Saying What One Means

I AM asked now and then by people who know little about writing how a style is acquired. I am sure I don’t know. It’s one of those things, like a light hand at pastry. All sorts of ingredients must go to make it up — fundamentally the same, and superficially so different for every individual.

One is safe, however, I think, in pointing out a basis without which no respectable style is possible, and this is the capacity to say more or less what one means. It is not as easy as it seems. Let anyone who doubts take some simple object — a teapot, a chair, a vegetable — and try to describe it exactly; he will come up at once against the formidable inexactitude of language. It is only when he has succeeded in following Flaubert’s advice — to describe a tree so that no other tree could be mistaken for it — it is only then that his stylistic problem will be on its way to being solved.

Colors, for instance, are extraordinarily difficult. There is a muddy little canal I often pass, and I have puzzled for a week at a time over its color. It is indeed exactly like putty, but one could not use such a word for any sort of water without instantly destroying the idea of fluidity. The point to remember is that every word calls up far more of a picture than its actual meaning is supposed to do, and the writer has to deal with all these silent associations as well as with the uttered significance. I noticed this once when walking along a street full of beggars in Cairo; they came up asking for alms in the name of Allah, and I paid little attention to the too-familiar sound until one said, “By God, I am hungry,” and the word “God,” which we use forcefully and rarely, immediately compelled me to give.

When I compare our new Bible with the Authorized Version, the passionate wish for exactitude seems more noticeable in the old translation than in the new, however their actual achievements may compare. Take a rather clumsy sentence from the old — the third verse in the first chapter of St. John: “All things were made by Him and without Him was not anything made that was made.” Regardless, we may say, of style, the word “anything” together with the insistence on the word “made” does lead the hearer or reader to realize the deadness of matter before a living Divinity inspires it. The modern version says “and through Him all things came to be” (as if it could be an accident!); “no single thing was created without Him” (and why “single”? It might be double, treble, or infinite). The old wording, “was not anything made that was made,” is far stronger.

Take also in the same chapter, verse one of the modern version: “When all things began, the Word was.” The point is that things didn’t begin, they were begun. The old and beautiful opening does not lose sight of this context — “In the beginning was the Word”; it concentrates on the main fact and is supremely accurate.

Accuracy is, indeed, the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit, and should fit not only in their utterances but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled. The problem of all writing is the same as that presented by the composition of a telegram; one has to convey a meaning with the use of few and always inadequate words and eke it out with what the reader, drawing upon his own reserves, will understand. The number of words that even the most profuse writer will dare to use is always insufficient for a complete impression, but the reserves that he can draw upon in the reader’s mind are lavish indeed. The whole generalship of writing is in the summoning and marshaling of these unseen auxiliaries.

This necessary cooperation makes tradition in literature valuable — the gradual development of a vast familiar field. It also makes it difficult to acquire a style in a foreign language, where the writer must rely on his own words and has few of the subtleties of his reader’s background to play with. It is as if a musician were condemned to have the resonance taken out of his notes.

Even the best stylist fails wherever his appeal finds no echo. The words he uses come down from their embroidered past and wield their magic in the proportion in which this rich sort of tracery is understood, and even the simple mere beauty of sound is built by an infinity of unrecognized associations. The writer’s business is to make all this as intelligible as he can. With sequences not too abrupt, with images not too remote, with necessary pauses, he must think how best to use the few words that are given him to deal with the unmanageable multiplicity of Nature, even at her easiest, relying on what echo he is able to awaken in the recesses of his reader’s mind.