`JIGGERY-POKERY' AND STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT THE ART OF LANGUAGE

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, January 18, 1998

Page: L4

Section: Books

I find the whole business wonderful, not only because of my interest in crackpots, but also because the project is so wrongheaded in an ever-recurring way: That is, it is based in the belief that the barrier to truth is our inherited language. To be sure, it's hard not to surrender occasionally to this idea, given that language usually flows along such deep runnels of banality. But then one takes up the work of George Orwell or Flannery O'Connor, as I have just done, and one is reminded of the power of simple, pure English. The problem, it's clear, is not language but will.

Orwell was as fastidious as a surgeon in his use of language; it drove him nuts to see sloppy, euphemistic, or evasive writing. Moreover, he was greatly put out by the way language itself so often perverts what one is trying to say. Of course, we know that this is the unfortunate case; still, it has shocked me to my boots to discover that Orwell thought, at least at one point, that the problem might be solved by radical language reform.

I was reading haphazardly through the four-volume ``Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell,'' edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, and came across an essay (probably written in 1940) called ``New Words.'' In this, the great man laments that we are unable to communicate accurately to anyone else what we have in our heads. He has, in fact, come smack up against the problem of ``other minds,'' without seeming to recognize that old bugbear. Instead he announces: ``The solution I suggest is to invent new words as deliberately as we would invent new parts for a motor-car engine. Suppose that a vocabulary existed which would accurately express the life of the mind, or a great part of it. Suppose that there need be no stultifying feeling that life is inexpressible, no jiggery-pokery with artistic tricks; expressing one's meaning simply [being] a matter of taking the right words and putting them in place, like working out an equation in algebra. I think the advantages of this would be obvious.''

A 17th-century man of science could not have expressed it better. Orwell observed that ``The art of writing is in fact largely the perversion of words, and . . . the less obvious this perversion is, the more thoroughly it has been done.'' This truth dismayed him; but it is one that Flannery O'Connor embraced as a blessing. Only think of her titles: ``A Good Man Is Hard to Find,'' ``Good Country People,'' ``A Stroke of Good Fortune''; the words are altogether perverted -- by irony, impregnable and devastating. In her piece ``The Nature and Aim of Fiction,'' contained in her just-back-in-print ``Mystery and Manners'' (Noonday, $12), O'Connor reports with approval that Henry James used to return manuscripts he did not like with the comment, ``You have chosen a good subject and are treating it in a straightforward manner.'' This, the greatest criticism he knew, invariably pleased the recipient.

For all the ``jiggery-pokery,'' as you might say, of her stories, O'Connor is the clearest, most honest expositor of the art of fiction. ``Mystery and Manners,'' then, is a book both for those who are puzzled by her bizarre, uncomfortable stories and for those who desire plain speaking on the nature of fiction in general. It is essential, in O'Connor's view, that the writer put his own ego aside and address what is actually there. For this reason, she thought painting was an excellent way for writers to sharpen their ability to see what really exists and liberate themselves from posturings and received impressions.

There is a great similarity between O'Connor's views in this matter and those held by that odd creature called Sister Wendy who lectures on painting on television. I have trouble organizing myself to watch television, so I was pleased to discover ``Sister Wendy in Conversation with Bill Moyers'' (WGBH, $11.95; call 800-255-9424). This little book, although a transcript and thus afflicted with a little more chaos and a little more Bill Moyers than is absolutely desirable, is as lucid and arresting a treatment of the nature of art as you will find in far bigger packages. The salient point that Sister Wendy makes, in more than one way but always with startling clarity, is that our eyes are not innocent and that experiencing art involves an immense act of will. Art, as she observes, ``is a great tester of the fake, because it must be the real you that responds. And the more the real you dares to respond, the more the real you is there. You're exercising the muscles of your own individuality, as opposed to your ego.''

That is a most valuable distinction, and one that we catch sight of in a somewhat different light in Vivian Gornick's remarkable book of essays ``The End of the Novel of Love'' (Beacon, $20). In ``Clover Adams,'' Gornick describes ``one of the most companionate marriages on record,'' that between Henry and Clover Adams, which ended after 13 years with her suicide. In this essay, as throughout this volume, Gornick is evenhanded in her treatment of men and women; in this case, she sees the agony of Henry Adams's self-loathing even as he projects it upon his wife.

But it is Clover's plight of having lost her way of responding to the world with which Gornick is chiefly concerned. After her father died and her weekly letters to him perforce ceased, Clover became prey to ``inner drift.'' The discipline of writing those letters, of framing concrete and honest descriptions, had been her means of experiencing the world as an individual. And as Gornick recounts it, ``Energy that should have fed experience now feeds the unlived life. The unlived life is not a quiescent beast. The unlived life is a little animal in a great rage, barely permitting of survival.'' To an extent this essay is about the position of women, but it is also about the vital force that lies in honest description.