Vintage Reading (20 page)
Authors: Robert Kanigel
By Kenneth Clark
First published in 1956
“What is the nude?” asks Kenneth Clark. “It is an art form invented by the Greeks in the fifth century (B.C.), just as opera is an art form invented in 17th-century Italy. The conclusion is certainly too abrupt, but it has the merit of emphasizing that the nude is not the subject of art, but a form of art.”
Let us be plain: Clark’s study of the nude in art is a work of formal scholarship and criticism. Available in book form only through a university publisher, it was originally presented as a lecture series at the National Gallery of Art in 1953. The author writes in a rich Latinate prose that, while elegant, is not easy. His erudition is daunting; many of his references to artists, paintings, and periods will escape the lay reader. And the shades of feeling, the nuances of idea, that he can discern in a work of art are sometimes so gossamer-thin one can scarcely get a hand on them at all.
And yet, of its kind,
The Nude
has already become something of a classic, a work so vigorous and human that it transcends the usual limitations of its form.
Right from the beginning, Clark distinguishes—or rather, as he says in a rhythm characteristic of his prose, “The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes”—between the naked and the nude. “To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word ‘nude,’ on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed.”
In each of the nine chapters, Clark traces how particular ideas and human motifs—Apollo-like reason, beauty, energy, pathos, and the like—have been represented through the nude since antiquity.
For example, he notes that in his work,
Temperance
, the fourteenth century Italian sculptor Pisano “Christianized” the goddess Venus through “the turn and expression of the head. Instead of looking in the same direction as her body, and thus confirming her existence in the present, she turns and looks upward over her shoulder toward the promised world of the future ... Govianni Pisano had discovered a gesture that was to become the recognized expression of other-worldly longing.” Hundreds of such insights bejewel the text.
To Clark, “the naked body is no more than the point of departure for a work of art.” But what a “point of departure” it is! Unlike a landscape, say, it touches us directly as humans; we see ourselves in it. And its eroticism gives it just that extra tension that artists through the centuries have sought to transmute into higher feeling. Nudes sexy? Clark quotes one professor’s scold that “if the nude is so treated that it raises in the spectator ideas or desires appropriate to the material subject, it is false art, and bad morals.” Nonsense, says Clark, “No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling ... and if it does not do so, it is bad art and false morals.”
In a sense,
The Nude
offers an erotically skewed course in the history of art. Are not most of the greats well-represented here? Polykleitos and Praxiteles are. So are Michelangelo and Botticelli, Picasso and Renoir, along with reproductions—298 of them—of their work.
The Nude
is like a perfect detail isolated from a larger canvas.
____________
By William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White
Earliest edition, by Strunk alone, appeared in 1918
First joint edition appeared in 1959.
The world would be a better place if everybody read
The Elements of Style
; if it were read not just by writers and journalists, but by all who write legal briefs, job applications, love letters, or notes to the teacher; read even by those who never write anything. Even a single reading of the Strunk and White classic imparts at least temporary immunity to bureaucratic gobbledygook, technocratic jargon and psychobabble. If we all wrote and spoke clearly, without resort to weasel words and fuzzy generalities, maybe we’d all feel more at home with one another.
This is not too grand a judgment to make of so slim a book; it is not making too much of it.
The Elements of Style
stands as a monument to clear thinking articulately voiced. Indeed, the terrible problem any writer faces in reviewing it is simply to live up to its injunctions. As the words click from the keyboard, he’s apt to feel Messrs. Strunk and White peering over his shoulder, remarking on each empty phrase and murky thought.
William Strunk, Jr. was a Cornell professor who, back in 1918, had his little rule book on prose expression printed privately. A revised edition appeared in 1935. Twenty-two years later, a former student of Strunk, the noted essayist E. B. White, wrote a
New Yorker
piece about “my friend and teacher” Strunk and his book. In 1959, with that piece to serve as introduction,
The Elements of Style
reappeared with revisions, deletions, and a new chapter by White. This is the edition better known today as “Strunk and White” than by its formal title.
White’s charming introductory tribute to Strunk leads off this guidebook.
It is followed by a chapter on rules of usage, another on principles of composition, and a concise rundown of “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused.” The final chapter is White’s own “Approach to Style,” advanced through Strunkian rules such as “Do not affect a breezy manner,” and “Write with nouns and verbs.”
None of this, of course, hints at the sparkling clarity here; it is a delight to read and for the first-time reader, may be experienced as revealed wisdom. “Prefer the specific to the general,” is the essential Strunk speaking. For example, he says, the sentence “He showed satisfaction as he took possession of his well-earned reward” just won’t do; much better is “He grinned as he pocketed the coin.” And we grin in recognition of Truth.
In the clear, crystalline world of Strunk and White, acts of a hostile character become
hostile acts
. The phrase
in the last analysis
is “bankrupt”; the word
interesting
is “unconvincing ... Instead of announcing that what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so.” As for an occasional colloquialism, “simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inciting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better.”
The final chapter on writing style displays all White’s own mastery of the essay form. “Writing,” he says, “becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in his blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.” Then come 21 of White’s own rules, echoing the voice of his mentor—as when he describes words like
rather, very, little, pretty
as “leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.”
