Clemency

What does our prose say about us?

Clemency Burton-Hill, who has penned a variety of articles for the British press, is young, blonde, attractive but not striking; she is the daughter of the renowned music maven Humphrey Burton, and has a double-barrelled surname. She speaks in moneyed tones. Thus she represents the core of the cultured bourgeois London élite, the intelligentsia, and to prove it she has a double-first in English from Cambridge, and a scholarship at Harvard. Not only a journalist, she is also a professional violinist, and an actress—from a string of embarrassing cashinhands like Until Death and Dungeons and Dragons she has lately graduated to prominent television rôles. All this can be gleaned from her crowning achievement to date—a Wikipedia article. So, how does she write?

I begin with an older piece, from the Telegraph a couple of years ago:

I turned 23 recently and very frightening it was, too. Apparently I'm now certifiably an Adult and supposed to behave accordingly; to be both Big and Clever at all times.

Here, Clemency is feigning childishness. This is obviously not how a woman with a double-first from Cambridge thinks. It is an ironic pose, struck so as to bond with her reader. Note that odd comma: 'was, too'. She is using an oral phrase, but she has not considered clearly how to transcribe its rhythm; she has introduced a pause before 'too' so as to disguise the slangy nature of the expression. Her use of 'supposed to behave accordingly' has the humorous suggestion of mumsy disapproval. The words 'adult', 'big' and 'clever' are capitalised for added ironic effect. The piece goes on to describe Clemency's infatuation with older men, such as Michael Ignatieff:

[T]here I was at Hay last month, tongue practically hanging out of my mouth, barely registering what he was saying about the democratic imperative of open adversarial review, so entranced was I by those blue, blue eyes. All rather embarrassing, really – and Ignatieff must be, what, in his forties at least?

The rhythm of her prose, as before, is hackneyed enough. The key point here is that Clemency is both trying to be funny, and vaunting her own urbanity. Not only does she slip in the fact that she attended Hay Festival with her cultural peers, but she abbreviates it to 'Hay', demonstrating her cosy familiarity with the literary event and its climate. Similarly, although 'democratic imperative of open adversarial review' is contrasted to the teenagerish 'blue, blue eyes' for comic effect, we are left in no doubt that Clemency fully understands the democratic imperative of open adversarial review. How else could she have remembered the phrase? The rest of her tone is gossipy: 'there I was' and 'All rather embarrassing, really' both reek of the garden fence. The 'what' inserted into the last sentence conjures an off-the-cuff oral estimate.

A final example from this article, in which Clemency meets one of her idols, Tom Stoppard—the living embodiment of middle-class British artistic ideals:

Nevertheless, before excusing himself, he squeezed my hands one more time, looked deep in my eyes, and said, with what can be described only as a flirtatious twinkle: "I think you'd be perfect for the part [in Arcadia], I hope you get it."

Ah—the excitement of being approved by Stoppard himself! Clemency swoons.

Another article, a meditation from last year on political conflicts in Kenya, opens in a different key, that of ekphrastic description—

The sun is rising lazily over Soysambu, a private estate which yawns across 100,000 acres of Kenya’s Rift Valley. Out of the corner of my eye I watch a gazelle lollop towards the horizon, where Lake Elementaita shimmers against the dramatic backdrop of the Mau escarpment. In front of 'Delamere’s Nose' — a squat peak so named because of its resemblance to a supine male profile — a herd of waterbuck graze on the acacia xanthophloea bush alongside plentiful buffalo, eland, zebra and giraffe. Apart from the agreeable cooing of cape turtle doves overhead, the silence and sense of peace is absolute.

Peace, however, is not quite the mot juste for this ravishing land.

Clemency's prose has been rising lazily over the reader, who was yawning across 100 words of boilerplate African exquisitries—complete with the pointedly technical xanthophloea, a word so ugly on the page but so beautiful to hear, darling—when all of a sudden the inevitable presaging note is wrung from her bow. The problem is that Clemency's heart isn't in it: she wants to move from the beauty of the landscape to the strife of its people, she wants to say, 'Peace, however, is not quite the mot juste for this troubled land'—but what she really must emphasise is how lovely it is. (Peace, of course, cannot be a mot juste; only 'peace'. But let's not be pedantic.) This is not an authentic voice.

