I’m back scribbling about writing again because penmanship is like cocaine—once you start it’s difficult to stop. Disaffection is my customary response to contemporary writers and literature—long-winded me-me-me balderdash—and I won’t go near hysterical American female screeches who pass for writing from know-nothings at The New York Times.
A Clockwork Orange
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So, everyone I mention in this column is, alas, dead, but their writing continues to enthrall and fascinate, as well it should. I never read Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange but have always admired him, and more so after I got hold of his Mozart and the Wolf Gang. Written partly in prose, partly in verse, it is a kaleidoscope of snatched conversations between Wolfgang and other geniuses up in heaven. Not my cup of tea, but Burgess is as perceptive as they come, and his use of language is unequaled.
Try this as an opening by Burgess on music and musicians: “Waking crapulous and apothaneintheloish, as I do most mornings these days, I find a little loud British gramophone music over the bloody mary helps me adjust to the daily damnation of writing.” Would you call this an arresting first sentence? Apo-what? Being Greek, I wasn’t fooled by old Anthony. The tongue twister means “I want to die.” Ancient Greek was laconic, and one word did the trick.
Opening sentences are famous for their brevity—“Call me Ishmael”—although my favorite is by Barnaby Conrad, a great gent and friend, amateur bullfighter, boxer, and wonderful writer: “On September 22, 1947, in Linares, Spain, a multimillionaire and a bull killed each other, and plunged a nation into mourning.” I may have the date of the month wrong, but the rest is kosher. That’s what I call an opening. It’s The Death of Manolete, the greatest bullfighter ever.
Mozart and the Wolf Gang
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that writing followed the Greeks, whose teachings and philosophies were mostly oral. Today no one writes, they type or text, and they certainly don’t write love letters. But just try to imagine what the world would have been like if pencils had never existed, or pens, or paper, no typewriters nor printing presses. What kind of a world would we be living in now without those? My only and great regret is we didn’t stay that way, without computers or word processors, no email or internet, and no social media. In one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates recounts a story in which an Egyptian god has invented writing and is admonished for it: “This discovery will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls because they will not use their memories.” If only old Plato could see us now, with people unable to string two words together except when quoting from a hamburger commercial. Plato, however, was aware of writing’s social value. Always in one of his dialogues, he has the great Athenian lawmaker Solon made to feel shame by the Egyptians because they know through writings more about the Greeks than the Athenian.
Then there is the theory that adopting literacy in ancient societies fundamentally reconfigured the human brain. If it did, it certainly is undoing it now with all the garbage online. Literacy for the ancient world is like the internet for us, say left-wing pundits, who also inform us that preliterate societies were matriarchal and worshipped the Goddess and feminine values. The written word propelled culture toward linear, left-brained thought and brought about the ascendancy of patriarchal rule and misogyny.
