Writers With A Damn' Good Turn Of Phrase

[rynner2]

Here's Will Self having a whinge:

A Point of View: Why Orwell was a literary mediocrity

George Orwell was a literary mediocrity and his views on the importance of plain writing are plain wrong, argues writer Will Self.

"The English," GK Chesterton wrote, "love a talented mediocrity." Which is not to suggest that we don't also have a reverence for the charismatic and gifted, or that we're incapable of adoring those with nothing to recommend them.

Still, overall, it's those individuals who unite great expertise and very little originality - let alone personality - who arouse in us the most perfect devotion. The permatanned actor whose chat show anecdotes are so dull the studio audience falls asleep; the colourless athlete who's had a highly successful charisma bypass; the nondescript prime minister whose fractious cabinet is subdued by the sheer monotony of his speaking voice. I could go on.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28971276

I've seen Will Self on the box, and read a few of his pieces in various parts of the press. To me he comes across as arrogant and opinionated, but I suppose that goes with the territory when you're called Self.

I'm aware he's written a few books (maybe a whole shelf-load of books) but I have no idea what they're about. In fact, I'm struggling to think of the name of any one of them, whereas I can think of the titles of at least four of Orwell's books!

So that's my whinge - Will Self - intellectual gasbag and waste of space!

(I wonder if anybody ever calls him Bill? "Hey Bill, coming down the pub...?")

 

[Yithian]

Orwell's writing is the model of clarity and his language so pellucid that one often forgets one is reading; Will Self is talented, but he's playing a different game: page after page of pithy puns, recondite allusions and complex constructions. Both have value, both can be entertaining, but Self's work has little of importance by way of meaning: it's like reading a jaded psychiatrist's notes. Orwell, in contrast, is the lighthouse of the 20th Century.

 

[stu neville]

That's the main point, I think - for Orwell the message was key, and he used his articulacy to make it clear, concise but also appealing to read. Having read a lot of Self's stuff (and I do like the man) he's as much about making you aware that you are in the act of reading something clever, and that he wrote it. Self has a formidable intellect and a matching vocabulary, but in prose he tends to demand points for his technical dazzle as much as his message, which can have the unfortunate effect of interfering with the overall clarity. Then again, when he's being bullish, like Martin Amis he'd probably argue that readers who find his works hard to digest shouldn't really be reading them in the first place. Orwell had no such discrimination - as far as he was concerned if all could understand what he was saying, and yet none felt patronised by the way he said it, he was doing it right.

 

[Mythopoeika]

Orwell's writing is the model of clarity and his language so pellucid that one often forgets one is reading; Will Self is talented, but he's playing a different game: page after page of pithy puns, recondite allusions and complex constructions. Both have value, both can be entertaining, but Self's work has little of importance by way of meaning: it's like reading a jaded psychiatrist's notes. Orwell, in contrast, is the lighthouse of the 20th Century.

Indeed!
Will Self is undoubtedly an intelligent man, but he has this misguided idea that the use of long and unusual words with multiple syllables is somehow more worthy of literary merit than something that is clearly worded - hence the reason why he himself uses oh-so-clever constructions and many words where a few would suffice.
What Self is expressing here is perhaps the snobbery of a large section of the literary world, that sees merit in complexity and obscurity and looks down upon clarity and simplicity.
100 years hence, a few people may remember Self as 'a man of letters', but many more people will remember Orwell as a great writer with a lasting legacy.

 

[Cultjunky]

I'm with Orwell on this one. I can only think of one reason to write something that's not understood by everyone, to conceal something. Not necessarily something nefarious mind, I'm all for ciphers being used for sensitive information. Many moons ago a teacher said to me that if you can't explain something simply, you probably don't understand it as well as you think.

