Best prose stylists in English literature?

[WICKES]

In 65 replies from soi-disant lovers of literature on English prose stylists and only a fleeting and scarcely complimentary mention of George Orwell. "Politics and The English Language", "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "The Road to Wigan Pier" are masterclasses of English prose and should be required reading for any aspiring writer. So many of the people held up for our admiration here are mannered...Kerouac for example or one trick ponies, Hemingway's a good example.

Agreed. Orwell is an absolute pleasure to read.

[ennison]

Looking at the quotes Profgood provided from McCarthy (a writer I enjoy) and Conrad (a writer I admire) I am struck again by what I sometimes feel about McCarthy - that he is flashy because he can be but Conrad integrates his style to the whole task and my admiration grows as I consider how difficult a task it is for most of us to learn another language as we get older and Conrad mastered a form of literary English that is really attractive. Mr Gass has a considerable dark humour.

[hannah_arendt]

I agree when it comes to McCarthy and Waught. I would mention also the name of Tolkien, R. Howard, U. LeGuin.

[maxphisher]

You're not really being very honest about Joyce. Yes, he did write to Jacques Benoist-Mechin that: "I have put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it keeps the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." However, to condense the entirety of Joyce's accomplishments, goals, and successes down to this one statement is very shortsighted. The sheer amount of research and connection-making that he performed in Ulysses is absolutely stunning, not to mention the ability with which he employed his various prose styles. Yes, a book like Ulysses demands a good bit of commitment from the reader, but the payoff that one receives after that work is well worth the effort.

Honestly, if clarity and concision were the only things that we need to look for in successful prose, then dictionaries and encyclopedias would be the most celebrated pieces of prose ever written. Whether we agree to like him or not, Joyce's ability to create incredibly vibrant and clear prose with such fluidity and variation is stunning. There's just no getting around it. The man was absolutely fearless when it came to writing.

[Hal]

Nabokov is pure style. He is like a tennis player that hits the ball between his legs just because he can.

[ennison]

Nabokov does THAT because he can? OUCH!

[PeterL]

There is no doubt in the matter. Jonathan Swift had the best prose style in the history of the English language, and he had a great sense of humor. Not only did he have style, but he had content; although some of the content is quite obscure now.

[mande2013]

May I suggest there's more to being a great novelist than merely being a great prose stylist. Prose is not poetry. This isn't to suggest the stylized aesthetics of someone like Nabokov or Woolf shouldn't be commended. If a writer can successfully do what those two do with the form, then great. But stylized prose should not necessarily be treated as a cornerstone of aesthetics where the novel is concerned. See Dostoevsky and Balzac for proof. Judging a novelist almost exclusively on how good a prose stylist he is strikes me as rather posh and bourgeois, sort of like if we were to judge a painter exclusively on his skills as a draughtsman. For poetry, sure, judge all you want based solely on their linguistic skills, but the novel is more of a "content"-oriented form in my humble opinion at least. If one were to call out Dostoevsky or Cervantes for not being a "great prose stylist", perhaps it's because they didn't try to be and merely had other concerns more related to "content", and there's nothing wrong that. That doesn't make them inferior artists, especially when they're working within what is essentially a story-telling medium. The novel, like 'classical' music is a mode of expression that more easily rewards "substance" whereas poetry and jazz more easily reward "style". Painting and filmmaking accommodate both in equal measure I think, as does play writing. My polemic is in no way intended as some anti-experimentalist backlash. I feel Faulkner is among the very best, but if you feel the 'flowery' linguistic style of Nabokov, Woolf, or I don't know, Flaubert is the necessary pinnacle of literary achievement and should therefore be propagated as prosaic gospel, then you probably don't understand the true essence of novel writing, just like someone who can't comprehend why Jean Renoir is superior to Kubrick or Kieslowski doesn't grasp the true essence of filmmaking. Linguistic perfectionism is more compatible with poetry writing than with prose writing in my opinion.

[Whosis]

John Steinbeck for the novel, Anton Chekhov for the short story.

[JanVanHogspeuw]

Judging a novelist almost exclusively on how good a prose stylist he is strikes me as rather posh and bourgeois, sort of like if we were to judge a painter exclusively on his skills as a draughtsman. For poetry, sure, judge all you want based solely on their linguistic skills, but the novel is more of a "content"-oriented form in my humble opinion at least. If one were to call out Dostoevsky or Cervantes for not being a "great prose stylist", perhaps it's because they didn't try to be and merely had other concerns more related to "content", and there's nothing wrong that. That doesn't make them inferior artists, especially when they're working within what is essentially a story-telling medium. The novel, like 'classical' music is a mode of expression that more easily rewards "substance" whereas poetry and jazz more easily reward "style". Painting and filmmaking accommodate both in equal measure I think, as does play writing. My polemic is in no way intended as some anti-experimentalist backlash. I feel Faulkner is among the very best, but if you feel the 'flowery' linguistic style of Nabokov, Woolf, or I don't know, Flaubert is the necessary pinnacle of literary achievement and should therefore be propagated as prosaic gospel, then you probably don't understand the true essence of novel writing, just like someone who can't comprehend why Jean Renoir is superior to Kubrick or Kieslowski doesn't grasp the true essence of filmmaking. Linguistic perfectionism is more compatible with poetry writing than with prose writing in my opinion.

I don't think anyone is saying that prose style is the exclusive way to judge the worth of a novel, but there's more to prose style than in your opposition of it to "content" or "substance". Take Nabokov for instance, whose style to me is a lot more than just 'flowery', but is often itself a meditation on perception and memory, and the relationship between language and life. I'll quote Pnin (considered one of his slighter works):

“What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself...never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because...the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind...but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past.”

Sure it reads pretty, and some will probably read the content of this as being the banal point about having to subsist in a world in which this death happened, but to me the content is in the style; of the way in which Pnin having this painfully overwrought memory is described to us. 'Flowery' suggests it's all about how trippingly on the page something reads, but to me great prose style is more about how words are used to make the imagery more vivid and the thoughts and emotions resonate more deeply, and in this passage these seven words, "those gardens and snows in the background", just floor me.

[R.F. Schiller]

Nabokov is pure style. He is like a tennis player that hits the ball between his legs just because he can.

Lol, did you get this off Nick Mount's lecture on Youtube? He was my first-year English Professor at UofT, and he said the exact same quote.

[LitNetIsGreat]

I have been re-visiting the delicious Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee this and last week, some yummy prose style there.

[kev67]

I have been re-visiting the delicious Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee this and last week, some yummy prose style there.

I wondered about suggesting Laurie Lee myself, but I was not sure what the definition of prose was. Cider with Rosie seems too lyrical to be called prose, but then I have read it described as a prose poem. I am currently reading the follow up As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. Laurie Lee is like a more lyrical George Orwell.

[WICKES]

If you are talking about style and nothing but style then Evelyn Waugh does it for me. His prose is pretty much perfect. When he was at Oxford he became involved with the Aesthetes and he retained a commitment to beauty above content throughout his writing career. When you read him you get the sense that he is refining and reworking his prose to make it ever more fine.

Aldous Huxley's first novel Crome Yellow is another masterpiece of style.

Oh, and PG Wodehouse. Wodehouse has a reputation as a light, comic novelist but, my god, the man was a genius with the English language. Someone once said that reading him is like swimming in Champagne- perfect description!

[prendrelemick]

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