The Merely Pretty

And the Beautiful

There’s a big difference between what is pretty, and what has beauty, and this is true of both poetry and prose. Though I like to use poetry as an example because so many people think poetry is prettier somehow than prose. Poetry is often where the language is indeed lovely. (”Oh, for a draught of vintage! that hath been/ cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,/ Tasting of Flora and the country green,/ Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!”)

But how lovely is this: “...Let him eat the last red meal of the condemned to extinction, tearing the guts from an elk.”

That is a line from a beautiful poem by James Dickey, one of his best, called “For The Last Wolverine,” the last line of which reads:

“I take you as you are, and make of you what I will/ Skunk bear, Carcajou/ blood-thirsty non-survivor

Lord, let me die

but not die out.

Anyway, it all works the same way with prose. Remember this: When the details are right and the writing is clear, and it adds up to meaning with feeling, well, it is always beautiful. It doesn’t have to be pretty. How pretty is it as writing in Henry James’s great story, “The Real Thing” when the highly aristocratic couple whose last name is Monarch, having fallen upon hard times, are trying their best to keep up appearances, and are standing as models of their type and class before the narrator, who is a painter, and has found that even as the so-called real thing—upper class people—they are somehow not right for his painting.

And Mr. Monarch pleads: “I say. Could we do for you?” offering himself and his wife, with their proud past, to be the painter’s servants: “’Take us on,’ they wanted to say, ‘We’ll do ANYTHING.’”

And he tells how he did take them on for a time, but finally had to “send them away with a sum of money.” He goes on to say he never saw them again, and describes how a friend of his now claims that the whole experience with Monarchs had “got [him] into false ways.”

And then comes this line, from the narrator: “If it be true, I am content to have paid the price—for the memory.”

Nothing more simply prosaic. But look at it. The beautiful weight and echo of context rings through the whole story, and his memory is of having seen once in his life ‘the real thing.’ Not the Monarchs as aristocratic types, but the love so clearly still existing between them. THAT is the memory. Being in the presence of Love. The real thing itself. There is not a pretty line in the whole story. And yet it is quite beautiful.

Don’t worry about being elegant. Get it right being clear. Let it breathe, and look for clarity. If you can make it true enough, beauty will take care of itself, and Keats knew what he was talking about.