The harsh style

For this Commonplace Blog’s precedent-setting two hundred and fiftieth post, I want to say a few words in defense of the harsh style.

It is the style most commonly associated with the philosopher and premier New York intellectual Sidney Hook, who has been described as a “take-no-prisoners debater whose style was deliberately confrontational“ and “deliberately provocative,” and whose “insistence that every battle be fought and every wrong righted made him a fighter.”[1] Because of this “engagé style,” Hook was “always willing to reenter the fray, to revive debates with countless political foes, and to have the final word.”[2] Although not as graceful as Orwell’s, his prose style was similar, exhibiting a “refusal to obscure his position with sodden words, turbid syntax, coy simulation of balance, or self-protective ambiguity.” His motto could have been “Have logic, will argue.”[3]

As the invocation of Orwell should suggest, the harsh style is first cousin to the plain style. They share a genetic predisposition, inherited from their ancestors the anti-Ciceronians and anti-Petrarchans, for clarity and exact statement (which are, of course, the same thing). The harsh style demands clarification, and knows there is a critical difference between clearing the air and freshening it. Where the plain stylist is content to speak definitively and to the point, the harsh stylist goes further, excoriating amiable blandness and sumptuous qualification. He is the sworn enemy of anything that menaces clarity and exact statement, whether it be accredited confusion, folk mythology, self-satisfied blunder, or political ideology.

Some other harsh stylists include:

• C. S. Lewis, who realized that polemicizing on behalf of Christianity would require that language step down from the pulpit and get into the streets.

• Gilbert Ryle, who did not merely attack philosophical error, but—to use his own word—abused it.

• Stanley Fish, whose entire career has been devoted to redefining literary criticism as a mode of argument rather than deferential appreciation or the rehearsal of pass-along certainties.

• Anyone who ever wrote for the old Partisan Review or Commentary, including—to speak only of previous generations—Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, William Barrett, Diana Trilling, Harold Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenfeld, Robert Warshow, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Midge Decter, and Norman Podhoretz.

It is no accident that so many harsh stylists are Jews. Judaism is a religion without catechism or dogma, and as a consequence, the Jewish tradition places great value upon loud-voiced and teeth-baring debate—as long as it is a makhlokhet leshem shamayim (“a dispute for the sake of heaven”). As long as a dispute is for the sake of heaven, there are no restrictions on “tone,” no code of manners, because how is it possible to be too aggressive and discourteous for the sake of heaven?

What, though, according to the rabbis, is an example of a dispute for the sake of heaven? “The debates of Hillel and Shammai” (Avot 5.17). In the Talmud, Hillel and Shammai are bywords for lifelong, bitter antagonists. The law nearly always follows Hillel, but the views of Shammai are fully aired. For though the law may be indispensable, without any provision for dissent it is intolerable.

Many readers find the harsh style intolerable. It seems cruel and heartless to them, or rude and uncivil, and there is no question that a style which aims at rigor and austerity, which grants no sufferance to fools, can stray into abrasiveness and truculence.

The thin line can be firmly drawn by another excursion into religious vocabulary. Orthodox Jews who are uncompromising in their observance of Jewish law are sometimes described as mahmir (“strict, stringent”), an epithet that derives from the Talmudic principle that every debate entails a mahmir and a meykel, a strict and a lenient position. Now, among Muslims the equivalent to mahmir is hamas, but in Hebrew hamas means “lawlessness.” The line that divides conscientiousness from terrorism is clear. The harsh stylist knows where it lies and takes infinite pains not to cross it, even though his critics, out of ignorance, blur the distinction.

Nevertheless, the first question to be asked of any style, as J. V. Cunningham says, is what is its vice? How does it go bad? And here the critics of the harsh style are of small assistance. Cunningham, however, who could himself adopt a harsh, combative style, is suggestive:

Hang up your weaponed wit
Who were destroyed by it.
If silence fails, then grace
Your speech with commonplace,
And studiously amaze
Your audience with his phrase.
He will commend your wit
When you abandon it.

The vice of the harsh style is not that it will lead straight to its abandonment, but rather that its very harshness will prevent it from being recognized for what it is—its weaponry will distract from its wit—and so it will not be answered in kind. It will provoke a merely social reaction, expecting clichés and mutually agreed upon empty phrases in the place of battle for the sake of what matters.
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[1] Judy Katulas, Review of Young Sidney Hook by Christopher Phelps, Journal of American History 85 (1999): 1623–24.

[2] Alexander Bloom, Review of Out of Step by Sidney Hook, Journal of American History 75 (1988): 276–77.

[3] D. B. Jones, Review of Convictions by Sidney Hook, Modern Language Studies 21 (1991): 116–19.