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PARTISAN REVIEW
neglected by those romantic early-Victorian English ladies who so pro–
digally enriched the balladry, folk-lore and costume of the Scottish
Highlands.
It
has a laird, a fishing fleet, an hotel . . . and nothing
more.
It
lies among other monosyllabic protuberances. There is seldom
clear weather in those waters, but on certain rare occasions Mugg has
been descried from the island of Rum in the form of two cones. The
crofters of Muck know it as a single misty lump on their horizon. It
has never been seen from Egg.
Aside from the comic genius embodied in it, it has a naturalness and
a propriety with the language than can only be owing to a perfect as–
surance about the way it ought ideally to sound. The conversational
tone-in general the objective of all English prose-can be preserved
only if speech retains its affiliations with the complex language of
literature.
In America this has not happened, and some of the extraordinary
things that have taken place in our writing are the result. What voice
does William Faulkner hear when he goes out into his barn with his
jug of white lightning and begins to write? It's certainly not anything
we could recognize as his own. It has something in it of an angry
preacher, and something of an unregarded soothsayer, and something
of a slightly swozzled lawyer too, but it is not a voice that could ever
speak-it can only write. Or when Mary McCarthy writes, what does
she hear? Something, I suppose, like an argument between several
splenetic philosophers, a lengthy dialogue of retorts and contradictions,
a dialectic of ironic equilibrations; but again, it somehow, despite all its
intelligence, does not issue as a prose commensurate to the talent we
feel behind it. What do the editors of
Time
hear when they sit down
to amend their articles? They hear, I expect, what other editors of
Time
have written, which is like nothing ever heard before on land or sea.
What we feel in Faulkner-and in Thomas Wolfe, and Robert Penn
Warren, and Saul Bellow, and others-is more than a writer's natural
impatience with the prevalent conventions of the language. Rather,
there is a barrier between them and the existing tradition of prose; their
sense of what is most relevant in their speech-their ideal voices-seems
inappropriate to the more ordinary and essential locutions of writing.
When they try to express themselves fully or eloquently they sometimes
are compelled to write in a manner that, apart from the vocabulary,
seems to have only vestigial similarities to English. This condition of
strife between our speech and our writing is present everywhere in
America; it is a condition of our democracy, and the list of writers
whose talents have been constricted by it includes almost every one of us.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why writers in America have
