the reader to follow a thought. “Due to that blameless neglect of Hope’s to call the halt she (the fair, the chaste, the inexpressive she!) had no need to call.” By phrasing the sentence differently, the author could have left the reader grammatical time to remember the character of Hope, then said what Hope failed to do—which would have been the logical order. Instead, he interrupts the thought at the most awkward point, between the subject and the verb, she and had. Why? Precisely to throw the reader off for a moment; i.e., not to allow his mind to proceed to a complete thought.
He does the same in the second half of the sentence: “there had been awkward occasions when the animal (disregarded by the hour and teased too far) reacted of a sudden.” For the reader to grasp it, a thought has to progress in a certain time sequence; but here the author again interrupts in the middle of the thought, throwing the reader into an aside and making him scramble mentally to catch the original intention. Cozzens deliberately puts the reader’s mind into an unfocused, nonrational state of wandering all over the map.
One has to watch carefully the between-the-lines implications to know what Cozzens is actually talking about in this sentence. In this respect, he is imitating the special kind of mid-Victorian prissiness which consists of being very bashfully indirect in talking about sex—and the more indirect, the dirtier the implications of what one dares not say openly.
What he is doing is illustrating the theory of love expressed in the first part of the quotation. That is, even though the young man had decided that love has nothing to do with sex, and even though the young couple tried to keep their relationship chaste, things would happen against the young man’s will; and Cozzens does not mean normal intercourse. The style of this—the mere fact that he is not talking about an actual affair, but about something totally unnecessary to mention—makes this passage typical of Cozzens. Writing in the spiritual style of four-letter words, he goes out of his way to make something ugly which is not necessarily ugly at all.
The best-drawn character in anyone’s writing is the author himself. None of the above passages deals with philosophy directly, yet the author’s philosophy is present—in what he chooses to say and in how he says it. In this sense, a fiction writer cannot hide himself. He stands naked spiritually.
You cannot create a style artificially, composing each sentence word by word and then weighing each word: “How does this fit with my official dogma?” A writer’s style comes from his accepted philosophy—accepted in his subconscious.
Just as, in your general behavior as a human being, your premises “will out”—they will come out in many subtle ways, and any conflict you might have will show, particularly in emergencies—so in your writing your premises will out. If your conscious philosophy has sunk into your subconscious and become automatic, that will show in your style. If your conscious philosophy is not fully assimilated—if you have premises contradictory to it in your subconscious—that will show. If you have good premises, that will show. If you have god-awful premises, then, in the passage from Cozzens, you have just seen an example of the result.
If you are not satisfied with what comes out of your subconscious, you can correct it by conscious thinking. But do not censor yourself in the process of writing. That cannot be done successfully. To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be.
Just as man is a being of self-made soul, so a writer is a being of self-made style. Both are made by the same process—by a man’s being fully convinced of certain premises to the point where they become subconscious and automatic.
9
Style II: Descriptions of Nature and of New York
From Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
She sat at the window of the train, her head thrown back, not moving, wishing she would never have to move again.
The telegraph poles went racing past the window, but the train seemed lost in a void, between a brown stretch of prairie and a solid spread of rusty, graying clouds. The twilight was draining the sky without the wound of a sunset; it looked more like the fading of an anemic body in the process of exhausting its last drops of blood and light. The train was going west, as if it,