Clive James on Waugh's dangling bits

The late Clive James wrote

Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh (1903–1966) was the supreme writer of English prose in the twentieth century,

Chesterton held that title while he lived. 

even though so many of the wrong people said so.

Waugh himself probably thought Beerbohm was better though, no doubt, he got his start in the Nineteenth Century. But it was to that period Waugh harkened back.  

His unblushing ambition to pass for a member of the upper orders

his wife, the mother of his children, belonged to the upper orders. There was no reason for him to pass for a chimney-sweep.  

was held against him by critics who believed that art, if it couldn’t be an instrument of social reform,

i.e. pretending to care deeply about chimney sweeps 

should at least not be the possession of a class that had enough privileges already.

because they weren't busy sweeping chimneys.  

Even so irascible a representative of that position as Professor John Carey,

he taught English to Chinese chimney-sweeps- right?  

however, felt obliged to enrol Waugh’s first comic novel, Decline and Fall, among the most entertaining books of the century. By extension, students should be slow to believe that Waugh’s most famous single book, Brideshead Revisited, is as self-indulgently snobbish as its denigrators say:

it is a marvellous satire on a prig- a stand in for Waugh himself. We are delighted when it turns out that  Catholicism prevents the nice girl from having to marry the awful prig.  

usually they have a social programme of their own, and almost always, against their inclinations, they can quote from the text verbatim.

probably because they are trying to pass for members of the upper orders.  

The same might be said for critics who can find nothing valuable in his wartime Sword of Honour trilogy:

It is very good at depicting a rather inglorious period in this country's military history. Still, we did better than the French.  

the comic scenes alone are enough to place him in direct rivalry with Kingsley Amis at his early best, and rather ahead of Anthony Powell and P. G. Wodehouse, neither of whom came up with an invention quite as extravagant as Apthorpe’s thunderbox.

Waugh had travelled in Africa and Latin America. Thunderboxes are no joking matter. Will Apthorpe supinely permit a superior officer to usurp his commode? An Old Etonian would scarcely have had the stomach. But Apthorpe's soul has been steeled by his frequent troubles with Bechuana tummy. 

Really it takes blind prejudice to believe that Waugh could not write magically attractive English.

He took pains to make his prose pleasing. 

But Waugh showed some blind prejudice of his own in believing that he wrote it perfectly.

Perfection does not please. It is either taken for granted or taken as a reproach.  

His apparent conviction that only those with a public school (i.e., private school) education in classics

translating dead languages at a young age trains you to lay out your own mother tongue with an undertaker's tact.  

could write accurate English was a flagrant example of the very snobbery he was attacked for.

He was merely repeating the conventional wisdom of an earlier generation. Having been a school master, he was bound to say foolish things of that sort.  

It also happened to be factually wrong, on the evidence that he himself inadvertently provided.

It was obviously wrong. The Classics were taught in England before there was any thing very much by way of English prose.  

In 'the Culture of Amnesia' Clive James wrote

THE DECAY OF grammar is a feature of our time, so I have tried, at several points in this book, to make a consideration of the decline part of the discussion.

 Even those with little learning know that grammars always decay as they gain wider currency and acquire a written literature. Inflectional complexity and irregularities tend to disappear. This is as true of Sanskrit as English. 

Except in a perfectly managed autocracy, language declines,

An autocracy may speed the simplification of the language in the interest of efficiency or to facilitate its spread to conquered tribes.  

and too much should not be made of the relationship between scrambled thought and imprecise expression.

Nothing should be made of it. Those who think most clearly see the advantage of speaking in a wholly meaningless manner.  

Hitler did indeed abuse the German language,

No. He had gone to a good school- the same one as Wittgenstein- and, for a Corporal, he spoke well. Indeed, he could understand and make himself understood in English. French, he knew slightly better. In Italian, he was fluent.  

and there was many a connoisseur of grammar and usage who was able to predict, from what he did to the spoken word, what he would do to people when he got the chance.

Is James thinking of George Steiner? But Steiner was a shithead who studied at the French Lycee in New York. He was faking his Europeanism in the best Yankee Doodle Dandy style. Still, at one time, it was the charitable view- one popularized by Thomas Mann- that the Germans had never wanted military conquest. Sadly, when they listened to Hitler sodomizing their mother tongue, they became so traumatized that they invaded Poland and Ukraine and so forth in a fugue state.  

But Orwell set his standard too high when he called for clean expression from politicians: it would have been sufficient to call for clean behaviour.

It would be equally useless and foolish.  

At the moment, the use of English in Britain is deteriorating so quickly that “phenomena,” after several years of being used confidently in the singular, is now being abetted by “phenomenon” used in the plural.

Thus has it always been. Jonathon Owen tells us 'The O.E.D has has citations for plural phenomenas dating to 1635 and singular phenomena dating to 1708, and many of these uses come from scientists and other academics who were well versed in Greek and Latin.' James published this shite in 2007. 

People sense that there ought to be a distinction.

Not if they have something important to say. Waugh didn't. He was a peerless observer and had a great ear for idiolect. But, as he says, he had little learning.  

Everybody wants to write correctly.

