| Drama, Poems, Essays |
SOME EXCELLENT
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Some writers don't worry about line-endings, meter,
subtle rhythmic changes, or deeply psychological significant sound. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Yet even I, a poet, must concede that many of these hacks -- uh, that is, that many prose writers -- are nonetheless great artists. How can they be great, these reprobates? These, these slackers who ignore what I have spent my life trying to learn? By mastering many kinds and qualities of writing that we poets seldom have opportunity to employ. For one thing, great prose writers are macro-artists -- workers in long forms. Most of us poets are micro-artists -- workers in short forms. We don't have room to do what they do, worrying as we are about our own small excellences. Or the prose writers may be narrators. They may be explainers of processes. They may (having space, unlike us rhymesters) tell long stories, while we poets (most of us) are lyric poets, confined to the short literary forms. Or the prose writers may be geniuses of characterization, like Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Balzac. Or they may be painters (at length) of weather, scenery, and background: Tolstoy -- damn him -- can make you feel a crisp, autumn day with clouds scuttling thinly through the sky. When he talks about a birch tree, you feel your hands around its thickness. We poets just don't have the space to compete with prosers this way. An occasional prose master, an Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) or André Gide (1869-1951), may even have virtues rare among prosers and common only in poets; for instance, the ability to use psychological sound, phrasing, and rhythm. Charles Dickens (1818-1870) sometimes showed fairly good prose rhythm; even Charles Darwin (1809-1882) occasionally. Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) and Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) were very good at this. Some writers are fine at imagery, especially the imagery of the naturalistic world. But even great prose writers also have glaring weaknesses. So, to pick some great prose writers for you, I will try to give you a sense of what I think is most notable about them; I will emphasize both their strongest and weakest features. (I have decided, for the moment, to ignore from this point on those too-often-ignored toilers, non-fiction writers, and confine my remarks to the great fiction creators.) In no particular order of greatness, I present a number of remarkable and worthy prosers. In his short stories (surely fifteen of which are the best of the 20th century) and in three of his novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms, American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) seems to me the most direct, truthful, and blunt pure writer of the 20th century. Who among prose writers gets the rhythm right more often than Ernest? Who has a more powerful directness? Hem ignored rhetoric and simply tried to write true sentences. Those who have read large amounts of him, however, know that he gradually became mannered, flat, stupid, incompetent, and befuddled. Across the River and Into the Trees is a gross travesty. It is as if Ernest's mind could no longer become clear. And his is no great philosophical mind, such as Tolstoy aspired to have and Ayn Rand (to some extent) became. American novelist John Steinbeck (1902-1968) wrote the The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men. That is accomplishment enough for any prose writer. But -- except for the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath -- excellence of style is not his forte. His strength is his understanding of and loyalty to his characters, and of the Monterrey and interior California region that was his Yoknapatawpha. He has a weakness common to many prose writers as well, namely, a certain blandness and flatness that mars his lesser works. This, I think, is the mark of a mind not seriously engaged or without an original idea. In works like Of Mice and Men, however, one sees Steinbeck's great strengths. Marie-Henri Beyle (1783-1842), known as Stendhal, wrote Le Rouge et Le Noir (1830), one of the world's greatest psychological-political-sexual novels, and my very favorite. Some readers prefer La Chartreuse de Parme (1839), which is remarkably well written, but I find that work more delicious than deep. I have found what I have read of Lucien Leuwen (1855; translated into English in 1950 as The Green Huntsman, and difficult to obtain in English) very interesting. (Stendhal's other work seems slight.) Jane Austen (1775-1817), besides being one of the pioneers of women's fiction, is a thoughtful, deeply insightful, and knowledgeably humorous writer who deeply empathized with her characters' problems. She has a deep sympathy with people and an ability to make us care about them. Pride and Prejudice is the work I most admire. It is so well shaped and so satisfying, the archetype of many love stories. Sense and Sensibility I find very difficult to get into; Austen insists at the beginning of that novel on narrating a great many matters, not dramatizing them. This is a classic beginner's fault in storytelling. I enjoy Austen's eloquence and wit, and the sympathetic strength of her woman's point of view. On the whole -- despite grievous faults -- I think Ayn Rand was the most important philosopher of the 20th Century. (See my essay on her growing influence.) In my humble opinion, Rand is the greatest philosophical novelist of all, and a very good writer of prose. T.S. Eliot claimed to think that a writer's philosophy is unimportant to his or her work (and, in my opinion, contradicted himself in his appraisals of writers). I disagree with Eliot. A great writer is or can be great (among other reasons) for embodying in his or her works a great philosophy. Despite some extravagances, and much tendentiousness, (I think extravagance is usually damaging), The Fountainhead (1943) seems