Today the American universities not only form the best system of higher education in the world, but are morally impressive institutions. They are not incoherent, nor are they in crisis.

Well, I guess this ain’t Allan Bloom.

No, it’s UD‘s hero, Richard Rorty.

She likes Bloom, but she likes Rorty more.

Her other heroes? The two Christophers: Christopher Lasch and Christopher Hitchens.

Albert Camus. George Orwell. Philip Rieff. Tony Judt.

Can we derive some coherence from these dead white males? Can we say why the same human being would swoon reading both hyper-righties and hyper-lefties? (And weren’t Lasch and Hitchens sort of both?) Why the same human being would applaud when Rorty says universities aren’t in crisis, and when Bloom says they are?

Do we want simply to say, with Gwendolyn, that ‘In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.’? Because all of these men wrote well (Rieff wrote like a jerk, yes, but not all the time. Not in his earlier days.), and some of them (Orwell) wrote insanely well.

No. Surely we want to grant UD a tad more depth than this. It’s not merely about writing style. Yet writing style is part of it. These men are all impassioned moralists, impassioned social justice warriors, and their prose shows it. Their prose has the sort of kick you get when you actually care about what you’re saying, when you believe that language is politics and that politics is how you decrease human suffering. It’s very much like what George Saunders says in an appreciation of E.L. Doctorow:

What I found particularly inspiring about Doctorow was the way he would tweak form to produce moral-ethical effect — the way that he seemed not to see these two things as separate. Reading his great “Ragtime,” for example, I can feel that all of that technical verve is there necessarily — to serve and escalate meaning and emotion. But as important — the verve serves and escalates the fun, the riveting sense that a particular and wonderful human mind is having a great time riffing on the things of this world, trying to make sense of them. The work exudes fascination with the human, and a wry confidence in it, and inspires these feelings in us as we read. Doctorow, we might say, role-models a hopeful stance toward what can be a terrifying world.

******************

In the same remarks of his I quote from at the beginning of this post, Rorty says:

If I were writing a history of the American university, I would tell an upbeat story about the gradual replacement of the churches by the universities as the conscience of the nation. One of the most important things that happened in the U.S. in the twentieth century was that the universities became the places where movements for the relief of human suffering found privileged sanctuaries and power bases. The universities came to play a social role that they had not played in the nineteenth century.

An impassioned atheist, Rorty reveres the American university as the place where arts- and sciences-inspired free and democratic discourse about the world and how to improve it, and about humanity and how to know and love it, thrives. The university is where we gather to read and talk about morally charged language, like Doctorow’s.

***************

Remember what Bartlett Giamatti called the university: a free and ordered space. When Rorty calls the university “not incoherent,” he doesn’t mean it’s coherent, as in fully pulled together, fully ordered and organized around some shared principle or faith. (And as readers of this blog know, once a university decides to organize itself around Joe Paterno, forfuckinggetit.) He means it’s coherent enough – it’s ordered enough to be free enough to generate the sorts of conversations, readings, and experiences that tend to make people (students, professors, readers of the research professors and students generate) more lucid and more compassionate. And more free, rather in the way of, as Saunders puts it, having fun — being part of a classroom where people are experiencing “the riveting sense that a particular and wonderful human mind is having a great time riffing on the things of this world, trying to make sense of them.” That mind, in the university setting, is a collective one, made up of the free and at the same time ordered synergy between a professor and her students.

***************

All of this is by way of background for a few comments on this intriguing opinion piece in today’s New York Times.

Kevin Carey is clearly on Bloom’s side. This is his opening paragraph:

To understand the failures of the modern American college system — from admissions marketing to graduation rates — you can begin with a notorious university football scandal.

So we’re going to talk about Chapel Hill as emblematic of what has made American universities a failure. Not just a failure – a nothing. An illusion. Carey’s title: The Fundamental Way that Universities are an Illusion. Later in the piece he will talk about them as Easter eggs – beautiful on the outside, dead on the inside.

The Nyang’oro fraud went on as long as it did because

U.N.C. had essentially no system for upholding the academic integrity of courses. “So long as a department was offering a course,” one distinguished professor told the investigators, “it was a legitimate course.” … The illusory university pretends that all professors are guided by a shared sense of educational excellence specific to their institution. In truth, as the former University of California president Clark Kerr observed long ago, professors are “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.”… When college leaders talk about academic standards, they often mean admissions standards, not standards for what happens in classrooms themselves. Or they vaguely appeal to traditions and shared values without any hard evidence of their meaning… The problem for students is that it is all but impossible to know ahead of time which part of the disunified university is which. [And the problem for faculty is that this] kind of profound dissonance can knock askew the moral compasses of people who have ostensibly dedicated their professional lives to education. How else to explain the many people at Chapel Hill — including, incredibly, the director of a center on ethics — who abetted or ignored rampant fraud?

