There is an ancient piece of classroom wisdom that is not entirely misguided when it states: steer clear of adjectives! Editors are unlikely to grumble about a missing adjective, but they will use up their pencils crossing out superfluous ones. When in doubt, leave it out. The critic Wolf Schneider provides an excellent illustration: ‘If the author of The Linden Tree had written’—instead of ‘By the well, before the gate, stands a linden tree’—‘“By the tumbled-down well, in front of the dilapidated, vine-clad gate, stands a gnarled old linden tree”, his poem would not have been set to music by Schubert.’ Quite so. Once the right verb and the right noun have been found, the writer has a full load and can set out for home (or embark on a Winterreise). That is the approach of the adjective sceptic. In the words of the poet-diplomat Paul Claudel, la crainte de l’adjectif est le commencement du style—fear of the adjective is the beginning of style.footnote¹

Hemingway was the most effective propagator of this stylistic purism. As a journalist, he knew the value of concise speech. Every word counted, as each one had to be paid for when telegraphed to the news desk. Every decorative, non-informative adjective should be axed. The revolution detonated by the application of this approach to the novel can scarcely be exaggerated. All authors, especially the Anglo-Americans—Fitzgerald, Cheever, Carver, Ford—are indebted to this legacy, whether they like it or not. The only writers who have sought to distance themselves from it are the conscious champions of the adjective—Nabokov, Updike and their disciple, Nicholson Baker. Nabokov’s masterly use of the adjectival tricolon is on display in Ada, when Van stares from the ocean-liner’s deck into the ‘black, foam-veined, complicated waters’ in which Lucette has drowned herself, thanks to him. The use of ‘complicated’ is a mark of genius.footnote² Nor did Borges, a reader with infallible literary judgement, allow himself to be infected by Hemingway, to say nothing of the four oarsmen, Julio, Carlos, Mario and Gabriel, in Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World.footnote³

The critique of adjectival extravagance was already flourishing in German-speaking countries. In 1910, Karl Kraus mocked his favourite target, Heinrich Heine, as the type of observer who compensates in opulent adjectives for what Nature has denied him in nouns.footnote⁴ Kraus is here a precursor of Hemingway, but both followed Voltaire in declaring that adjectives are the enemies of nouns. A properly placed adjective must tell us something, it is said; if it is something one already knows, the writer should have held back. As they say in Franconia, ‘a good bratwurst needs no mustard’; nor, by the same token, a good noun an adjective.

Some authors, however, are fearless in this respect. To slog through Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen in search of an original adjective is like looking for the Blue Flower in the Sahara. Everything is ‘graceful’, ‘charming’, ‘romantic’, ‘diverse’, ‘heavenly’, ‘indescribable’, ‘eternal’, with the same epithets frequently repeated from one sentence to the next. None of this has been really seen, heard or felt. Novalis could offer a negative case study for a school of style. But cut out the adjectives in Stifter or Keller, Proust or Woolf, Joseph Roth or Heimito von Doderer, Rudolf Borchardt or Thomas Mann, and the work is dead.footnote⁵ The right adjective—in other words, the adjective that subverts our expectations and stands in tension with the noun—can be the shining pebble that enlivens the whole sentence.footnote⁶ And there is nothing better than an adverb or an adjective for teasing out comic implications.

Two tiny examples. At the climax of Thomas Mann’s Joseph tetralogy, Joseph, who has risen to become the Pharaoh’s right-hand man, has succeeded in luring his brothers—who had earlier thrown him down a well—to visit him in Egypt. The brothers do not recognize him in his new grandeur, but they are already feeling queasy. What does he want with them? Judah is questioned, and reports on the situation of the family back home. When Joseph hears that his youngest brother, Benjamin, has already produced eight children from two different wives, he bursts out laughing without even waiting for the translation. The Palace officials laugh along, obsequiously. ‘The brothers smiled anxiously’, Mann tells us—the ‘anxiously’ striking a comic note, because of its incongruity with the verb.footnote⁷

Or take the explanation Borges gave for abandoning the Oriental studies he had begun around 1916:

Working with enthusiasm and credulity through the English version of a certain Chinese philosopher, I came across this memorable passage: ‘A man condemned to death doesn’t care that he is standing at the edge of a precipice, for he has already renounced life.’ Here the translator attached an asterisk, and his note informed me that this interpretation was preferable to that of a rival Sinologist, who had translated the passage thus: ‘The servants destroy the works of art, so that they will not have to judge their beauties and defects.’ Then, like Paolo and Francesca, I read no more. A mysterious scepticism had slipped into my soul.footnote⁸