I like to think of myself as a connoisseur of style. In my ambitious youth I teased myself with Homeric Greek, Dostoyevskian Russian and Flaubertian French in an effort to become more intimate with my idols. But then, in my twenties, came the devastating realisation that my native English style, despite years of patient effort, was still glaringly deficient. Writing stories was very difficult for me, writing business documents even harder. I struggled to put one sentence after another in anything like a coherent pattern.
I started to read books on how to write. All my foreign novels went up into the attic and I refused to read anything in translation. I sought out the purist English stylists and eschewed anything showy or slipshod.
Iris Murdoch became a favourite, followed by Terry Pratchett.
I was appalled when I saw a television interviewer ask Iris Murdoch, “How do you account for your status as one of Britain’s best living novelists, given that you don’t really have any style to speak of?”
Ignorant ninny! I thought.
“I like to think I have quite a neat little prose style,” she said.
That was telling him!
One of the things about great style is that it often goes unnoticed. All the craft is hidden. What emerges instead is the meaning, which the reader flatters himself he has grasped easily because he is clever.
I have received many compliments on my prose style over the years — mainly from foreigners — but there was one in particular from an Englishman that meant a lot to me. He was reading something I’d written about Stamp Duty Reserve Tax. “I like reading your booklets,” he said, “because you always make everything so clear and each sentence flows logically into the next.”
Writing about obscure financial topics made me an expert in them because in order to explain something you have to explore it from many different angles and on many different levels.
The same principle applies to writing novels. What makes Dostoyevsky great is his understanding and his lucidity. It doesn’t matter that his work is mediated by an imperfect translator or that he tells his stories in a rambling, discursive style with lots of digressions and debates. The souls of his characters appear luminously before you and their moral and spiritual preoccupations are laid out with comprehensive candour. Nobles and peasants, cynics and idealists are all given equal treatment. There is breadth and depth in his novels. Yet everything unfolds with apparent ease.
The style of The Brothers Karamazov, his last and greatest novel, is the effortlessness of a professional man of letters who knew that the hardest challenge was to set everything before the reader in such a way that it could be readily understood. Reading it is one of the easiest and most pleasurable things in the world only because it’s the culmination of a lifetime dedicated to the craft of writing.
I love the final sentence of your post. It’s a great reminder to appreciate great writing, for it takes thought, effort, and practice to produce.
Your point about how truly great style can often go unnoticed reminds me of something one of my piano instructors once told me. She had assigned a Mozart sonata to me, and I balked because it seemed too easy. Smiling, she told me that the pieces that seem the simplest are often the most difficult to play really well. How right she was!
Thank you, Christina, I’m glad you read as far as the last sentence, and I’m delighted you loved it. The last sentence was originally something else. I’m so relieved I changed it!
I have been reading your blogs posts and comments about Jane Austen recently. I’m not as knowledgeable about Jane Austen as most of her admirers but I am a big fan of hers and I’ve even been to her house a couple of times. I’m thinking of going to beg her for an interview, much as I did with Milton and Trollope. I’m dying to ask her a few questions about writing because I know she has some very strong views on the topic and I think she’d have some really practical advice for those of us who hold her in high regard. I just wish it wasn’t so much of a trek down to Bath. I’ve heard she hated it there, but it’s the best place to catch up with her these days. Life and her novels are full of these delightful little ironies.