How can a kindly person praise a friend's fairly good work without leaping overboard into the prepublication pool of prevarication?
Saul Bellow, Nobel laureate and surely one of the 20th century's greatest writers, who died last month at 89, showed me the way. A decade ago, a cloak-and-dagger novel of mine was roundly panned in the daily Times. (I did not wince nor cry aloud; in fact, when my espionage tradecraft was critiqued in another review by the incarcerated Soviet spy, Aldrich Ames, sales received a boost.)
Bellow, master of the art of fiction, sent me a note calling the review "offensive" and cheered me up with: "I thought your book was ingenious, diverting and even instructive. Nietzsche wrote somewhere that when you show people something true they sometimes behave as if it were old hat -- vieux jeu -- and accuse you of peddling platitudes."
That was a morale picker-upper, all right, not least because the adjectives he chose with his usual care to describe my book were neither excessive nor condescending. Ingenious dealt only with its complicated plot; diverting evoked a spirit of amusement about a work not to be taken seriously; and instructive described the informational use of spooky tradecraft. Each adjective showed restraint in friendly comment, and in a private note not to be exploited. But taken together -- and with that Nietzsche allusion as well as a French vernacular version of "old hat" casually tossed in -- it was the most generous "acclaim" a journeyman novelist could hope for.
Speaking of Bellow, some years back I performed an exegesis in this space on a beautiful extended metaphor the novelist used in one of his rare Op-Ed essays. Snowbound in Boston, he wrote: "Let the pure snows cool these overheated minds and dilute the toxins which have infected our judgments."
In case anyone complained about his use of "the toxins which" instead of that introducing the restrictive clause "that have infected our judgments," I noted that "you get Nobel prizes for literature, not grammar." Bellow promptly responded: "I'm only fair at relative pronouns. I do know the restrictive from the nonrestrictive. `Which' sounded better than `that,' and I do go by sounds as well as by grammar."
That I took as a lesson for the overheated minds in the endless struggle of Language Snobs against Language Slobs. Good writers are free to break the rules of grammar, but their freedom gains meaning when they know the rules and overrule them only for an artistic or polemical reason.
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