Earth Under Its Nails; Blood on Its Tooth

“I wish,” says Moliere’s bourgeois gentilhomme, brandishing a letter he is laboring to write, “for neither verse nor prose.”

“It must be one or the other,” insists his tutor. “Whatever is not verse is prose.”

“What! When I say ‘Nicole, give me my nightcap,’ is that prose? . . . Upon my word, I have been speaking prose these 40 years without being aware of it.”

The history of prose is dogged by broad definitions and low repute. Moliere’s aspiring gentleman may think the better of himself or his ability to declaim in prose, but others more often disdain the art than admire the practitioner. “The work of my left hand,” John Milton dismissed his own essays in 1644. “A sad fact,” W.H. Auden more recently called the phenomenon by which a literary personage of his caliber can earn more through articles than poems--evidence of depraved public taste.

And yet great prose is as difficult, as rousing and as rare in English literary history as great verse. Many a superior poet can’t muster a passable line of prose, as John Gross’ “New Oxford Book of English Prose” sometimes unwittingly betrays. Milton, whose essays are liberally represented, indeed sounds gauche when he quits pentameter for pamphleteering. Walt Whitman, it is safe to say, would not have made the editor’s cut either had he not shaped his name in verse, and William Wordsworth makes both these men--and a number of freshman composition students--look like prose angels.

The fact that poets like these regularly make the pages of prose compendiums dramatizes a major misapprehension that still preys on consumers of literature, who are inclined to assume that if someone is good enough to master poetry, they’re more than good enough--perhaps overqualified--to write memorable prose. The reverse assumption is unheard of; hardly any prose stylist is enjoined to offer occasional poems for anthologizing--even Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spent long years trying to write verse that could compete with his famed essays, is judiciously absent from poetry anthologies.

Gross’ book is a still-needed tribute to the genius and variety of prose in English from the late 15th to the late 20th century. In roughly a thousand pages, it excerpts more than 500 writers from Sir Thomas Malory and the translators of the King James Bible to Joyce Carol Oates and Salman Rushdie. The first third of the volume captures English prose in its floral youth; the decorative writing of the 16th and early 17th centuries was generated for and by one of the most educated groups of people in history. Enrollment in Oxford and Cambridge soared in this period, reaching its climax in the 1630s. Writers like Thomas Browne and Robert Burton could count on readers able and eager to catch their abundant allusions, from classical philosophy to contemporary medicine, savor erudite metaphors and follow the meandering syntax.

By the 1640s, the love affair with learning was on the decline, Oxford and Cambridge were losing students (it took more than two centuries for enrollment to return to the 1630 peak) and a simpler, sparser prose style was growing in popularity. The early 18th century saw the triumph of the coffeehouse over the college and the accessible essay over the obscure meditation. Periodical journalists such as Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and, most important, Samuel Johnson, provided debating coffee-sippers with rations of wisdom to rival their biscuits and raised clarity and aphoristic economy into the cardinal virtues of the age.

A new breed of “familiar” essayists in the early 19th century rebelled against the generality, maximal symmetry and transparency of this approach and began to cultivate personal and syntactic eccentricity. Thus Charles Lamb composed quirky reflections about his love of roast pig and allergy to Scotsmen, and William Hazlitt rambled tirelessly in defense of rambling. The novelists of the 19th century enhanced this emphasis on individuality by drawing more and more sharply individualized heroes in language as distinctive and variable as Jane Austen’s and Henry James’.

The 20th century has witnessed the globalization of English and the flourishing of ethnic American, Indian and Caribbean literatures. With this has come a still more kaleidoscopic explosion of voices, subjects and genres and a further retreat from the generalizing wisdom loved by the 18th century (and by 19th century stragglers like Emerson). Into its place has moved a personal revelation at once more modest and more arrogant.

Hazlitt once quipped about having to clamber over “the lofty pile of taste and elegance [that is French literature] into the bogs and wastes of English.” And, indeed, a vast groundedness does seem to distinguish English prose from its counterparts in other Western literatures. If German prose writers descend into philosophy and French lapse into cleverness, then English prose stylists stand, Samson-like, on the ground, their eye on the real world, their wills wed to the tangible, the sensual, the functional and the vivid. One has only to peruse the samplings in Gross’ book--the feistiness of Shakespeare’s prose passages with their porters discussing drink, urine and sex; the incorrigible pragmatism of Francis Bacon, who even when writing about “Truth” doesn’t remain in abstractions; the scatological detail of Jonathan Swift; the “how to” feel of essays by Johnson, Emerson and Thoreau--to sense a literature whose power has everything to do with its tremendous viscerality, its unflagging devotion to the practical, the corporeal, the bright and the real.

English prose has earth under its nails and blood on its tooth. Neither German systems nor French jests long distract it from the life in its maw. Perhaps that is one reason why English writers have historically excelled, Montaigne notwithstanding, in the essay--that genre of immediate, practical engagement--while the Germans, for example, have favored the philosophical tract and the French have honed the witty maxim.