It’s the free and ordered thing again. Carey believes the freedom Rorty identifies in the American university has dissipated into disorder, so that anything goes in terms of pedagogical content, which makes the world safe for the endemic cheating we know goes on at virtually all big-time sports schools. At such schools – the cutting edge, Carey seems to argue, of the frayed American university – even faculty – even ethics faculty – are cheaters. And why? Because they recognize “no shared values,” no “shared sense of educational excellence,” that would give existential identity, much less academic integrity, to the place where they happen to work.

In response to this, I’d like to cite Rorty once again:

In one sense, [the term “morality”] is used to describe someone relatively decent, trustworthy, and honest – one who gives correct change, keeps promises, doesn’t lie much, can usually be relied upon to take an appropriate share in cooperative efforts, and so on. It seems to me if you’re not that sort of person by the time you’re eighteen, it’s probably too late. I don’t think that sociopaths who enter the university are corrigible by any measures that the academy might adopt. If the family, the community, the church, and the like, haven’t made you a relatively decent member of society, haven’t given you a conscience that stops you from cheating the customers, administering date rape drugs, or doing a lot of things we hope our eighteen year olds won’t do, the university won’t either. The academy can’t take on the job of straightening you out, of creating the conscience that the rest of the culture didn’t manage to produce during your first eighteen years.

This is the same point UD tirelessly makes about the absurdity of ethics courses in business schools – and those are older students. They’ve had four or five years past undergraduate school to acquire a sense of decency.

And how much more hopeless when you’re whatever age professors Jan Boxhill and Julius Nyang’oro were when they dedicated year after year of their lives to robbing students of an education and trashing their school’s integrity…

Carey wants us to believe that the openness of their work setting, the structural trust of faculty and students upon which the maturity and generativity of the American university rests, knocked askew the fragile moral compasses of Boxhill and Nyang’oro. But that trust did nothing to their morality because they lacked morality all by themselves; they were the sort of people who take advantage of the trust others place in them, and the openness of the American university simply made it easier for them to do the sorts of things they do because of the way they are. UD doesn’t think we should press the great free liberal arts schools of America in the direction of moral explicitness and constraint merely because some of the people there are bad actors.

… spring.

I post something on this blog every day, most often of course something related to universities. But here I am, 5:50 PM, just starting in on today’s writing, and I’m posting that I’m not posting.

Not posting something about plagiarism, athletics, conflict of interest. Not posting about poetry.

I think, as the song I link to up there goes, that I have spring fever. I mean, spring fever’s part of it, part of the restlessness, the difficulty concentrating, the tendency to wander to the garden and do something – anything – to stay outside on a cool sunny day in the Arboretum And Bird Central Station which is Garrett Park Maryland. The Solomon’s Seal is out, the fallen cherry at the top of the hill puts out white flowers. The white-flowering dogwood that shelters the topiary bulls has been hammered by heavy snow the last few winters, but its lost limbs have allowed it to clarify itself, and it’s more beautiful, more Japanese – in my green and white garden – than ever.

So I wander about, feeling that it would be madness not to be wandering about.

As always, in these supercharged settings, I’m thinking mainly of the dead world-lovers for whom I’m taking up the task of loving the world. Gillian Rose, Tony Judt, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Lasch, and Paul Monette can’t be here – neither, for that matter, can George Orwell and Albert Camus – and I take seriously my role as proxy world-lover for them. Their writing taught me why I should love existence, and now I’m parading my gratitude.

The restlessness is more than that, though. Now that my fear for my sister-in-law is over – she lives in Watertown, and was hunkered down, alone, during the shootouts – I have time to think about what it must have been like for her, and for her neighbors. Relief and sadness come at me at the same time. Also some crazy sort of pity for the depraved little fucker in the boat, bleeding, trembling, trying to do himself in but too weak … Hiding out in the neighbor’s yard like some sick kid’s game…

We sent Joanna an assortment of Beacon Hill chocolates – survivor’s chocolates, we called them in our jokey note… All part of conjuring the event as farce rather than tragedy, and why not.

It’s what the song says. I feel so gay, in a melancholy way.

