When the context is historical, you see at once how ruinously these vulgarisms distort the tone. Here, toadying to the contemporary is not just resoundingly anachronistic; it also does violence to decorum, to literary decorum, which has nothing to do with etiquette and simply means conformity of style to content. I resent being told that Hitler was at any point feeling ‘upbeat’, which chummily accords him a human status that was never his. I find this inappropriate. And as for the idea of readers being ‘gobsmacked’ in 1729…
From here a larger lesson follows.
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To re-emphasise: never use any phrase that bears the taint of the second-hand. All credit to whoever coined no-brainer and (I suppose) to whoever coined go ballistic and Marxism lite and you rock and eye-popping and jaw-dropping and double whammy and all the rest of them. Never do it – not even in conversation. Never say (let alone write) You know what? or I don’t think so or Hello? or Hey (jocularly, as in ‘But hey, we all make mistakes’). Even in a quite handy-looking little tag like anytime soon you can hear the bleats and the cowbells. Don’t write, don’t say, and don’t think Whatever (this is probably the most counter-literary item in the entire lexicon).*1 Shun all vogue phrases, shun all herd words; detect them early on and shun them. Been there, done that, took the selfie, got the T-shirt…
Clichés have in their time put in some honest toil for the canon – Evelyn Waugh’s foreign-correspondent journalese in Scoop (‘The body of a child, like a broken doll’), the placid but maddening catchphrases in the cabman’s shelter in Ulysses (‘the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat’). These are venerable clichés, solidified by time. The clichés of the moment are evanescent; even in the impoverished lodgings of platitude they are mere transients.
In a work of fiction, ‘gobsmacked’, ‘upbeat’, and ‘smarts’ could achieve decorum – just about and not for long – if put into the mouth of a minor character, a representative (in Saul’s phrase) of ‘the mental rabble of the wised-up world’. Such speech would lose its threadbare legitimacy in a year or two, and the character would himself become an anachronism.
So cleanse your prose of anything that smells of the flock and the sheep dip. Your prose, obviously, should come from you, from you yourself – purpose-built, and not mass-produced.
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‘The hidden work of uneventful days’…That’s Saul’s marvellous evocation of the subconscious, the subconscious hard at it, trying to clarify and modulate. And it also evokes the process of writing, writing something long: writing a novel.
John Banville has described the mental atmosphere of composition as a dreamy or a dreamlike state, and so it is. And yet Banville intended no paradox when on another occasion he said with some vehemence, ‘The most important thing? Energy, energy, energy.’ Abstraction combined with exertion, producing a thrilled and thwarted tingle, like an ungratified need to sneeze; it is the tingle of creative life. That sensation, that feeling of pregnant arrest, was what Saul, at the last, was mourning.
Bellow Sr, Abraham Bellow, who died in 1955, always described Saul as a desperate sluggard, the only son ‘not working only writing’. Not working? From Augie March:
All the while you thought you were going around idle terribly hard work was taking place. Hard, hard work, excavation and digging, mining, moling through tunnels, heaving, pushing, moving rock, working, working, working, working, working, panting, hauling, hoisting. And none of this work is seen from the outside. It’s internally done…[I]n yourself you labor, you wage and combat, settle scores, remember insults, fight, reply, deny, blab, denounce, triumph, outwit, overcome, vindicate, cry, persist, absolve, die and rise again yourself! Where is everybody? Inside your breast and skin, the entire cast.
‘It’s the same idea, isn’t it,’ I said to Rosamund. ‘The hidden work of uneventful days.’
‘This time given the bravura treatment,’ she said. ‘But it’s the same idea.’
We had the book out on the kitchen table at Crowninshield Road. Rosie was nearby, of course, and so were Rosamund’s parents, Sonya and Harvey. It was April 2005, just a few days – a few uneventful days (the quiet visits to the synagogue, the quiet procession of friends and neighbours dropping off cooked meals, mostly stews or thick soups, in tureens and engraved samovars) – after the funeral.
∗
Phoebe Phelps is about to revisit us, but before we open the door and let her in…You know, every now and then, as I age, I discover a fresh refinement in ‘the complex symbol’, which is also the complex reality – meaning death.
It’s like this. There I am, staked out in the Boca Raton hospice; until recently I was retching and whimpering away with some brio, but now I’m in the Critical Care Unit and trussed up with tubes and pumps and catheters. I imagine that Elena, Bobbie, Nat, Gus, Eliza, and Inez were all there, all round about me. But they’re not. Together with my brothers and my friends and everyone alive whom I have ever loved – they’re in mid-air on a chartered jet, coming to Florida to say their goodbyes. And halfway through the flight (JFK to West Palm Beach), the plane suffers what they call a failure cascade, and by the time it crosses from South Carolina to Georgia it has no hydraulics, no flaps, no spoilers, no reverse thrust, and no brakes.
I have entered a light coma and my vital signs are flickering, and the plane is busy dumping fuel just east of Savannah as it prepares to ditch at, say, Brodie Air Force Base, a few miles north of the Sunshine State (also known,
