Edith Wharton's Muscular Prose

Back from Atlanta, this time without a cold. DAMOP was dreary, despite being in some ways nicer than March meeting -- fancy hotel vs. convention center, fewer parallel sessions, infinitely more free stuff -- and I'm getting more and more reluctant to go to these things. I used to think they were useful: abstracts are due a long time before the meeting, so (I used to think) committing to talk about something you haven't yet done gives you a strong incentive to do it by a certain date. Unfortunately one gets quite good at damage control over time, so that the objective incentive to finish up by a certain date loses its force; eventually conferences and talk prep take up time that would have been better spent writing papers.

Glad to report that the Kindle has put an end to my habit of traveling with the wrong books. Two things of interest that I read (dept of free e-books): The Age of Innocence and Gissing's Odd Women. (Still have a small amount of the latter to finish, I meant to finish it on the train from Chicago last night but the train was sold out so I had to take the bus, which was too dark to read in.) I had avoided Wharton she always sounded like a Henry James clone, and was surprised, or more accurately disconcerted, by the actual book. What is most disconcerting is the disconnect between the ostensible plot (which is about subtleties, silences, etc. in the canonical Jamesian way) and the style, which is vigorous, heavy-handed, "broad" and ungainly. Sometimes it is a little like reading The Golden Bowl as rewritten by Dr. Johnson: the writing is strongest at the level of the phrase, but the arrangement is often monotonous ("Civic Virtue" is more like Wilde, but Wharton doesn't do paradox):

Perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave her eyes their transparency, and her face the look of representing a type rather than a person; as if she might have been chosen to pose for a Civic Virtue or a Greek goddess. The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and pure.

The "thought" is good but it is expressed too monotonously, too many of the descriptors come in pairs -- a fault that is perceptible throughout the book. Then there is her fondness for lurid irrelevances, of which perhaps the best example is the running gag about Mrs. Manson Mingott's obesity:

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.

(I like this sort of thing as a rule. But note the redundancy, the heavy-handedness of the first sentence.)

Wharton's description of Boston in summer is reminiscent of Eliot's in "Preludes," written around the same time (though Wharton's novel is set some years prev.):

The streets near the station were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit and a shirt-sleeved populace moved through them with the intimate abandon of boarders going down the passage to the bathroom. ... every few moments the doors opened to let out hot men with straw hats tilted far back, who glanced at him as they went by. He marvelled that the door should open so often, and that all the people it let out should look so like each other, and so like all the other hot men who, at that hour, through the length and breadth of the land, were passing continuously in and out of the swinging doors of hotels.

I am intrigued by her weirdly heterogeneous sensibility; I'll have to read more of her books.

"The rudiments of Paradise"

More stuff from Saintsbury's History of English Prose Rhythm. (Prev. remarks here.)

Robert South on Paradise (proto-Augustan style, re "sin and time" cf. Auden's "time and fevers"):

All those arts, rarities, and inventions, which vulgar minds gaze at, the ingenious pursue, and all admire, are but the relics of an intellect defaced with sin and time. We admire it now, only as antiquaries do a piece of old coin, for the stamp it once bore, and not for those vanishing lineaments and disappearing draughts that remain upon it at present. And certainly, that must needs have been very glorious, the decays of which are so admirable. He that is comely, when old and decrepit, surely was very beautiful when he was young. An ARISTOTLE was but the rubbish of an ADAM, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.

Abraham Cowley on solitude ("plain style" approaching chattiness):

The First Minister of State has not so much business in public as a wise man has in private; if the one have little leisure to be alone, the other has less leisure to be in company; the one has but part of the affairs of one nation, the other all the works of God and nature under his consideration. There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear very often, "That a man does not know how to pass his time."

Coleridge, in Anima Poetae, trying to get past the antitheses of Augustan prose (the "return of rhythm" in Saintsbury's rather questionable typology):

The thin scattered rain-clouds were scudding along the sky; above them, with a visible interspace, the crescent moon hung, and partook not of the motion; her own hazy light filled up the concave, as if it had been painted and the colors had run. 

(Everything that is good and worthwhile in Coleridge or Wordsworth is bleak; pace Larkin, deprivation was for Wordsworth what daffodils are sometimes supposed to have been.)

More from Anima Poetae. Saintsbury is overly indulgent to this entry:

Leaves of trees upturned by the stirring wind in twilight, -- an image of paleness, wan affright.

Structurally it is not entirely unrelated to Pound's metro poem. I think it is rather bad, on the whole, because I find "leaves of trees" cheap and redundant, and the rhyme annoying, but Saintsbury's real point -- that omitting the conjunction gives the passage a distinctly and pleasantly un-Augustan feel, of a kind the Romantics would continue to exploit -- is valid.

Coleridge's throwaway lines and diary entries are sometimes extraordinarily tantalizing, consider this one (not quoted in Saintsbury):

Analyze the causes that the ludicrous weakens memory, and laughter, mechanically, makes it difficult to remember a good story.

(?!)

