WAUGH AND
ENTERTA I NMENT
357
shown so little capacity for development.
It
is a truism of our culture
that the majority of serious American novelists are "one book" writers;
they either write one large good book and then almost nothing else, or
spend their careers writing the same book over and over again. It is pos–
sible that the disjunction of American speech from the living tradition
of English prose has ill-disposed us for embracing the most fructifying
resources of the language and that this hiatus has alienated us fatally
from our talents. Certainly it might account for the impression that
some of our most interesting writers make. What we sense in the typical
American "giants" who fail, is an enormous talent that is dying unex–
pressed, a latent richness that can find no means of articulating itself.
We regularly produce novelists who seem just on the point of writ–
ing really first-class works, while what we get from them are large,
unwieldy failures, evidences of an inability to harness or express them–
selves with any kind of grace or economy. Naturally, this condition has
everything to do with our culture and its effects on the mind, but it
also has to do with our sense and use of the language. The modern
American style of language, for instance, is rich in picturesqueness and
humor but lacking in the kind of wit and terseness that ordinary good
English prose presupposes. Why our language has developed in this way
is a study in itself.
It
should be noted, however, that we have generally
maintained wit and terseness in our best poetry, perhaps because the
poet's relation to the language is ultimately more stringent, more rc–
sistant, and conservative than that of the writer of prose.
In the meantime we look to England for the kind of excellent, un–
strained delight that the professional entertainer can give us. Only
there, in writers like Waugh, has the irreplaceable intimacy of speech
and prose been preserved, and only there can a writer of talent devote
himself without sloth or shame to the continuance of that intimacy.
Until the conventions of the written language have become more ac–
cessible to our daily speech, America will continue to present us with
writers who, though of the highest talents and intentions, are largely
brilliant and inspired amateurs. It is still, it seems, the direct inheritance
of a great language and a great culture, and the will to sustain and
enlarge that inheritance, that bring forth the true professional.