One paragraph appears twice within
The Elements of Style
. Originally penned by Strunk in advancing his dictum to “Omit needless words,” White repeats it verbatim in his introduction. Here it is:
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary
parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
“There you have a short, valuable essay on the nature and beauty of brevity,” wrote White. “Sixty-three words that could change the world.”
One-Of-A-Kinds
A Room of One’s Own
— Virginia Woolf
The American Language
— H. L. Mencken
The Little Prince
— Antoine de Saint Exupery
The Education of Henry Adams
— Henry Adams
Their Eyes Were Watching God
— Zora Neale Hurston
A Mathematician’s Apology
— G. H. Hardy
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
— Thomas Kuhn
_________________________________
Some books that
could
be seen as falling under some other category nonetheless seem unique—absolutely distinctive, one-of-a-kind. Whether by virtue of the idea that drives it, as in
Flatland,
or the peculiar voice that marks it, as in
The Education of Henry Adams
, or by the sheer power of its argument, as in
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
, these are books that can never be mistaken for any other.
____________
By Virginia Woolf
First published in 1929
In October, 1928, at the age of 47, the great English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf was asked to give a series of lectures on the subject “Women and Fiction.” Now, imagine that subject in the hands of your garden-variety pedagogue. Imagine the tired theorizing, the belabored academic posturing, the gray tide of literary references. And imagine such a discourse’s likely effects upon the hapless listeners.
By a brilliant lecturer, the talk might conceivably turn out provocative, even profound. But downright pleasurable? A sheer delight? Enchanting?
That is just what Woolf accomplished—an outcome recorded in the expanded written version of her talk,
A Room of One’s Own
.
As it happens, she did so using a literary device that foreshadows one Norman Mailer would use 40 years later in
The Armies of the Night
, his account of the 1967 March on the Pentagon. Mailer employed a third-person version of himself—“Mailer,” he called him—to portray the action. Through this “Mailer’s” eyes the reader viewed the massive war protest; through “Mailer’s” perceptions, he came to see its meaning. “History as a novel, the novel as history,” the author called the resulting form, and for it he won a Pulitzer Prize.
In
A Room of One’s Own
Woolf foreswore the third person, but the effect is similarly compelling. “I propose,” she says right off, to make “use of all the liberties and licenses of a novelist to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here—how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life. I need not say,” she goes on, “that what I am about to
describe has no existence ... ‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being... Call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carpenter”—all earlier women writers with whom she felt a bond.
“A woman,” Woolf writes before properly beginning her “story,” “must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Then she proceeds to illuminate the process by which she arrived at that conclusion.
As protagonist of her intellectual tale, she lolls upon the banks of a river, wondering how best to approach her subject. She strolls through courts and quadrangles of the great university she calls Oxbridge, pondering Milton and Thackeray. She leaves Oxbridge for London, wondering, “Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?”
She visits the British Museum, leafs through tomes men have written on the subject of women, like one by a German professor on “The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex.” She ponders the fate of Shakespeare’s sister, asking what became of her genius while Will was hanging out with the boys at the Globe. She samples novels by women from earliest times to the then-present, pointing up this one’s strengths, that one’s weaknesses, setting both against the oppressive constraints under which all women worked.
But always, giving life to her thesis, there is her little story: “Next day,” after returning from the museum, she writes, “the light of the October morning was falling in dusty shafts through the uncurtained windows, and the hum of traffic rose from the street. London then was winding itself up again.” And each of these “scenes”—though so slight in contribution to “plot” they scarcely deserve the name—advances the line of her argument a little further.
It is, I must tell you, tempting to ignore the substance of that argument and focus wholly on its maker—to go off starry-eyed at having passed hours in the company of this masterful stylist. A contemporary critic apparently had the same idea when the book first came out: “What matters her argument,” he wrote, “providing she keeps writing books like
these.”
Woolf’s is not a Spartan, clippity-clop style such as the one Ernest Hemingway was perfecting in Paris at about the same time. This is leisurely, ruminative, with long paragraphs that march up and down the page, long trains of thought, and rich digressions almost hypnotic in their effect. And once trapped within the sweet, sticky filament of her web of words, one is left with no wish whatsoever to be set free.
An Inquiry Into the Development of
English in the United States
____________
By H. L. Mencken
First published in 1919
Revisions and supplements through 1948
H. L. Mencken never wrote anything that wasn’t a delight to read. And
The American Language—
a footnoted, indexed, annotated, exhaustively researched philology text, for God’s Sake! —is no exception. It begins with an essay, on the centuries-old linguistic warfare between the snooty British and the endlessly inventive Americans, that has no business being anything but incorrigibly dull. Except it’s not; it’s fascinating and fun.
Mencken’s subject is American English, what distinguishes it from that spoken and written in the Mother Country, the way its development mirrored the country’s own, its glorious Wild West excesses, the debt it owes America’s Indians and immigrants, and much more. Spelling and pronunciation, slang, grammar and proper names each draw Mencken’s attention. In all, several thousand words receive at least a passing note, and often substantially more, on their etymology, pronunciation, or usage.
