A Commonplace Book

What is style? And "what" as the Zen Koan asks, "is the sound of one hand?" No one really knows; yet either you know or you don't. For myself, if you will excuse a rather cheap little image, I suppose style is the mirror of an artist's sensibility--more so than the content of his work. To some degree all writers have style--Ronald Firbank, bless his heart, had little else, and thank God he realized it. But the possession of style, a style, is often a hindrance, a negative force, not as it should be, and as it is--with, say, E. M. Forster and Colette and Flaubert and Mark Twain and Hemingway and Isak Dinesen--a reinforcement. Dreiser, for instance, has a style--but oh, Dio buono! And Eugene O'Neill. And Faulkner, brilliant as he is. They all seem to me triumphs over strong but negative styles, styles that do not really add to the communication between writer and reader. Then there is the styleless stylist--which is very difficult, very admirable, and always very popular: Graham Greene, Maugham, Thornton Wilder, John Hersey, Willa Cather, Thurber, Sartre (remember, we're not discussing content), J. P. Marquand, and so on. But yes, there is such an animal as a nonstylist. Only they're not writers; they're typists. Sweaty typists blacking up pounds of bond paper with formless, eyeless, earless messages. Well, who are some of the younger writers who seem to know that style exists? P. H. Newby, Francoise Sagan, somewhat. Bill Styron, Flannery O'Connor--she has some fine moments, that girl. James Merrill. William Goyen--if he'd stop being hysterical. J. D. Salinger--especially in the colloquial tradition. Colin Wilson? Another typist.

...I don't think that style is consciously arrived at, any more than one arrives at the color of one's eyes. After all, your style is you. At the end the personality of a writer has so much to do with the work. The personality has to be humanly there. Personality is a debased word, I know, but it's what I mean. The writer's individual humanity, his word or gesture toward the world, has to appear almost like a character that makes contact with the reader. If the personality is vague or confused or merely literary, ça ne va pas. Faulkner, McCullers -- they project their personality at once.