Pen of Iron
By Robert Alter
Princeton, 208 pages
I cannot but feel that the prose writers of the baroque period, the authors of the King James Bible,” wrote W. Somerset Maugham in 1938, “were poets who lost their way.” Maugham thought the King James style, which spread when the King James Bible first appeared in 1611, was too “massive and mystical” for prose. It was beautiful, but only as an “alien” masterpiece that had invaded the English sensibility. Lodged in daily life, the King James Bible remained “foreign to our genius,” always luring English writers away from the daintier precision he preferred. “Englishmen,” Maugham grumbled, “twisted their tongues to speak like Hebrew prophets.”
He may have been a bit dismissive, but even so, Maugham struck on an essential quality of the King James style—that it had become at once archaic and familiar. Its verses were second nature to the English-speaking world, but it had never (and has never) lost its particular magisterial tone. It was in the household but not of it.
The English settled Jamestown, Virginia, around the same time that the King James Bible appeared, and the copies they brought with them formed nothing short of America’s cultural bedrock. Robert Alter’s excellent Pen of Iron shows how the King James Bible seeded American literary English almost as deeply as it has American history, not only as a common source of images and themes, but also as a stylistic touchstone of grandeur—a way of tuning language to an epic key. In this study of American novelists (primarily Melville, Faulkner, Bellow, and Cormac McCarthy) and how they use and grapple with the King James style, Alter offers a road map of biblical language and allusions in the novels he examines, as well as an understanding of how that language “articulates a set of values…and a way of imagining man, God, and history.”
The story of the King James Version begins with William Tyndale (1494-1536), the first writer to translate the Greek New Testament and some of the Hebrew Old Testament directly into modern English. Tyndale hoped to shift scripture from Latin to the common language of the less educated. The church was not pleased. For his anti-clerical efforts (not to mention his treatise against Henry VIII’s divorce), Tyndale was eventually arrested, brought to London, strangled to death by monks, and then burned at the stake. But the life of Tyndale’s work was just beginning. For decades, scores of new versions cobbled Tyndale’s work with the efforts of new translators, while carefully excising traces of Tyndale’s radical political and ecclesiastical views. And when King James set 47 scholars to work on a new version in 1604, they looted the bulk of it from Tyndale. It’s little wonder: Tyndale had a Shakespearean gift for phrasing, coining “let there be light,” “give up the ghost,“ “the salt of the earth,” “in the twinkling of an eye,” and many other famous expressions. He grounded his translation in the concreteness and simplicity of the original, modeling its syntax after Hebrew and crafting compact, memorable turns of phrase—what Edmund Wilson called “its concise solid stamp.”
The Pilgrims were especially keen on the Old Testament of the King James Bible. They identified their destiny with the promise of Israel, naming their new towns after ancient Israelite cities like Shiloh, Bethel, and Canaan. In 1686, Harvard University required Hebrew of its first students rather than the Greek in which the New Testament was written.
Just as the Hebrew Bible loaned a story of divine purpose to the colonies, its style in the King James Version loaned a tone of gravity to American English. Abraham Lincoln worked biblical phrasing into his speeches strategically. The “four score and seven years ago” that opens the Gettysburg Address was Lincoln’s way of adding some eternal heft to the country’s mere 87 years of existence. Yet where the King James Version says our life span is “threescore years and ten” (Psalms 90:10), the Hebrew reads just “70.” King James’s scholars seem to have included this longhand in an effort to make their style sound grander and stranger, fit for storied kings and prophets. And so, even in 1611, Alter notes, the voice of the King James Version was slightly archaic. As a result, antiquated language became ingrained in the American ear as a cue for lofty subject matter, and the King James Version has continued to draw strength from its contrast with regular speech.
Throughout Pen of Iron, Alter considers American literary style in terms of such contrasts. He juxtaposes high diction and low diction, complex syntax and simple syntax, and long Latinate abstractions and gruff Anglo-Saxon concreteness. He notes, for instance, that the Bible is just one “strong thread in the prose of Moby-Dick that is freely intertwined with Shakespeare, Milton, the English Baroque prose writers of the seventeenth century, sailors’ argot (or a literary stylization of it), and the colloquial Yankee speech of antebellum New England.” That Alter, a distinguished translator of Hebrew himself as well as a literary critic, distinguishes Melville’s version of “sailors’ argot” from the actual style is a clue to his precision. He doesn’t aim to funnel Moby-Dick into a biblical inkwell, nor to disentangle the single “thread” of biblical style from the whole fabric of the novel.
One element Alter often examines is parataxis, the term that describes the serial use of phrases linked by “and,” such as: “And she hasted, and emptied her pitcher into the trough, and ran again unto the well to draw water, and drew for all his camels” (Genesis 24:20). A line like this has a matter-of-fact momentum, bare of elaboration or metaphors. The narrator seems to step aside, simply offering a window into the scene as it happens. The most influential use of parataxis in America has been Hemingway’s. A master of spare writing, Hemingway made deadpan simplicity popular in the 20th century, and parataxis helped him to weave together his details with as little flourish as possible. A sentence like this one from The Sun Also Rises gives us the landscape without any sentimentality or rhetorical emphasis: “It was a forest of cork oaks, and the sun came through the trees in patches, and there were cattle grazing back in the trees.”
