    tends toward the writer as artist, even the writer as painter.
    (I've never known a real painter, incidentally, who was
    other than greatly concerned, if not with his brushes, certainly
    with the way he laid in the paint.)

    I'm less interested in what Pip did next than with the way
    it looked & felt that night on the Thames marshes, the night
    he first encountered Magwitch: what old Hem (inevitably
    the master for a guy of my generation) was always trying
    to convey in 'the way it was'. And remember Conrad:
    'My task .. is by the power of the written word to make
    you hear, to make you feel - it is before all, to make you see.
    That - and no more, and it is everything.'

    Hear, hear.

    This means I find myself in greater sympathy with someone
    like Tolstoy or Flaubert, working to show you how it was
    to lie dying in the field at Borodino or live as an apothecary's
    wife in an 1850 French provincial town - & who spent a very
    great deal of their time finding the right word - much more
    than with a Thackeray or Trollope, who seemed mainly
    concerned to keep the story rolling, rolling, rolling.

    Another influence on a boy growing up in the forties was
    a writer now largely forgotten: Somerset Maugham.
    His book 'The Summing Up' - reviewing his writing life -
    was for a long time one of my bibles. In particular, his promotion
    of a style incorporating the simple, the unshowy, the declarative,
    'as clear as a pane of glass', made a profound effect on someone
    already brain-washed by Ernie. Maugham spoke French before
    he spoke English & was imbued from his earliest days with the French
    ideals of lucidity as exemplified by Robbie's chum Racine, Montaigne,
    & so on. (When French Translation features in the evening's
    homework, you surely appreciate the unaffectedness of a Daudet
    or a De Maupassant.)

    When it comes to German or Russian, I have to depend on the report
    of others. But those who should know tell me Tolstoy's Russian
    belongs to the plain-cooking school of writing. As does, indeed,
    that great German stylist Freud whose simple 'Seele' (or 'soul'),
    for example, was rendered into 'psyche' by the misguided Strachey
    who hoped to make the whole thing more 'scientific' & respectable
    sounding with his arcane 'id's & 'superego's.

    Although I've just mentioned Conrad admiringly I have to say that
    he & Nabakov reveal their fundamental uneasiness with their second
    language by their very pyrotechnical skill in it. I can admire them -
    but never really love them.

    Scottie B.

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Received on Tue Aug 5 13:20:46 2003