Cyril Connelly Quotes

“One of Connolly’s lasting contribution to the debate is a one-word designation for prose that does not strive for the classical virtues of simplicity and clarity. He called it Mandarin. .... Connolly describes the Mandarin style’s reign in the nineteenth century, when its “last great exponents” were Pater and Henry James, and he has a plausible explanation for why James’s late novels, with their tortuous sentences and endless strings of metaphors, went virtually unread. James’s early works reached a small leisured collection of people for whom reading a book—usually aloud—was one of the few diversions of our northern winters. The longer a book could be spun out the better, and it was the duty of the author to spin it. But books got cheaper, and reading them ceased to be a luxury, the reading public multiplied and demanded less exacting entertainment, the struggle between literature and journalism began. Literature is the art of writing something that can be read twice; journalism what will be read once, and they demand different techniques. There can be no delayed impact in journalism, no subtlety, no embellishment, no assumption of a luxury reader, and since the pace of journalism is faster than that of literature, literature found itself in a predicament. It could react against journalism and become an esoteric art depending on the sympathy of a few, or learn from journalism, and compete with it.”
― Ben Yagoda