… here, in this Jonah Lehrer post, because I’ve always loved Gore Vidal’s phrase “a patter of penitence.” And – even stranger – I mention Johan Hari in the post, and Hari once conducted an interview with Vidal that Christopher Hitchens mentions in this 2010 essay about Vidal’s having become, in old age, a hopeless crank.

Vidal has died.

One can only wonder about that interview, now that we know Hari, like Lehrer, routinely made quotations up. But one doesn’t have to wonder about Hari feeding lines to Vidal that he must have known would bring out the worst of his nutty nihilistic nastiness.

Rounding off his interview, an obviously shocked Mr. Hari tried for a change of pace and asked Vidal if he felt like saying anything about his recently deceased rivals, John Updike, William F. Buckley Jr., and Norman Mailer. He didn’t manage to complete his question before being interrupted. “Updike was nothing. Buckley was nothing with a flair for publicity. Mailer was a flawed publicist, too, but at least there were signs every now and then of a working brain.”

This description of Hari’s shock, and his motive in asking the question, makes Hitchens look naive, though I suppose he can’t have known, at that time, Hari’s amorality. It’s unlikely Hari was shocked and trying to cool things off when he brought up Vidal’s literary rivals. Hari was twitting the old guy; he got exactly what he expected to get.

When Vidal was good, he was very very good. Here’s the opening paragraph of a 1979 review he wrote of a Leonardo Sciascia novel:

Since the Second World War, Italy has managed, with characteristic artistry, to create a society that combines a number of the least appealing aspects of socialism with practically all the vices of capitalism. This was not the work of a day. A wide range of political parties has contributed to the invention of modern Italy, a state whose vast metastasizing bureaucracy is the last living legacy anywhere on earth of the house of Bourbon (Spanish branch). In fact, the allegedly defunct Kingdom of the Two Sicilies has now so entirely engulfed the rest of the peninsula that the separation between Italian state and Italian people is nearly perfect.

There’s a completeness about this paragraph. It’s not only sly and witty and stylish; it actually encapsulates everything Vidal is going to go on to say. When I say stylish I mean that it does poetic things with prose. Take a phrase like

vast metastasizing bureaucracy is the last

Vast and last are a straightforwardly rhymed pair; but there’s also the ast lurking in metastasizing. Few prose writers have this sort of ear, though …

Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we’re in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we’re leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night.

Light/night; again/peneplain/rainbands; secluded beauty… Don DeLillo does it too.

Of course you could argue that Vidal overdoes it in his last sentence –

In fact, the allegedly defunct Kingdom of the Two Sicilies has now so entirely engulfed the rest of the peninsula that the separation between Italian state and Italian people is nearly perfect.

You could argue he sticks in too many intensifiers and modifiers: in fact, allegedly, so entirely, nearly… But aside from the fact that defunct and engulfed are a nice assonantal pair, there’s the way in which this overloaded language conveys the beyond-maddening reality of life in the broken Italian state. When he wrote this, Vidal lived there, and in his both careful and over the top prose you sense that he’s been stewing in contempt for so long that he’s been able to produce a spectacularly mature carbonade.

This sense of a writer having overcome his raw emotions (see the problem with raw emotions here) enough to create chiseled language, but at the same time having retained enough emotion to keep his blood flowing through the passage is exciting to us — it’s what we go to the best prose for, as in George Orwell’s essay about charity hospitals, and Hitchens’ and Tony Judt’s essays about their last illnesses. You want the writerly control of the language; you also, just as intensely, want the honest, immediate reality of the writer’s emotions. It’s very difficult to provide both of these things, especially at a time dominated by fakers like Hari, Jonah Lehrer, James Frey, Jason Blair, Stephen Glass and a ton of others. We have to be wary now; we have to look out for prose that looks honest but is actually cynical and manipulative.

You never needed to worry about – even to think about – that with Orwell, Hitchens, and Judt. Vidal, for all his nuttiness, was like that.

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Cruella Vi Dal.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm has told you and told you and told you that good writers have their prose and their emotions under control. Helen Vendler cites Yeats:

Yeats, in “The Fisherman,” thought a poem should be “cold/And passionate as the dawn” — that it should embody, along with the rising passion of inception, the cold inquisition of detached self-critique.

Passion and chill: You might say this about any good piece of writing, as in, most lately, this consideration of body radiation by Christopher Hitchens.

