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The poet Glyn Maxwell likes to conduct the following test in his writing classes, one apparently used by Auden. He gives them Philip Larkin’s poem “The Whitsun Weddings,” with certain words blacked out. He tells them what kinds of words—nouns, verbs, adjectives—have been omitted, and how they complete the meter of the line. The aspiring poets must try to fill in the blanks. Larkin is traveling by train from the north of England to London, and as he watches from the window, he records passing sights. One of these is a hothouse, which he renders: “A hothouse flashed uniquely.” Maxwell excises “uniquely,” telling his students that a trisyllabic adverb is missing. Not once has a student supplied “uniquely.” “Uniquely” is unique.
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Nietzsche laments, in Beyond Good and Evil : “What a torment books written in German are for him who has a third ear .” If prose is to be as well written as poetry, novelists and readers must develop their own third ears. We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why one metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality. We must proceed on the assumption that almost all prose popularly acclaimed as beautiful (“she writes like an angel”) is nothing of the sort, that almost every novelist will at some point be baselessly acclaimed for writing “beautifully” as almost all flowers are at some point acclaimed for smelling nice.
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There is a way in which even complex prose is quite simple—because of that mathematical finality by which a perfect sentence cannot admit of an infinite number of variations, cannot be extended without aesthetic blight: its perfection is the solution to its own puzzle; it could not be done better.
There is a familiar American simplicity, for instance, which is Puritan and colloquial in origin, “a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to the essentials,” as Marilynne Robinson has it in her novel Gilead . We recognize it in the Puritan sermon, in Jonathan Edwards, in Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, in Mark Twain, in Willa Cather, in Hemingway. These are the obvious examples. But that same simplicity is also always present in much more ornate writers like Melville, Emerson, Cormac McCarthy. The stars “fall all night in bitter arcs.” “The horses stepped archly among the shadows that fell over the road.” These lucid phrases are from McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses , respectively, books whose prose is often fantastically baroque. Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead achieves an almost holy simplicity; but this is the same writer whose earlier novel, Housekeeping , abounds in complicated Melvillean metaphor and analogy. Is the following passage from Gilead an example of simple or complicated prose?
This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven—one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning. My grandfather’s grave turned into the light, and the dew on his weedy little mortality patch was glorious.
Weedy little mortality patch —how fine that is.
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Prose is always simple in this sense , because language is the ordinary medium of daily communication—unlike music or paint. Our ordinary possessions are being borrowed by even very difficult writers: the millionaires of style—difficult, lavish stylists like Sir Thomas Browne, Melville, Ruskin, Lawrence, James, Woolf—are very prosperous, but they use the same banknotes as everyone else. “Vague squares of rich colour” is the simple little formulation Henry James uses to describe Old Master paintings seen from a distance in a darkened room in The Portrait of a Lady . How precise, paradoxically, is that “vague”! Aren’t these exactly the best words in the best order? “The day waves yellow with all its crops.” That is Woolf, from The Waves . I am consumed by this sentence, partly because I cannot quite explain why it moves me so much. I can see, hear, its beauty, its strangeness. Its music is very simple. Its words are simple. And its meaning is simple, too. Woolf is describing the sun rising and finally filling the day with its yel low fire. The sentence means something like: this is what a field of corn on a summer’s day will look like when everything is blazing with sunlight—a yellow semaphore, a sea of moving color. We know exactly and instantly what Woolf means, and we think: That could not be put any better. The secret lies in the decision to avoid the usual image of crops waving, and instead, to write “the day waves”: the effect is suddenly that the day itself, the very fabric and temporality of the day, seems saturated in yellow. And then that peculiar, apparently nonsensical “waves yellow” (how can anything wave yellow?), conveys a sense that yellowness has so intensely taken over the day itself that it has taken over our verbs, too—yellowness has conquered our agency. How do we wave? We wave yellow. That is all we can do. The sunlight is so absolute that it stuns us, makes us sluggish, robs us of will. Eight simple words evoke color, high summer, warm lethargy, ripeness.
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In Sea and Sardinia , Lawrence describes the short legs of King Victor Emmanuel; but he refers to “his little short legs.” Now, in some technical sense, there is no need to have both “short” and “little” in the same sentence. If Lawrence were a schoolboy, his teacher would write “redundant” in the margin and remove one of the adjectives. But say it aloud a few times, and it suddenly seems inevitable. We need the two words, because they sound farcical together. And short does not mean the same as little: the two words enjoy each other’s company; and “little short legs” is more original than “short little legs,” because it is jumpier, is more absurd, forcing us to stumble slightly—stumble short-leggedly—over the unexpected rhythm.
