Scruton on style

Last week I revisited the late Sir Roger Scruton’s Beauty: A Very Short Introduction via audiobook on my commute. It’s an excellent precis of much that is fundamental to his thinking and, true to the subtitle, a wide-ranging introduction to many topics that bear further thought. Here’s one.

From a discussion of the role proportion plays in the creation of vernacular architectures by launching the builder on “a path of discovery” to what “fits” and is “suitable” for each detail in relation to the others in Chapter 4, “Everyday Beauty”:

One result of this process of matching is a visual vocabulary: by using identical mouldings in door and window, for example, the visual match becomes easier to recognize and to accept. Another result is what is loosely described as style—the repeated use of shapes, contours, materials and so on, their adaptation to special uses, and the search for a repertoire of visual gestures.

I like the idea of a style as mastery of a discipline’s “repertoire,” the selective, purposeful use of a shared vocabulary. Scruton’s example is architectural, but he also refers throughout the book to painting, sculpture, cinema, and most especially music. My mind naturally suggested literary style, with its literal shared vocabulary and the many effects and fine shades of meaning that a firm control of English can yield.

Scruton himself raises the idea of control as a component of style in the next chapter, “Artistic Beauty”:

“True artists control their subject-matter, in order that our response to it should be their doing, not ours.”

True artists control their subject-matter, in order that our response to it should be their doing, not ours. One way of exerting this control is through style . . . Style is not exhibited only by art: indeed, as I argued in the last chapter, it is natural to us, part of the aesthetics of everyday life, through which we arrange our environment and place it in significant relation to ourselves. Flair in dressing, for example, which is not the same as an insistent originality, consists rather in the ability to turn a shared repertoire in a personal direction, so that a single character is revealed in each of them. That is what we mean by style, and by the ‘stylishness’ that comes about when style over-reaches itself and becomes the dominant factor in a person’s dress.

The tension between originality and a common vocabulary and the need for balance is an important topic and one Scruton returns to later in the book, but he continues by introducing another consideration:

Styles can resemble each other, and contain large overlapping idioms—like the styles of Haydn and Mozart or Coleridge and Wordsworth. Or they might be unique, like the style of Van Gogh, so that anyone who shares the repertoire is seen as a mere copier or pasticheur, and not as an artist with a style of his own. Our tendency to think in this way has something to do with our sense of human integrity: the unique style is one that has identified a unique human being, whose personality is entirely objectified in his work.

This passage in particular offers a lot for the writer to think about. Every writer has heroes and idols and role models, other writers whose control over their work has influenced our own technique, consciously or not. This starts young. It’s been more than twenty years since I read Stephen King’s On Writing, but I still remember and think often about this passage:

You may find yourself adopting a style you find particularly exciting, and there’s nothing wrong with that. When I read Ray Bradbury as a kid, I wrote like Ray Bradbury—everything green and wondrous and seen through a lens smeared with the grease of nostalgia. When I read James M Cain, everything I wrote came out clipped and stripped and hard-boiled. When I read Lovecraft, my prose became luxurious and Byzantine.

All of which is, for King, a crucial developmental stage in the writer’s life, one that should be refined through constant reading and writing, so that eventually one is no longer writing in imitation but in “one’s own style.”

But if you’re aware of what you’re doing and working hard at it, particularly in order to achieve a certain specific effect—so that, per Scruton, the readers’ response will be my doing, not theirs—it’s hard not to become anxious that one is working merely in pastiche or even accidental parody. Have I sacrificed my integrity to sound like someone else? Inconsistency doesn’t help. I’ve worried more about this on some projects than others. Why am I confident that I can use tricks learned from Charles Portis but not those from Cormac McCarthy? Food for thought.

I think, naturally, of John Gardner and his description of “mannered” prose, a term he’d certainly have applied to McCarthy. “Mannered” suggests artificiality or phoniness, the lack of integrity Scruton suggests above, which is how every good writer hopes not to come across. But I also think of Elmore Leonard, another author whom I’ve quoted here many times, and who worked hard to make his style the absence of style. Scruton contends that that is impossible:

Style must be perceivable: there is no such thing as hidden style. It shows itself, even if it does so in artful ways that conceal the effort and sophistication . . . At the same time, it becomes perceivable by virtue of our comparative perceptions: it involves a standing out from norms that must also be subliminally present in our perception if the stylistic idioms and departures are to be noticed. Style enables artists to allude to things that they do not state, to summon comparisons that they do not explicitly make, to place their work and its subject-matter in a context which makes every gesture significant, and so achieve the kind of concentration of meaning that we witness in Britten’s Cello Symphony or Eliot's Four Quartets.

This is exactly right, and Leonard would agree. Leonard’s style, which was precisely designed to “conceal the effort and sophistication” of his writing and make it seem effortless, was immediately recognizable because it was distinct from the “norms” described above in particular ways—something Leonard himself noted. Those “norms” or context are the broader shared vocabulary we began with—which gives shape to one’s work through contrast.

And that final sentence on what a firm, controlled, purposeful, precise style can do, using the power of allusion, implicit comparison, the subtle significance of every detail to “achieve . . . concentration of meaning”—is there a writer who wouldn’t die happy having that said of his work?