Free An Annie Dillard Reader by Annie Dillard Page B

Hardy’s. Plain prose follows such characters intimately, lovingly, even a little ironically, and always with respect. It is a perfected prose of surpassing delicacy, control, and power. It honors the world because the characters honor the world. Listen to these adjectives:
    Floyd Warner kept a calendar on which he jotted what sort of day it was, every day of the year. Windy, overcast, drizzly, rain, clear and cool, clear and warm, and all through October he put simply, Dandy . Practically every day was dandy, and that had been true over the years. (Wright Morris, Fire Sermon )
    This prose is a kind of literary vernacular. It possesses the virtues of beauty, clarity, and strength without embellishment.
    In England, Henry Green also writes very often from the minds of people who are not formally educated and who know the world and love it on its merits. Green’s prose is sometimes stylized to the point of self-consciousness. It is so plain it distracts as much as any fancy writing. Almost any experimental writing is fine writing; Green’s is experimental plain writing. At its quirkiest, it omits articles for the sake of concision, and sounds like Tonto: “Mr. Cragan smoked pipe, already room was blurred by smoke from it.” The warped purity of such sentences in Living achieves a watercolor lyricism: “Just then Mr. Dupret in sleep, died, in sleep.” “What happened of her. What did her come to?”
    Plain prose is almost requisite for handling violent or emotional scenes without eliciting dismay or nausea in the reader. We have long since tired of imitation fine writing, of bad fine writing, of the overwritten straining prose that we find not onlyin unskilled and youthful literature but also in junk fiction—and we tire of it especially in the wringingly emotional and violent scenes of which failed literature and junk are made. So unless he is William Faulkner, a serious writer of this century has little other recourse than to plain writing for violent and emotional scenes. If a writer wants to play safe, he will underwrite drama. Plain prose affords distance; it permits scenes to be effective on their narrative virtues, not on the overwrought insistence of their author’s prose. The central love scene of Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume “A Dance to the Music of Time” ends unforgettably: “I took her in my arms.”
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    There is something about plain writing that smacks of moral goodness. Interestingly, many writers turn to it more and more as they get older. (The exception is Joyce, whose writing gets steadily fancier and worse as he ages.) There is a modesty to it. Paul Horgan uses it in his “Richard” trilogy, a series of novels that take the form of autobiography. Henry Green uses it in his autobiography; Graham Greene uses it in his autobiography. It is a mature prose. It honors the world. It is courteous. Its credo might be that of French entomologist J. Henri Fabre: “Lucidity is the sovereign politeness of the writer. I do my best to achieve it.” Part of its politeness to readers is based on respect; this prose credits readers with feeling and intelligence. It does not explain events in all their ramifications; it does not color a scene emotionally.
    This prose is humble. It calls attention not to itself but to the world. It is intimate with character; it is sympathetic and may be democratic. It submits to the world; it is honest. It praises the world by seeing it. It seems even to believe in the world it honors with so much careful attention. In the nineteenth century, readers liked their prose syntactically baroque and morally elevating. Each bit of world was a chip off the old sublime, and tended distressingly, in the prose that described it, to ascend to heaven before we got to know it.
    Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water.It needs no fence. Nations