I do think that Self often goes on a bit of an ego trip with a beach towel and a thesaurus though. :lol:

 

[Yithian]

I propose a compromise candidate that brings the best of both traditions: in my humble opinion, P. G. Wodehouse is best composer of fluent prose in modern English. Conrad writes more ornately (in his third language, for heavens' sake!), but for pure clarity Plum has it - and churned it out by the bucketload, nine to five, five days a week, fully formed. I score it Wodehouse, Conrad, Orwell [...] Self.

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.” - The Luck of the Bodkins (1935)

“Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.” The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology

Stuff like that.

 

[stu neville]

A tremendous compromise! Helps that you've picked my fave author bar none..

I'm not absolutely certain of my facts, but I rather fancy it's Shakespeare -- or, if not, it's some equally brainy lad -- who says that it's always just when a chappie is feeling particularly top-hole, and more than usually braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with a bit of lead piping. - My Man Jeeves

Honoria, you see, is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of cavalry charging over a tin bridge. A beastly thing to face over the breakfast table. - Carry On, Jeeves

He groaned slightly and winced, like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for lunch. -Big Money

and the glorious..

Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes.

 

[rynner2]

We seem to have hit a rich seam of agreement here.

I'm a great fan of Plum myself, and if the BBC should ever banish me to that Desert Island, I'd say, 'Forget the Discs, I'm too deaf now anyway. Can I have the complete works of Wodehouse instead?'

The stories are clever and amusing in themselves, but the manner of their telling raises the reader's joy to a celestial level! 8)

 

[JamesWhitehead]

Saki is everything that Wodehouse is cracked up to be.

Lots more Saki fun here Quotations from H. H. Munro.

"It's the early Christian that gets the lion!" I prefer my tighter version.

 

[Cochise]

Patrick O'Brian. Not only a master of English and the subtle joke, but a suitable unusual and somewhat mysterious personal history as well for a Fortean board

The heroes have arrived at a boatbuilder's house in South America, their ship in need of repairs:

. . a broad veranda with a number of domesticated creatures on it, marmosets of three different kinds, an old bald toucan, a row of sleepy parrots, something hairy in the background that might have been a sloth or an anteater or even a doormat but that it farted from time to time, looking round censoriously on each occasion, and a strikingly elegant small blue heron that walked in and out.

 

[titch]

He gets my votes! stunningly beautiful writing , his descriptions of storms at sea can never be beat, but we also have "yes yes they are at the gangway now, eyes bulging out their heads and their pricks a yard long" Then the good captain lowers his voice.

 

[dreeness]

"The dove is not a coward to fear the hawk; it is simply wise."

John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

 

[rynner2]

Don't pack George Orwell, visitors to Thailand told
Travellers heading to Thailand have been urged not to carry a copy of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984
By Oliver Smith
9:41AM BST 06 Aug 2014

The warning can supposedly be found inside the in-flight magazine of Philippine Airlines and has been circulated on Twitter.
Passengers with Philippine Airlines are told that “Thailand is very safe for tourists” but are offered five tips to help “blend in”.

They include “carry your passport (or a copy) with you at all times”, “avoid wearing red t-shirts, which are association with a group opposed to the military government”, and “don’t carry George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984’. You don’t want to be mistaken for an anti-coup protestor.”

The book has become a popular symbol of protest following the May coup, prompting an alleged crackdown by the country’s military regime. Demonstrators have been arrested for reading the novel, according to reports, while screenings of the film adaptation have been cancelled with organisers claiming they were intimidated by police.

But Twitter users have mocked the warning. “Don't breath in and out. You don't want to be mistaken for an anti-coup protester,” said one.

The Foreign Office makes no mention of the novel in its advice for Britons heading to Thailand, but warns: “It's illegal to criticise the coup and you should be wary of making political statements in public. You should monitor local news and social media for developments.
“Over recent months there have been large-scale planned demonstrations, and spontaneous protests, in Bangkok and other cities,” it adds. “Some of these have turned violent. You should avoid any protests, political gatherings, demonstrations or marches.”

See gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/thailand for more information

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/desti ... -told.html

Probably quite safe with a Will Self book though!

