Essay by Jay Owens
What’s Wrong with Ornate Writing—Really?
Adorned rather than clad.
These four words revealed the power of writing to me. In the second paragraph of his 1922 short story “The Offshore Pirate,” F. Scott Fitzgerald describes the small feet of a young flapper as “adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes.”
My love of words got a late start. I first read “The Offshore Pirate” at the age of nineteen while on suspension from Hamilton College for studying girls and alcohol too intently. Lonely, I began reading a lot of Fitzgerald and other Jazz Age writers, trying to recapture the dissipated spirit of my own college experience. Contemporary novels were no good; anything with a cell phone in it reminded me that I was not where I wanted to be.
The intensity of Fitzgerald’s words made me forget my own predicament. Why both “adorned” and “clad”? Another author might have chosen one word, but not Fitzgerald. The slipper adorns the girl, but “clad” suggests that on another foot it wouldn’t seem so decorative.
When I realized this, I knew he’d bestowed a great gift: how to see the world with the critical and precise eye of a writer. But I was greedy, too. I wanted more than a beautiful vision; I wanted to learn how to write like that.
The problem for me, an aspiring writer in 2011, is that Fitzgerald’s opulent phrasing is at odds with the personality-driven prose that permeates the Internet. Instead of choosing a surprising word or combination—linear mustache, petty syllabi, clambering—many online authors infuse their writing with expressions meant to align themselves with the reader.
You’re supposed to keep reading because the author is just like you! Take columnist Bill Simmonsas“The Sports Guy.” This excerpt from a recent online piece is typical:
You know how NFL talking heads speak their own language, rely too much on recognizable code words and take 100 words to say something that could be said in 15? ….Well, those guys are going to be banging home a new code word in September and October.
When this is done well, it can capture a broad audience. But the effect of such pandering is often insufferable. Entire websites and forums have cropped up (fairly or unfairly) just to ridicule Simmons for his ‘80s pop-culture preoccupation with The Karate Kid and Hoosiers. At its worst, contemporary online style bears a disturbing resemblance to the cheery falseness of advertising. Instead of shilling for cereal, the author is asking you to buy his or her personality. The quality of the writing is incidental.
Admittedly, I naturally gravitate toward the elaborate and academic. I identify with Milton’s plea to Urania in Paradise Lost that his writing find a “fit audience…though few” much more than I do with maximizing page views. It’s also true that I’m still learning to write, and that my main goal is to produce fiction rather than magazine journalism.
Some might say that I’m stuck in the past, or that I need to just suck it up. Maybe so, but I don’t want to read phrases like “suck it up.”
My middle school friends and I used to amuse ourselves by elevating trite kid slang to the posh world of high art. An unexpected free period was not awesome; it was ex-quis-ite. No longer was exquisite just a word used by wealthy patricians to express tempered appreciation of a de Kooning. We made it our own.
For every letter saved by LOL or CYA, there’s also an opportunity to resurrect outmoded gems. My current emails to friends incorporate obsolete language whenever possible, if only to make sure they remember there’s something a little off about me:
Me: How was Singapore? On etait chouettes? While you were in absentia, Ting and I examined the merits of ham.
Her: What is chouettes? Ham is pretty good. I concur wholeheartedly.
Me: Chouettes literally translates as ‘owls.’ But on etait chouettes = it was cool. It’s kind of a dated term now, like peachy keen. I am on a mission to return it to the lexicon.
While this preoccupation with the unusual served me well in writing papers for my literature B.A.—yes, I eventually graduated this past May, although not from Hamilton—I clashed with journalism instructors who expected me to adopt a more conversational tone.
I imagine that authors who are naturally effusive find that heavy editing tightens up their writing. “Clad rather than adorned” may be the new philosophy, and it’s not always a bad thing. Often I find myself dancing in the opposite direction of Fitzgerald’s flapper girls, condensing the frivolous and ornamental into the efficient and necessary. When I manage this successfully, my voice is no longer muddled but clear and strong.
However, my reason for writing is sometimes stripped out with the four-dollar word, especially when it’s replaced by a ten-cent alternative. When teachers (and editors) redline adverbs like “intently” or “admittedly”—or suggest rewording “I naturally incline” as “I’m drawn to”—they’re not only squelching me. They may be strangling a fresh approach to language.
Adorned rather than clad.
It’s not that I have nothing to say; it’s that I enjoy subtle misdirection. The connection I want to forge with readers is one based on surprise and a bit of prodding, not mutual identification and narcissistic adoration. I find straight narrative tedious and more deceptive than when an author plays with a reader’s expectations. If it is too neat, I don’t trust it. Little in life is clean.
Consider Fitzgerald’s description of the wealthy socialite Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and Damned, a novel that was also published in 1922:
Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual ‘There!’
Such phrasing implies that this character’s mind is as well groomed as his person. The images fit together neatly, creating an amusing vision of a pleased-with-himself sartorial artist. Yet, the parts are incongruent and the opposite of clean. Comparing irony to shoe polish is odd and brilliant. It shades Patch’s egoism. It may even foreshadow the complicated mess he becomes by the end of the novel—and surprises like this are what the best literary writing is about.
I do learn something each time a precious opus of mine is hacked to pieces. Still, I will never submit all the way. I need both “adorned” and “clad” in that sentence about a girl’s blue slipper. Both words matter to me, just as they did to Mr. F. Scott.
I love the shiftiness in the relationship of those two descriptors. I love imagining another reader puzzling out their distinctions, as I have. The more precise Fitzgerald gets, the more the image he conjures blurs—and his words lift me far above the simple charm of the author.
Publishing Information:
- “The Offshore Pirate” by F. Scott Fitzgerald in Flappers and Philosophers (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922).
- “The NFL in 2011: All About Continuity” by Bill Simmons in "The Sports Guy" for Grantland, September 8, 2011.
- The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922).
Art Information
- “A Study of F. Scott Fitzgerald” by Gordon Bryant, published in Shadowland magazine, 1921; public domain
- “Satan” (from John Milton’s Paradise Lost) by Gustave Doré, circa 1866; public domain
Jay Owens is currently engaged in graduate work in literature at the Harvard University Extension School. He received a bachelor's degree in literature from Harvard Extension in May 2011.
This piece began as a "Why I Write" essay in Martha Nichols's magazine writing course at the Extension School, where she was one of the instructors pushing Jay to be more "personal."
