Crafting the Classics

Literary Opinions, Ideas, and Advice from Authors of Classic Literature.

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Work, meditate, meditate above all; condense your ideas–you know that lovely fragments are no use. Unity, unity, that is everything. The whole: that’s what’s lacking in all writers today, great and small. A thousand fine bits, no complete works. Compress your style: weave a fabric soft as silk and strong as a coat of mail. Forgive this advice, but I’d like to give you everything I desire for myself.

Gustave Flaubert gives his mistress, Louise Colet, some of the best writing advice I, for one, have ever read in a beautiful letter dated October 14, 1846.

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You ask me for details about Victor Hugo: Victor Hugo is an extremely brilliant man; of as much wit as poetry. He is most fascinating in conversation, a little like [Alexander] Humboldt, but superior, and more amenable to dialogue. He is full of bourgeois ideas. He execrates Racine, whom he considers a secondary man. He's mad on that point. There's more good than evil in him--though the good is an outcome of vanity and all things are deeply calculated in him--he is, in the main, a charming man, besides being the great poet that he is. He has lost much of his quality, force, and value by the life he leads.

Honoré de Balzac describes fellow author and close friend, Victor Hugo, to his future wife, Eveline Hańska, in a letter dated July 3, 1840.

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The house full of toadies and humbugs. They all know and despise one another; but–partly to keep their hands in, and partly to make out their own individual cases–pretend not to detect one another.

Charles Dickens never ended up using this wonderful little prompt, one of many set down (and never taken up again) in his Book of Memoranda, circa 1859.

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The bourgeois (which today comprises all of mankind, including ‘the people’) has the same attitude toward the classics as toward religion: it knows they exist, would be sorry if they didn’t, realizes they serve some vague purpose, but makes no use of them and finds them very boring.

Gustave Flaubert reveals the real relationship between the bourgeois and the classics in yet another brilliant letter to his mistress, Louise Colet, dated November 22, 1852.

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You have made a beautiful book, sir, and I am proud to tell you so. There is a kind of bond between you and I that attaches me to all your successes. I remember your noble and charming letters from four years ago, and it seems to me I can see them in the beautiful pages you make me read today. Madame Bovary is quite a work. The dispatch you were so kind as to send me arrived rather late, which will explain the delay of this letter.        You, sir, are among the leading spirits of your generation. Continue to carry the torch of art. I am in darkness, but I love the light. This is my way of telling you I love you.        I shake your hand.

Victor Hugo congratulates fellow author and longtime admirer, Gustave Flaubert, on the completion of his masterpiece, Madame Bovary, in a heartwarming letter dated 30 August, 1857.

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New literary forms always produce new forms of life and that is why they are so revolting to the conservative mind.

One of the many insightful (and undated) entries in the notebook of Anton Chekhov.

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Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.

Oscar Wilde puts fellow author Henry James in his proper place part way through The Decay of Lying, the first section of his 1891 work on aesthetic criticism simply titled Intentions.

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I just finished your atrocious, beautiful book! I’m still stunned. It's strong! Very strong!       I blame only the preface; in my opinion, it spoils your work, which is so impartial and so high. You reveal your secret with too much candor, something that, in my Poetics, no novelist has the right to do.      These are all my revisions.      But you’ve a proud talent and you’re a brave man!      Tell me, by just one little word, when I may come to see you, to talk more at length about this book of yours.       I shake your hand very cordially, and am yours...

Gustave Flaubert congratulates Émile Zola on the publication of Zola’s Fortune of the Rougons, the first of the twenty novels that comprise his groundbreaking Rougon-Macquart family saga, in a letter dated December 1, 1871.

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Your comedy is tragic. I have read you, my eloquent and dear colleague, and I will read you again. Success is to be read; triumph is to be reread. You draw with a firm hand--in frank colors and bold relief--truth and life. Continue these studies of the depths. I shake your hand!

Victor Hugo congratulates Émile Zola on the publication of Zola’s Fortune of the Rougons, the first of the twenty novels that comprise his groundbreaking Rougon-Macquart family saga, in a letter dated October 25, 1871.

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Visualize, emotionalize afterwards. Beginning writers work from the sense impressions, forget cold realistic organization. First get the cold objective plot scene set. Rigid. Then write the damn thing after lying on the couch and visualizing, whipping it to white heat, to life again, the life of the art, the form, not longer formless without frame of reference.

Sylvia Plath recorded this wonderful writing advice in her journal sometime during the summer of 1953.

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Mother–did not like it [Mansfield Park] so well as P. & P. [Pride and Prejudice]–thought Fanny insipid–enjoyed Mrs. Norris.

Over the course of her relatively brief life, Jane Austen managed to accomplish an extraordinary number of extraordinary things; however, if we are to believe her manuscript booklet entitled Opinions of Mansfield Park, impressing her mother was not one of them.

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I sympathise with Miss Austen's clear common sense and subtle shrewdness. If you find no inspiration in Miss Austen's page, neither do you find mere windy wordiness--to use your words over again--she exquisitely adapts her means to her end; both are very subdued, a little contracted, but never absurd.

Charlotte Brontë concedes that Jane Austen may, in fact, possess something resembling literary talent in a letter to critic and occasional friend, George Lewes, dated January 18, 1848.

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Great hearts are like great suns, they contain their own light and warmth. You, therefore, have no need of praise; you do not even need thanks; but I must tell you that I love you more every day, not only because you are one of the marvels of the age, but also because you are one of its consolations.       I thank you.       But pray come here; you known you promised to do so. Come and receive the greetings of all those who surround me, and who will rally round you no less loyally than round me.       Your brother.

Victor Hugo praises and cajoles his close friend and brother author, Alexandre Dumas [père], to pay the Hugo household a long awaited visit in a letter dated March 8, 1857.

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To deny the existence of lukewarm affections because they are lukewarm is to deny that the sun sometimes shines when it isn’t high noon. There is as much truth in halftones as in violent colors.

Gustave Flaubert could get pretty profound in his correspondence with his mistress, Louise Colet; this little sample is from a beautiful letter dated December 11, 1846. 

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The message—to use a term invented by quack reformers—began to affect the Russian novel in the middle of the last century, and has killed it by the middle of this one.

Vladimir Nabokov lets loose in his blunt and brilliant lecture on Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin and The Death of Ivan Illych, the fourth of his six Lectures on Russian Literature.

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At intervals, summers and falls, I used to go off, sometimes for a week at a stretch, down in the country, or to Long Island’s seashores—there, in the presence of outdoor influences, I went over thoroughly the Old and New Testaments, and absorbed (probably to better advantage for me than in any library or indoor room—it makes such a difference where you read) Shakespeare, Ossian, the best translated versions I could get of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, the old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindu Poems, and one or two other masterpieces, Dante’s among them.

Walt Whitman recalls the literature of his youth in November Boughs.

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The book will be written in the first person throughout, and during these first three weekly numbers you will find the hero to be a boy-child, like David [Copperfield]. Then he will be an apprentice. You will not have to complain of the want of humour as in the Tale of Two Cities. I have made the opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a child and a good natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very funny. Of course I have got in the pivot on which the story will turn too—and which indeed, as you will remember, was the grotesque tragicomic conception that first encouraged me. To be quite sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read David Copperfield again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe.

Charles Dickens describes the story that would eventually become Great Expectations to his close friend, John Forster, in an extraordinary letter written sometime in early October, 1860.