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We cannot write about rhythm and not refer to Flaubert. Of course writers before him had agonized about style. But no novelist agonized as much or as publicly, no novelist fetishized the poetry of “the sentence” in the same way, no novelist pushed to such an extreme the potential alienation of form and content (Flaubert longed to write what he called a “book about nothing”). And no novelist before Flaubert reflected as self-consciously on questions of technique. With Flaubert, literature became “essentially problematic,” as one scholar puts it. 1
Or just modern? Flaubert himself affected a nostalgia for the great unself-conscious writers who came before him, the beasts of instinct who just got on with it, like Moliè re and Cervantes; they, said Flaubert in his letters, “had no techniques.” He, on the other hand, was betrothed to “atrocious labor” and “fanaticism.” This fanaticism was applied to the music and rhythm of the sentence. In different ways, the modern novelist is shadowed by that monkish labor. It is a difficult inheritance, in some ways imprisoning, and we must escape it. The rich stylist (the Bellow, the Updike) is made newly self-conscious about his richness; but the plainer stylist (Hemingway, for example) has also become self-conscious about his plainness, itself now resembling a form of highly controlled and minimalist richness, a stylishness of renunciation. The realist feels Flaubert breathing down his neck: Is it well written enough? But the formalist or postmodernist is also indebted to Flaubert for the dream of a book about nothing, a book flying high on style alone. (Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, originators of the nouveau roman , were explicit about crediting Flaubert as their great precursor.)
Flaubert loved to read aloud. It took him thirty-two hours to read his overblown lyrical fantasia, The Temptation of Saint Anthony , to two friends. And when he dined in Paris at the Goncourts’, he loved to read out examples of bad writing. Turgenev said that he knew of “no other writer who scrupled in quite that way.” Even Henry James, the master stylist, was somewhat appalled by the religious devotion with which Flaubert assassinated repetition, unwanted cliché s, clumsy sonorities. The scene of his writing has become notorious: the study at Croisset, the slow river outside the window, while inside the bearish Norman, wrapped in his dressing gown and wreathed in pipe smoke, groaned and complained about how slow his progress was, each sentence laid as slowly and agonizingly as a fuse. 2
So what did Flaubert mean by style, by the music of a sentence? This, from Madame Bovary —Charles is stupidly proud that he has got Emma pregnant: “L’idé e d’avoir engendré le dé lectait.” So compact, so precise, so rhythmic. Literally, this is “The idea of having engendered delighted him.” Geoffrey Wall, in his Penguin translation, renders it as: “The thought of having impregnated her was delectable to him.” This is good, but pity the poor translator. The translation is a wan cousin of the French. Say the French out loud, as Flaubert would have done, and you encounter four “ay” sounds in three of the words: “l’idé e , engendr é , dé lectait .” An English translation that tried to mimic the untranslatable music of the French—that tried to mimic the rhyming—would sound like bad hip-hop: “The notion of procreation was a delectation .”
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Yet even if Flaubertianism casts a permanent shadow over the development of style in fiction, our sense of what is musical in style constantly changes. Flaubert feared repetition, but of course Hemingway and Lawrence would make repetition the basis of their most beautiful effects. Here is Lawrence, again, in Sea and Sardinia :
Very dark under the great carob tree as we go down the steps. Dark still the garden. Scent of mimosa, and then of jasmine. The lovely mimosa tree invisible. Dark the stony path. The goat whinnies out of her shed. The broken Roman tomb which lolls right over the garden track does not fall on me as I slip under its massive tilt. Ah dark garden, dark garden, with your olives and your wine, your medlars and mulberries and many almond trees, your steep terraces ledged high up above the sea, I am leaving you, slinking out. Out between the rosemary hedges, out of the tall gate, on to the cruel steep stony road. So under the dark, big eucalyptus trees, over the stream, and up towards the village. There, I have got so far.