to me the most perfect, though not the most important, of Rand's novels. The greatest and most important is Atlas Shrugged (1957); indeed, it is the most important of all Rand's books: but it is marred by its improbable titanism. (Some would say, its gigantosis.) A grand, flawed tapestry of events and characters, in my opinion it rivals Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924). Rand, however, has no sense of humour at all. And her odd personal psychology led her to make many strange and damning judgements which have damaged her critical reputation. Lev Tolstoy is the author of War and Peace, my nominee for the greatest novel of all. What sweep, what characters, what richness of background. Still, one must sympathize with Henry James for calling Russian novels (and he must have been thinking of Tolstoy) "great baggy monsters". War and Peace is damaged by Tolstoy's lengthy Hegelian reflections on the unimportance of great men, and -- I think -- by its slow pace. I must admit that I have never managed to get through the whole thing. My appreciation of War and Peace is based on Manuel Komroff's excellent 600-page abridgement. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) was the author of The Brothers Karamazov, of which I have read enough to agree that it is at least a very great novel. In my youth I could not feel anything about the problem of the so-called death of God, or care about Dostoyevsky's ideas about Russia, but Ivan Karamazov's problems have more meaning for me now as a 50-year-old. But the novel of Dosty's I most enjoyed was Crime and Punishment. This is gripping. Its ending, which some find sentimental, I found satisfying. Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and Charles Dickens, of course. Each has a broad imagination capable of taking in hundreds of unique and powerful characters, and the ability to make them come alive. Most of Dickens' characters, however, are like the villains in Atlas Shrugged: electric caricatures. I admire Alexandre Dumas for having written in The Three Musketeers (and its sequels) and especially The Count of Monte Cristo, novels of exciting adventure the world can not forget. Like Borges I admire Robert Louis Stevenson !1850-1894). I admire him for Treasure Island (1883). Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde (1886) surprised me when I reread it some years ago; it was more subtle and rewarding than I had expected. James Joyce (1883-1941) is a great writer for whom I feel little excitement. He certainly made a new and subtler kind of short story in Dubliners. He is a master (like so many Irish writers) of the Irish way of blather and blarney. And A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an original and powerful book (though it took me several tries to complete the long, harrowing sermon on hell; it seems rather a lot about that -- dreary and taxing to the reader). My problem with Joyce is that, original, marvellous, talented, and powerful though he is, I don't seem to enjoy him any more. (I got a lot from him when I was 22.) And I don't find him in the slightest inspiring. I have not yet finished more than half of Ulysses (1922), although I am determined to. Finnegans Wake (1939) influenced my longish poem Eyes of Lapis Lazuli" a great deal in 1973, but I have since moved away from this influence. I would like to put in a good word for two much lesser, popular scribblers, Anthony Hope (1863-1933) and Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950). Few would ever call these great writers. Why do I include them here? Simply because I can't get some of their work out of my head. The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) is one of the few novels now become adolescent literature that I periodically return to. And I have found since the age of 12 richly fascinating the deeply flawed, horrendously juvenile, and wildly, excitingly romantic A Princess of Mars (1912). I know I shall look again at the rest of Burroughs' Martian series, and Tarzan of the Apes (1914) and some of its first few sequels. The American science-fiction writer Roger Zelazny (193 -1995) was a fascinating stylist with a genuinely poetic and musical sensibility. I enjoy his work generally, but especially the early "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (1964), my favorite novella, with its great love story, its rich, florid characterization of the romantic poet-protagonist Gallagher and its evocative Martian background. In this work he shows a remarkable control over pace and a powerful ability to control theme. This Immortal (19 ) (in its shorter form known as "--And Call Me Conrad") is an excellent short novel with an exciting opening. Another high-quality effort is "He Who Shapes". Another excellent effort was the short story "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth" (196 ). Zelazny had the music of poetry in his work, and a wonderful ability with mythology and archetype, and the power to make a story move in exciting life. His major fault is that sometimes he is not very interested (or interesting) thematically, just writing picturesque action, for example in an ordinary effort like Damnation Alley (1969). I admire Robert Silverberg -- especially for his Dying Inside (1975), a minor masterpiece, but also for many, many of his stories (the novella "Born with the Dead" (19 ) comes to mind). Has anyone but Hemingway and Poe written so many good stories? He knows, unlike many science fiction writers, what literature is, and he knows about love, loss, hopelessness, and the callowness of youth. The Book of Skulls (197 ), Thorns, and about ten other books of his middle period, between about 1967 and his temporary retirement from writing (1974??) are the works I find of most depth, interest, and originality. I shall read them again. In my opinion, no prose writer is as great or talented as Shakespeare or, perhaps, Dante, although I used to think that Tolstoy was. [To Be Revised]
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