Friday, January 29, 2010

'a new and abusive school of criticism'

Rebecca West in The New Republic.

So it is the duty of writers to deliberate in this hour of enforced silence how they can make art a more effective and obviously unnecessary thing than it has been of late years. A little grave reflection shows us that our first duty is to establish a new and abusive school of criticism. There is now no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation that is not stilled unless a book is suppressed by the police, a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger. We reviewers combine the gentleness of early Christians with a promiscuous polytheism; we reject not even the most barbarous or most fatuous gods. So great is our amiability that it might proceed from the weakness of malnutrition, were it not that it is almost impossible not to make a living as a journalist. Nor is it due to compulsion from above, for it is not worth an editor's while to veil the bright rage of an entertaining writer for the sake of publishers' advertisements. No economic force compels this vice of amiability. It springs from a faintness of the spirit, from a convention of pleasantness, which, when attacked for the monstrous things it permits to enter the mind of the world, excuses itself by protesting that it is a pity to waste fierceness on things that do not matter.


[Via] First published in The New Republic, November 7, 1914 (thanks Rahul!)

29 comments:

Aditi said...

I haven't yet read to the article in its entirety, but I like her prose. It's the sort of thing you want to read aloud.

'So it is the duty of writers to deliberate in this hour of enforced silence'

reads like a political manifesto. It has all of that grand energy one expects of orators gathering crowds to lead them into revolution.

Pompous but in a way that I like.

'for it is not worth an editor's while to veil the bright rage'

Poetry!

I hope she 'abuses' someone specifically. It would be very disappointing if it's all general.

Aditi said...

*I haven't yet read the article in its entirety

Gah!

Falstaff said...

the word ponderous comes to mind. I wish it said when the piece was originally written.

Thank god people don't write like this anymore.

Space Bar said...

aditi: no she doesn't, does she?...unless you count what she said about shaw or wells as abuse.

falsie: i wish they had. it occurred to me that i haven't read anything she's written, though i used to keep seeing stuff when virago press was still around.

Rahul Siddharthan said...

Um, it does say when the piece was originally written -- or, at least, originally published. (November 7, 1914.) Personally I wish people still wrote like that -- with style and clarity. (Some British writers still do, but they're a vanishing tribe.)

For the most part, these days, people who don't write plain English write impossibly opaque prose. In fact she complains about that: "here is the tradition of unreadability which the governing classes have imposed on the more learned departments of literature, such as biography and history. We must rebel against the formidable army of Englishmen who have achieved the difficult task of becoming men of letters without having written anything." The only thing that has changed is that the army has largely moved across the pond...

Space Bar said...

rahul: completely my bad. i just read from the byline down. thanks for pointing that out. will now include in the post.

Falstaff said...

SB: Me neither. And if this is an example of her writing, I can't say it's been a great loss. A lot of overwrought sound bites (I mean really - "Now, when every day the souls of men go up from Finance like smoke"!) that make little coherent sense (the way to "rebel against the formidable army of Englishmen who have achieved the difficult task of becoming men of letters without having written anything" is through more criticism?!!) and suffer from considerable ignorance ("Formerly they [great writers] sat in their studies, and thinking only of the emotional life of mankind—thinking therefore with comparative ease, of the color of life and not of its form—devised a score or so of stories before death came" - really? has the woman heard of Shelley? Keats? Wordsworth? Byron? Has she heard of Shakespeare? Of Milton? This is the fallacy of the golden age at its very worst) I'd offer harsher criticism, except I'd rather go with Pope (now there's someone who could write): "At ev'ry Trifle scorn to take Offence /
That always shows Great Pride, or Little Sense"

Rahul Siddharthan said...

Falstaff - I suspect (from the year), that by 'criticism' she did not mean 'lit crit'. Especially as unintelligible academic pontification (or 'discourse' in modern language) is precisely what annoys her.

Cheshire Cat said...

The best thing about the article was that it cued me to the one on Gluck... Hail our hyperlinked world.

Falstaff said...

Rahul: Neither did I.

Rahul said...

Falstaff - then I don't understand. The answer was indeed more criticism. Which in her time was done not by academics spouting theory on taxpayer money, but by people who made their living as writers, and were often recognised in their own right. Some of that breed still exist.

The remainder of your comments are a matter of taste. I am clearly not alone in thinking she was a fine writer, and I suppose you are not alone in thinking she sucks.

Falstaff said...

Rahul: yes, I know you don't understand.

km said...

I'm with Falstaff. That is seriously stuffy prose. (And I swear I've read parodies in "Punch" magazine that sound like just like that essay.)

Rahul: There's a link to a short Orwell piece on the right of the linked article. I know, different subject matter and all, but to me, that has both style and clarity.

//But SB, thanks for linking to this. It's not everyday I read a "TL;DR" piece twice.

Rahul Siddharthan said...

km - I'm curious to know what you find stuffy. Was Chesterton stuffy? Russell? Orwell was a great writer, but that essay was written a few decades after West's. Writing styles do evolve, and evolved particularly rapidly in the twentieth century. Rebecca West made her early name writing reviews and articles such as this one: if she was as obviously bad as that, surely she'd be forgotten by now. Which is not to say that every modern reader must like her.

OT, again: one of the finest essays I know of, on any subject, is this one. It is of course very enlightening and was influential in this time, but to me the prose alone (by a scientist, not a professional writer) makes it worth reading.

Falstaff said...

km: While you're there, don't miss the Fitzgerald piece on Lardner. Exquisite stuff, though you have to wonder how much of what FSF ascribes to Lardner is really true of himself.

Space Bar said...

rahul: (also OT) thanks for that link! it's made my evening.

km said...

