The Elegant Variation: "CERTAINLY OUR BEST FEMALE WRITER"

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January 29, 2008

"CERTAINLY OUR BEST FEMALE WRITER"

We are, we confess, unfamiliar with the novels of Theodora Keogh, but this obituary in the Telegraph has left us curious to remedy that shortcoming, Rorem's hyperbole notwithstanding. (Thanks to Robert Nedelkoff.)

The remarkable early novels treated young girls facing sexual conflict in New York and Paris, and critics could not decide whether Theodora Keogh possessed extraordinary understanding of these matters or was merely aiming to shock.

The composer and diarist Ned Rorem described her as "our best American writer, certainly our best female writer", and judged that the Keoghs "represented all that was good about America to everyone in Paris".

Posted at 12:17 AM in Obit | Permalink

Comments

It is somewhat disturbing to me that Rorem has to make a distinction between "writer" and "female writer"...come to think of it I have never heard the term "male writer" or "best male writer".

Posted by: Johnny Esoteric | January 29, 2008 at 08:14 AM

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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