I have a small, slowly growing list of people who mustn’t expect an invitation to lunch from me. Roger Clemens is on it; so, among others, are Donald Trump, Jack Valenti, Shirley MacLaine, Howell Raines, Jack Quinn, Barbara Walters, and Alan Dershowitz. Loaded with odious and silly opinions, their conversation would, I feel, seriously complicate my digestion.
I now add to this select list Anne Lamott, a writer whose name I first came across on the morning of March 29, 2001. A novelist and the author of a book called Bird by Bird, Miss Lamott is someone I encountered in two paragraphs toward the close of an article in the “Circuits” section of the New York Times by Bonnie Rothman Morris on the simultaneous spread of writing and loss of interest in elegant prose owing to the advent of quick composition via e-mail and chat-room conversations.
Miss Lamott recently wrote a column for Salon, and reported that the Internet had somehow loosened her up as a writer in a way she found most agreeable. “The Internet was much more playful for me,” she said. “It was like an open mike at a bookstore, much less lofty, much less elitist. You don’t take yourself very seriously.” And then she went on to say — and here is the reason she is going to have to get lunch on her own — “The communication is the point, rather than the beauty of the sentence. I think beautifully crafted sentences are really overrated.”
Reading that last sentence I won’t say that, like a drowning man, I saw my entire life pass before me, but I did see roughly forty years of it swoosh by. Those would be the forty years that I have devoted to attempting to write those “beautifully crafted sentences” that Miss Lamott so jauntily disparages.
Already lunchless, Miss Lamott is also, I believe, clueless. In his novel The Tragic Muse, Henry James has a character of whom he writes: “Life, for him, was a purely practical function, not a question of phrasing.” Pity the man isn’t around to introduce to Miss Lamott; the two might show up one Sunday married in the New York Times’s “Vows” section. For Henry James himself, of course, phrasing was the name of the game, if not life itself then his best method for teasing out its meaning in “the dim and tortuous labyrinths” in which we all “sit in eternal darkness.” James wrote, for example, about the likelihood for happiness being less for one of his heroines, who was “inconvenienced by intelligence.” That phrase, brief as it is, could not be more fully packed or absorb more truth.
Jules Renard said that only Balzac was permitted to write badly. He meant that Balzac had so much to say, and literary ambitions so large, that he alone in French literature couldn’t be expected to slow down for the niceties of style. The same, I suppose, might be said for Dostoyevsky, another writer in a powerful rush; in his case, the hurry was caused by the lash of serious gambling debt. Closer to our own day, Theodore Dreiser and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, two other big-subject writers, are thought, with some justification, poor stylists. Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Dreiser, Solzhenitsyn — if our literary ambitions are less than theirs, I’d say we’d better avail ourselves of as much craft as each of our sentences can bear, because, darlings, we’re going to need it.
A poet achieves greatness if he can write six or seven poems that perfectly click. Click is the precise word; when I read a great poem, I hear in my mind a clicking sound, as of tiles sliding together and fitting exactly, exquisitely, forming a thought hither-to unpredictable yet, somehow, now inevitable. How many beautiful sentences does a prose writer need to compose before he or she is acknowledged a master? A hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? I may have struck off a dozen or so in my time, and when I have done so I have always known it, for — swish! goal! touchdown! — there is no other feeling like it.
Style in prose is intelligence perfectly formulated. Style is also a writer’s way of seeing the world — “a question,” as Proust wrote, “not of technique but of vision.” And style has very little to do with the “communication” that Miss Lamott seems to think is the point of writing. The point of writing isn’t communication — pandas, lions, seagulls, after all, communicate — nor is it information, of which the world already has more than a surfeit.
The point of writing is discovery. The writer discovers first for himself, by moving words around, bringing out surprising new meanings in them through arranging them in never-before-seen combinations. And if he hits upon the perfect combination, a light goes off, and the world will seem a brighter place to him and his readers. The result is a sentence called “crafted” or, when it really comes off, in Anne Lamott’s phrase, “beautifully crafted.”
If Miss Lamott calls, by the way, tell her I’m at lunch. Sorry to have missed her.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