To let the details speak for themselves—or to let them seem to—lends what Alter calls a “resolute simplicity” to a writer’s work. In the Bible, that quality conveys divine authority. The details are true because the Bible is true, and they are relevant because the Bible is sacred. But while Hemingway used a technique found in the King James Bible (and also in the original Hebrew syntax), his authorial reticence is almost the opposite of biblical scale. This fact highlights an important distinction: not all the uses of King James style bring the Bible into the reader’s experience. The tone can be used without the effect.
Pen of Iron is most revealing when Alter shows how novelists use King James style not as Hemingway did but as Lincoln did—to shape their meaning through biblical resonances. Note the shift, in Melville’s description of the outgoing Pequod in Moby-Dick, from typically novelistic prose at the end of one paragraph to parataxis in the next:
The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows.
Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft dived deep into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes were heard.
The first sentence intimately describes what “we” saw, freely associating icicles with “teeth” and “tusks.” But the next stands farther back. Its diction, along with the “and” syntax, has shifted to biblical narration, not personal reflection. Indeed, Bildad’s “steady notes” turn out to be a hymn. On its first night, the whale hunt already sounds like the spiritual quest Melville reveals it to be.
Alter calls Melville “a post-theistic writer,” but while “he no longer believes in the personal and providential God of Christian faith, he manifestly still carries the weight of theistic ideas.” Melville wants his huge novel to swallow even the Bible. For this reason, whales in Moby-Dick are both biblical symbols and symbols of the Bible’s limits. As Ishmael muses, the line of “Leviathans,” or ancient whales, began long before the chronicle of the Bible and will survive long after humans are gone. Their descendants give “shuddering glimpses into Polar eternities,” a perspective so vast that it makes the term of human existence seem like a pointless blip. In other words, the Bible can mention the Leviathan, but its scope is too narrow to contain or define it. In the same way, Alter argues that while Melville’s White Whale reflects the hostile Hebrew God of the Old Testament, it also speaks to a more universal frustration, which is “the inscrutability and the blind power of the natural world.”
Maybe it is less the blindness of power than the blindness of those subjected to inscrutable natural power that torments Ahab. “But if I know now the tail of the whale, how understand his head? ‘Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail,’ he seems to say, ‘but my face shall not be seen,’” Ahab ponders in an appropriation of Exodus 33:23 (“thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen”). We can hear in Ahab the accursed Job, the Satan lost to Paradise, and the howling Lear (given voice by the near-contemporaries Tyndale, Milton, and Shakespeare), each of whom is at a loss to justify the forces behind his suffering.
Cormac McCarthy hints at the same lines of Exodus in The Road, his post-apocalyptic 2006novel about a nameless father and son wandering in near-starvation among ruins and cannibals. “Have you a neck by which to throttle you?” the father asks. “Have you a heart? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.”
Like Hemingway, McCarthy writes in cleanly cut sentences. The characters may sob, but the prose is unflappably restrained. Near the beginning of All the Pretty Horses (1992), a teenager admires a drawing of beautiful horses, wondering where he could find them in real life, and here McCarthy uses parataxis to move quietly toward a startlingly profound disappointment: “But nothing else matched and no such horse ever was that he had seen and he’d once asked his grandfather what kind of horses they were and his grandfather looked up from his plate at the painting as if he’d never seen it before and said those are picturebook horses and went on eating.”
By contrast, as Alter points out, a typical sentence in Faulkner’s novels is a cluttered safari of clauses, asides, and exotic lexical plumage, with almost none of the compactness of typical King James style. One way that Faulkner keeps his meandering prose fresh is by rooting high-flown language in earthy diction. We find the word “guts” in the phrase “somnolent and impervious guts” (The Sound and the Fury) and “puny” in “puny evanescent human sojourn” (Go Down, Moses).
And yet it is these simpler words—dust, curse, flesh, son—that are often the most charged with meaning, as they allude to major themes in the Bible. In Absalom, Absalom!, for instance, a racist plantation “house” mirrors the sinful “house of David,” and becomes a powerful symbol of the fallen South.
Saul Bellow reflected that the style he sought in The Adventures of Augie March was “a new sort of American sentence…a fusion of colloquialism and elegance,” but Alter shows us that Bellow’s goal was anything but unique to him. While one indeed finds in Bellow a timely American pluralism—inclusive of Chicago vernacular, Yiddish, Proust, and Henry James—Pen of Iron demonstrates that such variety has been a hallmark of American literary style for centuries, and that the King James style has been a binding element in the mix.
A sharp awareness of style, Alter laments, is fading in American culture about as quickly as the role of the King James Bible. But Alter’s great talent for savoring the sound and history of words renews a reader’s own “relish for language”—and now more than ever, we should be glad it is contagious.
