I’ve been writing English prose since I was about six years old. The first thing I remember producing was a mini-novel of about ten handwritten pages. It was a silly effusion about a talismanic sword that men fought each other to possess. When it was done, all it lacked was a title, and at the age of six I couldn’t think one up. I pestered my mom to name it, and she offhandedly said “Oh, stop bothering me—just call it The Golden Days of Spain or something.” This struck me as a brilliant title, even though my novel hadn’t a thing to do with Spain. So I printed THE GOLDEN DAYS OF SPAIN in big calligraphic capitals at the top of the first page.
I also wrote a series of fake medieval romances based on the Arthurian cycle, which I was reading at the time. They were all about knights errant and ladies and love tokens and chivalric derring-do. At school I composed a long narrative about Daniel Boone and his frontier adventures, and an account of Jim Bowie’s death at the Alamo. At the request of our parish priest, I even wrote a group of small plays based on the lives of early saints for catechism class. All of this juvenilia is happily gone, swept away by successive house cleanings and file-prunings.
There never was a time when I felt uncomfortable holding a pen. In fact, over the years I developed a rock-hard callus on the middle finger of my right hand, where the pen pressed. I had this physical mark for decades until it slowly softened as I began using a typewriter almost exclusively at university, but even today it is tangibly present.
Some men need a hip flask of bourbon in their back pocket wherever they go. In my case, I need a writing implement and blank paper. I really can’t travel anywhere for an extended period without being able to jot something down. Catullus and Horace carried their little codicilli or wax tablets with them; I have my large artist’s sketchbook where I have space for anything at all, from a limerick to an ode to a full essay.
This doesn’t make me special. In the Renaissance, educated men carried something called a commonplace book with them. In it they wrote down anything that they found striking or memorable in the various books they were reading, and also whatever idea or good turn of phrase came to them. This commonplace book became their literary well, so to speak, from which they could draw material for composition. Every serious writer kept one. I sometimes fantasize about what it would be like if we had Shakespeare’s commonplace book, or Kit Marlowe’s.
In fact, at a certain point a serious writer comes to prefer the pen to actual speech. The written word has so much more capacity for detail, nuance, and specificity that after mastering its techniques one thinks of the spoken word as hopelessly clumsy and inefficient. How much clearer is a well-composed letter than a rambling, half-coherent phone conversation! How much more satisfying to the mind is a carefully outlined and organized written report than some dithering committee meeting! Add to this the great advantage of cool impersonality and emotional distance, and one can see why professional writers begin to detach themselves from the mindless chatter and chin-music of fools who like to gab.
Of course, such a stance has its unfortunate side. Consider the plague of “blogs” that infect the Internet now. Some writers suffer from a true logorrhea, and they see no reason why they shouldn’t produce a mind-numbing flood of daily commentary on their every thought, adventure, and bowel movement. Blogs of this personal nature are embarrassingly solipsistic, but obviously prompted by an intensely neurotic urge. Since no one is compelled to read these blogs, I see no actual harm in them. And they are possibly therapeutic for the persons who produce them.
But for anyone who is addicted to prose, a larger issue has to be considered. An old Latin saying has it that Laborare est orare—that is, “To work is to pray.” The idea behind it is that any honest labor at something, any labor that is respectful of its materials and the rules of its craft, is a holy thing that gives honor to God. No matter what you do, if you do it well and with pride in your work you are connecting with a transcendent reality.
For me, the generation of good prose is a form of prayer. Whenever I write I feel a deep interior satisfaction, a fulfillment of some basic need. I have never found the task of prose composition to be onerous, not even as an undergraduate writing assigned papers under a deadline. I turn to prose as a monk turns to his canonical hours: with devotion to a calling, and with gratitude for a blessing.
A major defect in the teaching of freshman composition here in the United States is the more or less complete absence of any sense of delight in the act of prose writing. Both students and teachers look upon the entire process as an annoying obstacle or burden. Undergraduates who can’t see the slightest value in a compound-complex sentence or an extended metaphor are being instructed by young composition teachers who are just as indifferent to and impatient with the demands of sophisticated English style. Neither group views the mastery of English prose techniques as anything more than a barely endurable preliminary to college work, a hump to be gotten over and forgotten, a dose of castor oil to be swallowed and digested as quickly as possible.
That is a completely wrong-headed attitude towards any art form. The inability to see that good English prose is an end in itself, and not just a convenient tool for churning out a few required term papers, is why the teaching of composition in this country fails miserably semester after semester, and why we have an out-of-control plagiarism problem. When teachers communicate to students a sense of their own lack of interest in the art of writing, why in hell should students take the subject seriously?
Let me give an example. Many years ago at Hunter College I had a female colleague whose job—like mine—was to teach freshman composition. One day I came in with an offprint of a scholarly article that I had just published, and it happened to be on an author whom I knew she appreciated. I was very proud of my new article, and I asked if she would like to see it. She said yes, and I passed it over the desk to her.
Two minutes later she handed it back to me. I knew there was no way she could have read an extensive article like that in so short a time, so I said “Is anything wrong?”
She answered “Oh no—nothing’s wrong. I just read your last paragraph to get your conclusions. That’s all I need to know.”
I was deeply offended. I had spent months polishing that essay to a high literary and scholarly sheen. I had made it as pellucid and perfect a specimen of fine English prose as I could. I was as proud of that article as if it were my newborn child. And all this dimwitted composition teacher could think of doing was to skim my final paragraph to get the “gist” of my argument. I never spoke to her again.
We’re not good at teaching the skills of composition in this country because deep down we simply don’t see the value of fine prose. For Americans, prose is just a somewhat antiquated means to the simple end of communication. Like a rotary-dial phone, it’s something you might keep around as a decorative accessory, but that you don’t normally bother to use in a world of text-messaging and e-mails. And when this attitude is shared by members of the English department, why should we expect the teaching of composition to be anything other than a bad joke?
How different from the Renaissance period, when men were passionately in love with words, rhetoric, and the well-structured sentence! Everyone aspired to be as learned and voluble as Erasmus in both Latin and the vernacular. The hunger for linguistic complexity and verbal pyrotechnics was a European-wide craze, and a man would have been ashamed not to know all the tropes and figures. All these things are signs of love, and love is strongest, as Pietro Bembo said, when the beloved object is seen as a reflection of the divine. Good prose back then was a secular prayer.
The absence of that love today is what is killing English prose. We are too much distracted by trivia and garbage and fakery to love what is genuinely lovable.
