Marauders of Literary Fashion

Read widely enough so that you are not provincial, but not so widely that you become some sort of deracinated cosmopolitan. Walls that are too narrow can stifle all thought and originality. Walls that are not there at all leave you defenseless. Marauders of literary fashion come galloping in, and there you are.

Loyalty of some sort is inescapable, and so if a writer doesn’t have a sense of people and place, then he will tend to substitute some literary school or other. Belonging to a particular stylistic school is perfectly necessary, of course. Once you start writing, your use of the passive voice will either be closer to Jane Austen’s or to Ernest Hemingway’s. If you are going to write, you have to write something, and you will have to do it in some way. And presumably, you would do so for a reason.

But the problem of deracination is still a serious one. If you have been paying attention to the earlier advice about living an actual life among other people, you will have been doing so as a Christian, then a family man, then an American, and then a writer, and so on, just as your friend the software engineer is a Christian first, a member of a different family, a Korean, and then a software engineer. All idolatries are sinful, as when a particular nation is put before Christ, but some idolatries are pathetic, as when a peculiar literary preference is.

You can tell when the writer’s guild has tiptoed off with someone’s loyalties. The hapless victim starts apologizing for the literary sin of his Christian brothers, that sin being failure to belong to the current literary school, and the apologizer does this when it is completely unnecessary and uncalled for. If it weren’t so funny, it would be sad. “Why can’t Protestant Christians write?” the lament goes up. “We have to do better than this, people!” with “better” defined as receiving the accolades of the denizens of the nearest MFA program at the nearest state university, in which the lamenter is currently enrolled and learning lots of stuff.

To which I would respond by pointing to Chaucer, Tyndale, Beza, Spenser, Marvell, Donne, Herbert, Defoe, Shakespeare, Bradstreet, Bunyan, Taylor, Milton, Johnson, Buchan, and Lewis. Not bad, I would say, but please remember that we’re just getting started. But I admit I included Bunyan on the list in order to draw the inevitable sneer. You see, Bunyan wrote allegories where the people had names like Talkative, and Hate-Good, and Faithful, and Pliable. You can see the labels sticking out of the back of their coat collars. Right, but that doesn’t keep Bunyan from being one of the great literary geniuses of our civilization, a man who practically invented dialogue in the modern sense.

Lewis remarks on the marvelous ear that Bunyan had for this kind of thing.

“Such passages seem to me the essential Bunyan. His prose comes to him not from the Authorized Version but from the fireside, the shop, and the lane. He is as native as Malory or Defoe. The Scriptural images themselves take on a new homeliness in these surroundings”[1]

And I should remark in passing that one of the reasons why Lewis was such a marvelous writer is that he was not threatened by the academic pretensions and pufferies that regularly surround aspiring writers, urging them to try to fit in a little better. Lewis had the same kind of ear that Bunyan did. Here is something he noticed about Elizabethan writers.

“They talked more readily than we about large universals such as death, change, fortune, friendship, or salvation; but also about pigs, loaves, boots, and boats. The mind darted more easily to and fro between that mental heaven and earth: the cloud of middle generalizations, hanging between the two, was then much smaller. Hence, as it seems to us, both the naivety and the energy of their writing. Much of their literary strength (when at the end of the century they became strong) is bound up with this. They talk something like angels and something like sailors and stable-boys; never like civil servants or writers of leading articles”[2]

When Lewis says that the Elizabethans never wrote like civil servants or the writers of leading articles, you can tell where his sympathies are.

Ko-Ko from The Mikado once referred to this problem, as he was assembling his “little list” of potential executionees—

“Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,

All centuries but this, and every country but his own”

[1] C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 140.