Gross’ book draws heavily from essays as well as from early prose narratives, novels, short stories and more intimate forms: letters, journals and memoirs. It is to our astonishment that we discover some of the most trenchant insights and striking formulations not in the genres that we now esteem most highly--not, say, in a novel, but in a letter. When Samuel Johnson addresses his patron who ignored him for the eight years he travailed on the English dictionary, only to heap praise on him when he finished, we can wish for no more literary performance: “Is not a patron, My Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water and when he has reached ground encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known and do not want it.”

When Emily Dickinson writes to her editor that she cannot “stop for” his smiles because “my Business is Circumference,” whole novels fade into forgetfulness. One wonders, in fact, whether the letter might not be the genre of the future, whether, in an age of e-mail, it may not be the next “people’s” form to assume literary status. The letter’s present proletarian rank is no worse, after all, than that of novels in the early 18th century or of play scripts in Shakespeare’s time, which were often neither signed nor saved because, as everybody knew, they weren’t literature. The tale of literary taste is a tale of the upgrading of popular, and the upstaging of highbrow, genres (consider the demise of the epic poem). Looking at the quality of the correspondence in Gross’ anthology, it is tempting to join our hopes with a slogan in a local bookstore: “Forget e-mail,” reads a sign on the stationary rack, “discover the art of letter-writing.”

It would be easy to fault Gross--or anybody charged with representing five centuries of literature in one volume--for his exclusions. The selection is definitely weighted toward writers based in England, and the multinationalism heralded in its introduction most conspicuously serves as passport for London-residing Indian authors like Kamala Markandaya and Salman Rushdie. This is not surprising: Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who edited the first Oxford book of English prose in 1925, set the tone for the series when he declared that his selection aimed to revive tearful pride in “this imperishable land of ours . . . in the breast of any gallant Englishman on outpost duty in fort or tent” and to serve as a portable trove of English treasure whose glitter might brighten the bleary eye of Britons far from home. The new book’s jacket alone--graced, as it is, with a Sir John Lavery painting of a tanned Englishman reclining in a beach chair on the Riviera with an ivory suit on his back and a book in his hand--suggests how little Gross has strayed from the intentions of his venerable ancestor.

It is not, however, what Gross excludes from his anthology that’s ultimately striking; it’s how much he includes. The selection is so big as to be nearly numbing. The table of contents alone spans 30 pages, and with no divisions that might allow the location of an author by period, theme, nationality or any other distinction, it’s hardly more fun to peruse than a telephone book. And then there’s the utter absence of explanatory notes accompanying the individual selections. If you encounter an author you don’t know, you still won’t know a thing about him when you finish the volume. Sure, you will have savored a small sampling of his particular literary cuisine, but you won’t have the haziest historical, biographical or cultural context for it.

In this, Oxford is deeply--and in some ways refreshingly--out of step with the fashions of contemporary literary criticism. Don’t they know, one wonders, that professional literary students today read authors in the first place to learn about their periods, politics and social power structures? Does Gross dare think we can read Thomas Overbury with pleasure without knowing that he was poisoned by the wife of the king’s favorite, or Francis Bacon without the New Historicist assessment of his political maneuvers, or Virginia Woolf without knowledge of her relevance to modern feminism? The fact that he does suggests a faith in the text alone that is unusual at a time when progressive literary critics ostensibly prefer that Shakespeare had written less drama and more social history--an account of Jacobean court life, perhaps, or a seating chart for the Globe Theater.

Unfortunately, this faith may stem, in part, from a confusion about the identity of his reader. At times Gross seems to target the amateur, at others the specialist. The fact that the book contains only very short extracts suggests that it is conceived as an introduction for the general reader. On the other hand, the absence of identifying information about the writers seems to assume prior acquaintance with them, as does the fact that Gross excerpts passages that are often neither the best nor most representative. Look up America’s most philosophical optimist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, and you will find lines that look like they were penned by England’s most systematic pessimist, Thomas Hobbes: “Yes! it is true there are no men. A man . . . is a money machine. He is an appendage to a great fortune, or to a legislative majority, or to the Massachusetts Revised Statutes, or to some barking and bellowing institution.” From here it is not far to Hobbes’ famously mechanistic view of human life as “but a motion of limbs,” with the heart “but a spring.” The irony is that Emerson spent his career proclaiming the opposite point, invoking man’s “oversoul” and championing his potential for self-reliance. Perhaps to distinguish himself from Quiller-Couch, who aimed “to include the best though a hundred judges have declared it so,” Gross has sifted through his raw materials in search of the oddest, most unlikely and justifiably neglected passages of each author. The result is interesting for connoisseurs but misleading for amateurs, who realistically comprise the book’s only audience.

Only a few books demand “to be chewed and digested”; most, according to Francis Bacon, are merely to be nibbled. “The New Oxford Book of English Prose” is one of these. When ingested in small quantities--and without an appetite for literary history or representative work--it yields many a pungent and healthful morsel, great critical fiber and, time and again, a burst of intoxicating sweetness.