A great prose style in the
service of a trivial topic becomes trivial;
I disagree completely. Certainly not true when using the word trivial in its proper original (according to the OED) meaning, belonging to the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) of medieval university studies. But you presumably used trivial in its more common current meaning, which the OED defines as commonplace, ordinary, everyday, familiar.
The New Yorker, in Talk of the Town, especially in the hands of E.B. White, turned writing about trivial topics into very fine prose writing, some of the best expository writing that has been done in this century. Ross and White were unquestionably (IMO) some of the finest expository writers of the century. Yet much -- even most -- of their writing was about trivial subjects. White wrote about a person he observed on the street, a bird in the meadow, a Model T, a tree, trivial subjects all, but written about with great skill and style, so that the commonplace was for a moment elevated to the unique by the style in which he he wrote.
It is much harder, I agree, to write well about the commonplace than about the unusual. When you are writing about the headhunters of Borneo, the reader's fascination with the topic will cause her to overlook many stylistic deficiencies. But when you are writing about a breeze on 49th street in New York City, the style has to carry it all. And White and Ross and others who wrote in those columns had the style to carry it all. And part of that style was that it looked so easy and effortless that most people never understood how incredibly difficult it was and how much skill it required. |
