More From F. L. Lucas: on style in writing
[NOTE: I wrote previously about Lucas here and here.]
Here’s a quote from F. L. Lucas that remains all too true. In fact, I believe it’s only become more true since he wrote it. Although I’m not sure when that was, it had to have been some time between the Second World War and Lucas’ death in 1967:
The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn… tired of common sense and civilization.
Lucas was quite obviously a great prose stylist (he was also a poet, it turns out). What’s more, he wrote a book on style in writing that contains many nuggets of good advice. Some stylish excerpts:
Communication [is] more difficult than we may think. We are all serving life sentences of solitary confinement within our bodies; like prisoners, we have, as it were, to tap in awkward code to our fellow men in their neighboring cells. . . . In some modern literature there has appeared a tendency to replace communication by a private maundering to oneself which shall inspire one’s audience to maunder privately to themselves–rather as if the author handed round a box of drugged cigarettes.
…a writer may cultivate the obscure, to seem profound. But even carefully muddied puddles are soon fathomed. Or he may cultivate eccentricity, to seem original. But really original people do not have to think about being original–they can no more help it than they can help breathing. They do not need to dye their hair green.
…without passion little gets done; yet, without control of that passion, its effects are largely ill or null.
I particularly liked his comment about not having to dye one’s hair green. Very appropriate in today’s America.
But really original people do not have to think about being original—they can no more help it than they can help breathing. I nominate Neoneocon as a rare, original person! She may not have been original until, with difficulty, she started changing her mind.
If you want to be original, then stop avoiding conflict (fear) and/or avoid agreeing with or being agreed with by the status quo.
From The Real Thing by Stoppard:
“This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly. What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might…travel.”
Henry, Act II, scene V
“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”
Henry, Act II, scene V
A lot more worth contemplating in that play which is about the nature of our various perceptions and how they affect us.
Objectivity and logic have long since been put into exile. Art has stopped being about human nature, which is why even the ugliest stuff fetches millions, bought by others also not much interested in human nature.
Not really about style but about subject matter. William Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Address:
“… the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner
Art has stopped being about human nature
In the West, sure, but the West doesn’t encompass all the world.
Even for Yuri Bezmenov, it was his encountering another culture in India that allowed him to break away from his social conditioning in the USSR.
Thank you for introducing Mr. Lucas to us. Some wonderful quotes.
I liked them so much I did what I normally do in this situation; I looked him up at the Brainyquote.com, but only found a few more morsels of insight.
Sadly, he was wrong about what happened at Munich in 1938. He thought that disgrace would be remembered forever. Sadly that has not been the case. Our current political leaders have repeated that folly several times in the last 7 years without any indication they feel the shame. Indeed they call it enlightened diplomacy.
AKJimBob:
Well, to defend Lucas, he didn’t think everyone would remember it forever. But considering everything, quite a few people still remember it, don’t they?
That doesn’t mean our leaders do.
First came the French Revolution, and the chaos of democracy (not a bad thing in itself). Hegel saw history as following a chaotic path toward a destination, as did Marx. Darwin saw the order of species being the result of chaos. Freud saw the mind as chaos. People took a hard look at the atom and found stuff we still have trouble understanding. The medieval idea of order was replaced by the modern idea of randomness.
Meanwhile, after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, European nationalism rose. New countries developed out of national identities. Let the stew simmer for 100 years, and you’ll have countries believing that they’re the perfection of human existence, ready to wipe out any non-members within their borders and stomp on any neighbors who are by definition inferior.
World War I was caused by the new chaotic racist nationalism. World War II was caused by the biggest losers of WWI doubling down on chaotic racist nationalism. After the first war most all of Europe grew tired of the thing that had replaced civilization, and after WWII the Germans and Americans grew tired as well.
The ideological conflict of the struggle against Communism, and currently against radical Islam, has taken place while the West has grown increasingly tired of the thing that replaced civilization. America had the benefit of the European immigrants who remembered what civilization meant.
That doesn’t mean our leaders do.
If they were above average, they would have shown that excellence by now.
Since they are at the bottom 20% of human trash, you get what you get.
Evil is what evil does.