In general, as I remarked earlier, Saintsbury seems to me far too cavalier about the constraints imposed by meaning; for instance he quotes the Coleridge passages above after a string of excerpts from Gibbon and Johnson -- he anticipates the objection that most of his so-called "rhythmical revival" is simply a revival of descriptive prose, and of the diffuse at the expense of the crisp, but doesn't really answer it except to say that it's ipso facto good for prose to have complex harmonies.

(Topic for another post: scattered protestations aside this book does very little, directly, to counter one's naive belief that stylistic elaboration is possible and non-distracting only to the extent that the subject matter is already familiar to readers. Jeremy Taylor is explicitly an example of this. If granted, this has the corollary that useful prose is never particularly good. The main counterexamples appear to be Hobbes (clever arrangement of clauses) and Gibbon (musical use of foreign names) -- one could do both, I think, in scientific discourse. Ancient prose could be expository and beautiful because the ancients had so little to expound. (But what about Tacitus?))

"To fill all penuries"

img from Wikipedia


George Saintsbury, in his History of English Prose Rhythm, cites this sentence from one of Donne's sermons -- the ending of which is very famous -- as one of the greatest examples of English rhythmical prose:

If some King of the earth have so large an extent of Dominion, in North, and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and West, as that he hath day and night together in his Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgement together: He brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benummed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.

It is a magnificent bit of writing, I think, but shows how hard it is to assess prose primarily for its rhythm; if it weren't for the opulence of the language, this would not be an especially notable passage; and yet the opulence is in fact part of the rhythm -- the quantity of a word is not separable from the degree of its unexpectedness; "illustrate," for instance, is dwelt on here as it would not be in other uses.

As usual Saintsbury has a lot of good observations to make -- on Milton's tendency to spoil his sentences by tacking on afterthoughts, on the effects one can get out of alternating short and long sentences (the "undulating" quality of good 16th century prose), on the value of slightly avoided isocolon (see Donne above), on the absolute necessity of avoiding strings of anapests and the relative permissibility of strings of choriambs -- and one enjoys his occasional sarcasms, but the book comes off, on the whole, as the work of a crank. His principles for foot-division are entirely unsystematic as far as I can make out; the quoted passages are usually foot-divided, even when he has nothing to say about the foot-divisions; so you have to read through "to fill | all penuries; | all occasions | invite | his mercies" etc., which is painful and distracting. (It must be admitted, however, that Saintsbury's book has enormous historical value as a guide to stress patterns in RP circa 1900.) The quoted passages are often a little mystifying, being drawn from longer works, like Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, that are about something and that one is unlikely to have read. And the decision to annotate the entire last chapter of Urn-Burial with foot-divisions and (in many places) accent markers was evidently not that of a sane person.

Fire escapes and broken staircases

Reading Teju Cole's Open City I had the distinct sense that fire escapes were a Chekhovian gun (phrase appears only twice in the first half of the book though), and when I got to the scene near the end in which the narrator takes the wrong door out of a concert and ends up on a crow's-nest-like fire escape, I was a little surprised that I hadn't read a fire escape scene in a literary novel before this. The novel is one I'd recommend; it's fascinatingly (dis)organized (James Wood is good on this aspect of it), intermittently very well-written esp. in descriptive passages -- e.g., I liked "starlight coming as fast as it could," and rain "like a great torrent of mirrors" -- but both probably need context to work -- and the voice is on the whole right for the narrator, superficially a plodding Nigerian psych resident living in New York. While clearly influenced by Sebald, Cole seems to me quite lacking in one of Sebald's great merits -- there is little that is self-delighting about the narrator's knowledge, it is mostly humdrum and dutiful and sometimes downright boring; again this is probably appropriate to the narrator, such as he is, and a much more Sebaldian narrator would have been wrong for this book and definitely less psychologically interesting.

But this post is meant to be about fire escapes, which are peculiarly evocative of a certain kind of New York street, and ultimately of a certain era. My favorite description is from Richard Price's Lush Life:

the hanging gardens of ancient fire escapes

but Cole has a good one too:

prewar buildings, each with an elaborate fire escape that it offered like a transparent mask to the world.

(There are other refs to Yoruba masks in the book.) Cole is very good on cities-as-palimpsests, and the narrator's getting stuck on the fire stairs of Carnegie Hall is of-a-piece with the meditations about, say, the lack of significance of Ellis Island for black immigrants; fire escapes and ramshackle tenements are symbols of the immigration-heavy early 20th, when the experience was better-defined and in some ways richer. Being a certain kind of present-day immigrant is, in relative terms, an amorphous predicament; the actual differences between cities are relatively small (power outages!) and one can easily keep in touch with people, etc. but the old, once-functional set of associations are now a little absurd if "evocative."

As I was walking back to work from the coffee-shop where I finished the book, I remembered the line from Price and tried to recreate the passage it was from; I seemed to remember it "musically," as periods and pauses one had to set words to -- this didn't work at all, because as it happens I was just remembering the tune of a sentence in Proust-Scott Moncrieff-Kilmartin:

In each of their gardens the moonlight, copying the art of Hubert Robert, scattered its broken staircases of white marble, its fountains, its iron gates temptingly ajar. 

There are gardens, iron, and staircases here I guess...

(Self-indulgent to record this here w/ no attempt to vivify, but it was an interesting experience and quite unusual with prose.)