Rahul: I'm a HUGE Chesterton and Bertrand Russell fan, actually :)

Haldane's essay (thanks for the link - I had not read that one before) *is* a model of style and clarity. It's a pleasure reading that essay and I know it's not just because I understand what Haldane is talking about.

West's essay feels dense, that's all. And you are right - Orwell's essay was written a full three decades later. (Though I doubt if my favorite writers and essayists from the 1970s and 1980s seem stodgy compared to writers of today....some writers' works just age poorly.)

km said...

Falstaff: I did read that FSF piece on Lardner. It is indeed beautifully written. You can pick almost any sentence in that and it flows so much more gracefully (than the essay in question).

Falstaff said...

km: Yes, exactly. And it isn't just about style. The FSF piece works because it's deeply specific to Lardner and bristling with ideas. Unlike West's piece, it doesn't indulge in sloppy generalizations, or deliver vague platitudes in a soapbox-y tone. Style is, frankly, the least of the problems with the West piece. The real problem is that once you get past the style you're left with what, intellectually, is just your average NYT puff-piece.

Falstaff said...

The Haldane essay is amusing. A little belabored, and a silly caricature of a long and serious economic debate. But amusing.

Rahul Siddharthan said...

km - perhaps she has aged poorly. I find it amusing to read Fowler's 'The King's English' (written a couple of years before West's essay) to see how much the language has changed. His indignation at certain usages sounds comical today.

Falstaff - I'm sure Haldane would have been flattered. The essay wasn't on economics. I suspect the last paragraph was a dig at European intellectuals of the day, who were in awe of the Soviets (just as they are in awe of China today). But I also found it prescient. There were no centrally run city states of that sort in 1928. Today there are at least three: Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai (though the latter two are technically part of larger units). Two are apparently successful, one seems to be an Enron (though it may recover). It is too early to say whether China will remain autocratic and successful; I suspect it won't, for the scaling reasons of Haldane, and hopefully it is the autocracy that will give way first.

Aditi said...

You guys are crazy. That's one of the most enjoyable bits of non fic I've read in a long time. And it's not ponderous. Jeez.

Of course, I still need to read the whole thing...

Falstaff said...

Aditi: Who says its non fic? The past writers who spent all their lives in their studies writing at their ease are largely fictional. As are all these nameless people who've become men of letters without writing anything. And the idea that all this is somehow connected to the political situation of Europe is little more than the product of an overheated imagination. If anything, the piece has a lot more merit as a spoof / a work of fiction than as a serious argument.

Rahul Siddharthan said...

Falstaff - I feel stupid, as if I had been arguing seriously with Lewis Carroll on the merits of Father William as a role model. Various things should have alerted me, including your chosen pseudonym. It is a pity that you needed to go so over-the-top before I caught on (even my credulous self can't believe you were around in 1914 or are aware of all the forgotten writers and political currents of the time). No doubt several others have been in on the joke and have been sniggering at my earnestness.

In retrospect, your other posts are masterpieces of parody of a certain kind of intellectualism. Absolutely brilliant stuff. You should make a career of it -- perhaps you do?

Rahul Siddharthan said...

Aditi: it looks like you read prose the way you read poetry, savouring each line before passing on to the next. So, though it shouldn't need saying, don't get discouraged by Falstaff's somewhat strange sense of humour (and this goes for anyone else who may be reading this).

West does not say writers of the past "spent all their lives in their studies writing at their ease". She says "Formerly they sat in their studies, and thinking only of the emotional life of mankind---thinking therefore with comparative ease, of the color of life and not of its form---devised a score or so of stories before death came. Now, their pride telling them that if time would but stand still they could explain all life, they start on a breakneck journey across the world." You can interpret that as you will. I think she's talking about people like Rider Haggard, who were very popular in 1914.

Of the "formidable army" of faux "men of letters" she names a couple of names -- A C Benson and Mrs Humphry Ward -- who, though obscure today, are not fictional characters. In fact Benson's biography seems to match exactly what she is talking about.

And of course we know what was happening in Europe in 1914, and it is not surprising that it affected literature and other arts in England.

So, if you haven't finished the thing yet, enjoy! (I just re-read it, myself.)

Aditi said...

@ Falstaff

I just read the whole thing. Ahem.

So I've changed my mind, about how worthy it is as writing.

I still find it entertaining. It has a certain soap-box quality to it that you don't find anymore. I think SB picked one of her better paragraphs though. West's writing gets unbearable at times.

But you have a curious understanding of what constitutes fiction. I suppose you're using it to mean 'thing that is not true.' Even so, strange.

@ Rahul

Heh, I'm used to Falstaff by now.

I wouldn't say I read prose as poetry, no.

Rahul Siddharthan said...

It was polemical, which is part of what made it fun for me.

The only thing I didn't understand is how Shaw fit into her criticism. She seems to be criticising the public for relegating Shaw to a comic role, but offers no particular criticism of Shaw himself -- but she says he "greatly need[s] correction". In what respect?

I haven't read the Wells book she mentions, or any fiction by him other than his science fiction: but since his "serious" fiction is largely ignored today, I can believe that her criticisms are justified.

Falstaff said...

Aditi: Obviously, I'm partly kidding about it being 'fiction'. I think the trouble is that I tend to think of non-fiction as writing meant to be taken seriously, writing with ideas one can actually engage with. This piece doesn't make that bar. Which means its valuable, as you suggest, only as entertainment, as an amusing curiosity. And that, too me, is closer to what I expect from fiction than what I expect from non-fiction.

At any rate, at least we know how people in 2110 will respond to Maureen Dowd.

km said...

At any rate, at least we know how people in 2110 will respond to Maureen Dowd.

I swear I will personally hunt down anyone who shows the slightest bit of reverence toward MoDo.

//No, I'll just cancel my Times' sub and write an angry letter to the Robot Editor.