Stanley Plumly, a poet and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland who also writes about literary romanticism, ventured out of his subject matter to talk about 19th- and 20th-century fiction writers and “The Art of the Sentence.”
“Words, as means and matter, were my first take on the art of writing—the obvious fact that writing is first and last words, and that, as Coleridge says, good writing is the best words in their best order,” Plumly writes.
“I’m talking about the art of the sentence, especially the modern sentence as practiced by Henry James, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, James Agee, and Saul Bellow, in which writing becomes the language of the experience. I’m not talking about a writer such as John Updike, who, too often—notably in his fiction—writes exclusively in the experience of the language.”
The brief article appeared under the banner “Writing Lessons” and was posted November 10, 2014 on The American Scholar website.
Prof. Plumly’s remark is ridiculous and short-sighted.
Here’s what I posted in response, if anyone’s interested:
One would be hard pressed to find writers alive or dead who fit Auden’s idea that “the mark of a true writer is liking to hang around words” notion better than John Updike. And, few writers are more generally acknowledged for strong writing than Updike. So, perhaps, Prof. Plumly could explain what the essentially incomprehensible potshot he takes at Updike — “writes exclusively in the experience of the language” — actually means. Some 50+ years of literary criticism exists that examines Updike’s place in literary history and his writing skills, which may be a good place for Prof. Plumly to turn in considering Updike’s standing and his lifetime of work with “the language of the experience.”