The New Oxford Book of English Prose edited by John Gross OUP 1,012pp, £25 in UK.
There is so much prose around, not only in our speech but also, transformed into literature, in books, that it is hard for readers to find their bearings. This is where literary historians and critics and anthologists can be useful. John Gross, an experienced editor, in this new anthology presents extracts from about five hundred writers of English, beginning with Malory's Morte Darthur (1485) and ending with Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995). In between is a bewildering variety of styles and subject-matter and one would be hard put to discern a line of development.
The language owes more to the individual than the individual does to the language. A change of direction can be detected with the advent of the great novelists of the 18th and 19th centuries; up till then there is a sense that most writers wished to convey wisdom, to instruct; after that period, information, linked to entertainment, begins to take over; the sermon, it might be said, gives way to the news report.
However, the editor does not recommend a chronological approach; and most pleasure will be gained by dipping in the volume as fancy dictates. I did not expect to find Stanley's account of how he met Livingstone so well written; Queen Elizabeth I's Speech to the Troops at Tilbury (1588), in its mixture of eloquence and plain speaking, could not be matched by any ghost-writer of any present day potentate; Browne's Urn-Burial (1658) is as opaquely purple as ever but seems somewhat easier to understand when its passages are short; Mailer's The Naked and the Dead is brought into focus with a vivid account of soldiers in the jungle; the Kenyan-born Indian Desani writes in a manner that has to be seen to be believed.
The inclusion of writers from many countries where English struck root shows how the language can be adapted to reflect divers origins, but the emphasis is naturally on Great Britain - Scotland and Wales are scantily represented. Ireland, in the editor's words "always a special case", is drawn on for contributions from Beckett, Behan, Carleton, Joyce, Kiely, Brian Moore, Flann O'Brien, Frank O'Connor, O Faolain, O'Flaherty, Somerville and Ross, James Stephens and W.B. Yeats. Those are the writers listed as Irish in the Index; others such as Berkeley, Swift, Alling ham, George Moore, Bowen and G.B. Shaw have been subsumed into the British literary empire; not so divided are the Americans, who have been allotted a hundred places, almost twice as much as all the non-British together.
If the anthology had been confined to the 20th century, America would have bulked even larger; as it is, the late 19th century receives most attention and Hawthorne and Twain have six pages each, which makes them the equal of Thackeray or Conrad. Melville has to be content with four pages but Henry James (American, subsequently resident in Britain) has nine pages, which puts him ahead of Joyce or George Eliot. Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, to name some recent names, haven't been included; the noting of exclusions is an irresistible temptation. Nearer home, where are such eccentrics as George Borrow, C.M. Doughty, T.F. Powys or our own Amanda M. Ros, whose style it would be hard to equal? - "The hot hand of bewilderment again pasted its crimson patch suddenly on both her cheeks .. ."
That the ridiculous as well as the sublime has its place the editor must be aware, for he includes a burlesque School Timetable by Oscar Wilde and this brief entry from a diary by Gerard Manley Hopkins: "Tuncks is a good name. Gerard Manley Tuncks. Poor Tuncks."
Such light-hearted moments don't come often, for most of the prose here is distinguished by gravity of tone and a high style, as if conscious of ancient lineage. Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861-2) gives a glimpse of ordinary speech and the editor has used letters and diaries where the language is more unbuttoned. He could have included non-literary sources: scientific, technical and legal writings; newspaper cuttings, etc., but chose not to do so as he feared the selection would become "too arbitrary, too personal, too much of a miscellany".
The volume is stately in size, weight (three and a half pounds), appearance and content. The editor has a fine nose for what he calls excerptability and whether it be part of a sermon by Donne, or an incident from Pepys' Diary, a conversation from a novel by Compton-Burnett or Matthew Parris mythologising The Fall of Mrs Thatcher, the extracts give a brief illusion of standing on their own. Fiction, inevitably, suffers most but not as much as English Prose would suffer if fiction were to be removed.