Lawrence is leaving a Sicilian house at dawn, and heading for the ferry: “I am leaving you, slinking out.” This is his farewell to all that he has loved there. The passage might as well be an example of simplicity as of musicality. Its complexity, such as it is, lies in his attempt to use his prose to register, minute by minute, the painful largo of this farewell. Each sentence slows down to make its own farewell: “Scent of mimosa, and then of jasmine. The lovely mimosa tree invisible.” First you smell the scent, then you see—or apprehend—the tree. After that, the path. Sentence by sentence.
And meanwhile the darkness is changing as the day breaks, which is why Lawrence repeats his word “dark.” In fact, every time he repeats the word, the word has changed a little, because each time Lawrence changes what he attaches the word “dark” to: very dark—dark still—dark the—dark garden—the dark, big eucalyptus trees . Repetition is not really repetition after all. It is alteration: dawn light is slowly dissolving this darkness. At the end of it all, the writer has done no more than get onto the path: “There, I have got so far.” This could be a description of the movement of the prose, too. So near, so far. So little, so much.
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Listen to the operation of an intensely musical ear in one of the greatest stylists of American prose, Saul Bellow, a writer who makes even the fleet-footed—the Updikes, the DeLillos, the Roths—seem like monopodes. Like all serious novelists, Bellow read poetry: Shakespeare first (he could recite lines and lines from the plays, remembered from his schooldays in Chicago), then Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, Hardy, Larkin, and his friend John Berryman. And behind all this, with its English stretching all the way back into deeper antiquity, the King James Bible. A river, seen as “crimped, green, blackish, glassy,” or Chicago as “blue with winter, brown with evening, crystal with frost,” or New York as “sheer walls, gray spaces, dry lagoons of tar and pebbles.” Here is a paragraph from his story “The Old System,” in which Isaac Braun, in a high state of agitation, rushes to get his plane at Newark airport.
On the airport bus, he opened his father’s copy of the Psalms. The black Hebrew letters only gaped at him like open mouths with tongues hanging down, pointing upward, flaming but dumb. He tried—forcing. It did no good. The tunnel, the swamps, the auto skeletons, machine entrails, dumps, gulls, sketchy Newark trembling in fiery summer, held his attention minutely … Then in the jet running with concentrated fury to take off—the power to pull away from the magnetic earth; and more: When he saw the ground tilt backward, the machine rising from the runway, he said to himself in clear internal words, “Shema Yisrael ,” Hear, O Israel, God alone is God! On the right, New York leaned gigantically seaward, and the plane with a jolt of retracted wheels turned toward the river. The Hudson green within green, and rough with tide and wind. Isaac released the breath he had been holding, but sat belted tight. Above the marvelous bridges, over clouds, sailing in atmosphere, you know better than ever that you are no angel.
Bellow had a habit of writing repeatedly about flying, partly, I guess, because it was the great obvious advantage he had over his dead competitors, those writers who had never seen the world from above the clouds: Melville, Tolstoy, Proust. He does it very well. Notice, first of all, that the rhythm of the passage never settles down. Bellow gets a list going, with a repeated “the,” and then suddenly drops “the” halfway through: “The tunnels, the swamps, the auto skeletons, / machine entrails, dumps, gulls, sketchy Newark…” The effect is destabilizing, agitating. (Thus even this passage is a version of free indirect style, striving to capture or mimic Isaac Braun’s flustered anxiety, his eye failing to retain things seen through the bus window.) And in sentence after sentence the world is captured with brimming novelty: Newark seen as “sketchy” and “trembling in fiery summer,” the jet “running with concentrated fury to take off” (a phrase that with its unpunctuated onrush itself enacts such a concentrated fury), New York which, as the plane tilts, “leaned gigantically seaward” (say the phrase aloud, and see how the words themselves—“leaned gi-gan-tic-ally sea-ward”—elongate the experience, so that the very language embodies the queasiness it describes); the dainty, unexpected rhythm of “The Hudson green within green, and rough with tide and wind” (“green within green” captures very precisely the different shades of green that we see in large bodies of cold water when several thousand feet above them); and finally, “sailing in atmosphere”—isn’t that exactly what the freedom of flight feels like? And yet until this moment one did not have these words to fit this feeling. Until this moment, one was comparatively inarticulate; until this moment, one had been blandly inhabiting a deprived eloquence.
