But neither is its impact, which has only just begun. Speaking as one whose flabber is hard to gast, I’m bound to say I was floored. Not bound in the sense of being tied up with ropes by a burglar, or floored in the sense of having tipped my chair over while trying to reach the telephone with my teeth: I mean floored in the sense of having my wings clipped. One of my convictions about the art of composing a prose sentence in English is that for some of its potential metaphorical content to be realised, the rest must be left dormant. You can’t cash in on the possibilities of every word. In poetry you can do more of that than in prose, but even in poetry, pace Baudelaire, you must concentrate your forces to fight your battles, and there is no concentrating your forces in one place without weakening them in another – a fact that Field Marshal von Manstein vainly tried to point out to Hitler.
To achieve conscious strength in one area, we must will a degree of inattention in other areas: such has been my conclusion from long experience. But here, from out of the blue, per media the genius of Mr Harman, is a sentence that demonstrates how the whole construction can be inattentive, and achieve an explosive integrity through its having not been pondered at all. Imagine the power of being that free! Imagine being able to use a well-worn epithet like ‘out of the blue’ without checking up on whether its implied clear sky comes into conflict with a storm later in the sentence, or whether it chimes too well, but in the wrong way, with a revelation in the previous sentence that the person being talked about once rowed for Oxford or Cambridge! Imagine not having to worry about ‘explosive integrity’! Imagine, just imagine, what it would be like to get on with the writing and leave all the reading to the reader!
Too late. I missed the wave, perhaps because I was carrying too many weapons. A kind of wild card myself, I might have ridden my potato-chip surf-board more easily if I had not been burdened with all my onerous ordnance. The mine detector, especially, was the straw that broke the camel’s back – or, as Mr Harman might have put it, was the bridge too far. At high school in Sydney I was taught not just to parse a sentence but to make sure than any pictures it evoked matched up. Our teacher, Mr Aked, was not a professional philologist, but like all people with an ear for language he was a philologist at heart. He taught us enough Latin roots to make us realise that etymology was a force in the language, and the more likely to be a confusing force the less it was recognised. He didn’t make it all fun. Some of it was hard work. But he made the hard work satisfactory, which is the beginning of good teaching, and I suppose that period was my one and only beginning of good learning: that I began to become the student I would be in later years, long after I had proved that formal study was not my gift.
It was also, alas, the beginning of my suffering. My antennae for linguistic anomaly were extended and I could never afterwards draw them in. Even today, half a century later, I can’t use a word like ‘antennae’ without first picturing in my mind what kind of antennae I mean. Are they metal antennae, like the basket-work arrays of a radar station, or are they organic antennae, as on a bug? Having decided, I try to make something else in the sentence match up, so as not to leave the word lying inert, because it is too fancy a word to be left alone, while not fancy enough to claim its own space. Having finished the piece, I comb through it (what kind of comb?) to look for what I overlooked: almost always it will be a stretch of too-particular writing, where the urge to make everything vivid gets out of hand. But I will still question what kind of urge gets out of hand, and I might even have to look up the origin of ‘out of hand’, to make sure it has nothing to do with wild cards.
Purple patches call attention to themselves and are easily dealt with by the knife. The freckle-sized blotches of lifeless epithet, unintended repetition and clueless tautology are what do the damage. In the first rough draft of this piece, in the first paragraph after the quotation from Mr Harman, I had a clause, which I later struck out, that ran thus: ‘with the bonus of its proud owner’s barely suppressed grief.’ But ‘barely suppressed’ is the kind of grief that any journalist thinks a subtle stroke; and, even less defensibly, ‘bonus’ echoes ‘onus’, one of the key words of the fragment under discussion. All that could be said for my use of ‘bonus’ was that I used it without tautology. In journalism, the expression ‘added bonus’ is by now almost as common as it is in common speech. (My repetition of ‘common’ is intentional, and the reason you know is that you know I must know, because the repeated word comes so soon.)