Unless they were avant garde and made a point of not doing so.  

But they resist being taught how, and finally there is nobody to teach them, because the teachers don’t know either.

Young teachers like Waugh- maybe. But if he had stuck it out in that grim trade, sooner or later, he would have made it his business to find out. 

In a democracy, the language is bound to deteriorate with daunting speed.

I suppose, that was the gravamen of the Proteus episode in Joyce's Ulysses.  

The professional user of it would do best to count his blessings: after all, his competition is disqualifying itself

if your competition is a bunch of Grammar-Nazis, you aren't likely to be making very much money.  

presenting him with opportunities for satire while it does so, and boosting his self-esteem. (When I catch someone on television using “deem” for “deign,” it consoles me for having found out that I have spent fifty years stressing “empyrean” on the wrong syllable.)

Stress the right syllable and you sound like a dick or, if that description is otiose, one so abruptly entered by a dick as to emit a high pitched yelp.

The most interesting aspect of the collapse is that the purist can do so little to stem it, and might even succumb to it himself, sometimes through a misinterpretation of his own credentials.

Even if this were true, it would not be interesting. But it isn't true. The purist can and does triumph by finding something important to say and saying it more simply and soundingly than those who jaw away in jargon. Also, nobody 'misinterprets' their own credentials. It is not the case that when you get a Batchelor's degree, you think you are prohibited from marrying.  

Evelyn Waugh was a case in point. Nobody ever wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English;

plenty did. That was the point. We grant no plaudits to one who wields a blunt scalpel.  

he stands at the height of English prose;

Nonsense! He is a comic master but Thalia stands at the foot, not the summit, of Parnassus. I suppose, had his war experiences ranked with those of T.E Lawrence, his prose may indeed have touched heights of sublimity inhospitable to the joyous Muse. Or, had the fate of the free world rested in his hands, he may have gibbered in the Gibbonesque manner of Winston Churchill. Alternatively, had he made his mark in the Mathematical Sciences, he, like Bertrand Russel, might have been thought worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sadly, Apthorpe's thunderbox- though, to my mind, equal and opposite in value to the discovery of the atomic bomb- was not an achievement the world thought worthy of condign acclamation. 

its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him.

No. A particular, self-consciously facetious, late Nineteenth Century, style enjoyed, at his hands, an unnatural extension into our own age. But Logan Pearsall Smith died in 1946. Beerbohm died in 1956. Ronald Knox died the next year. E.M. Forster, who had known them all, died in 1970. 

But he was wrong about how he did it. In A Little Learning he pronounced that nobody without a classical education could ever write English correctly.

Foreigners write it too correctly. 

Only a few pages away from that claim, he wrote the cited sentence,

'A little later, very hard up and seeking a commission to write a book, it was Tony who introduced me to my first publisher.'

which is about as incorrect as it could be, because he ends up talking about the wrong person.

Nonsense! There is a psychologically interesting elision which might look like slip-shod construction to a particularly stupid reader.  

He meant to say that it was he, Evelyn Waugh, who was very hard up, and not Anthony Powell. To make the lapse more delicious, Powell himself was the arch-perpetrator of the dangling modifier.

Perhaps this was deliberate. The modernist was studiedly lewd, not a prude, about dangling bits. 

At least Waugh had got over the influence of Latin constructions. Powell, to the end of his career, wrote as if English were an inflected language,

or as if it is not received analytically- which it isn't. A Hindu might say the English sentence is a 'sphota'. A pseudo-intellectual Hindu might speak of its fugitive, futile, flight from holophrasis. 

and at least once per page, in Powell’s prose, the reader is obliged to rearrange the order of a sentence so that a descriptive phrase, sometimes a whole descriptive clause, can be re-attached to its proper object.

Few readers have felt any such need. One might say that Powell doesn't read 'smoothly'. Was this by design? 

In a book review I once mentioned Powell’s erratic neo-classical prosody. He sent me a postcard quoting precedent as far back as John Aubrey. He was right, of course: our prose masters have always been at it.

English's analyticity is not innate. It is a heuristic device- nothing more. 

But our prose masters, now as then, ought not to prate about correctness while leaving so much of the writing to the reader.

Writing really doesn't matter. Do you have something interesting to say? If not, gas on about the decay of language or cultural amnesia or the fact that the country is going to the dogs now the whole place has been swamped by immigrants who will probably cook and eat my pussy cat.  

Correct prose is unambiguous.

Lawyers are trained to write in an unambiguous way. But what they produce is not prose precisely because it is correct. 

There is no danger of the clear becoming monotonous, because opacities will invade it anyway.

In which case, there is no danger of anything being clear. What is of no interest to us is monotonous even if it is conveyed by hideous shrieks punctuated by sonorous farts. 

Even the most attentive writer will have his blind spots, although deaf spots might be a better name.

Anyone can pick holes in anything.   

Kingsley Amis, who was an admiring friend of Anthony Powell, was nevertheless well aware that Powell’s grammar was all over the place.

That was the least of his weaknesses as a creative writer. 

(In a letter to Philip Larkin, Amis made a devastating short list of Powell’s habitual errors.) Amis himself was a stickler for linguistic efficiency.

