I can sometimes draw from a more obscure vocabulary, and I am very particular with spelling (yet I am still a fumbling student of the rules of grammar), but I am not content enough to say that my writing style is consistently beautiful and coherent. My writing, as with my speech, unfurls in a fragmentary manner - which may explain my affinity with the music of Scriabin and Lyadov - so it usually displays an inconsistent quality. Sentences and phrases that come to me tend to oscillate wildly between unfocused sentimentality and refined rhetoric, and their level of cogency is highly dependent upon my corresponding emotional state, which is infrequently at rest.
However, I think my insecurities with regards to my intelligence may also contribute. Often, I will look at an essay, article or passage from a noted writer (let's say, Nabokov) and I say to myself, "If I was asked to write on the subject, I would never think of that subject in such detail", or "I couldn't express myself in such an jewel-like manner" or simply "I never would have thought of that". Writing and speaking in an extemporaneous manner - dealing with the subject at hand immediately "off the bat" - is not an ability I can find in myself. Neither is the critical practice of gathering the focus 'inwards' towards the work or subject being considered while, at the same time, spreading the senses 'outwards', synthesizing various disparate (and sometimes unexpected) elements and associations in order to form 'new' work that is of a greater complexity. Here's is an example of what I am striving for. Whilst focusing 'inwardly' on the 'work of Walt Whitman', the critic William Bronk manages to analyze the literature in a manner that goes beyond mere praise or condemnation:
Quote:
"Whitman speaks to the sea as a phantom in the night, as one who though knowing himself to be part of the universe and activated by desire, yet feels himself a still unspecified part, and feels a still unspecified desire. It was no personal and eccentric longing that made Whitman feel his kinship for the sea, but rather a feeling that both of them shared in some cosmic and elemental passion. On the beach at night alone, he had become aware of a vast similtude which interlocked all. All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, all distances of place however wide, all distances of time, all inanimate forms, all souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds, all gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes, all nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages, all identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe, all lives and deaths, all of them past, present, future, this vast similtude spanned them, and always had spanned them and compactly hold and enclose them."
Or Evelyn Waugh's wonderful summary of his love for Wodehouse's work:
Quote:
"I am confident that Mr Wodehouse's characters will live. It is the half-real characters of the ordinary popular novelist who disappear. Literary characters may survive either through being so real and round that they are true of any age and race, or through being so stylized that they carry their own world with them. [...] of the second [group] are Mr Wodehouse's characters. They live in their own universe like the characters of a fairy story. [...] Mr Wodehouse's characters are purely and essentially literary characters. We do not concern ourselves with the economic implications of their position; we are not sceptical about their quite astonishing celibacy. We do not expect them to grow any older [...] We are not interested in how they would `react to changing social conditions' [...] The `Drones,' with its piano, swimming baths, sugar throwing, and borrowing and lending of fivers, has no conceivable resemblance to any London club; its Beans and Crumpets even wear a distinguishing archaic costume of spats [...]; their language has never been heard on human lips. Their desperate, transitory, romantic passions are unconnected with the hope or fear of procreation; age in their world is usually cantankerous, extreme youth, obnoxious; they all live, year after year, in their robust middle twenties; their only sickness is an occasional hangover. It is a world that cannot become dated because it has never existed."
When I first looked at that passage by Waugh, I was aghast. I thought to myself, "I never would have been able to write something of that caliber if someone has asked me to write about Wodehouse." I certainly recognise those qualities in Wodehouse's work, and it is an accurate portrayal of why the stories of Jeeves and Wooster are timeless literaure, but they would not have come to me spontaneously, and possibly not
at all. I would not have known what to say beyond liking it or disliking it. I'm sure I would have found something, but I need to react to another passage by another writer in order to do that. It's similar to my problems with conservation: I'm not very good at starting and maintaing a topic but I am good when I have something to react to. Does anyone here feel like that?
I think part of my mistake is that I imagine other writers to be unhindered by the same problems that I have when a particular subject is first foisted upon me. In my mind, although I know that it is not entirely true, writers draw their words onto the page as a spider weaves its silk: without strenuous difficulty. After I have imagined this, I then attribute their seemingly praeternatural gift to a superior intelligence or better education. However, it is easy to forget that there have been writers who do not write effortlessly or even entirely "off their own steam"; we imagine, possibly as the result of superstitions handed down to us by others, that beautiful writing is not the product of a laborious struggle but of a natural sense of what the beautiful is. I am comforted when I read about the difficulties that Nabokov, one of my favourite writers, had when he tried to express himself, or the length of time it would take for Housman and Dylan Thomas to write a single line of poetry. I don't have the advantage of knowing what goes through the mind of the great writers and intellectuals when they try to tackle a subject, but it is possible that I may not be too dissimilar to them.
I know that I've waffled a little bit, but I write so much in this post because I would like to know if anyone here has the similar feelings (and maybe insecurities) about your own abilities to perceive, articulate and explicate.
08 Nov 2012, 5:00 pm