How does this kind of stylishness avoid the dilemma we explored earlier, in Flaubert and Updike and David Foster Wallace, in which the stylish novelist uses words that his more hapless fictional character could never have come up with? It doesn’t. The tension is still there, and Bellow has to remind us that Newark “held his [Isaac’s] attention minutely,” as if to say, “you see, Isaac really is looking as hard as I am at these things.” But Bellow’s details and rhythms are so mobile, so dynamic, that they seem less vulnerable to the charge of aestheticism than do Flaubert’s or Updike’s. That smooth, premade wall of prose that Flaubert wanted us to gasp at—“How does it all come about?”—is here a rougher lattice, through which we seem to see a style apparently in the process of being made. This roughened-up texture and rhythm is, for me at least, one of the reasons that I rarely find Bel low an intrusive lyricist, despite his high stylishness. 3
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One way to tell slick genre prose from really interesting writing is to look, in the former case, for the absence of different registers. An efficient thriller will often be written in a style that is locked into place: the musical analogue of this might be a tune, proceeding in unison, the melody separated only by octave intervals, without any harmony in the middle. By contrast, rich and daring prose avails itself of harmony and dissonance by being able to move in and out of place. In writing, a “register” is nothing more than a name for a kind of diction, which is nothing more than a name for a certain, distinctive way of saying something—so we talk about “high” and “low” registers (e.g., the highish “Father” and the lower “Pop”), grand and vernacular diction, mock-heroic diction, cliché d registers, and so on.
We have a conventional expectation that prose should be written in only one unvarying register—a solid block, like everyone agreeing to wear black at a funeral. But this is a social convention, and eighteenth-century prose, for instance, is especially good at subverting this expectation, wringing comedy out of the jostling together of different registers that we had not thought should share the same family space. We saw how well Jane Austen made fun of Sir William Lucas, by writing that he built a new house, “denominated from that period Lucas Lodge.” With the phrase “denominated from that period,” and especially the fancy verb “denominated,” Austen uses a grand register (or pompous diction) to mock Sir William’s own pomposity. More subtly, in Emma , Mrs. Elton, on the trip to Donwell Abbey to pick strawberries, is described as dressed in “all her apparatus of happiness, her large bonnet and her basket.” The phrase “apparatus of happiness” is of course absolutely killing, and, as in the Lucas Lodge passage, the comedy emanates from the little lift in register, the move upward, to that word “apparatus.” Suggestive of technical efficiency, the word belongs to a scientific register that puts it at odds with “of happiness.” An apparatus of happiness sounds more like an inverted torture machine than a bonnet and basket, and it promises a kind of doggedness, a persistence, that fits Mrs. Elton’s character, and which makes the heart sink.
Austen’s tricks can be found in modern writers as different as Muriel Spark and Philip Roth. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , one of the little girls, Jenny, is confronted one day by a flasher; or as Spark wittily has it, “was accosted by a man joyfully exposing himself beside the Water of Leith.” That adverb, “joyfully,” is marvelously unexpected, and seems to have no place in the sentence. It robs the incident of menace, and makes it a kind of fairy tale. The capitalized “Water of Leith” introduces an absurd mock-heroic register that Pope would have applauded. The Water of Leith is a small river; to insist on identifying it makes further fun of the incident, and the aural suggestion of Lethe is very funny. You can hear the comedy in these different dictions—and laugh—without necessarily knowing why. 4
Philip Roth does something similar in this long sentence from Sabbath’s Theater . Mickey Sabbath, satanic seducer and misanthrope, has been having a long, juicy affair with a Croatian-American, Drenka:
Lately, when Sabbath suckled at Drenka’s uberous breasts—uberous, the root word of exuberant , which is itself ex plus uberare , to be fruitful, to overflow like Juno lying prone in Tintoretto’s painting where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit—suckled with an unrelenting frenzy that caused Drenka to roll her head ecstatically back and to groan (as Juno herself may have once groaned), “I feel it deep down in my cunt,” he was pierced by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother.
