The New Oxford Book of English Prose

Rating:
Summary: Five Cheers for Mr. Gross
Review: A good anthologist is like a tour guide of a city you might have thought you knew like the back of your hand who reveals wonderful nooks and crannies and even entire aspects of the most public places that you never knew existed. John Gross is a literary tour guide nonpareil, and the city of English prose he reveals in this successor to old Q's anthology is rife with rich surprises. The Wilde and Newman entries are particularly good. The Flann O'Brien entry might have been better, as could the one for Beerbohm. Nevertheless, even if, unlike our Australian reviewer, you consider D.H. Lawrence a very sorry fellow, you'll still enjoy this immense cornucopia of lively prose gems. Let's hear it for Mr. Gross. Five cheers.

Rating:
Summary: New Oxford Anthology is not so new
Review: The new Oxford Book of English Prose.Eight hundred pages, several hundred different writers, and edited by Oxford don, John Gross... all goes to reinforce old suspicions about great fiction-writing in English.

The last editor, Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, is briefly included, a marvellous little piece of advice on style and jargon: 'The first virtue, the touchstone of the masculine style is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun. When you write in the active voice, you write as a man... Set even higher store on the concrete noun... The Parables speak only of things which you can touch and see... The Gospel does not, like any young essayist, fear to repeat a word, if the word be good.'

This sets out a little of what makes the very best writers in English of true poetic prose. After browsing extensively through authors as various as Shakespeare and Amis, Malory and Clive James, Gibbon and Margaret Drabble, all of whose writings are printed (of course) in the same typeface and in chronological order, so making for more even comparisons, the best can be sorted into three ranks:

First without peer, D H Lawrence (whose extracts number third after Dickens and Conrad). His is the clearest most vibrant expressionistic and poetic prose in English writing. His utterly transfixing images (the moon episode in Women in Love, the miner's breakfast in Sons and Lovers) transfigure the natural landscape into charged symbolic dramatic correlatives for emotional states. Truly without parallel.

Conrad, writing only twenty years earlier, achieved only slightly less, as did Hardy (Troy's sword-play in Far from Madding Crowd and Tess covered in cuckoospit meeting Angel Clare). George Eliot (early Mill on the Floss) and Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights (Cathy's madness on seeing Heathcliff's ghost) are outstanding. Most startlingly impressive, Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose letters and diary notes, written fifty years before, detail short word-pictures of extraordinary linguistic intensity. The prose of Dickens (Mr Micawber, and the opening of Great Expectations) can be seen to emerge clearly from Carlyle, Ruskin, Smollet and Gibbon, but is so human and humorous. Jane Austen and Swift's satire sparkle in their different ways. The short samples of Shakespeare's dialogue in prose include little marvels from Hamlet and As You Like It.

In the second rank, Dylan Thomas (badly excerpted in the anthology, which should have included A Child's Xmas in Wales, A Day at the Beach, and Bank Holiday Monday instead of a lacklustre chapter of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog). Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped and Treasure Island stand out, as does Melville's Moby Dick. Henry James looks stodgy, humourless, pedantic and rather too abstract, not so interested in the sensual world. Orwell's writing is quite different from any of these, yet when he is lyrical and naturalistic (the end of Homage to Catalonia), he is full enough, large enough in scale, to earn a place next to Stevenson and Thomas, if not Melville and James. Hazlitt's essays are remarkable for their pungency, density, irony and subtle character portraiture. Johnson looks no more impressive than Boswell, Sterne and Paine (in these extracts). Of modern writers, only Nabokov comes close to any of these: exact, sensual, lyrical, articulate, but somehow too facile, always too facetious. James Joyce and Sam Beckett seem minor writers both. Are their reputations possibly the result of scholarly overenthusiasm or does it only seem so from bad anthologising?

In the third rank, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and, much to my surprise, Kingsley Amis, whose writing I have never cared for, now seems rather good, if light.

The extract from Money by Martin Amis just doesn't make the grade, I'm sorry. It's just too trite, and Burgess' Enderby seems far better, almost more modern. Though one feels contemporary English (the writing of the last thirty years in books, periodicals, papers and magazines) could have been represented, even if only by very short extracts from the best journalism: it would have given a flavour of the colourful nastiness of writing in the broadsheets, the NME and The (early) Face, Julie Burchill's and Tom Wolfe's journalism, for example, which I doubt the editor, John Gross (an Oxford don), knows about at all. Postmodernist American fiction doesn't feature whatsoever, which is a lack. Indian, Australian and Canadian prose is best represented by a Clive James memoir - draw one's own conclusions.

There are hundreds of minor writers included, some of whom, like Pater and Virginia Woolf are of outstanding interest, many of whom are there for archaeological interest. The early fifteenth and sixteenth century stuff is far more fascinating (in terms of vivid style) than anything postwar, aside from the abovementioned. Obviously, what I have said here has little to do with the political, historical and journalistic writing, which must be judged by what it is attempting to do, and, style aside (dry and abstract) is on the whole remarkable.

Any summary of the greatest writing in twentieth century English ought to include that seminal work by C K Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, their translation of the incomparable A la recherche. Of course, the Oxford Book doesn't mention it, though surely they could have given it honorary place, displacing some of the drek that gets in (Vikram Seth's Suitable Boy, some Drabble and Byatt, Bradbury and VS Pritchet, Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing to mention only a few of the very plain mediocre ordinary everday writers of my lifetime).

What stands out as the foremost quality of English writing is, of course, its joy in making natural images, using concrete nouns in close observation of the living world, of landscape and country, and assembling vibrant images to express the inner life, using the extraordinary vocabulary of Anglo Saxon English. What other literature can beat this? Maybe the apparent decline of English fiction into mediocrity is partly due to the urbanisation of society, for England has never done cities well and modern English suburban life is so difficult to rhapsodise, being so drab and banal. The Americans, Europeans, Indians and Asians are always going to outclass the English on that score. That Martin Amis is England's current best prose stylist says it all.

One word, Martin: Dickens.