“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever,” writes Don DeLillo, in Point Omega. A Guardian writer quotes this line by way of explaining DeLillo’s modernist commitment to difficulty and complexity in his novels. “As a champion of ‘difficulty’, albeit in an American mode, [DeLillo] is an heir of modernism and says that he sees himself as ‘part of a long modernist line starting with James Joyce’. …Readers who want neat plots and tidy endings should leave now,” warns the Guardian writer, who goes on to describe a recent afternoon spent interviewing DeLillo in Manhattan.

Like Joyce, DeLillo takes up the stark and daunting task of rendering consciousness as it ceaselessly expresses itself to itself over the length of a human life. But he does this, as his interviewer notes, “in an American mode.” Indeed DeLillo says to him: “When I get a French translation of one of my books that says ‘translated from the American’, I think, ‘Yes, that’s exactly right.'”

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I don’t know if it’s because I spent a year in England when I was eight, but I’ve always leaned toward the British mode. I think I’m a very American person, but many of the writers I love – Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot, Orwell, Larkin, Auden, Hitchens, and now, having read his short essays about dying of ALS, Tony Judt – are British.

Is it possible to distinguish a British mode of essay writing, or, in the case of Eliot and Larkin and Auden, poetry? Is there a British writerly dialect, as it were? A modern one, since we’re talking here about twentieth and twenty-first century British writers?

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In their obituaries for Tony Judt, many people are quoting this line from his New York Review series about his disease:

[T]here I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts.

I think that sentence, like these from Hitchens about his chemotherapy, displays the British inflection I have in mind:

I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

Aside from the obvious marks of careful writing both men exhibit — going to the trouble of finding a spectacularly good simile (like a modern-day mummy; like a sugar lump in water); using alliteration as if it were the most natural thing in the world (myopic motionless modern mummy; people poison plug passivity impotence powerlessness); using unusual words and phrases, some of which feel uncomfortably multiple or medieval in meaning (trussed, gravely, myopic, venom sack) — there’s the stoic attitude to be noticed here, a mental position at some distance from the self, watching the self as it suffers, watching it with a grim and wry intelligence whose absolute fidelity to reality and candor gets us as close to what DeLillo calls “the true life” as words are liable to get us.

Although when we are with these men we are

In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

we are nonetheless oddly buoyed by their writing, for it is after all muscular, finely rippled.

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“[The act of writing my first] novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking,” says DeLillo. “That’s really what writing is – an intense form of thought.”

Strong writing is the intensest form of strong thought, and strong thought in a condition of entropy feels to us heroic, cutting edge, thrilling. This is humanity resisting to the last its reduction to an object by powering up subjectivity to a sort of hyper-controlled shriek. “[W]hile the world moves / In appetency, on its metalled ways,” the en-graved or gravely endangered writer, immobilized, fights that much more fiercely for consciousness, for the words to encompass consciousness.

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still.

At the point of greatest tension, under the heaviest burden of fear and despair, the writer, with courage, gathers his wits about him and continues, even now, to get the better of words.

“I get satisfaction out of understanding what I’m going through, which I can only achieve by describing it with an almost externalised dispassion,” said Tony Judt. “It makes me feel like I’m not dead yet.”