This is an amazingly blasphemous little mé lange. This sentence is really dirty, and partly because it conforms to the well-known definition of dirt—matter out of place, which is itself a definition of the mixing of high and low dictions. But why would Roth engage in such baroque deferrals and shifts? Why write it so complicatedly? If you render the simple matter of his sen tence and keep everything in place—i.e., remove the jostle of registers—you see why. A simple version would go like this: “Lately, when Sabbath sucked Drenka’s breasts, he was pierced by the sharpest of longings for his late mother.” It is still funny, because of the slide from lover to mother, but it is not exuberant . So the first thing the complexity achieves is to enact the exuberance, the hasty joy and chaotic desire, of sex. Second, the long, mock-pedantic, suspended subclause about the Latin origin of “uberous” and Tintoretto’s painting of Juno works, in proper music-hall fashion, to delay the punchline of “he was pierced by the sharpest of longings for his late little mother .” (It also delays, and makes more shocking and unexpected, the entrance of “cunt.”) Third, since the comedy of the subject matter of the sentence involves moving from one register to another—from a lover’s breast to a mother’s—it is fitting that the style of the sentence mimics this scandalous shift, by engaging in its own stylistic shifts, going up and down like a manic EKG: so we have “suckled” (high diction), “breasts” (medium), “uberare ” (high), “Tintoretto’s painting” (high), “where the Milky Way is coming out of her tit” (low), “unrelenting frenzy” (high, rather formal diction), “as Juno herself may have once groaned” (still quite high), “cunt” (very low), “pierced by the sharpest of longings” (high, formal diction again). By insisting on equalizing all these different levels of diction, the style of the sentence works as style should, to incarnate the meaning, and the meaning itself, of course, is all about the scandal of equalizing different registers. Sabbath’s Theater is a passionate, intensely funny, repellent, and very moving portrait of the scandal of male sexuality, which is repeatedly linked in the book to vitality itself. To be able to have an erection in the morning, to be able to seduce women in one’s mid-sixties, to be able to persist in scandalizing bourgeois morality, to be able to say every single day, as the aging Mickey does, “Fuck the laudable ideologies!” is to be alive. And this sentence is utterly alive, and is alive by virtue of the way it scandalizes proper norms. Is it Drenka or Juno or Mickey’s late mother who is being fucked in this sentence? All three of them. Roth brilliantly catches the needy, babyish side of male sexuality, in which a lover’s breast is still really mommy’s suckling tit, because mommy was your first and only lover. Drenka, then, inevitably, is both Madonna (mother, Juno) and whore (because she can’t be as good as mommy was). In classic misogynistic fashion, the woman is adored and hated by men because she is the source of life—the Milky Way flows out of her breasts, and children come from between her legs (“the Monster of the Beginning Womb,” as Allen Ginsberg calls it in Kaddish ). Men cannot rival that, even as they, like Mickey or late Yeats, rage on about male “vitality.” And notice the subtle way that, with his verb “pierced” (“pierced by the sharpest of longings”), Roth inverts the presumed male-female order. Mickey, who is presumably piercing (in a sexual sense) this mother-whore by entering her, is really being pierced or entered—fucked back in turn—by the woman who gave birth to him. All this in one superb sentence.
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Metaphor is analogous to fiction, because it floats a rival reality. It is the entire imaginative process in one move. If I compare the slates on a roof to an armadillo’s back, or—as I did earlier—the bald patch on the top of my head to a crop circle (or on very bad days, to the kind of flattened ring of grass that a helicopter’s blades make when it lands in a field), I am asking you to do what Conrad said fiction should make you do—see . I am asking you to imagine another dimension, to picture a likeness. Every metaphor or simile is a little explosion of fiction within the larger fiction of the novel or story. Near the end of The Rainbow , Ursula looks out at London from her hotel balcony. It is dawn, and “the lamps of Picadilly, stringing away beside the trees of the park, were becoming pale and moth-like.” Pale and moth-like! We know, in a flash, exactly what Lawrence means, but we had not seen those lights like moths until this moment.
And of course this explosion of fiction-within-fiction is not exclusively visual, any more than detail in fiction is exclusively visual. “As he spoke he stroked both sides of his mutton-chop whiskers as if he wished to caress simultaneously both halves of the monarchy.” That is from Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March , which chronicles the decline of a family in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The two halves of the monarchy, then, are the Austrian side and the Hungarian side. It is a fantastical image, excitingly surreal and strange, but you could not say that the simile brings the two halves of the whiskers to our eye, any more than Shakespeare (or his cowriter) intends us to visualize something when a fisherman in Pericles exclaims: “Here’s a fish hangs in the net, like a poor man’s right in the law.” Instead, Roth’s is the kind of hypothetical or analogical—“as if”—metaphor that Shakespeare is very fond of. It wittily tells us something about the devotion of this Hapsburg bureaucrat; it arrests him in an outlandishly symbolic gesture.