But I do remember lying there and looking down at my naked torso, which was covered almost from throat to navel by a vivid red radiation rash. This was the product of a month-long bombardment with protons which had burned away all of the cancer in my clavicular and paratracheal nodes, as well as the original tumor in the esophagus. This put me in a rare class of patients who could claim to have received the highly advanced expertise uniquely available at the stellar Zip Code of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought: If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it.

Hitchens learned how to write from the master, George Orwell, here describing his own encounter with pain:

[T]he doctor and the student came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying [a] set of [cupping] glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an animal. I was very much impressed by the impersonal way in which the two men started on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only put on six glasses in my case, but after doing so they scarified the blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew about a dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone. But no, not a bit of it. There was another treatment coming, the mustard poultice, seemingly a matter of routine like the hot bath. Two slatternly nurses had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as tight as a strait-jacket while some men who were wandering about the ward in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic grins. I learned later that watching a patient have a mustard poultice was a favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don’t happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is buckled at the back and you can’t get it off. This is the period the onlookers enjoy most. During the last five minutes, I noted, a sort of numbness supervenes. After the poultice had been removed a waterproof pillow packed with ice was thrust beneath my head and I was left alone. I did not sleep, and to the best of my knowledge this was the only night of my life — I mean the only night spent in bed — in which I have not slept at all, not even a minute.

Do ye nae see that great writing – prose or poetry – is not the shriek, but the shriek mediated by consciousness? The mind at the same time registering and reflecting on experience? Compiling the metaphors and physical details that will generate in the reader the mood of the writer — the world of the writer? Not simply shrieking I HURT MAN but patiently, perceptively, gathering in the details of the material and social and psychological world in which consciousness moves?

I am offered a final scratch on any of a dozen itchy spots from hairline to toe; the Bi-Pap breathing device in my nose is adjusted to a necessarily uncomfortable level of tightness to ensure that it does not slip in the night; my glasses are removed…and there 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.

The late Tony Judt, describing the bondage of his last illness.

I could go on. But note in all of these great writers a sedate, almost stately, pace; an embroilment in the world around them rather than in their feelings; a stoical disposition that takes anguish for granted and sets about getting some leverage over it by thinking and writing about it…

One may be tired of the world — tired of the prayer-makers, the poem-makers, whose rituals are distracting and human and pleasant but worse than irritating because they have no reality — while reality itself remains very dear. One wants glimpses of the real. God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle — or instruction. I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of a river. It is precarious. I don’t know what I am doing. The unknowing, the taut balance, the jolts and the instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There was never any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.

Yes, yes, I’ll stop. I wanted to toss Harold Brodkey into the mix. This was written days before he died.

*************************************

In the recent dust-up between Rita Dove and Helen Vendler over what good poetry is, we see what happens when you go with the shriek rather than the mediated shriek. In choosing poems with lines like

We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews. Black poems to
smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches
whose brains are red jelly stuck
between ‘lizabeth taylor’s toes. Stinking
Whores!…
Setting fire and death to
whities ass.

for the poetry anthology she’s edited, Dove prompts the question of poetic standards. In including this poem, she has given me access to an angry consciousness. Poems should be blades and fists with which to kill people; but they are also smears, which confuses me. The enemy is smears – red jelly, slime. To call the poem also a smear is to mix up the low sliminess of the enemy with your side’s high slashing quality. You’re hard; they’re soft. If you’re also a smear, the sides get mixed up.

This isn’t a surprising outcome, because when your writing is a spew, it’s likely to be a mess. Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man is equally rageful, but the writer chills the passion with his prose… which has the effect of making Ellison’s rage far more powerful and disclosing than Baraka’s. The very fact that Ellison has gone to the trouble of removing the rage from one singular consciousness, and placing it a larger, accessible world, makes his writing ramify out to an audience in a way Baraka’s simply cannot.

So this, Vendler points out, is a bad poem, and there are too many others like it in Dove’s anthology – flat, propositional, linguistically dull statements of rage and suffering and celebration and love.

“One wants the contemporary poets of Dove’s collection to ask more of their language, to embody more planes of existence,” writes Vendler; and this is because readers of poetry want the same “more capacious regard for the world” that everyone engaged in aesthetic experience wants, not an encounter with a singular shriek.

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What about the umbrage in this post’s title?

That’s Dove’s, in her unfortunate response to Vender’s dislike of her anthology.

See, raw emotion doesn’t cut it. Writing is a cool medium, and if you can’t be cool, you make a hash of things.

