Having solved the shipping problem that has been eating away at my vitals for three weeks, I feel well enough to write a proper entry, complete with picture, but I think I’ll just keep my head down in case the well-being goes gossamer. What shipping problem, you ask? See how nice I am, that I don’t bore you with all my troubles? This one was particularly odious, in that I brought my full reserves of obstinacy to not dealing with it. I have only myself to spank.

(However, nota bene: I have solved the shipping problem prospectively only. No further boxes will languish at the Bay Shore branch of the Post Office in the wake of the one that I sent to an address where, it turns out, boxes from the Post Office are not accepted! (Fire Island Ferries deals only with UPS and FedEx.) As for the one that, I hope, will be returned in due course to us here in New York, it was a test, containing nothing very valuable.

***

Now, back to F L Lucas’s Style: On the Art of Writing Well, originally published in 1955. A formidable book! I wish I could remember how I heard of it. (That I hadn’t heard of it until just this summer is what’s really remarkable.) Never having spent much time with Strunk & White, I can’t say how very different Lucas is, but he’s certainly more comprehensive (longer and deeper)  than they are, and he values what used to be called Continental literature at a level wildly beyond the stretch of American popularity. Lucas extols the classical virtues of clarity and brevity and variety, but it was only for the second edition of Style that this Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, could be persuaded to footnote his copious extracts from foreign letters, chiefly French, with translations. The first edition, cannot have struck any reader as clear, brief, or varied (the examples being incomprehensible to the monophone).  

In the new Harriman House reprint of Style, a somewhat rebarbative studio photograph of the author serves as the frontispiece; you can see it here. Looking at it makes me feel that I have just spent hours in a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, and I cannot quite reconcile it with Lucas’s chapter on “Good Humour and Gaiety.” And yet…

The practical conclusion? That must remain, I think, a question of temperament and of tact. There are some people with as little gift for gaiety as Milton’s elephant trying to amuse Adam and Eve by twisting its “lithe proboscis” — or as Milton himself. Heaven forbid that I should tempt any such into the quicksands of facetiousness. Better I should be taken by the neck and cast into the Cam.

It’s the right time for me to be reading this book, though. Writing intelligibly has never been more important to me. I fear that I don’t. I’m afraid that I chatter in a donnish patois all my own, composed like a bird’s nest of the most miscellaneous straws. As a sort of compensation, I have come to share Lucas’s dislike of everyday contractions, especially ‘s, which can stand for either is or has, an ambiguity that poses no difficulty to the native speaker but that may well, given the other demands of my way of writing, add an unnecessary burden to friends from other tongues. At the same time, I can’t quite bring myself to say “I am afraid” instead.

And then there is the future to consider. How much of today’s writing will be comprehensible a century from now? I should prefer most of mine to be. I am particularly worried by the sporting verbs that permeate vernacular English today, almost everywhere it is spoken. How long will “step up to the plate” mean anything? Sometimes I find myself using terms that I don’t really understand myself, such as “full court press.” I have looked into this phrase several times, but I rest assured that its meaning is a sealed book to anyone lacking an interest in basketball.

Finally, there is Lucas’s concern for “the purity of English.” It sounds awful to talk about the purity of anything, but there’s no other way to describe a problem that presses ever more heavily on my mind. It would be better to talk of the strength of the language, perhaps, because that’s what’s lost when standards are lowered in order to make an enormous intake of new speakers feel comfortable. This is no merely contemporary matter; what I have in mind is the vast immigration that made Germans the most numerous ancestors of today’s white population. Its impact remains undigested. Also: the thorough dissemination of Yiddish throughout American humor. To the extent that these influences add to the language’s flexibility and expressiveness, they are most welcome. To the extent that they replace its native structures (“graduate college”; “shop Bloomingdale’s”), they are even more noxious than the affectations of French and Latin that have troubled the English now and then in the past, worse for seizing the minds of the uneducated. We have always counted on the uneducated to remind us of our roots; it is in counterpoise to the oaken tenacity of unlettered speech that English has incorporated ways of thinking and of speaking from almost every culture with which it has come into contact. Ironically, the pigheaded Midcountry ban on bilingualism threatens the degradation of English as much as any other factor. We would all speak better English if we had to speak a little Spanish.  

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 at 5:21 pm.