I’ve been thinking about styles in writing. Narration, dialogue, description, syntax—all these things. By far my favorite American fiction writer is William Faulkner, and if I had it in me, I would probably write like him; but I like sparer styles, too, à la Hemingway. I have been reading a young writer, Courtney Craggett, who has an extremely trim style that would be irresistible were she not so fanciful of content in some of her stories. She is adept at the five- or six-word sentence: “The music pulses. The breezes blow.” “There are no stars tonight. The moon is small and pale.” These sentences occur on a single page of her short story “Also Lonely, Although on Land” in her book Tornado Season. What I have noticed about her writing most especially, though, is that her dialogue, while the product of artifice, is convincing until she goes too far into the improbable, and this fact gives rise to another thought: fiction is all language, so anything goes provided it is artfully done. This “anything goes” dictum holds true for books as diverse as Moby Dick, The Golden Bowl, A Farewell to Arms, Go Down, Moses, Humboldt’s Gift, and All the King’s Men, surely a diverse lineup. Language informed by imagination can perform almost any feat of verisimilitude. My recent reading has underscored this truth: John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Emile Zola’s Germinal, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, William Gilmore Simms’s Woodcraft, Faulkner’s The Reivers, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys. These books all live as if taken from the life. Steinbeck evokes suffering and endurance, Zola frenetic crowd behavior, Manzoni and Simms the guile of wickedness set against the resistance of the just, Faulkner comic misbehavior with heuristic undertones, Cather the stoicism of a strong woman, Oates the dissolution of family ties and their ultimate restoration, and all these things in all these books through the magic of style. Of the gifts of style, there are some that cannot be taught.
This fact can be illustrated through the power of Emile Zola to evoke crowd action. A riot is hard to depict convincingly, but Zola seems to do this easily. No passage of literature is more terrible than the one in Germinal depicting a mob of women tearing a shopkeeper’s manhood off by main force, yet Zola accomplishes this scene through simple language marshaled to evoke hysteria and rage. A lesser writer would merely have produced a revolting mélange of ugly images. Zola produces a mob scene of power.
The sinuous, learned language of Saul Bellow in Humboldt’s Gift presents a stark contrast to the simple language of Zola, yet Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charley Citrine’s story is every bit as riveting as that of the coal miners in Germinal. Citrine seems to be spiraling toward ruin only to be rescued by Fleisher from beyond the grave from a net that keeps the reader agitated and apprehensive right to the end. Bellow is a word merchant to equal Faulkner, with syntax equally complex. Hemingway would probably say the same thing of Bellow that he did of Faulkner: “Poor Faulkner. He believes that to express a big emotion he must use a big word.”
For those familiar with Faulkner, little needs to be said. He was a magician. He could produce lush prose like that of “Wash,” “Red Leaves,” and Absalom! Absalom! and lean fare like that of “That Evening Sun Go Down,” “That Will Be Fine,” and Sanctuary, not to mention the sheer frolic of stories like “Shingles for the Lord” and “Mule in de Yard.” He shows as great a range as any writer in literature, and as I said, he is my favorite American fiction writer.
In Faulkner’s short story “Vendée,” Bayard Sartoris, a mere boy, with his Black pal Ringo, sets out to find and kill the man who murdered his Granny. Bayard is the narrator as well as the protagonist. At the climax of the story, when Bayard kills the murderer, there is a typical Faulkner passage: Grumby shoots and wounds Bayard, and Bayard falls to earth. Grumby tries to finish Bayard off, but Ringo leaps onto Grumby’s back, “looking exactly like a frog, even to the eyes,” and diverts Grumby’s attention. While this is happening, Bayard manages to raise the hand in which he is wielding a gun; Grumby throws Ringo off his back and runs; and the passage ends: “He shouldn’t have tried to run from us in boots.” The violence occurs, as it were, off-stage, as in Greek tragedy. It is in such passages as this one that Faulkner confounds Hemingway’s strictures about his wordiness. The truth is that Faulkner adapts his language to the voice of a given story or novel; he is not a unistylist.
I see that in these remarks about style I have mainly stated some reasons why I like Faulkner—but that is only because he was in my view the greatest master of fiction in American literature. A course in Faulkner is a course not alone in style, but in the whole arsenal of a fiction writer’s weapons.
David Massey is an older writer who started late but pins his hopes on the fact that Aeschylus, Sophocles, Cervantes, and Milton all did their most distinguished work in the last ten years of their lives. Thus he, too, hopes for a late apotheosis. His only background for a writing career is a Masters in English Literature After 1660, with a few creative writing classes thrown in. David has a half-dozen published stories.
