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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [112], (1) Lines: 0 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal P PgEnds: [112], (1) 11 Brian Morton The Literary Craftsman For biographical information on Brian Morton see chapter 1, “A Man of the Left,” by Mark Levinson and Brian Morton. Writers sometimes write a little differently after their reputations are made. Some become mandarins in their old age—wise, all too wise. Some let the belt out a few notches and settle into verbosity. A few, at the height of their fame, struggle to reinvent themselves or to refine their craft. These writers win our admiration and our love. Irving found his style very quickly. His earliest work displays the tense lucidity that marked his prose for the rest of his life. His voice on the page was so confident that you might have thought it came easily, but he said that it didn’t: he once said that he put almost everything he wrote through nine or ten drafts. In an essay on Orwell he wrote that the “discipline of the plain style—and that fierce control of self that forms its foundation—comes hard.” In the last few years he subtly remade his writing style. His earlier voice, though lucid before all else, had been bravura, self-consciously dazzling. As he said of the prose of the “New York intellectuals,” it was “the style of brilliance.” Now his work became even more spare, less adorned. He left hints about this change in two pieces he wrote for the New Republic. In an article about the late works of Leo Tolstoy he described him, “deep into old age,” as a writer who had worked his way “free of literary posture and the sins of eloquence.” And in a review of a book by Yitzhak Zuckerman, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, published less than a month before he died, he said that Zuckerman “speaks plainly, without verbal flourish or the wanton rhetoric that has disfigured some writings about the Holocaust. . . . The dryness of his voice as he recalls terrible events comes to seem a sign of moral strength.” The Literary Craftsman 113 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [Last Page] [113], (2) Lines: 39 to ——— 244.162pt ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [113], (2) I don’t know why Irving’s voice grew more austere. It may be that after he had made his reputation, the claims of the self grew less insistent, and he no longer felt the need to dazzle. But I don’t really believe it can be put down to personal reasons alone. I think it had something to do with his lifelong meditation on the nature of our time—the century of Auschwitz and the gulag, a time, as he wrote in A Margin of Hope, that “has been marked by a special terribleness.” I think he belongs to the small fraternity of writers who took the experience of our century into the way they saw the world, into the weather of their prose. Orwell, Silone, Primo Levi . . . a few others. In the end there was winter in his prose, but not because he was an old man. The chaste late voice was something like a voice of witness. I miss his curiosity, his wit, the demands of his restlessness. The sheer pressure of his intensity turned the most casual encounter—a quick lunch at the coffee shop near his house—into something electric, charged. Everyone knows he was a steady worker, but the word steady doesn’t say nearly enough. He devoted himself to his calling with a matchless intensity; he gave of himself as deeply as anyone can. When he’d hang up the phone without saying good-bye—his famous habit—I often found myself smiling. I took pleasure in the thought of him turning quickly back to his desk, his task, his passion. ...

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