Williams, Santayana, and the Secrets Style Can’t Keep
Confession lives in the prose of the ablest writers
Style is a tattletale, a dead giveaway. I’m thinking prose style, but I suspect it’s true of any. The more personal the style, the more revealing – of the person beneath the pose.
This thought occurs as I read two autobiographies written in English at about the same time – by George Santayana and William Carlos Williams. Both were poets who worked to pay the bills – Santayana as a professor, Williams as a physician. Both attended Ivy League colleges (Harvard and University of Pennsylvania, respectively). Both were smart, talented, erudite, acquainted with the currents in their art. Both aimed for immortality, like any maker worth their salt. Both died renowned, neither a best-seller. But how different!
Compare two passages, picked almost at random. Santayana’s:
Very different was dapper Mr. Groce, our teacher of English composition and literature, a little plump man, with a keen, dry, cheerful, yet irritable disposition, a sparkling bird-like eye, and a little black moustache and diminutive chin-beard. I suspect that he was too intelligent to put up with all the conventions. Had he not been a public-school teacher, he might have said unconventional things.
And Dr. Williams’:
When Ezra was staying with us once for a short time Pop looked at him with considerable doubts. He acknowledged that Ezra knew a good deal, though what he knew Pop was not by any means sure. He knew also that Ezra, being my friend, was welcome in our house. He was curious about Ezra: he wanted to hear this young man expound theories which, generally speaking, the older man rejected on general principle but, being both intelligent and generous-minded, he wanted to give my friend an opportunity to express himself. (The Ezra here was Ezra Pound, Williams’ college classmate.)If these scraps were all we possessed of each author, how might we characterize them? Both are literate, observant, peering beyond what they’re describing into what it might mean. Both treat the language with respectful, even reverent care. How about their diction, tempo, tone? Speak both aloud. Williams’ gait is casual, natural, amiable, humorous. He calls his dad Pops and Ezra Ezra and you can’t help liking all three (Pops, Ezra, and the narrator). No fancy words, few commas, no need to take a breath and anticipate your cadences to make your way through a sentence.
Santayana views his subject critically, not lovingly. Even his flattering descriptors feel dismissive – “dapper”, “bird-like”, “diminutive”. His words are precise, finicky, unfamiliar. He’s working hard at being generous, but it isn’t easy. Where Williams finds life funny, Santayana finds it bothersome. Williams throws his arm over your shoulder; Santayana recoils from human touch.
I wonder, with a shudder, what you might make of me, similarly scrutinized. For sure, my prose is fancier than Williams’, more hoity-toity words, more punctuated. I don’t want to be an ordinary, bar-and-grill sort of guy. But neither do I want to be prissy, censorious, uptight. I want to be your smart pal, who’s fun to talk with, who uses uncommon language now and then but only with a conspiratorial wink. If I get showy and windy, I hurry to prick my balloon, so you know I “don’t mean anything by it.” I want to come across as someone who takes life seriously but not himself.
The abler the writer the more confessional their style. By their tone of voice, you feel them in the room with you. And you can’t fake it, any more than you can fake your affect. Falsity reeks. Cautious propriety bores. Dare to be your peculiar, unprecedented self. Who knows, we might hit it off!