Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading (1938) was originally – and very briefly – entitled ‘Invitation to an Execution’. Now why do you think he changed it?
‘…The repeated suffix?’
Exactly. Invitashun to an execushun. It sounds like doggerel. So keep an eye on the suffixes; maintain a safe distance between words ending (say) with -ment, or -ness, or -ing; and the same goes for prefixes, for words beginning (say) with con-, or pre-, or ex-. Try it. You’ll notice that the sentences feel more aerodynamic. Oh yes. Can you use the same word twice in a sentence? This is arguable (see below). But do try not to use the same syllable twice in a sentence (which can only be the result of inattention): ‘reporter’ and ‘importance’, ‘faction’ and ‘artefact’, and so on.
When I’m at my desk I spend most of my time avoiding little uglinesses (rather than striving for great beauties). If you can lay down a verbal surface free of asperities (bits of lint and grit), you will already be giving your readers some modest subliminal pleasure; they will feel well disposed to the thing before them without quite knowing why.
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As you compose and then revise a sentence, repeat it in your head (or out loud) until your ear ceases to be dissatisfied – until your tuning fork is still. Sometimes, along the way, you’ll find you want a trisyllable instead of a monosyllable, or the other way round, so you look for a more congenial synonym. It’s the rhythm, not the content, that you’re refining. And such decisions will be peculiar to you and to the rhythms of your inner voice. When you write, don’t forget how you talk.
It is here that you’ll need the thesaurus – whose function is much misunderstood, especially by the young. When I was about eighteen, I used to think that the thesaurus was there to equip me with a vocabulary brimming with arcane sonorities: why would you ever write ‘centre of attraction’ or ‘arid’, given the availability of ‘cynosure’ and ‘jejune’?
Although the passion for fancy words (and the more polysyllabic the better) is a forgivable phase or even a necessary rite of passage, it soon starts to feel like an affectation. So for years my thesaurus went unconsulted, scorned as a kind of crib. But now I use it as often as once an hour – just to vary the vowel sounds and to avoid unwanted alliterations. It sits on my desk alongside the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and I often spend twenty minutes going from one to the other, making sure that the word I’m tracking down still passes the test of precision.
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Mark this well. There is a need for elegance and, to that end, there is a need for variation. There is never any need for what is called Elegant Variation (EV) – where the adjective is of course ironic and sour.
My favourite example of EV comes from a thoroughly average biography of Abraham Lincoln: ‘If the president seemed to support the Radicals in New York, in Washington he appeared to back the Conservatives.’ Thus ‘seemed to support’ becomes ‘appeared to back’ – without the slightest variation of meaning. And yet you can almost hear the author’s little cluck of contentment: he has avoided repetition, and done it with style.
‘The fatal influence’, writes the great usage-watcher Henry Fowler, ‘is the advice given to young writers never to use the same word [or phrase] twice in a sentence…Such writers are ‘first terrorised by a misunderstood taboo, next fascinated by a newly discovered ingenuity, & finally addicted to an incurable vice…’
Christopher, eccentrically enough, was for a while a dogged exponent of EV. I tormented him about it for a decade and a half. I would say,
‘Ooh, you won’t catch the Hitch using use twice in a sentence – the second time it comes up, he employs employs. He’s that elegant.’
‘Yes, well,’ he said without much irritation (these were early days), ‘that’s what they taught me at school.’*1
A few years later (having not let up in the interval) I said, ‘You did it again! You employed used and used employed.’
He sighed. ‘I tell myself to stick to use and not be tempted by employ. But I can never quite bring myself to follow through…Do me a favour, Mart. Stop going on at me about Elegant Variation.’
I said, ‘Okay. I’ll stop reproaching you for Elegant Variation. From now on I’ll uh, I’ll upbraid you for Gracious Dissimilitude.’
‘Christ…I suppose I could just swear off it.’ Which he did (pretty much). ‘And start denying myself that – what was it? That little cluck of contentment.’
…Eliot said that poetry ‘is an impersonal use of words’: it has no designs on the reader, or eavesdropper, because poets are not heard – they are overheard. To a lesser extent this applies to the novelist. Sickeningly rife in discursive prose, EV is comparatively rare in fiction – though it regularly vandalises the ‘beautiful’ sentences of Henry James (in which ‘breakfast’ becomes ‘this repaste’, ‘teapot’ becomes ‘this receptacle’, and ‘his arms’, pitiably, becomes ‘these members’).
The little cluck of contentment: in general, something has gone very wrong when one finds oneself picturing the fuddled toilers at their desks; the reader, in effect, becomes conscious of the writer’s self-consciousness; with a blush, the reader becomes the reader of the writer’s mind.*2
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Your path as a writer will be largely determined by temperament. Are you cautious, buoyant, transgressive, methodical? It is temperament that decides the most fundamental distinction of all: are you a writer of prose or a writer of verse?
On this matter Auden’s sonnet ‘The Novelist’ wields great authority. ‘Encased in talent like a uniform’, the poet is pure royalty, to the manner born, tolerating no distractions or competing voices; the poet sings as the sole begetter. By contrast the novelist is a putschist upstart, and cannot