 

[Yithian]

I've been dipping into the One Thousand And One Nights and the translator's introduction had a wonderful distillation of why the stories are so enjoyable:

 

[SkepticalX]

"... Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us." -- H G Wells

 

[SkepticalX]

"One green light squinting over Kidd's Creek, which is near the mouth of the pirate river, marked where the brig, the JOLLY ROGER, lay, low in the water; a rakish-looking craft foul to the hull, every beam in her detestable, like ground strewn with mangled feathers." -- J M Barrie

 

[Coal]

"I took my .38 out and looked to see that there were bullets in all the proper places. I knew there would be, but it did no harm to be careful. And I'd seen Clint Eastwood do it once in the movies."​

Robert B. Parker, Small Vices

 

[INT21]

And no mention of Graham Greene.

 

[titch]

"... Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us." -- H G Wells

quite possibly the best opening to a book ever.

 

[Spookdaddy]

I occasionally make a note of lines that make me laugh out loud, or stop and think, or just stick in my mind for reasons I can’t quite work out and probably don’t matter. And there’s no reason they have to be acts of genius, or even from a work I otherwise think of as being particularly notable - although, of course, they often are.


Charles Portis - The Dog of the South:

"She wore hardly anything when she was sunning herself back there in the yard."

"Her shameful parts were covered."

"That goes without saying, Melba. It wasn't necessary for you to say that and make us all think about it."


From Gerald Kersh’s, Clock Without Hands – from a fine piece of description all round, but to my mind it’s the final image that nails it:

...He was something less than non-descript —he was blurred, without identity, like a smudged fingerprint. His suit was of some dim shade between brown and grey. His shirt had grey-blue stripes, his tie was patterned with dots like confetti trodden into the dust, and his oddment of limp brownish moustache resembled a cigarette butt, disintegrating shred by shred in a tea-saucer.


William McIlvanney -The Papers of Tony Veitch (It’s from the 70’s* - for those of an easily offended disposition replace ‘Macey’ and ‘her’ with ‘Tracey’ and ‘his’ – it’s a great image either way):

Macey watched her buttocks move in her fawn cords as if they were chewing a very sweet caramel.


David Seabrook - All The Devils Are Here. Describing somewhere well-heeled on the Kent coast – I can’t quite recall where just now:

...flint walling, personalised number plates, a QPR sticker in a bedroom window. Spindrift, Windy Bay, Lindisfarne – houses which clamber over each other like mad-eyed toads in a jar.


And there is also, of course, Jim Crumley's opening line to The Last Good Kiss, which has semi-legendary status among both writers and fans of crime fiction:

When I finally caught up with Abraham Traherne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts, in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

I know much of this is down to individual taste, but if you could resist reading beyond that opening line, then you're a stronger human being than I could ever be.

* (Edit: My mistake - it was actually published in 1983; but that was when the 80's were still a bit like the 70's, but wearing a mullet.)

 

[Coal]

And there is also, of course, Jim Crumley's opening line to The Last Good Kiss, which has semi-legendary status among both writers and fans of crime fiction:

When I finally caught up with Abraham Traherne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts, in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

That is awesome.

 

[titch]

"We are like children who have been abandoned and we are as experienced as old men, we are coarse, unhappy and superficial - I think we are lost"
From all quiet on the western front, by Remarque

 

[Zeke Newbold]

I haven't got any quotes, but I think that Anthony Powell (best known for his `A Dance to the Music of time collection, but wrote did a lot else besides )is a very good writing stylist. On a more contemporary level Ruth Rendell writes very very well too.

Will Self does deserve credit for bullishly trying to create some kind of literary avant gardism. This is not something that we Brits are very good at on the whole. The last concerted attempt was Moorcock and his mates with some of their New Wave stuff in the late sixties.

I'm with the consesnus here on Orwell. Yithian put it well when he said that sometimes you forget that you're reading when you read Orwell. I find the same is sometimes true of Martin Amis too. I don't mean his novels so much (which can be flashy or a bit dull) but his essays. To see what I mean get a copy of Visiting Mrs Nabokov or Experience.

