“Brevity is the soul of wit” - the wise adage that
Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Polonius in Hamlet. Will himself practised what he preached as there are few
finer masters of the economical sonnet with its blessedly limited 14 lines. As
I tumble towards senility, I appreciate more and more those authors, poets and composers
who take less and less time and space to convey their no doubt exquisite
thoughts or messages.
Take the French (I suppose someone must) who gyrate wildly between
the amazingly prolix and the neatly laconic. I recall trying to read Marcel
Proust’s À la Recherche in 1969 in
the Scott-Moncrieff translation (12 paperback volumes) – one famous single
sentence in Sodom et Gomorrhe would
easily occupy 1 ½ pages of print. Others complain about how long Madame Bovary takes to die in Flaubert’s
classic. Short, sweet and underrated are the beautifully-written novels of
André Gide, Strait is the Gate and The Immoralist. I greatly admire the punchy, arresting style
of Albert Camus’s brief L’Etranger,
which much influenced my callow youth. Its opening words seize you: “Mother
died today. Or maybe yesterday. I can’t be sure.”
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| Albert Camus |
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| Marcel Proust |
The Continentals have their novellas but the term is less used in English. Plenty glittering
gems qualify: Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde, Wilde’s The Picture of
Dorian Gray or Scott Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby. There is a tiresome tradition in the novel in English to
spread and sprawl like bind-weed. It was an early fault epitomised by Sterne’s
eccentric Tristram Shandy and much in
evidence in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers.
Dickens redeemed himself later in his great novels and the merits of brevity
were well illustrated in his cherished A
Christmas Carol. American novelists are perhaps the worst offenders. They
adore the blockbuster, the 800-page effusion more useful as a door-stopper than
a work of literature. They revel in huge casts of characters, in narrative
diversions and endless sub-plots. Thus classically there is Wolfe’s meandering Look Homeward, Angel, while recently
Donna Tartt’s The Gold Finch (788pp)
has wowed her voracious American public.
More is seldom better and I favour the pithy, short works of
the younger Evelyn Waugh like Scoop, the
original and engrossing The Bridge at San
Luiz Rey by Thornton Wilder,
Conrad’s gripping The Heart of Darkness or a brilliant fable like Animal Farm by George Orwell.
Nowhere is my intellectual stamina more tested, and the
attraction of sleep more pervasive, than in the opera house. Why are operas so
long? Was Wagner some kind of sadist that he thought it reasonable to inflict
upon innocent Germans (there must be some) up to 5 ½ hours of Parsifal? I long to shout out “Enough,
please stop!” but I know my words would be drowned out by the shrieking of the
overfed diva in her helmet on stage. By comparison Mozart is a dawdle, but even
Wolfgang Amadeus can go on too long and his only opera of perfect length (not
to mention perfect harmony too) is his ravishing Die Entführung.
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| Stylist Evelyn Waugh |
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| Haiku Herman van Rompuy |
In fact the palm for economy in literary emanations must be
granted to the Japanese, who invented the haiku,
a delicate poetic form with 3 themes nowadays compressed into 4 lines. Perfect!
It can only take a few seconds to read a haiku
– the shades of Homer and Milton please note. To my great surprise I read that the former President of the
European Commission, Belgian Herman van Rompuy, is an expert composer of haiku and was nicknamed “Haiku Herman” –
our Nigel Farage called the luckless euro-bureaucrat much worse. I now fondly
dream of euro-regulations being reduced to 4 lines of pellucid poetic commands!
SMD
26.04.16
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2016
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