… has spent much of today cleaning her house. She’s almost finished. At some point this evening, she hopes to post on the following subjects:

1. Tea. Christopher Hitchens has something to say about the subject, and it is of course a category on this blog, since UD is a mad tea drinker. She pens poems to it… New Years stir deep thoughts, and some of the deepest thoughts have to do with tea. I’ll also say a word or two about this Hitchens interview .

2. Having read Tony Judt’s Memory Chalet while I was in Cambridge and Vermont (Judt has much in common with Hitchens; maybe I can fold my Judt remarks into the tea post.), I’ll post some thoughts about that.

3. This one’s short, so I’ll just post it here:

After only a year, Yeshiva University has lost (fired?) its first chief investment officer. With an overpaid president, a board of trustees only recently boasting the Madoff/Merkin investment partnership, possible clawback action from Irving Picard, and an internecine, no comment, corporate culture, Yeshiva has a lot of problems. To lose a CIO so quickly looks like another problem.

4. Oh and you know what else? See that post a few posts under this one about whooshing up experiences? I think I had one at the New Year’s party I went to.

Nothing obviously dramatic about it, but I had a rather long conversation with a fourteen-year-old girl named Liv. Liv lives (that was fun to type) in Norway, but is immensely fluent in English; and Liv loves (that was fun too) to read novels.

“Jane Austen and the Brontes – I don’t like them.”

The outrageous confidence with which Liv said this comported strangely with her thin high little girl voice.

“Why not?”

“People don’t really change in those novels. My favorite novel is The Secret Garden. So many people change! Mary Lennox, and Colin, and Colin’s father… ”

“I love that novel too. We have a copy at our little house in the country, and I have a tradition of taking it off the shelf first thing when we get there and reading it again … I think you might be right about the Brontes — roughly speaking anyway. Austen’s another story – people change like mad in Austen. Try Pride and Prejudice.”

“They might change – but they don’t change in a big way. And in The Secret Garden, it’s not just people. It’s places! The garden is all dead, and then it’s all flowers …”

“I see what you mean…”

We went on like that at length, finessing the matter of personal and earthly transformation and its relation to literary quality, and I guess the whooshing up moment came for me when I realized I’m talking literary criticism with a fourteen-year-old from Norway and she’s making an intriguing point and we’re batting it around…!

Maybe it’s wasn’t whooshing so much as welling – a welling up of pleasure at the sight of UD as a fourteen-year-old with blond hair at a New Year’s party… Because Liv was like me at that age.

And a welling up of emotion not only at a kind of self-recognition, but at my gradual realization that I had found and was now delicately exploring real literary sensitivity in Liv, and that her forms of sensitivity were fascinating and moving.

My mother, a gardener, had a book in her library with a pleasantly old-fashioned title: Plants That Merit Attention.

Certain sentences merit attention, and over the life of this blog I’ve featured and talked about quite a few. These are sentences that rather leap out at you, little poems amid the prose.

Rereading, last night, the prose of Marjorie Williams, I found these two sentences. In the first, she’s describing her mother on her deathbed:

There she was in the hospital bed that had been brought in and set up in the corner of her bedroom, comatose some of the time and the rest of the time small and frail with an avian air of confusion.

In the other – I’ll give you two sentences for this one – she’s talking about the depression she and her husband felt as they tried living a normal life after Williams’ cancer diagnosis:

We don’t have to be actively thinking about the wild uncertainty of our future together to be pulled by its undertow. Sometimes, when either of us comes out of it and manages briefly to raise from the ocean floor the graceful wreck of our old, normal life, we can be happy for days or weeks or even a month.

Avian, yes? And the graceful wreck, yes? These are moments amid the prose when the eye stays on that part of page a bit longer, idles in the unexpected beauty of an image. An avian air. It’s not just that she found the bird metaphor, though that’s already spectacular, a way of making the rather abstract words that precede it (small, frail) suddenly take on physical specificity. It’s that an avian air is a poetic phrase, richly alliterative, delicate to the mind’s ear like a bird, landing with the mother’s frailty on the very end of the sentence.

And the word air! It breathes meanings, associations… Song, manner, atmosphere. When I first encountered this phrase, I heard a song I sing: The Lass With the Delicate Air. It played through my mind.

Graceful wreck of course is something of an oxymoron, the sort of phrase that lets us do the work we like to do when we read, lets us work out the ambiguities of an idea or argument or situation…

Or not so much work them out as recognize and accept them in their unworked essence. This prose doesn’t instruct. It makes nothing explicit. It gives voice to the almost-unutterable enigmas of life.

“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.'”

********************************

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?

*********************************

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.

*******************************

“[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.”