Commonplace Book

'...From the first, when it begins to be said that I have a style, am a "stylist," I chafe. Doesn't this mean I have nothing to say comparable to the way I say it - or else that anything I say will all sound the same? I do have in mind an image of sentences I would like to read: long lean branches of them, with buddings here and there or at the end - of fruit, or short stoppages, in sudden calm. And a prose, centrally aural-visual, which would make one hear-see. The "disappearing" style once so vaunted by Maugham and so fondled by the hacks - that seems to me merely a "showing," with no room or vision left for "telling" - and done in an understatement which never dares overdescribe. The best style seems to me so much the fused sense of all its elements that it cannot be uncompounded - how-you-say-what-you-say, so forever married that no man can put it asunder. Its elements may be anything; the expression may be as elaborate or violent as the meaning is. (No one ever raises the point, if it is as mild as the meaning is.)  The word "prose" itself is what should all but disappear in the mind as one reads; just as in poetry, one accepts the marriage of idea and word, but does not too dividingly congratulate. The marriage of meaning and manner is then its own lawful issue, a new object or presence, made accessible. What words make at their best is an open fortress of meaning.'

from Herself by Hortense Calisher (Part I)