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Wittgenstein once complained that Shakespeare’s similes were “in the ordinary sense , bad.” 5 Doubtless he meant Shakespeare’s fondness for metaphorical extravagance, and his tendency to mix his metaphors, as when Henry complains about “the moody frontier of a servant brow” in Henry IV, Part 1 . There are readers who will object that a brow cannot be a frontier, and that a frontier cannot be moody. But again, as in the Lawrence example, metaphor is doing here what it is supposed to do; it is speeding us, imaginatively, toward a new meaning. A better example—also involving a brow—occurs in Macbeth , when Macbeth is watching his wife sleepwalking, and implores the doctor to help her: “Raze out [i.e., erase] the written troubles of the brain.” Wittgenstein would not approve, but Wittgenstein was not, in the end, a very literary reader. That strange image manages to combine the idea of our trouble as a sentence of judgment, “written” by the gods; the customary idea of the mind as a book upon which are written our thoughts; and the idea of the lines on a troubled brow, lines written into the brow by distress. Readers and theatergoers storm upon these meanings in a flash, without having to unpack them in the laborious way I have just done.
Actually, there is a way in which mixed metaphor is perfectly logical, and not an aberration at all. After all, metaphor is already a mixing of disparate agents—a brow is not really like a frontier—and so mixed metaphor can be said to be the essence, the hypostasis, of metaphor: if a brow can be like a frontier, it follows that a frontier can be moody. In contemporary parlance, what people dislike about mixed metaphor is that it tends to combine two different clich é s , as in, say, “out of a sea of despair, he has pulled forth a plum.” The metaphorical aspect is actually dimmed, almost to nonexistence, by the presence of two or more mixed cliché s (which by definition are themselves dim or dead metaphors). But Shakespeare’s metaphors more often inhabit a speculative realm rather than a mechanical one, in which readers and audience have already been asked to abandon a customary world of familiar correspondence (as, for instance, when Macbeth likens pity to a newborn babe). Henry James was once reproved for using mixed metaphors in a novel, and he replied to his correspondent that he used not mixed but “loose metaphors”: “Lastly, the metaphor about muffling shame in a splendor that asks no questions is indeed a trifle mixed; but it is essentially a loose metaphor—it isn’t a simile—it doesn’t pretend to sail close to the wind.” 6 (And notice that the inveterately metaphorical James has to provide another metaphor, about sailing close to the wind, to explain his own metaphors.) 7
But most similes and metaphors, certainly of the visual kind, do pretend, of course, to sail close to the wind, and give us that sense that something has been newly painted before our eyes. Here, for instance, are four metaphorical descriptions of fire, all of them tremendously successful. Lawrence, seeing a fire in a grate, writes of it as “that rushing bouquet of new flames in the chimney” (Sea and Sardinia ). Hardy describes a “scarlet handful of fire” in Gabriel Oak’s cottage in Far from the Madding Crowd . Bellow has this sentence in his story “A Silver Dish”: “The blue flames fluttered like a school of fishes in the coal fire.” And Norman Rush, in his novel Mating , which is set in Botswana, has his hero come upon an abandoned village, where he sees that “cooking fires wagged in some of the lalwapas” (a lalwapa is a kind of African courtyard). So: a rushing bouquet (DHL); a scarlet handful of fire (TH); a school of fishes (SB); and a wagging fire (NM). Is one better than the others? Each works slightly differently. The Bellow and the Lawrence are perhaps the most visual—we can see in our mind’s eye the flames as bright as flowers and rippling like fish (notice that Bellow writes “a school of fishes” not “a school of fish,” precisely because the plural sounds more numerous, more rippling). Hardy is the most homely, perhaps, but he is daring in his way: we might think of a handful of dust but never of a handful of fire, since we keep our hands away from fire. Rush’s is marvelous. Flame does indeed wag (i.e., bend, flap, dip, decrease, increase), but when would most of us ever think to use the verb “wag”? Like Hardy’s handful, wag is daring precisely because it is a strikingly unfiery verb. Tails wag, and jokers are called wags, but flame belongs to a different realm from this coziness. Lawrence’s is the most verbally daring, because, along with the likening of flames to a bouquet of flowers (and of course, flames are indeed gathered in a grate for us as a bouquet gathers flowers in a vase), there is the pairing of “rushing” with “bouquet”—“a rushing bouquet”—which is a further metaphor within the larger metaphor, since while flames can rush at us, bouquets cannot. In a way, it is a mixed metaphor. So Lawrence is the only writer in this group to give us two metaphors for the price of one. (New flames, to go with the idea of new flowers, perhaps introduces a third.)