The same could be said for the scriptwriter for the Carry On films.  

The only mistake I ever caught him making was when he overdid it.

James is mistaken. Anyway, a man so self-involved could not catch anyone at anything.  

In Lucky Jim, which is a treatise on language

it really isn't. The thing is one step up from a Carry On film. That's why it worked so well on screen.  

among its other virtues, Gore-Urquhart, Jim’s mentor in the art of boredom detection, unaccountably seems to approve of the paintings of the fake artist Bertrand Welch.

There is no such incident in the book. Jim claims to be a 'boredom-detector' to the rich old man. Clive was either senile when he wrote this or else was drunk off his head when he read the book as a teenager.  

“Like his pictures,” says Gore-Urquhart. Since he says everything tersely, the reader—this reader, at any rate—tends to assume that he means “I like his pictures.”

Nonsense! This is the passage James is referring to-

But what he means is that he considers Bertrand a fake, like his pictures.

Bertrand pictures aren't fake. He did actually paint them. That's why they are no good. But, Gore-Urquhart also thinks the man is no good. He doesn't want his niece to marry the fellow. That's why he has given a well-paid job to Bertrand's rival in love. 

The reader is sent on a false trail

No. The rich dude says 'Bertrand is no good- just like his pictures'. This is easy for the reader to understand because it is borne out by everything which has preceded it.  

by a too-confident use of the character’s habitual tone. The author should have spotted the possibility of a misinterpretation.

There really is none.  

But we, the readers, should remember that it is one of the very few possibilities of misinterpretation that Kingsley Amis didn’t spot.

James 'read' English at Pembroke College. Clearly it destroyed his ability to understand even a very simple, farcical, novel like 'Lucky Jim'. 

He spotted hundreds of thousands of them, and eliminated nearly every one. If he had written without effort, many of them would have stayed in. (Exercise: find a complex interchange of dialogue in Lucky Jim and count the number of times you are left in doubt as to who is speaking. You are never in doubt. Now try the same test with a novel by Margaret Drabble.)

Don't. Get a fucking life. 

The main reason a good writer needs a drink at the end of the day is

the same reason a bad writer does.  

the endless, finicky work of disarming the little booby traps that the language confronts him with as he advances.

Lawyers may have to sweat over such matters. Otherwise, you just edit your manuscript after having laid it aside for a day or two. Does it read smoothly? Are the main points leaping out at you or has decorative shrubbery rendered them invisible or indistinct? Should you take out that bit about shitting yourself in Swahili class? Is it a case of 'too much information'? Does it distract from the main thrust of your critique of German monetary policy? Such are the questions which face an editor. They are of no great concern to a creative writer- more particularly if it wasn't him who shat himself in Swahili class. It was Bakul Joshi. Lots of people confuse him and me- even Mum. Much of the blame for this must be borne by German monetary policy in the age of Adenauer.  

They aren’t really very dangerous—they only go off with a phut and a puff of clay dust in the reader’s face if they aren’t dealt with—but those aren’t the sounds that a writer wants his sentences to make.

Even Homer nods. Readers make allowances so long as you have something interesting to say.  

Evelyn Waugh didn’t really want this sentence to make this sound, but he relaxed his vigilance.

Or else, he was being 'psychological'. The defective syntax reveals  that he wants to expunge the humiliating memory of the penurious scapegrace he once was. If anybody should be thought of as 'hard up' let it be Anthony Powell. What was intolerable was the thought that he had taken to the pen for the same reason other Cockneys, failing at other trades, returned to their ancestral profession of purveying  cockles, whelks, and mussels, alive, alive, oh!

He knew what he meant, and forgot that the descriptive phrase was closer to the wrong person than to the right one.

The Psychological interpretation is more interesting than the notion that a professional writer suddenly 'forgot' what was, after all, second nature to him.  

If we correct the sentence, we can guess immediately why things went wrong. “A little later, very hard up and seeking a commission to write a book, I was introduced by Tony to my first publisher.” But the correct order would have struck the writer as awkward, because the loss of “it was Tony” would have removed the connection to a previous sentence in which Powell had been talked about. In other words, it was Waugh’s sense of coherence that led him into the error.

He could have easily written, 'Later, when I was very hard up and desperate to get commissioned to write a book, it was Tony who came to the rescue, introducing me to my first publisher.' What is interesting, from the psychological point of view, is the elision of 'I' in the sentence.  

With bad writers it is often the way.

A writer is only bad if he is neither entertaining nor informative but insists on boring the shite out of us.  

In their heads, it all ties up,

Plenty of good writers don't have anything 'tied up' in their heads. What matters is whether they can entertain or inform.  

and they don’t fully grasp the necessity of laying it out for the reader.

Joyce should have taken grammar tips from James. Finnegans Wake might then rank with 'Lucky Jim'.  

Even good writers occasionally succumb. Waugh, who was as good as they get, hardly ever did: but he did this time.

No. We get that Waugh- perhaps because of his middle class, North London, background, had been psychically scarred by his youthful impecunity. Had his father been a Duke or a dustman, this would not have been the case. The thing would have been a lark.