 

[Ogdred Weary]

The best prose I've ever read, by some margin is Nabakov's Lolita, simply wonderful. I own a couple of other books by him which I am forever about to read, much like all of my increasingly large pile of unread tomes. The only other text I've read by Nabakov was The Bend Sinister. which was nowhere near as good and the writing felt felt like embryonic version of what's in Lolita, the early demos, as it were. I like Will Self as a talking head and enjoy his journalism, I've read a couple of his early-ish books and found the prose excessive and turgid, frankly clumsy.

I've only read one book by Michael Chabon - The Final Solution and I really loved his writing, keep meaning to read more by him... Iain Sinclair's prose is difficult both in delivery and, like, Self, he's fond of long, obscure or archaic words or turns of phrase, I just get the impression he's a lot beter at it. There's something deeply incantatory about his writing, though I can only read him in short bursts. China Mieville is also one of the long/obscure word brigade, I quite like his prose, he's far more readable than Self though not up to the standards of Sinclair.

Saki, who has been mentioned before, is wonderful. I think Clark Ashton Smith's prose is overlooked and Lovecraft had many genuinely moments, sadly buried in over-reliance on certain terms - gibbous, blasphemous, cyclopean, non-euclidean; he's a satirist's dream in many ways. His stronger passages are probably balanced out by his weaker ones. I think Terry Pratchett sometimes has fantastic, pithy turns of phrase nestling among otherwise functional writing.

 

[Graylien]

Self seemed to entirely miss the point of Orwell's essay in that it's called Politics and the English Language. Orwell wasn't trying to prescribe rules for novelists or poets. He was simply saying that those in power, or those who try to influence our opinons, should stop waffling and express themselves clearly and concisely.

Personally I enjoy a bit of literary purple prose though Self himself is too emptily long winded for my tastes (as is Salman Rushdie, a writer who never uses one word when five will do.).

Ronald Firbank comes to mind, as does Wilde's Dorian Gray, and Chesterton's hallucinatory masterpiece The Man Who Was Thursday (bafflingly often shelved in the crime section, which makes no more sense than shelving Macbeth under history.) Lovecraft has already been mentioned - Clarke Ashton Smith almost matches him for ornate purpleness.

Not that you can't write a decent novel in plain prose. Kurt Vonnegut is startlingly minimalistic, for example (see his 8 basics of creative writing for his own take on style in fiction). And Anglo Indian writer R.K Narayan created vibrantly colourful scenes with efficiently precise prose.

 

[Ogdred Weary]

Personally I like Rushdie's writing but can see how the verbiage would wear people down.

 

[Yithian]

I'm taken with this from V. S. Naipaul's A Bend In The River. It's a story of a post-colonial African nation and the rocky road it set out upon.

In many ways this passage is a cameo of the whole novel, a sketch in miniature, and the theme--now you see it--is a seductive one, although Naipaul was criticised for the negativity with which he presented Africa. Come to think of it, Naipaul is criticised for the negativity with which he criticised a good list of countries, but then most people don't like having a mirror thrust in their face by a stranger.

 

[Reverend D]

Raymond Chandler has some of the most incredible descriptions and one-liners ever. But, I sometimes think he throws so many of these in that it detracts from the story. There have been times when I've read a chapter of Chandler and remembered some fantastic lines but nothing about the actual plot.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Raymond Chandler has some of the most incredible descriptions and one-liners ever. But, I sometimes think he throws so many of these in that it detracts from the story. There have been times when I've read a chapter of Chandler and remembered some fantastic lines but nothing about the actual plot.

Agreed, but ... Some of those one-liners really drive home the scene / description / etc. One that's stuck with me for decades comes from the opening pages of Farewell, My Lovely:

Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

 

[Lizard King]

I am a fan of George Orwell, but really like Cormac McCarthy and Donald Ray Pollock.