How to start: Benjamin Anastas has a perfectly succinct review of this collection of essays. He writes, “Pity the mortal novelist (John Updike, Toni Morrison, Martin Amis) whose work is subjected to Wood’s fierce and loving gaze.” Anastas expresses better than I could, exactly what is wonderful about Broken Estate: “It is rare to be in the company of such bracing ideas about literature, and rarer still to see these ideas expressed with a style and complexity usually reserved for fiction.”
I’m sorry… I can’t just put a few little sentences here. My favourite quotes are whole passages:
When it comes to language, all writers want to be billionaires. To be utterly free in language, to be absolute commander of what you do not own - this is the greatest desire of any writer. Even the deliberate pauper of style - Hemingway, Pavese, late Beckett - have their smothered longings for riches, and make their reductions seem like bankruptcy after wealth rather than fraud before it: Pavese translated Moby Dick into Italian. Realists may protest that it is life, not words, that draws them as writers: yet language at rush hour is like a busy city. Language is infinite, but it is also a system, and so it tempts us with the fantasy that it is closed, like a currency or an orchestra. What writer does not dream of touching every word in the lexicon once?
In Moby Dick, Herman Melville nearly touched every word once, or so it seems. Language is pressed and consoled in that book with Shakespearian agility. No other nineteenth-century novelist writing in English lived in the city of words that Melville lived in; they were suburbanites by comparison. No other novelist of that age could swim in the poetry of “the warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days.” And so, despite the usual biographical lamentations, despite our knowledge that Moby Dick went largely unappreciated, that in 1876 only two copies of the novel were bought in the United States; that in 1887 it went out of print with a total sale of 3,180 copies; that these and other neglects narrowed Melville into bitterness and savage daily obedience as a New York customs inspector - despite this, one says lucky Melville, not poor Melville. For in writing Moby Dick, Melville wrote the novel that is every writer’s dream of freedom. It is as if he painted a parch of sky for the imprisoned. (p. 42 The All and the If: God and Metaphor in Melville).
On sympathy:
And we know that the novel is the real home of this sympathy precisely because it routinely demands from us a sympathy that we could not possibly want to extend, in real life, to real people - to murderers, bore, pedophiles. The novel is able to test, and enrich, our power of sympathy in this way because it is both real and not real. Because, in Mann’s terms, it is absolutely serious and then not quite serious. It is true, and a game - a true game, but still not life. Which is why we can allow our ideas of things to remain unresolved in fiction as we rarely do in real life. (p. 124 Thomas Mann: The Master of the Not Quite).
An appreciation of D.H. Lawrence’s style:
Yet Lawrence has far greater stylistic powers than Hemingway and manages simltaneously to be both a power and a less mannered stylist. Here is Lawrence writing in 1916:
And then the tussocks and tussocks of primroses are filly out, there is full morning everywhere on the banks and roadsides and stream sides, and around the olive roots, a morning of primroses underfoot, with an invisible threading of many violets, and then the lovely blue clusters of hepatica, really like pieces of blue sky showing through a clarity of primrose.
And here is Hemingway, writing in 1929:
The fields were green and there were small green shoots on the vines, the trees along the road had small leaves and a small breeze came from the sea. I saw the town with the hill and the old castle above it in a cup in the hills with the mountains beyond, brown mountains with a little green on their slopes.
Both writers, as it happens, are writing about Italy. Both use one word three times (“green” for Hemingway, “primroses” for Lawrence), and repeat two other words. Hemingway’s passage is static. He is layering, using the coincidence of words to suggest a coincidence of colors, a pastoral monotony. But Lawrence’s words work against their own repetition, to enact a sense of change and movement. Lawrence is describing the breaking of down, the changing of light. This is a verbal discovery. At each moment of higher light, the landscape is changing but remaining the same. What is being revealed is merely the fuller essence of the same landscape, as the light builds - “a morning of primroses” culminates in “a clarity of primrose,” as morning is finally born, and Lawrence realizes that the sky above his head is the same color as the hepatica at his feet. The sentences move toward the light; we move into “a clarity.” The language stays the same but alters, as light changes but remains the same; Lawrence merely lets us see a word from an improved angle. Repetition is difference. Hemingway, one feels, knows in advance just what his repetitions will be; Lawrence discovers as he proceeds, that a word has changed its meaning as he has used it, and that he will need to use the same word because it now has a different meaning.
Lawrence is more refined than Hemingway, more of a true stylist, with a better ear; but he is also more natural than Hemingway. (p. 134 D.H. Lawrence’s Occultism)
And here:
Lawrence is sitting on a ledge. It is late afternoon, and suddenly, beneath him walk two monks, apparently in conversation. Lawrence cannot hear them, and he can barely see them. Instead, they must be divined:
And then, just below me, I saw two monks walking in their garden between the naked, bony vines, walking in their wintry garden of bony vines and olive trees, their brown cassocks passing between the brown vine-stocks, their heads bare to the sunshine, sometimes a glint of light as their feet strode from under their skirts.
It was so still, everything so perfectly suspended that I felt them talking. They marched with the peculiar march of monks, a long, lapsing stride, their heads together, their skirts swaying slowly, two brown monks with hidden hands sliding under the bony vines and beside the cabbages, their heads always together in hidden converse. It was as if I were attending with my dark soul to their inaudible undertone… I could hear no sound of their voices.
All of Lawrence’s qualities as a writer seem to me to be gathered here. There is the brilliance of Lawrence’s repetitions, so that the language becomes an abstract swoon, a religious nudging. There is the humble, funny, practical mention of the cabbages, beside which the monks walk. And then a verbal exchange occurs: Lawrence describes the vines as naked and bony, and then both the vines and the monks as “brown.” He uncovers the monks, denudes them. He takes their cassocks off: For if the vines are like the monks, the monks become like the vines. The monks become “naked, bony” and brown.
More important, the writer is feeling the presence of the monks, prayerfully. He cannot hear them, he can hardly see them, but he can feel them. They are “hidden,” yet Lawrence uncovers them. And he uncovers them religiously - by looking for the light they give off: “sometimes a glint of light as their feet strode.” Underneath their cassocks, they glow. So Lawrence attends to the monks with his “dark soul.” And what lights the path of this dark soul? The monks, who glow with light. Lawrence refers to the “hidden converse” of the monks as they exchange words, but this passage is really the “hidden converse,” for it enacts a secret exchange. On the one hand, Lawrence uncovers the monks by removing their trivial clothes, by stripping them to a state of nature (they are vines), and by illuminating them with light (they give off light, but Lawrence can see them only by the light they give off); on the other hand, and in an opposite direction, it is the monks who uncover Lawrence, who shine a light onto his “dark soul.” Lawrence is dependent on the monks even as he conjures them into being on the page. This is a religious and literary humility with which Lawrence is hardly ever credited. Jesus said that he was the vine, and that we are the branches; in a sense, Lawrence, hovering out of sight, dependent on the monks and growing out of them, is a dark branch to their bright vine. All of this is to be found in Lawrence’s style, which so many “knowing” critics and readers so cheaply disdain as hysteria. I doubt that a more vitally religious passage of prose has been written by an English novelist in this century. (p. 142 D.H. Lawrence’s Occultism)
Tangential: James Wood is married to Claire Messud (whose book Kant’s Little Prussian Head I quoted from here and here). I liked this interview with Wood on the blog Aesthetics for Birds.