Too many times, on the way to Australia by air, the helpless passenger will be informed over the public address system that his Qantas flight is ‘co-shared’ with British Airways. The tautology is a mere hint of how the Australian version of English is rapidly accumulating new tautologies as if they were coinages: as an Australian police officer might say, it is a prior warning. Already the spoken term ‘co-shared’ is appearing as ‘code-shared’ when written down: I saw it this year at a Qantas desk in Terminal 4 at Heathrow, and Terminal 5 isn’t even built yet. If the language goes on decaying at this rate, an essay consisting entirely of errors is on the cards. In the television studio it is already on autocue. (In America I could have said ‘cue-cards’ for ‘autocue’ and got a nice intentional echo to make ‘on the cards’ sound less uninspired, but it would have been unfair: American English is the version of the language least prone to error at present – or, as the Americans would say, at this time.) But when all the nits are picked, and the piece is in shape and ready to be printed, one can’t help feeling that to be virtuous is a hard fate. Most of the new errors I couldn’t make if I tried. In the Melbourne Age for August 27th, 2001, an article that it took two women to write included the sentence ‘The size of the financial discrepancies were eventually discovered.’ I couldn’t match the joyous freedom of that just by relaxing.
What I would like to do, however, is relax my habitual attention to the sub-current of metaphorical content. Most of the really hard work is done down there, deep under the surface, where the river runs in secret. (Watch out for the sub-current and the river! Do they match?) No doubt it would be a sin just to let things go, but what a sweet sin it would be. It is sometimes true of poetry, and often true of prose, that there are intensities of effect which can be produced only by bad writing. Good writing has to lay out an argument for the collapse of a culture. Bad writing can demonstrate it: the scintillating clangour of confusion, the iridescent splendour of decay. A box of hoarded fireworks set off at random will sacrifice its planned sequential order, but gain through its fizzing, snaking, interweaving unpredictability.
The handcart of culture has to go a long way downhill before the hubs wobbling on its worn axles can produce a shriek like Mr Harman’s prose. You will have noticed how, in my previous paragraph, I have switched my area of metaphor from chaos to decay, and then from pyrotechnics back to chaos. I would like to think that this process was deliberate, although there is always a chance that I undertook it in response to a reflex: the irrepressible urge to turn an elementary point into a play of fancy. If it is a reflex, however, I hope it lurks in a deeper chamber than my compositional centre, and so leaves room for conscious reflection – a word from the same root, but suggesting a very different tempo.
Mr Harman’s reflex occupies his whole mind. But he should worry: look at what he can do without pausing for thought. In his classic sentence, Mr Harman does not commit a single technical error. It is on a sound grammatical structure that he builds his writhing, art nouveau edifice of tangled imagery, as if Gaudi, in Barcelona, had coated his magic church of the Sagrada Familia with scrambled eggs, and made them stick. Mr Harman has made a masterpiece in miniature. There is an exuberant magnificence to it. As Luciano Pavarotti once said, I salute him from the heart of my bottom.
The Monthly, January 2008
Postscript
After the turn of the millennium, when I finally began the actual writing, so long put off, of the book that was eventually called Cultural Amnesia, I spent about a year collecting example
s of misused language in the newspapers and the periodicals. A year was more than enough and I had to abandon the practice, lest I give way to that weird cocktail of depression and self-loathing that comes from irritability too often driven to its limit. I also abandoned my plans of incorporating into the book a long section that would demonstrate how our beloved tongue had gone to the dogs. For one thing, a few pages would be enough to prove it, and for another, the theme looked petty beside the twentieth-century political tragedies which provided the book’s fulcrum – if a fulcrum can be something spread out over almost a thousand pages. Outside the world of my book, however, in the real world which persisted in maintaining its separate course, the written language continued to fall to bits, so that the once glitteringly busy traffic of the up-market British newspapers on the weekends began to look like a demolition derby. It therefore seemed only like duty, over the course of the next few years, to take some of my annotated examples out of their low-tech cardboard file and work them up into separate essays, in the hope that I might deploy them as weapons in a counter-campaign against (and here I employ the kind of mixed metaphor that was becoming increasingly prevalent) the tsunami of decay.