These four examples tell us that often the leap toward the counterintuitive, toward the very opposite of the thing you are seeking to compare, is the secret of powerful metaphor. Flame is as far from flowers, fish, handfuls, and wagging as can be imagined. Clearly this is the principle, if not quite the effect, of the technique made famous by the Russian formalists, ostranenie , or defamiliarization. Cé line, in his novel Journey to the End of the Night , shocks us out of the familiar by likening rush hour in Paris to catastrophe: “Seeing them all fleeing in that direction you’d think that there must have been some catastrophe at Argenteuil, that the town was on fire.” Nabokov, showing his Symbolist and formalist roots, likens a rainbow-colored oil slick in The Gift to “asphalt’s parakeet.” Obviously, whenever you extravagantly liken x to y, and a large gap exists between x and y, you will be drawing attention to the fact that x is really nothing like y, as well as drawing attention to the effort involved in producing such extravagances.
The kind of metaphor I most delight in, however, like the ones above about fire, estranges and then instantly connects, and in doing the latter so well, hides the former. The result is a tiny shock of surprise, followed by a feeling of inevitability. In To the Lighthouse , Mrs. Ramsay says goodnight to her children, and carefully closes the bedroom door, and lets “the tongue of the door slowly lengthen in the lock.” The metaphor in that sentence lies not so much in “tongue,” which is fairly conventional (since people do talk about locks having tongues) but is secretly buried in the verb, “lengthen.” That verb lengthens the whole procedure: Isn’t this the best description you have ever read of someone very sl-o-w-ly turning a handle of a door so as not to waken children? (Tongue is good, too, because tongues make noise, while this particular tongue has to stay silent. And the now blissfully silent children have of course been using their noisy tongues all day.) In the opposite spirit, in Katherine Mansfield’s “Daughters of the Late Colonel,” Kate, the cook, has a habit of “bursting through the door in her usual fashion, as though she had discovered some secret panel.” It would take the repetition of weekly episodes, and the full panoply of actors and set to reproduce, in Kramer’s similar antics on Seinfeld , what Mansfield captures in one simile. Mansfield is very good at simile; in another of her stories, “The Voyage,” a girl on a boat listens to her grandmother, lying in a bed above her saying her prayers, “a long, soft whispering, as though someone was gently, gently rustling among tissue paper to find something.”
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In New York City, the garbage collectors call maggots “disco rice.” 8 That is as good as anything I have been discussing, and indeed there is a link between that kind of metaphor-making and Hardy’s handful of fire, or Mansfield’s grandmother saying her prayers like someone rummaging through tissue paper, or Marilynne Robinson’s “weedy little mortality patch.” This returns us to one of our continued questions, how the stylist manages to be a stylist without writing over his or her characters. Metaphor that is “successful” in a poetic sense but that is at the same time character-appropriate metaphor—the kind of metaphor that this particular character or community would produce—is one way of resolving the tension between author and character; we saw this when discussing the “leggy thing” of the nutcracker in Pnin . Shakespeare’s fisherman likens a fish caught in a net to “a poor man’s right hanging in the law.” We might as sume, by extension, that he sometimes likens the law to a fisherman’s net: he finds the image which is near at hand. Chekhov describes a bird’s nest as looking as if someone has left a glove in a tree—in a story about peasants. Cesare Pavese, in The Moon and the Bonfire , a great novel set in a poor, backward Italian village and its rural environs, describes the moon as yellow, “like polenta.” In Tess of the D’Urbervilles , Angel and Tess are riding in a milk cart, and the milk is slopping in the pails behind them—except that Hardy says that the milk is “clucking” in the pails, which is first of all true to life (we can instantly hear the milk clucking in the pails) and is also very homely and farmlike. (Likewise, in the same novel he describes a cow’s udder as having teats that stick out like the short little legs on the bottom of a Gypsy’s cooking pot.) In Loving , Henry Green describes a pretty housemaid’s eyes as glowing “like plums dipped in cold water”—in a novel almost exclusively about domestic servants in a large castle. In all these cases except the Shakespearean one, metaphor is not explicitly tied to a character. It issues forth in third-person narration. So it seems to be produced by the stylish, metaphor-making author, but it also hovers around the character, and seems to emanate from that character’s world.