Mind your language
In Bevis Hillier's fat final volume of his biography of Betjeman, he quotes a chrestomathy of book reviewers' clichés taken from a letter to The Spectator by Jocelyn Brooke, published on 3 January 1958. It is interesting to see how critical vocabulary has changed.
In the later 1950s, terms of praise included agreeable (later a televised favourite of Kenneth Clark's); astringent and clinical (where edgy is now favoured); significant and contemporary (now transmuted into innovative — though it is seldom thought necessary to say what the innovation is); delicious and deliriously (now sometimes achingly; 50 years ago funny was deliriously, whereas now it is usually beautiful which is achingly).
In place of twentyish, we have thirtysomething. The cult of youth has become the cult of eternal youth, with Sixties people turning into sixtysomething people without the adoption of more mature behaviour or the expectation that the flame of youth will pass from them.
In the summer, Tom Payne, the poetry critic, drew up his own laughoutloud funny' (no, but it was) catechism of critical clichés for the Dail)) Telegraph Books pages. Among overused terms which were, I think, unthought of in the 1950s, he identified heady mix, highoctane and like %IOC on acid.
In Jocelyn Brooke's items of reviewese, the following have faded: mellifluous, disquieting (now disturbing), jejune (after a half-life misspelled as jejeune), artist's predicament, polarisation, exquisite sensibility, crystallisation, Swiftian misanthropy. For some reason penetrating has remained, or returned, as a favoured product of the cliché factory.
Disturbing also figures in a list of artcriticism vocabulary sent me by a reader, Mr Christopher Mason, from Adriers in France. Others are: distinct, poetic, original, inventive, organic, assured, vibrant, eloquent, clear, immaculate, minimal subtle, passionate, vivid, tentative, formal, enduring and intense.
I can't see that all of these are clichés, nor did he say they were, for Mr Mason suggests that combination is the key (or simply 'key', as people now prefer). It can produce instant art criticism, varied by the aid of the adverbial suffix distinctly formal, vibrantly eloquent etc.
With the help of some stock phrases (assured in its handling; deploying a subtle range; every bit is . . ; an almost 5oLe arrangement), he feels that only the addition of a little biographical and historical detail is needed to finish the job.
Dot Wordsworth
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