For anyone who volunteers to fight in this doomed battle it is important, I think, to distinguish between mere bad grammar and more elevated bad writing. The question of bad grammar I tried to cover, or at any rate make a start on, in the first of the two preceding essays. But bad writing often doesn’t need bad grammar to make it awful. It can be awful even while keeping all the formal rules. A perfectly bad sentence, indeed, can be an intricate miracle of ostensibly correct construction. Often, indeed, it’s the mandarin elevation of the approach that leads to the disaster, as a new ambassador bowing himself elaborately backwards out of the monarch’s presence might end up in a broom cupboard. There are reasons to think that the urge to accident-prone highfalutin’ is an aspect of personality.
As I know from my own time in broadcasting, it takes a degree of egocentricity to feel that one has a natural affinity with a microphone. People eager to get on air are often bent on impressing you with their superiority, and the rule applies all the way down to those whose only access to broadcasting is a public address system associated with some means of transport. Many an announcer on a British train is as stilted in his diction as a minor Victorian novelist, and there must be something about the atmosphere of an airport that drives would-be broadcasters to the heights of rhetorical bravura. At Stansted one afternoon I heard a strident female voice warn all of us under the terminal’s elegant metal roof that any car left incorrectly parked outside would be ‘subject to a towing procedure’. You couldn’t say that the announcement was grammatically incorrect. Semantically, however, you yourself would never have thought of saying it at all. It’s a whole new language, closely based on ours yet infinitely foreign, like a penthouse hotel suite in Dubai.
HAPPINESS WRITES WHITE
Usually attributed to that prolific aphorist Anonymous, the sadly true notion that ‘Happiness writes white’ probably emerged from Tin Pan Alley or Broadway, when somebody finally realised why most of the good love songs were about love lost. The idea might seem to conform to the standard Romantic conception of poetry, but it is important to remember that the Romantic conception was a real discovery of something that had always been true: art is an outward integration inspired by the artist’s inner disintegration.
The converse holds. Contentment has either no need of artistic expression, or few resources for it. Even when we doubt this is so, we think it ought to be so, and apply the concept to other arts as well as to poetry. One of the reasons we speak so slightingly of Mendelssohn when we put him beside Beethoven is that we can hear Mendelssohn’s music smiling – or anyway we believe we can, which is enough to make us patronise him, reserving our unmixed approval for Beethoven, even when the personality revealed in his life story strikes us as actively unpleasant. With a less glaring discrepancy, but in the same way, our opinion of Renoir will always be lower than our opinion of Monet, because Renoir suffered less. Renoir might have suffered more had he not been so reasonable, but he gets no points for that. Renoir correctly found Monet irresponsible and loathed the way he spread misery among his women, but the more that the truth of their lives came out, the more that Monet looked serious vis-a`-vis Renoir, until, by now, Renoir’s reputation carries an indelible question mark. Instead of putting himself to the anxieties of developing his maniere aigre, he might have done better studying to be more miserable.
Unhappy artists are to be pitied, but often not for the apparent cause of their unhappiness, which they might have arranged. If they had become artists in order to deal with a psychic imbalance that was implanted early, the urge to remain productive might well entail a deliberate avoidance of ordinary happiness, especially in its domestic branch. When Philip Larkin said ‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’ he was giving a powerful hint that he would stay deprived if he could. Eliot showed the cost of settling for bliss: it produced exactly one late, pale lyric, whereas the opposite had produced The Waste Land.
