Essay

The Power of ‘One’

Time to resurrect this meek and mighty pronoun?

I’m reading Elizabeth Bowen’s A Time in Rome and struck by how often she uses the pronoun one.

To talk of “entering” the past is nonsense, but one can be entered by it, to a degree…whatever went on, goes on, in one form or another. One can more than picture, one can all but take part.

Throughout the book, one is used frugally—mainly Bowen uses the first person singular, I—but enough that I noticed it.

One is a third person singular pronoun. It means ‘a person.’ One is democratic and non-gendered. Strangely, magically, like alchemy, one also implies the collective person, the every person, the eternal person, the us.

By using one, Bowen avoids the relentless rush of it’s-all-about-me which continuous use of I can induce. One also has the virtue of subtly including the reader in the visit to Rome.

You don’t see it much these days, certainly not here on Medium. Mostly one is used ironically to mock an affected, bumptious voice or person.

There’s no doubting that one can emit an elevated, fusty, distant tone, at once condescending and removed, as if the writer inhabits a lofty place far above the lowly reader.

‘One is not pleased,’ is a line perhaps only Queen Elizabeth II could get away with. It’s clearly ridiculous — the use of one when referring strictly to oneself, the I. To do this is so lofty as to suggest the writer or speaker sits beside God. Supercilious, arrogant, bumptious — one can repel and alienate a reader.

Unconsciously, we relegate the writer of one to a past where the pronoun was used by educated writers who smoked pipes behind broadsheets. Writers like Orwell:

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.

George Orwell, Why I Write, 1940

One seems at home with Orwell. He hails from that cast of pre-war, Eton-educated, male writers. But Orwell wasn’t above grit: he fought in The Spanish Civil War and to research his book Down and Out in Paris and London, he became a vagrant and lived with the homeless in both those cities. If he was a snob, he was an earnest snob with the right impulses.

Orwell could have used the pronoun you, but one seems ironically to elide itself here, as if the pronoun is unimportant: it’s the trait of constitutionalism and legality which is important.

But here’s Baldwin. He brings out one’s every-boy, ubiquitous side:

In the case of the girls, one watched them turning into matrons before they had become women.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963

Baldwin could have used we instead of one, but the one seems to elevate his language and further his cause; the use of one implies an expectation, almost a requirement, to watch girls ‘turning into matrons,’ which for a poor, young gay boy must have been alienating, an adjective which is the thrust of Baldwin’s experience and his book.

Bowen’s book was published in 1959. Orwell’s before that, and Baldwin’s shortly after. Perhaps one is a product of its time, a relic of a heyday when writers were more rarified.

The dog’s growth was monitored on a daily basis and every small accomplishment was captured on film. One could find few pictures of my sister Tiffany, but Melina had entire albums devoted to her terrible twos.

David Seders, Me Talk Pretty One Day, 2000

The less “uplifting” beauty of face and body remains the most commonly visited site of the beautiful. But one would hardly expect the pope to invoke that sense of beauty…

Susan Sontag, At the Same Time, 2002

It seems that even in the twenty-first century, good writers know the value and efficacy of one.

So is it time for us less well-known, less exulted writers, to channel a bit of one’s heft, by using one in our writing?

A small word—the smallest when the meaning is included—like perfume, one is concentrated; one one goes a long way.

Used sparingly, it can hint at prowess and assurance and includes the world in the writer’s observations, even while it states itself as single.

Perhaps it is a matter of confidence: in order to use one in one’s writing, one must have a certain daring, a chutzpah, a sheer brass neck effrontery.

Slip one in your writing if you are brave.

Just a dash, perhaps only one.

Get used to it.

Do not be timid. Place it firmly, authoritatively, in your sentence. Make sure it sits comfortably, is not conspicuous, is not self-conscious, but self-assured.

The reader will, perhaps not consciously, but unconsciously, flag its being and subtly elevate you into the pantheon of fine writers; but use one clumsily, and readers may flag you as a pretentious oaf.

Democratic, egalitarian, with a history of superciliousness, one is both exclusive and embracing; one belongs to us all. And as I always say:

One must take risks in one’s writing lark.