Subject: aping one's betters
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Sun Jan 27 2002 - 12:59:07 GMT
Cecilia,
Although I acknowledge the distinction is quite artificial
I still want to make it – between a writer’s technique
& his voice.
It’s almost impossible for any writer of English since 1930
not to have been affected to some extent by Hemingway’s
purification of the language. (You will find expressions
of indebtedness in the most unexpected places: for instance,
in the letters of Evelyn Waugh & Anthony Powell.)
Trying to forego it is a bit like performing brain surgery
nowadays without the benefits of Lord Lister’s antisepsis.
Likewise, if you’re exploring the irrational swamps of
the mind, it will be hard not to avail of some of Joyce’s
associative techniques. And so on.
But the voice, the posture, the persona is something else
altogether. Bad writers – the ones concerned to be glorious
writers rather than to write gloriously – are usually much
more taken with this aspect of their admired model.
Millions of them have glued on their moustaches & poured
themselves a triple daiquiri in the pathetic hope of writing
another Death in the Afternoon. Just as another million
have bought a red hunting cap & assumed that the pure,
hurt cries of an adolescent boy will bring the Bryn Mawr
girls crawling out of the trees.
I don’t really share your attitude of forgiveness. I think
they’re pitiful. I can understand borrowing your neighbour’s
tool kit – but not his clothes & passport with the intention
of embezzling his money.
You write about the ‘voice’ of a generation. I realise you
don’t quite mean he was the ‘spokeman’ for a generation,
but there’s no denying that Hemingway infected a greater
number of his peer group than anyone else with what
were at least popularly perceived as his attitudes.
The same is to a more limited extent true of Salinger.
(Though I’d have thought Faulkner only ever really affected
the chaps in the bottom right hand corner.) But I wonder
if hidden in all this there is still some wistful yearning for
The Great American Novel? You Yanks seem terribly
obsessed with that particular dream. Reading the reviews
of Franzen (& before him, Updike, O’Hara, Fitzgerald ...)
the hope keeps recurring that THIS time we’ve found him,
the next Laureate To His Generation.
I don’t believe the real artist, the real writer, is ever concerned
to speak for anyone other than himself. I have no quarrel
with a man who has learned to cut out the adjectives or
discovered the Rule of the Iceberg. (Or even, at a pinch,
finds himself writing in 6’’ square paragraphs with multiple
subordinate clauses & droll asides in flowering parentheses.)
Just so long as it’s HIS story he’s trying to realise.
Scottie B.
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Wed Mar 20 2002 - 09:27:54 GMT