Style–Who’s Got it (The Paris Review: Interviews, Vol. 1)
So let's get back to Paris, since it certainly has so much style.
Truman Capote (Photo by Irving Penn)
One of the biggest stylists in Vol. 1 has got to be Truman Capote. His interview is the second in the volume, and I feel sorry for Hemingway who comes right after (I know! feeling sorry for Hemingway!) because Hemingway's direct talk of cello, literature, and work habits cannot compare to Capote's expansive musings and meandering tangents on thrillers, growing up in the South, and discovering how Europe could start "taking away" as much as it gives an American. From the moment Capote comes on scene, digging into a crate to pull out a wooden lion, he shines as bright as a freshly scrubbed putti. I envision him "horizontal" while chatting to the interviewer, exactly as he describes his work process in bed or on a couch.
When asked about writers who are stylists and writers who are not, Capote's attention, however, snaps into focus for maybe the first time in the interview:
What is style? And what, as the Zen koan asks, is the sound of one hand? No one really knows; yet either you know or you don't. For myself, if you will excuse a rather cheap little image, I suppose style is the mirror of an artist's sensibility -- more so than the content of his work. To some degree all writers have style -- Ronald Firbank, bless his heart, had little else, and thank God he realized it. But the possession of a style, a style, is often a hindrance, a negative force, nost as it should be, and as it is -- with, say, E. M. Forster and Collette and Flaubert and Mark Twain and Hemingway and Isak Dinesen -- a reinforcement. Dreiser, for instance, as a style -- but oh, Dio buono! And Eugene O'Neill. And Faulkner, brilliant as he is. They all seem to me triumphs over strong but negative styles, styles that do not really add to the communication between writer and reader.
After this remark, Capote's wit keeps unfurling, and so we meet the styleless stylist ("which is very difficult, very admirable, and always very popular: Graham Greene, Maugham, Thornton Wilder, John Hersey, Willa Cather....") and, then, the nonstylist (or "sweaty typists blacking up pounds of bond paper with formless, eyeless, earless messages" whom he doesn't name). But I'd like to emphasize the end of the quote above. Capote begins to draw a distinction between strong styles that add to the communication between writer and reader and those that don't.
As any reader, writer, and editor knows, differing takes on style can bruise egos and rupture friendships. That discord may be one reason why style, at least in the way Capote means it, has fallen out of favor in higher education, replaced by an emphasis on The Chicago Manual of Style or whatever rule book an institution decides upon. I have had my own experiences with folks who think commenting and line editing mean adjusting everything to fit the preferred guidebook and nothing else, and I've seen friends battle the twenty-something-year-old copywriter across numerous drafts. But how can one approach it otherwise when, as the saying goes, you know it when you see it?
In an attempt to take a stab at that, I want to pull two quotes together. The first is by Bob Gottlieb. I posted this last Friday:
If you are a good editor, your relationship with every writer is different.... You can't have only one way of doing things; on some instinctual level you have to respond not just to the words of the writer but to the temperament of the writer.
This advice seems a propos of style as much as of responding to the writer as a person. Why? Because as Capote points out, style is really about personality:
I don't think that style is consciously arrived at, any more than one arrives at the color of one's eyes. After all, your style is you. At the end the personality of a writer has so much to do with the work. The personality has to be humanly there. The writer's individual humanity, his word or gesture toward the world, has to appear almost like a character that makes contact with the reader. If the personality is vague or confused or merely literary, ça ne va pas. Faulkner, McCullers -- they project their personality at once.
I admire this definition greatly: style is the projection of an author's personality through word and gesture. That definition, of course, makes it all the more difficult to start poking around in someone's style when something is hindering that precious communication between writer and reader.
But poke around I do. I'm an editor. I try to do it as gently as possible. I offer up a comment. I scribble alternative words or phrasing in the margins. Sometimes I devise an argument about this approach or that effect upon the reader. Now, mind you, I'm talking about words and gestures that project style and personality, not flabby prose. Unless -- wait for it -- flabbiness is what fleshes out, what makes corpulent, the personality of the author.
And it is this dance with style that makes me wonder: What would happen if we reemphasized that style just is that personality of the writer? Would that bring any relief for anyone? Because for all I've read and dissected, the greatest threat to strong style is the overwriting of authorial or narrator "voice." It is the pushing of voice, the stretching of it, until it is so distended it covers up all the other parts of a story -- including the other characters. It's the making of something innate to the prose and story and author artificial. It's working -- or doing something -- too hard.
Borges had an opinion on this. All the greats did -- or, really, an author worth her or his paper. On style, then -- on how even great stylists can overdo it and on why letting himself just be himself worked for Twain (most of the time):
Look here, I'm talking to an American: there's a book I must speak about -- nothing unexpected about it --that book is Huckleberry Finn. I thoroughly dislike Tom Sawyer. I think that Tom Sawyer spoils the last chapters of Huckleberry Finn. All those silly jokes. They are all pointless jokes; but I suppose Mark Twain thought it was his duty to be funny even when he wasn't in the mood. The jokes had to be worked in somehow. According to what George Moore said, the English always though "better a bad joke than no joke."
I think that Mark Twain was one of the really great writers, but I think he was rather unaware of the fact. But perhaps in order to write a really great book, you must be rather unaware of the fact. You can slave away at it and change every adjective to some other adjective, but perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes. I remember what Bernard Shaw said, that as to style, a writer has as much style as his conviction will give him and no more. Shaw thought that the idea of a game of style was quite nonsensical, quite meaningless. He thought of Bunyan, for example, as a great writer because he was convinced of what he was saying. If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it. In this country, though, there's a tendency to regard any kind of writing -- especially the writing of poetry -- as a game of style. I have known many poets here who have written well -- very fine stuff -- with delicate moods and so on -- but if you talk with them, the only thing they tell you is smutty stories or they speak of politics in the way that everybody does, so that really their writing turns out to be kind of a sideshow. They had learned writing in the way that a man might learn to play chess or to play bridge. They were not really poets or writers at all. It was a trick they had learned, and they had learned it thoroughly. They had the whole thing at their finger ends. But most of them -- except four or five, I should say -- seemed to think of life as having nothing poetic or mysterious about it. They take things for granted. They know that when they have to write, then, well, they have to suddenly become rather sad or ironic.
Borges offers many lessons here. For now, I'll take this one: "You can slave away at it and change every adjective to some other adjective, but perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes." After all, to err is only human.
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