The Rules
There was a discussion yesterday at Ward Six about Elmore Leonard. John was saying that he loved Leonard’s dialogue, and then someone posted a link to Leonard’s rules for writing, published some years back in the Times. The rules are simple and indisputable, as far as they go, and they have the limitations of any set of rules. Mostly they apply to books like Leonard writes: short, entertaining crime novels, rooted in plot and character. There is nothing to distract the reader from the matter at hand, description is eschewed, the emphasis is on noun and verb.
Can rules like these apply across the board? I don’t ask that rhetorically. My instinct is to always reject rules, but of course compositional rules are necessary. But it got me thinking about where these rules come from. In the post people invoked Hemmingway. Rules like these date back to the Modernists, especially Hemmingway (and before him Ford Maddox Ford) in prose, and Pound, Williams and Eliot for poetry and criticism. The phrases are famous: ‘No ideas but in things’, ‘Make it new’, etc. They favour a clipped, minimalistic style, with few or no modifiers: ‘show don’t tell’, or Strunk and White’s infamous, ‘omit unnecessary words’ etc. Journalism’s Who, What, Where, When and Why is the model here. Authorial interjections, too much emotion, sentimentality, are to be avoided. Objective description is favored, and all the art is to be poured into artlessness. Taken to the extreme the rules lead to formalism and fragmentation.
The rules are constructed for the modern world, and create a prose style meant for busy, uneducated people in a rush, who are knowledgeable about the contemporary material world. These rules have survived all of the literary trends and disputes of the past century. Their roots lie in the 19th century, with Flaubert, Zola, Ibsen, and Mallarme, but they reflect the author’s experience not just with the modern world of technology and commerce, but with writing for newspapers and journals, the primary commercial outlet for writing. They wanted to be financially successful, and to do so they had to communicate in such a way that people would read them. The prolix, romantic style everyone had inherited from Milton wasn’t fit for cars, trains and planes.
We follow these rules because they work, but as I said, they lead to fragmentation and minimalism, and also exclude content that doesn’t fit. And the rules have become dogmas. 16th century England had dogmatic rules of composition too. At that time writers proved their ability by showing off their mastery of Latin Rhetoric. To say something ornately, in as many different ways as possible, was considered to be the height of taste, art and sophistication. Lily, whose father wrote THE book on Latin Rhetoric, invented Euphuism, an elaborate literary style that was the rage in the 1580’s. Shakespeare, writing ten years later, both loved and loathed it sufficiently to parody and perfect it as need arose. Shakespeare’s courtiers and kings speak in this obscure, roundabout language and his clownish ruffians parody it. Loves Labours Lost is full Euphuisms, so much so that some people date the play to the 70’s or 80’s and question Shakespeare’s authorship. Wyatt’s diplomatic dispatches to Henry VIII are written in the courtly style and are tedious, almost incomprehensible. But there was another tradition, that of the plain style, and Wyatt could use it when necessary. His defense against charges of treason is a model of prosodic clarity. Against Milton there were Dryden and Herbert.
If the plain style’s speed and concision are products of the modern world, like rock and roll and television and fast food, isn’t there a value in questioning this style? There have been counter styles over the decades, the Beats, and metafiction, or maximalism, but they have not thrived in academia, except on the margins, and today most writers receive their training in academia. Those who don’t tend to be commercial writers, whose mastery of the rules is a main cause of their success. I read recently a quote from Wallace Stevens to the effect that experimental writing is difficult and usually fails. Even avant-garde writers, though, preserve the rules in the main, even as they reject the ideologies that were attached to them. Stein and Zukofsky are the muses of the contemporary avant-garde. It is as if Mondrian had written the rules for painting.
There is, to oppose fast food, the slow food movement. I am reminded of Harold Brodkey. When I was young I would periodically read in the NYTBR references to the long anticipated but never published Great Work, (ultimately published in 1991 as Runaway Soul) expected from Brodkey, based on stories he published in The New Yorker. Brodkey teased the literary establishment with this work for 20 years. When it was finally published the literary establishment responded with scorn and dismay. He had betrayed them by not only writing a very bad book, but by writing a book that consisted almost entirely of adverbs and other stylistic flatulence. In the 1991 NYT review of the book, Christpher Lemann-Haupt wrote:
And the prose that the mouth employs! It is verbose, repetitive, overstuffed with adverbs, of questionable sense, tedious and just plain ugly. “She wasn’t being a goody-goody but she was staying okay, not Lutheranly, but ex-Lutheranly and middle-classishly-during-the-war.” You try to make sense of this and you give up before you get started because you suspect it isn’t worth the effort.
I read the reviews and thought, how stupid. But I did not know the rules. I learned my craft by ear and eye, and had no doubt absorbed the Adverb Rule (use no adverbs) but poor idiot that I am and was, did not know this was a rule of good writing. It was only years later, when I read the rules in some writing book, that I realized how hilarious it was that Brodkey had done this. I may not have wanted to read the book, but I love a good thumb in the eye.