Neither is it authentic when she writes, in an earlier review of Maile Maloy's Liars and Saints:

As she has previously demonstrated with her short stories, she is a keen observer of human emotion, but here she diffuses any potential melodrama by both understatement — ‘Henry had thought he understood grief, but nothing had ever shaken him like Abby’s death’ — and use of objective correlatives.

I leave aside the clichés ('keen observer') and the fact that the quoted line is quite the opposite of understatement, and focus instead on the expression 'objective correlatives'. In a flash it betrays Clemency's double-first in English, and her need to bring specialist knowledge, embodied in antique jargon, to bear on her appreciation of cultural phenomena. She uses the expression with no confidence, with no grasp of the irony of language; rather, she is still an undergraduate marvelling at the greatness of T. S. Eliot.

Similar examples could be multiplied endlessly.

*

Now my readers will wonder why I have chosen to pick apart the slapdash prose of a woman in her mid-twenties—a woman who, despite her expensive education, her brains and her cultural upbringing, has no reason to be a good writer. After all—she's also an actress and a violinist, and a political analyst, and a model and everything else. Isn't all this a bit churlish?

I cannot entirely absolve myself of this charge; on the other hand, my motives are greater than mere whimsical caddishness. You see, I'm a believer, with Buffon, that le style, c'est l'homme même—or in this case, la femme même. I think Clemency's style reveals a lot about who she is. And this is particularly interesting to me because who she is is related to who I am. I shared a class with Clemency, or Clemmie as she was universally known then, back in school, eight years ago. We barely knew each other, although given the nature of our respective positions in the social hierarchy, I knew more of her than she did of me. She was always perfectly friendly to me, and quite likeable, which is more than I was at that age. We'd share a walk to the Tube, or chat idly for a few minutes, and that was the extent of it. So I bear her no ill will, and yet she continues to intrigue me as a successful product of the schooling we shared.

Clemmie's journalism exists to propagate a certain set of cultural values—she loves to travel, she loves the performing arts—Bach and Chekhov—and she loves 'breakfasting at the Wolseley'. She's passionate about politics, and concerned about the plight of the Third World. She fancies older and especially elder men. This is the ideal envisioned by today's public schools. This is, in short, who I was supposed to be—except for the 'fancying older men' part, of course. Recently she wrote,

Having steadfastly refused to settle into any one profession since graduating a few years ago, I’m used to the identity crisis that comes with juggling careers. . .

Again, she is overtly telling us, 'having lots of careers is not so great', but she is really saying, 'I have had lots of careers—isn't that marvelous?' There is no identity crisis. I just don't believe it. I've no doubt she has as many problems as the rest of us, but not this one. For of all people, Clemmie has her place in society, and is celebrated for it. I am deeply jealous.

And her prose demonstrates, with utter transparency, the tensions of a woman who has been corralled into playing a set part. It possesses the irony of the lesser, of the courtier—the irony of 'certifiably an Adult'. It tells us that she knows, but pretends at the same time that she does not; thus she conceals her superiority as she reveals it. She shows herself to be intelligent, astute, well-read, cultured, talented, warm, hard-working, ambitious, confident—and reassuringly average. This is the conclusion we wanted to reach, isn't it? Even Clemmie would take it as a compliment, or at least part of her would. That part, not yet swallowed up by ambition, would be relieved to think that for all her accomplishments, she still 'has two feet on the ground', that she has not 'disappeared up her own arse', as she would likely say herself. Like the rest of us privileged brats, Clemmie has learnt to be ashamed of her education, and especially of her intelligence. This is why she plays the ditz with Ignatieff and Stoppard—or at least why she tells us she does—and why she makes goo-goo noises at her 23rd birthday. She is far more comfortable in this chatty, dissimulative style than she is in the idiom of serious criticism, or of political reportage. She has surrendered herself.

'Clemency', it seems, was a name well chosen.