If I started writing with any literary theory at all, it was that content is more important than style. This was borne out, I felt, by just about everything I read and enjoyed. In order to discuss this theory, I will have to examine four different genres of literature: essays, poetry, drama, and fiction.
First of all-the essays. It's never easy to list your favorite authors-although people are expected to do so all the time. But in terms of essays, I know exactly who they would be: George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, and William Hazlitt. But these writers were important to me not because of the beauty of their prose, but because of the things they had to say. It didn't occur to me that their style was partly what allowed them to say what they did in a convincing way. I simply looked at the occasional prepositions dangling at the ends of their sentences and decided that style didn't matter half as much as everyone thought. And in drama, it struck me that a work like A Doll's House wouldn't be half as good if it weren't for the final scene.
It didn't seem to me that Ibsen was a master of dialogue or dramatic style-he was simply able to convey a message, and that message made his work interesting. But surely poetry is reliant upon style. A poet can't get away on content alone. But then again, it struck me that the best English poets were the Romantics-all of whom are interesting because they were willing to deal with poverty, rural life, local legends, and revolutionary creeds. This content alone was, I felt, what set them apart from the norm of previous English poetry: the Robert Herrick school which dealt with very self-centered religious guilt and repressed sexuality. Herrick, after all, addressed many of his poems to an imaginary woman with whom he was supposedly having an affair.
Thank God the “content” of the Romantics was so different! And in the novels I read, it was never the beauty of the language that I remembered years later, but passages or snatches of dialogue which spoke to my understanding of the world. In all cases, I felt that it was what was said, not how it was said, that was important.
Never did it occur to me that style was what made interesting content believable. Maybe I had to read a work without style before I could understand its importance. Style is probably most desirable in an essay, so it was in that genre that I made this discovery. This occurred when I was reading Percy Bysshe Shelley's undergraduate attempt at a philosophic treatise-the notorious The Necessity of Atheism, which got him expelled from college.
I was a fan of Shelley's poetry and an even greater fan of atheism, so I opened the tract with high hopes. Here we have promising content. Not only was Shelley one of the first proponents of atheism in England (Godwin, I suppose, came first) he was also facing expulsion for the publication of his essay. And yet, because of its style, it's almost impossible to get through it. Shelley's unsmiling bombast, which works so well in his poetry, makes his essay lie on the page like a dead rodent. Even if I didn't discover the necessity of atheism from the pamphlet, I did come to believe in the necessity of style.
Now, what is the root of this bad writing? Well, the problem begins in school. Teachers tend to believe that they are instructing kids in good writing. But in reality, schools ought to teach young people how to read and write at the most basic level and then call it quits. It's all downhill from there. What an eye-opening experience it was for me to read genuine essays. The first time I opened Orwell or Hazlitt, I was shocked by how real the writing felt, by how much of the writer's personality had seeped into the words. Schools teach young people to write as though they were in a fourth-grade pageant about the Boston Tea Party. Any trace of an individual flavor in school-writing, any hint of the writer's personality, is stamped out immediately.
Kids are forced to play dress-up when they write for school. Therefore, if young people want to escape their upbringing, they must spend years as devoted readers, unlearning everything they learned before. Because schools stamp out individual style, kids also become afraid of expressing original thoughts or opinions. They learn not to trust themselves-to fill their work with bland statements of the obvious. They learn that in order to write, they must not write as themselves, but as starchy old men and women. In effect, they are alienated from their own words, which seem to be the words of someone else. Shelley was in school when he wrote his essay. That's problem one.
