Re: words, words, words

You're making me want to read Somerset Maughm, Scottie. Nice post.

Jim

Scottie Bowman wrote:

> 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 13:55:38 2003