Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Strunk and White's much-revered "The Elements of Style" has sapped the life from American writing.
Sep 2, 1999 | "From every line there peers out at me the puckish face of my professor, his short hair parted neatly in the middle and combed down over his forehead, his eyes blinking incessantly behind steel-rimmed spectacles as though he had just emerged into strong light, his lips nibbling each other like nervous horses, his smile shuttling to and fro under a carefully edged mustache."
Pretty.
Such was the face of William Strunk Jr., the other half of "The Elements of Style," as described by E.B. White. Remember Strunk? Right. No one does anymore. Nevertheless, it was Strunk who originally composed "the little book" (his stress; modest fella) and took the trouble of publishing it at his own expense way back when. A caviling cavalier, a knight pursuant of the English language -- or custodian of it, rather, like the dapper little dustman who cleans up after Hannibal's elephants in the credits for the old "Fractured Fairy Tales" cartoons.
White we do remember. Elwyn Brooks. "Andy." The caretaker editor of the slim volume that has cramped the hands and minds of "studentry" and wannabe writers since the end of the Great War. The teacher's pet. Clever. Trad, but not too trad, unlike loony old Fowler. Tweedy, pipe-sucking, a Down Easterner by adoption. And from his perch at the New Yorker, where he did more to help Harold Ross' fledgling take flight than anybody except Thurber (his difficult friend), a man to be reckoned with -- though not a forcible one, mind, Andy being every bit as prim and proper as his beloved Will.
Editor, senior of course, first among equals, as wise as Solomon. Creator of the "casual," the American feuilleton, with all the virtues and vices of that finicky form. A master craftsman who prized the order of a Maxwell, Taylor or O'Hara above the chaos of a Faulkner, Chandler or Bowles; Updike a safer pair of hands than Vidal. Even fellow birthday-boy Hemingway, whose spare, lean sentences seem tailor-made for the New Yorker, didn't quite measure up. Funny how Hemingway and Faulkner were good enough for "The Elements of Style," though.
No surprises, no shocks (unless cushioned). No fire, no sparks (except Muriel). No modernism of any manifestation. No dirt; dust, yes, swept under the davenport, unseen. Nothing too ethnic or foreign. Nothing that hasn't been tamed, stuffed or predigested. No hustle, no bustle, no shoulder pads or ambitions. Poseurs and arrivistes shown the back door. Neat and tidy white picket fences keeping unpleasant thingamajigs away, the washed out, autumn colors of a New England calendar.
Curiously, White's unpublished guide to good writing (quoted in Brendan Gill's "Here at the New Yorker") suggests an altogether different beast: "Before I start to write, I always treat myself to a nice dry martini. Just one, to give me the courage to get started. After that, I am on my own." High livin' there, and yet you see what a painful duty it all is for him. Not the Happy Island, is it?
We ain't got fun.
Well, the fourth edition of "The Elements of Style" has landed upon us like a parcel of feathers, and with the exception of some cosmetic changes ("she" alternating with "he" in the examples, Toni Morrison elbowing Wordsworth aside for the sake of inclusion, a dutiful foreword from stepson Roger Angell, a bland afterword by Charles Osgood), the book remains the same. Pity. Save for its brevity and general reliability and its fundamental soundness on grammar and punctuation, I've always found "the little book" annoying and a shade disingenuous. Its faults are myriad, and given White's talent for cagey plainness and elliptical straightforwardness, damn hard to call out.
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