26 August 2022

The Day the Language Changed


Recall your high school English classes, the books you had to read. Early on, it's usually Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter or even Robinson Crusoe. Of this last, I prefer the Andy Weir version, but that's a story for a different day.

Now let's not kid ourselves. No English teacher is going to assign Tom Clancy or Danielle Steele or Nicholas Sparks. Their job is not to bump up sales at Barnes & Noble. They want culturally significant writings in the English language. A stranded sailor in the waning days of exploration, a metaphor-heavy story about an angry captain and the whale who maimed him, and religious hysteria in Colonial New England have a lot to say about how the language has evolved.

Take those three tomes with Charles Dickens' body of work, and you realize that, at least in the 18th and early 19th centuries, novelists were a wordy bunch.

And then some guy from Hannibal, Missouri writes a travelogue laced with humor, local color, and... spare prose? The Innocents Abroad is a diary of one Samuel Clemens's travels from the Mississippi River through Utah and Nevada, to California, and even to Hawaii back when it was still independent. Writing as Mark Twain, he ditches the heavy, ponderous prose of Melville and Hawthorne (and Dickens) for one-liners. Instead of long introductory essays (Hawthorne goes on a political rant about the Whigs), Twain jumps in and starts talking about preparing for his trip. This isn't fine literature. This is a cigar-chomping Border State wanderer talking to you over a bottle of whiskey. 

And the eyes sweep right across the page. Even though language has shifted somewhat since 1870, you understand instinctively what Twain is saying. It's a refreshing change.

He's not the first English-language writer to cut to the chase. Shakespeare himself kept his dialog spare, lacing just enough in to avoid long passages of stage setup and sound effects. Yes, he wrote drama, but in between his less-than-subtle references to classical literature and to history (skewed, of course, toward the Tudors and their Stuart cousins) are puns, dialog meant to appeal to the masses. But Shakespeare wrote drama. Washington Irving did not. If you've ever read his essays about living among the Dutch of Upstate New York or his famous The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, you know Irving didn't waste words.

But Irving was an exception. Twain, more popular in his own time than Irving ever hoped to be, was, no pun intended, novel.

Of course, Dickens, Melville, and Hawthorne, while trying to lean into symbolism and history (sometimes contemporary history), also had to keep hungry audiences coming back. In an age before mass media, readers in Illinois or Texas had no clue about whaling ships or pre-Revolution Massachusetts. Dickens knew his readers did not just live in London, and those that did knew nothing about parts of their own city. So, internal monologue and heavy description were not just smart, they were mandatory.

Twain emerged after the Civil War, when telegraphs sent news and messages instantly across the continent. The telephone would follow in 1876. And anyone could hop the railroads and cross the country. So, people's knowledge of the world had widened. By the time of A Tramp Abroad, Twain did not have to spend pages describing the Swiss Alps or the German Black Forest unless it served his story.

In fact, the first really difficult Twain book to read is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and mainly for his insistence on writing in Huck's broken dialog. On the other hand, we are discussing a book that introduces a character too racist for the Confederacy, that being Huck's Pa. The Prince and the Pauper, The Gilded Age, and Tom Sawyer all have more in common with Stephen King and Nicholas Sparks than Herman Melville.

Is it our shortening attention spans? Maybe. But Twain, for all his reputation while alive and since, was an outlier. For an example, I direct you toward Henry James's Portrait of a Lady, which begins with James doing his own literary criticism. (Spoiler alert: I abandoned that one. I could finish Moby Dick.)

It wasn't until after World War I, a few years after Twain's death, that prose started to tighten up. We now look to Hemingway as our role model. Clean, sparse prose almost to the point of white room scenes, Hemingway was part of the Lost Generation. Raymond Chandler made fun of him in a Philip Marlowe novel, but that same novel followed his example, just with more similes that fell to the ground like cocaine from a politician's coffee table. (Ouch. That was bad.)

Hemingway's time overlapped that of Tolkien, whom I would call the last of the classical writers. The Lord of the Rings trilogy has so much description, interior monologue, and side stories that Stephen King's work looks like a collection of pamphlets. But try to submit something like The Fellowship of the Ring today, and expect a form rejection letter back. Update The Old Man and the Sea for the present day, and you might get a serious look.

But I have to believe Hemingway took Twain's get-to-the-point method of storytelling as permission. Some lament the change as the death of the "high-minded novel." Normally, that means tales of middle-aged college professors in inappropriate relationships with young female students. (Actually, Philip Roth pulled that off brilliantly in The Human Stain, but that was a jumping off point.) These days, especially in crime fiction, we want our prose lean.

6 comments:

  1. Hemingway famously said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
    I disagree with Hemingway - Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne leap to mind. You don't get much sparer - and spookier - than "The Minister's Black Veil".

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  2. Fun post, Jim, and I agree with you, but I'd go further.

    Eve, I've always liked Hawthorne's stories better than his novels and I'd put "Young Goodman Brown" at the top for the vicious irony. But Hawthorne's ear for language was never very good.

    I'd say the creators of truly American (as opposed to derivative English) lit absolutely start with Twain. I drove past the Twain house in Hartford this morning, and my wife is a tour guide there. She tells me Twain's biggest seller in his lifetime was The Innocents Abroad.

    Twain was one of the several Mid-western writers who moved the language and the focus into a modern era. Sherwood Anderson (born in Ohio), Ring Lardner (Michigan), Fitzgerald (Minnesota) and Hemingway (Illinois) brought it back to the common man instead of the upper classes. It's a lot like Chandler's comment that Hammett brought murder out of the drawing rooms of British stories to the gutter where it belonged.
    I'd also add Stephen Crane, even though he was born in New Jersey. Those writers all looked at the common man and polished the common vernacular into a unique animal.

    I thank them.

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  3. I’d once read Dickens was paid by the word, hence his tendency to wax verbose, garrulous, and loquacious. Tolkien seemed interminable, a nightmare for this ADD reader.

    (I touched a teacher’s nerve when I complained in class that part of the ‘punish’ dialogue between Sampson and Gregory was omitted. Tch, tch, bad Leigh!)

    I stopped to compare the chronology of Prince & Pauper, Huck Finn, and Puddnhead Wilson– Finn always seemed a more mature novel although it was released a decade before Puddnhead. In looking them up, I discovered Puddnhead Wilson was made into a silent movie. I’m curious how that was pulled that off.

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  4. I love Thorne Smith (who wrote through the 1920s and 30s) but he takes a few chapters to get things really going in his novels. (Except maybe "Turnabout.")

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  5. Very insightful. Nuff said.

    Craig Faustus Buck
    CraigFaustusBuck.com

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  6. Jim, Jim, Jim… you forgot Hemingway’s contemporary over in the cheap seats: Mr. Dashiell Hammett, who wasn’t too bad with the pruning shears himself.

    Tight, taut? You’re soaking in it.

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