Yeats probably knew he was a fool for love. Knowing it, he was no fool at all, but perhaps something even more pitiable, an artist so dedicated that he would hoodwink reality if it threatened to make him content. His instruction to himself – ‘Never give all the heart’ – would have killed his work had he obeyed it. He always gave all the heart, over and over: but only to those women who shared the useful characteristic of incomprehension. His wife, George, paid the penalty for understanding him: she inspired him often to gratitude, but seldom to a rhapsody.
Yeats’s muse, on the other hand, whoever she might happen currently to be, fled forever out of reach, like a Daphne just a touch faster on her feet than Apollo. In Norman Jeffares’ excellent Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, we find Yeats expressing himself thus: ‘How much of the best I have done and still do is but the attempt to explain myself to her? If she understood I should lack a reason for writing, and one can never have too many reasons for doing what is so laborious.’ He means that he wouldn’t write poetry unless he had to, and implies that nothing must be allowed to remove the reason. Chateaubriand, in the preface to Atala, said that when the Muses cry, it is only to look more beautiful. The immediate implication was that the poet might not be beyond courting some high-quality misery in order to make the Muses tearful.
There is a deeper implication: the poet will exploit grief when it comes. Peter Porter, with characteristic frankness, laid bare this truth in the sequence of monumentally beautiful poems he wrote in commemoration of his first wife. But true artists don’t need love trouble to stave off happiness: all they have to do is look at the world. In that regard, all the great art we know of carries within its compass a guarantee that its creator is not content. Shakespeare’s sonnets are the most powerful possible assertion that love is not only a fine thing but that we have scarcely lived if we are shut out of it, yet all the ecstasy in the sonnets would amount to nothing if it were not threatened by time and death, which he evokes with at least the invention that he lavishes on the erotic. Similarly Dante’s Inferno might be hard to take if we didn’t know that he would later write the Paradiso, but the Paradiso would be unbearable without the Inferno. We don’t allow our master artists to be merely twee, but neither, on the whole, do they themselves; and they, as we, will always put Boucher and Fragonard in the second rank merely for suggesting that Arcadia can be an unmixed pleasure and go on forever; although it could be said that the melancholy of monarchical absolutism imposing its requirements somehow seeps through to give even manufactured bliss an undertone of menace. Besides, Fragonard’s pretty girl reading her book will grow old and die: we know that, and we know he knows that, or he would not have been so seized with the beauty of her concentration. French painting and music are copious with what we would call the merely lovely but we can be confident about bringing our own unhappiness to the picture or the composition even
when they are careful to avoid any of their own. We can be equally confident that their makers would never have shown that care if they themselves had been truly untroubled. To be undisturbed and yet still creative would be impossible. When playing Vermeer in Girl with a Pearl Earring, Colin Firth looked grief-stricken but probably underplayed it. To want to produce that degree of serenity is a sign (for once the semiotic vocabulary becomes appropriate) of a sensitivity to turbulence that can’t, as it were, be brushed away. If the world’s horror had not been eating at the artist’s soul, we would never have seen the girl. The instinct, on the part of those who project utopia, to leave the artists out of it is politically deplorable but aesthetically sound: they would produce anodyne art.
The Monthly, December 2006 – January 2007
Postscript
Coughing apologetically as I run, let me hasten to add that I don’t put Fragonard in the second rank when I am actually looking at one of his pictures. I put him first and everybody else nowhere. Any successful work of art drives all the other works of art out of your head while you are in its grip. In the Oval Room at the Wallace Collection hangs the great Fragonard picture in which the love-sick young swain is forever looking up the skirt of the girl in the swing. If Hieronymus Bosch had painted the same scene, the stricken youth might have been looking into the pit. But if that idea occurred to me while I was looking at the Fragonard, it would only mean that my attention was wandering. The insidious fault of all criticism that ranks artists is to convey the impression that we can do that while we are occupied with the works of art. But a work of art is successful precisely to the extent that it stops us doing any such thing. Hence the folly of asking whether Bob Dylan is as good as Keats: the mere question means that we aren’t listening properly to Bob Dylan.