Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [72]
This is not a Horrible Example—we shall have some later—but a typical run-of-the-mill Cozzens paragraph, chosen at random. It seems to me about as bad as prose can get—what sensitive or even merely competent novelist would write a phrase like “the ridiculous impracticalness of his aspirations”?
“Mr. Cozzens is a master of dialogue,” wrote Orville Prescott. On the contrary, he has no ear for speech at all. “You answer well, Arthur!” says one matron. “But, to my very point!” And another: “They’re all, or almost all, down at the boathouse, swimming, Arthur.” A practicing lawyer, not supposed to be either pompous or barmy, uses the following expressions during a chat: “I merit the reproof no doubt....My unbecoming boasting you must lay to my sad disability....I’m now in fettle fine....Our colloquy was brief.” In short, Cozzens’s people tend to talk like Cozzens. They’re out for that cake, too.
“He has always written with complete clarity,” wrote Granville Hicks, “but here, without forsaking clarity and correctness, he achieves great eloquence and even poetic power.” On the contrary, malphony exfoliates, as our author might put it. As:
The succussive, earthquake-like throwing-over of a counted-on years-old stable state of things had opened fissures. Through one of them, Arthur Winner stared a giddying, horrifying moment down unplumbed, unnamed abysses in himself. He might later deny the cognition, put thoughts of the discovered country away, seek to lose the memory; yet the heart’s mute halt at every occasional, accidental recollection of those gulfs admitted their existence, confessed his fearful close shave.
“Succussive” is cake-walking, since it means “violently shaking... as of earthquakes” and so merely duplicates the next word; a good writer wouldn’t use four hyphenated expressions in a row; he would also avoid the “occasional, accidental” rhyme, and the reference to unplumbed abysses; he would ask himself what a mute halt is (as versus a noisy halt?); and he would sense that “close shave” is stylistically an anticlimax to so elevated a passage. It’s all very puzzling. Here’s Richard Ellmann of Northwestern University, who has been perceptive about Joyce’s prose, finding By Love Possessed “so pleasant to read,” while I find almost every sentence grates.[4]
“Its author has become the most technically accomplished American novelist alive,” wrote Whitney Balliett. Let us say rather: the least technically accomplished. To list a few defects of style:
(1) Melodramatics. “Deaf as yesterday to all representations of right, he purposed further perfidy, once more pawning his honor to obtain his lust. Deaf as yesterday to all remonstrances of reason, he purposed to sell himself over again to buy venery’s disappearing dross.” (Haven’t seen “dross” in print since East Lynne.)
(2) Confucius Say. A queer strangled sententiousness often seizes upon our author. “In real life, effects of such disappointment are observed to be unenduring.” “The resolve to rise permitted no intermissions; ambition was never sated.” Like shot in game or sand in clams, such gritty nuggets are strewn through the book.
(3) Pointless Inversion. “Owned and...operated by Noah’s father was a busy...gristmill.” “Behind these slow-minded peerings of sullen anxiety did dumb unreasonable surges of love swell.” “For that night, untied Hope still her virgin knot will keep!” The last is interesting. He must mean “tied,” since the “still” implies a possible later change, and a virgin knot, once untied, must ever remain so. I think the “un-” was added automatically, because Cozzens makes a dead style even deader by an obsessive use of negative constructions, often doubled, as: “unkilled,” “unhasty,” “not-unhelped,” “not-uneducated,” “not-unmoving,” “a not-unsturdy frame,” “a not-unhandsome profile.” May we take it the profile is handsome, the frame sturdy, or do they exist in some limbo betwixt and between?[5]
(4) Toujours le Mot Injuste. If there’s an inexpressive