Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

The clothed city
E.B. White's "classic" book on Gotham is downright phony.
By Charles Taylor
[09/02/99]

Reviews
"Blind Eye: How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away With Murder"
A throrough investigation tells a hair-raising story but doesn't go far enough in its indictment of the medical profession.
By Bill Vourvoulias
[09/02/99]

The respectable cult
A new book asks why Christian Science has gotten away with the kind of paranoid, secretive practices that usually push religions into the kook bin.
By Laura Miller
[09/01/99]

Ivory Tower
Fear 101
Seasonal teaching anxiety reduces the most experienced professors to raw nerves and nightmares.
By Elizabeth Bobrick
[09/01/99]

Interview
Like Jonestown in slow motion
Caroline Fraser, author of "God's Perfect Child," talks about the casualties of Christian Science's belief in the power of prayer and the media's soft spot for the church.
By Laura Miller
[09/01/99]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

White allows that you may wish to go ahead and break the rules after learning them, but his idea of rule breaking is stepping on his neighbor's lawn or jaywalking on an abandoned street. His do's and don'ts reveal a cautious, conservative temperament, the WASP ethos that the unexamined life is worth living.

What White doesn't allow is that nice, polite words can fail us in dark times, in murky situations. His famous letter (widely anthologized) to the editor of the New York Herald Tribune, protesting the blacklist of the Hollywood Ten in 1947 and the Trib's craven defense of it, has all the bite of an ornery rabbit. I just can't picture him taking his coat and specs off the way I can Kempton.

If White has a credo lurking about "The Elements of Style," it can be found in his use of this passage taken from E.M. Forster's "Two Cheers for Democracy": "I believe in aristocracy, though -- if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet." A worthy sentiment, seriously, though I doubt White ever lived it the way Forster, patron of tram conductors and palace barbers, did. (Nevertheless, White would probably feel right at home with the Bloomsburies: the cult of friendship, the sniffy, finger-extended gentility, the smug self-satisfaction, the blancmange -- an accent and ocean removed from the gin and wisecracks of the Algonquin Round Table.) Clues like the Forster passage litter "The Elements of Style."

Also Today The clothed city "Here is New York," E.B. White's "classic" book on Gotham, is downright phony.

The most telling, however, is the Orwell in Chapter II. A parody updating a famous verse from the King James bible (Ecclesiastes 9:11: "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift ...") to what Orwell called "modern" English, it is a typical prose "improvement": tin-eared, anemic and dull. But for Orwell this was not just a matter of tarnished beauty, it was a matter of ethics as well. The source, "Politics and the English Language" (which White doesn't mention), is an essay relevant to every season. In it Orwell writes: "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like cuttlefish squirting out ink." But that's not all: "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." To Orwell the decline and fall of a language had political and economic causes; defending it was too important to be left to the grammarians.

But then Orwell was a bit strident, wasn't he? Sweaty. Smelly. Polemical. Injects opinion. Not our kind. Yet there is a rich Anglo-American tradition of polemical, opinionated writing, two-fisted, unfair, wrong-headed, bloody rude, stretching back to the scatological anti-Lutheran diatribes of Thomas More, the roundhead tracts of Milton, the revolutionary pamphlets of Paine, the excoriations of Burke, the moral fervor of Orwell, the small personal voice of Doris Lessing. Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, Nicholas von Hoffman, Alexander Cockburn, Molly Ivins and the scribes at the Baffler are among the best practitioners of it today. Unfair. Bloody rude. Too bad. As my favorite anglophile, Voltaire, wrote more than two centuries ago: "Qui plume a, guerre a." (Who writes, fights.) You would never know it from reading "The Elements of Style."

If I am harsh it is because this book has had an influence far out of proportion to its actual merit. It is taught as gospel truth, seen as the last word. It hedges, it trims, it hems, it shears, it is the all-purpose weed-eater. It is easy and undemanding. It is a numbers game: 10 million of these babies sold, therefore there must be something in it. It is the perfect book for those who mistake etiquette for grace, who do not want to think too deeply about writing or about the way we live now or about anything at all. But if you believe, as I do, that the act of writing is an extension of thought, you will find this book thoughtless. If you believe that honest writing operates within some kind of moral framework, you will find that this book operates in a vacuum. And if you believe that a good writing style is "an intimate and almost involuntary expression of the personality of the writer, and then only if the writer's personality is worth expressing" (Bertrand Russell), you will find the personality of its author wanting.
salon.com | Sept. 2, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon