WAUGH AND ENTERT AI NMENT
355
they rise above their rank and demand comparison with America's most
serious writers, writers of demonstrably finer intelligence and fuller
seriousness than these entertainers but less gifted in their capacity for
articulating the intelligence they have to communicate. In America
we don't have anything quite like them. Our entertainers are either
the potboiling, unreadable historical novelists, or the quiet, pretentious
New Yorker
story writers, or else they are like
J.
P . Marquand or John
O'Hara, writers equipped by their faculty of observation and the cir–
cumscription of their gifts to be good entertainers, but who for several
reasons, not the least of them an irritation at not being first-class writers,
seldom realize their powers with unequivocal success. Nevertheless, the
English knack of producing brilliant figures of the second rank has more
to it than plain unpretentiousness or contentment with doing a limited
job expertly.
It
is connected with the Englishman's relation to writing,
to the naturalness and ease of his prose compared to ours.
When a writer sits down to write he hears a voice speaking in his
ear. This voice is not his own, nor is it the voice of someone else reciting
or making a speech. It is a kind of ideal voice he hears, as if it were
he, with all the halts and clumsiness, and all the lapses of vocabulary
and discordances of rhythm finally expunged or resolved, speaking as
he has always desired to speak. The effort of writing is to
transcrib~
this voice, to capture its tones and cadences. On the other hand, this
ideal voice is not wholly unlike our speech; it is after all onIv thp.
refining in our minds of our usual voices. This refinement has been
accomplished chiefly through our reading of literature; the tones of
rhetoric and style that we retain from our reading infuse this voice
more fully than they ever can our speech-there is no organ like the
tongue for them to get past. It is apparent, of course, that difficulty or
ease in writing will be in proportion to the dissimilarity or resemblance
our actual speech bears to the silent voice that is heard when we write,
and that the qualities of our prose will be the outcome of this com–
munion.
It
is also true that the relation of our actual speech to the tra–
dition of English speech and prose is an essential component of what–
ever difficulty we may face in writing-what may be most alive or im–
mediate in our speech may not easily find its way into the usual
form~
of expression. But for the English, the living connection between
speech
and traditional prose has not altered radically, as it has for us, and in
writers like Waugh the transition from cultivated speech
into
clear,
elegant writing requires a minimum of artifice. Take a passage like this :
The I sle of Mugg has no fame in song or story. Perhaps because when–
ever they sought a rhyme for the place they struck absurdity, it was
