Especially clever readers
of The Rake know what we think of E.B. White. He is one of our pole
stars. When things seem to be getting a little too serious or ornery or
inhuman or just too damn wordy, and the readers are in trouble, we
refer back to the American master of the humane essay. Just last night,
we picked up our dog-eared, spineless, heavily highlighted copy of his greatest hits.
Like that old Bible trick, we let it fall open. And we reread White’s
wonderful little profile of Professor WIlliam Strunk Jr. , the man who
originally wrote “The Elements of Style.”
That book, of
course, is considered gospel today in most college composition courses.
But before White wrote this profile of Strunk for the New Yorker, “The
Elements of Style” was a tiny, self-published little pamphlet that had
fallen into disuse. (Strunk had been White’s composition instructor at
Cornell.) Shortly thereafter, White was asked to produce a new edition
of the book. Thus was it reborn into celebrity as “Strunk and White,”
its nom de guerre ever since. We keep it within reach at all times. We
think not enough people actually read it or take its chastening message
to heart.
Over lunch yesterday we happened to be browsing
through the latest issue of a good local paper that publishes some of
our favorite writers, including some Rake contributors. But something
funny had happened to the copy. It had been run through some kind of
taffy-stretching machine. Where we expected a crisp bite, we got
several mouthfuls of soggy prose. Here is a random sentence that we
noticed: “I don’t know what the lens looking back at me reveals about
my thoughts on sex, but I imagined on the other side of the room sat a
lonely rotund businessman who called for a raven-haired hottie while
wiping his sweaty forehead with a filthy handkerchief.” The excerpt
made us feel a little sad, because we suspected that our friend the
writer didn’t have much fun writing this.
But speaking
mechanically, this is a good example of gilding the lily, of obscuring
the picture by trying to be too precise. Some of the best writing is
distinguished by what is left unsaid. It reminded us of one of White’s
most wonderful emendations to the Elements of Style. Under “Style Rule
Number Four” (“write with nouns and verbs”), he says, “The adjective
hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a
tight place.” We think this is exactly right. It is our constant
struggle to unhitch adjectives from exhausted nouns that are spinning
their wheels in swampy sentences. (No one is blameless, by the way.
That last sentence is way too wordy, for example. Practically roccoco.
We would have improved it, but we are conserving our strength for
print.)
So, we have a larger more interesting point to make. We
were also reminded of Garrison Keillor’s most recent novel, “Love Me.”
We liked that book about as well as any of his novels, which is quite a
lot. Maybe a little bit more than the others, because it was his most
directly autobiographical novel. It was sort of like Bill Murray in
“Lost In Translation.” The perfect autobiographical vehicle, even if it
was slow and uninteresting to anyone who isn’t a superstar in
literature or film.
Keillor, in the person of his pseudonymous
self, Larry Wyler, discusses his years at the New Yorker, and it’s a
fun read. But there were two bizarre falsifications. First, he made
legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn into a capering cad, whereas
Shawn (it is said) was actually a mousey, painfully agoraphobic genius.
We’ll chalk this one up to humorous inversion, though we’re not sure it
works.
More bizarre is Keillor’s sustained soto voce attack on
“Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.” At several points in the book,
it is a metaphoric stand-in for writerly indulgence and
wrong-headedness. Late in the novel, Keillor puts these words into
William Shawn’s mouth:
“I don’t want you to turn into a stylist
like White and devote your life to painting Easter eggs. Him and Strunk
have screwed up more writers than gin and scoth combined. You take the
Elements of Style too seriously and you’ll get so you spend three days
trying to write a simple thank-you note and you’ll wind up buying a
nickel-plated .38 and robbing newsboys out of sheer frustration.”
Now,
we can understand the contrarian desire to dismiss any formulaic
approach to writing—there is a strong sense among writers that the act
of writing is more like surfing than wood-working. So reducing the act
to a handful of rules is offensive in principle. White knew this and
wrote about it. He said trying to analyze good writing is like
dissecting a frog; it won’t hop any more, and the innards will interest
only the scientifically minded.
But we can hardly think of
another writer who better embodies many of the principles of Strunk and
White. Few writers are as concise and fluid as Keillor, few writers are
so parsimonious about their structure, few writers make every word
count the way Keillor does. (Corollary: Comedy is HARD!) And few
writers have had the spine to leave the New Yorker as a result of having even higher standards of style and simplicity.
Strunk
and White would have been proud of Keillor, we think. Despite Keillor’s
odd dissing of the masters.—The Editor in Cheese
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