Talks with Sri Aurobindo

SRI AUROBINDO ON WRITING IN ENGLISH AND ON STYLE IN WRITING

As in these Talks there are remarks by Sri Aurobindo on Indians writing in English and on literature in general, it will be both interesting and instructive to quote a few passages from his letters to poet-discples apropos of these themes.

Theme 1.

Indians have naturally in writing English a tendency to be too coloured, sometimes flowery, sometimes rhetorical.... One ought to have in writing English a style which is at its base capable of going to the point, saying with a simple and energetic straight-forwardness what one means to say, so that one can add grace of language without disturbing this basis. Arnold is a very good model for this purpose.

(To Dilip Kumar Roy)
16 May 1932

Theme 2.

Avoid over-writing; let all your sentences be the vehicle of something worth saying and say it with a vivid precision neither defective nor excessive. Don't let either thought or speech trail or drag or circumvolute. Don't let the language be more abundant than the sense. Don't indulge in mere clever ingenuities without a living truth behind them.

(To Amal Kiran)
14 May 1935

Theme 3.

If you want to write English poetry which can stand, I would suggest three rules for you:

(1) Avoid rhetorical turns and artifices and the rhetorical tone generally. An English poet can use these things at will because he has the intrinsic sense of his language and can keep the right proportion and measure. An Indian using them kills his poetry and produces a scholastic exercise.

(2) Write modem English. Avoid frequent inversions or turns of language that belong to the past poetic styles. Modern English poetry uses a straightforward order and a natural style, not different in vocabulary, syntax, etc., from that of prose. An inversion can be used sometimes, but it must be done deliberately and for a distinct and particular effect.

(3) For poetic effect rely wholly on the power of your substance, the magic of rhythm and the sincerity of your expression —if you can add subtlety so much the better, but not at the cost of sincerity and straightforwardness. Do not construct your poetry with the brain mind, the mere intellect -that is not the source of true inspiration: write from the inner heart of emotion and vision.

(To Amal Kiran)

Theme 4.

Each poet should write in the way suited to his own imagination and substance; it is a habit of the human mind fond of erecting rules and rigidities to put one way forward as a general law for all.... In any case it was far from my intention to impose any strict rule of bare simplicity and directness as a general law of poetic style. I was speaking of "Twentieth-century English poetry" and of what was necessary for Amal, an Indian writing in the English tongue. English poetry in former times used inversions freely and had a law of its own —at that time natural and right, but the same thing nowadays sounds artificial and false. English has now acquired a richness and flexibility and power of many-sided suggestion which makes it unnecessary for poetry to depart from the ordinary style and form of the language. But there are other languages in which this is not yet true. Bengali is in its youth, in full process of growth and has many things not yet done, many powers and voices it has still to acquire. It is necessary that its poets should keep a full and entire freedom to turn in whatever way the genius leads, to find new forms and movements.

(To Dilip Kumar Roy)

Theme 5.

Too violent condensations of language or too compressed thoughts always create a sense either of obscurity or, if not that, then of effort and artifice, even if a powerful and inspired artifice. Yet very great poets and writers have used them, so great a poet as Aeschylus or so great a prose stylist as Tacitus. Then there are the famous "knots" in the Mahabharata. I think one can say that these condensations are justified when they say something with more power and depth and full, if sometimes recondite, significance than an easier speech would give, but to make it a constant element of the language (without a constant justification of that kind) would turn it into a mannerism or artifice.

(To Arjava)

Theme 6.

Most modern (contemporary) English poetry, at least what I have seen of it, is all very carefully written and versified, recherché in thought and expression; it lacks only two things —the inspired phrase and inevitable word and the rhythm that keeps a poem for ever alive.... There are something like a hundred "great" poets (if you can believe their admirers) writing like that in England just now. It will be easy for you to be the hundred and first, if you like, but I would not advise you to proceed farther on that kind of modern line. It is not the irregular verse or rhymes that matter, one can make perfection out of irregularity —it is that they write from the cultured mind, not from the elemental soul-power within. Not a principle to accept or a method to imitate!

(To Amal Kiran)
June 1931

Theme 7.

I stand rather aghast at your summons to stand and deliver the names of the ten or twelve best prose styles in the world's literature.... There are great writers in prose and great prose-writers and the two are by no means the same thing. Dickens and Balzac are great novelists, but their style or their frequent absence of style had better not be described; Scott attempts a style, but it is neither blameless nor is it his distinguishing merit. Other novelists have an adequate style and a good one but their prose is not quoted as a model and they are remembered not for that but as creators.... What was in my mind was those achievements in which language reached its acme of perfection in one manner or another so that whatever the writer touched became a thing of beauty —no matter what its substance —or a perfect form and memorable. Bankim seemed to me to have achieved that in his own way as Plato in his or Cicero or Tacitus in theirs or in French Literature Voltaire, Flaubert or Anatole France. I could name many more, especially in French which is the greatest store-house of fine prose among the world's languages—there is no other to match it.... All prose of other languages seems beside its perfection, lucidity, measure almost clumsy... The great prose-writers in English seem to seize you by the personality they express in their style rather than by its perfection as an instrument....

(To Dilip Kumar Roy)

Theme 8.

I am in general agreement with your answer to M's strictures on certain points in your style and your use of English language. His objections have usually some ground, but are not unquestionably valid; they would be so if the English language were a fixed and unprogressive and invariable medium demanding a scrupulous correctness and purity and chaste exactness like the French; but this language is constantly changing and escaping from boundaries and previously fixed rules and its character and style, you might almost say, is whatever the writer likes to make it. Stephen Phillips once said of it in a libertine image that the English language is like a woman who will not love you unless you take liberties with her....

As for "aspire for", it may be less correct than "aspire to" or "aspire after", but it is psychologically called for; it seems to me to be much more appropriate than "aspire at" -which I would never think of using.... "To contact" is a phrase that has established itself and it is futile to try to keep America at arm's length any longer; "global" also has established itself and it is too useful and indeed indispensable to reject; there is no other word that can express exactly the same shade of meaning. I heard it first from Arjava who described the language of Arya as expressing a global thinking and I at once caught it up as the right and only word for certain things, for instance, the thinking in masses which is a frequent characteristic of the Overmind. As for the use of current French and Latin phrases, it may be condemned as objectionable on the same ground as the use of clichés and stock phrases in literary style, but they often hit the target more forcibly than any English equivalent and have a more lively effect on the mind of the reader. That may not justify a too frequent use of them, but in moderation it is at least a good excuse for it. I think the expression "bears around it a halo" has been or can be used and it is at least not worn out like the ordinary "wears a halo." One would more usually apply the expression "devoid of method" to an action or procedure than to a person, but the latter turn seems to me admissible. I do not think I need say anything in particular about other objections, they are questions of style and on that there can be different opinions; but you are right in altering the obviously mixed metaphor "in full cry", though I do not think any of your four substitutes have anything of its liveliness and force. Colloquial expressions have, if rightly used, the advantage of giving point, flavour, alertness and I think in your use of them they do that; they can also lower and damage the style, but that damage is mostly when there is a set character of uniform dignity or elevation. The chief character of your style is rather a constant life and vividness and supple and ample abounding energy of thought and language which can soar or run or sweep along at will but does not simply walk or creep or saunter and in such a style forcible colloquialisms can do good service.

(To Amal Kiran)
2 April 1947