Author: Cameron Aitken. Cameron is a First Class English Literature Graduate and Jazz Musician. He loves poetry and philosophy, and has a background in literary theory. He is also interested in psychoanalysis, and thinks about films through this lens. He is an Early Modernist at heart.

‘Style isn’t something you apply later; it’s embedded in your perception, and writers without that freshness of voice make no appeal to me.’ – Martin Amis

The death of any artist often prompts an audience to not only look back upon their work but also to examine in greater detail the influences that crystallised their craft. There is no better contemporary example of this than Sir Martin Louis Amis: a curious blend of Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow. Of course, Amis — who left Exeter College, Oxford with a first-class degree in English Literature — promiscuously absorbed the lofty jewels of the canon from Chaucer to Shakespeare, from Austen to Joyce, yet has always referred to both Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow as his predominant influences. Bound by these two foreign novelists, Amis held onto the Baroque prose that his coevals were soon beginning to abandon. Ineluctably, it developed (or descended) into a rejection of this stylised form of writing into something a little more experimental. What suffered was the loss of the coquettish discourse in which Nabokov engaged his readers. As Amis remarks in his interview in The Guardian, the excitement lies in the interaction between style and reader; the whole of the world needs to be laid out neatly for you so that you can see it through the writer’s eyes: Amis is not as fond of killing the author as Roland Barthes is. The author, for Amis, is crucial to understanding the text, and Nabokov was to him the oasis from where all the goodness flows in a dry literary land. The caustic Saul Bellow is of course an important influence for Amis in his later years, especially from having known Bellow until the end of his life. But I will focus more on Nabokov because he laid the foundation for Amis.

A question to ponder is not one that can be answered with much verve or exactitude. The question is thus: what exactly is fine prose? Initially, it sounds rather much like a subjective question that could only be answered with a coltish and fleeting response — not being emboldened by the question, generally a person would recoil over their prospective answer. Style has been characterised differently over the decades; an early twentieth-century view of style is one that students would hear either from Hemingway or from a teacher in their creative writing seminars: ‘Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center [sic] handy, ready and able.’ This instruction is from William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s writing manual The Elements of Style. While pointers on avoiding superfluous words and phrases are useful, they did not appear to anticipate the great shift in English Literature that was taking place: an elevation and semi-prioritisation of form over the plot.

            Flaubert had already established this sentiment long before the rise of Modernism when he declared that he wished to write a novel about absolutely nothing. Plot has arguably never been essential to literature. Shakespeare invariably demonstrates this to us, for he is awkward with the exposition and resolution of plot structure. What the writer says can be unimportant at times; it is more fruitful to think more concisely about the way the writer says what he says. Consider the ambiguity in the famous ‘to be, or not to be’ soliloquy — does isolating this phrase not only obscure the suicidal contemplations of Hamlet but also cloud any other meaning behind this message? Why did Shakespeare write ‘be’ instead of ‘exist’? Should he have written ‘to get involved, or not to get involved?’, which is another conception of how this word could be interpreted. Metre plays a part in this, however, and negates the possibility of extra syllables. The overarching point here is that form commands the content; the powerful and definite single syllable of the repeated word ‘be’ emphasises and intensifies the importance of this word. Perhaps this is more obvious in poetry, for a single line of poetry feels less diluted than a large paragraph of prose. Yet Nabokov’s prose is arguably much more musical than his poetry. It is difficult to forget the haunting prose poem at the start of Lolita:

            Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

The unmistakable emphasis on the linguistic is striking here; the euphony of each sound, as it invites the reader to sound out the words, indulges the reader in Humbert Humbert’s own perversity. Although Nabokov disliked the term, his prose in Lolita embodies the form equals content trope of modernist writing. The descriptions of Lolita are more delectable than the girl herself. Nabokov tricks us with fervent delight; he even performs this vulgar trick when trying to convince us that a girl in her late twenties resembles a little girl, and magnifies her features for us:

            She looked fluffy and frolicsome, dressed à la gamine, showed a generous amount of smooth leg, knew how to stress the white of a bare instep by the black of a velvet slipper, and pouted, and dimpled, and romped, and dirndled, and shook her short curly blond hair in the cutest and tritest fashion imaginable.

Who else could provide the most beautiful description of a woman and remind you that it is actually a malevolent reimagining of her as a much younger girl? Our main character never intends to view her as her own age but rather distorts her image to satisfy his own needs. Nabokov’s game is revealed when he begins to claim her responsibility for the involuntary. The narrator argues that the chiaroscuro of the white ankle and the black slipper are intensified by her own precocious and innocently kittenish actions. Style is playful here, for Nabokov cleverly exploits what James Wood describes as a novelist’s three languages. The novelist, according to Wood, not only employs their own style in the work but is consistently heedful of the character’s voice and the perspicacious attention to and execution of detail. Nabokov enables us to see the world through the character’s eyes, as opposed to the weak writer who only provides us with their own morals and their own didactic foreplay. Nabokov is similar to Shakespeare in this regard because he is able to distance himself from his own characters — rendering us powerless to recognise the true voice of the author; the exquisite mingling of voices challenges our own perceptions.

            In his complex magnum opus The Gift, Nabokov accentuates the blending of styles and voices when he himself emulates the styles of other Russian literary greats in this metafictional triumph. Although Nabokov certainly transcends “isms”, he could quite easily be regarded as a postmodernist from this work, in addition to Pale Fire, in which he metamorphoses the very role of prose into a commentary upon a poem. Similarly, he does this in The Gift while critically brooding upon one of the writer’s “poems”:

            It is strange how a memory will grow into a wax figure, how the cherub grows suspiciously prettier as its frame darkens with age-strange, strange are the mishaps of memory.

Nabokov is one the most acute examples of a writer who can microscopically illustrate an abstract concept with such kaleidoscopic intent. He fulfils the vision of the old critics in establishing the abstract form into that of a concrete existence. It would not be inaccurate to place Nabokov in the same rank as the metaphysical poets, for he is able to extend these conceits over several paragraphs. This combination of sound and image resembles the poet who is trapped in a novelist’s body. His prose is an utter paradox in this respect: it glimmers an iridescent glow across every page. Only masters of form are able to accomplish this with such elegance; only writers with a profound command over the euphony of the English language are able to conduct a jaunty orchestra of syllables with the ease and repose of a lullaby.

            The recent decline of this emphasis on ornate prose is unsettling but not unforgivable. If one were to attend a creative writing class today, with the utmost enthusiasm to write like Nabokov, Bellow, or Joyce, then the student would be accused of engaging in frivolous overwriting. There may be some truth in this, for it is easy to miscalculate the superfluity of phrases at times — particularly across the length of a gorgeously crafted paragraph. Nabokov never makes his own sentences redundant; however, he still baulks creative writing tutors whenever prose that is merely intended for the novel crops up. The novel is moving towards the visual and tends to eschew the characteristically novelistic elements in order to emulate the filmic. Is Amis one of the last of this cohort of style writers, or will the novel soon begin to move away from the experimental phase and reinvent itself? I suspect that only time will tell.

Sources

Cummins, Anthony. “Martin Amis: ‘Style isn’t something you apply later’.” The Guardian, 7^th August, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/07/martin-amis-style-isnt-something-you-apply-later

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. London: Penguin Classics, 2000.

Nabokov, Vladimir. The Gift. London: Penguin Classics, 2001.

Strunk Jr., William and White, E. B.. The Elements of Style 4^th edn. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2000.

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. London: Vintage, 2009.