Style and Alchemy Strunk, White and their influential 'little' book. STYLIZED
A Slightly Obsessive History of tiffany & Whites
"The Elements of Style." By Mark Garvey. Illustrated. 208 pp. Touchstone/ Simon
& Schuster. $22.99.
"I HATE the guts of English grammar," an illustrious stylist once wrote.
Reader, perhaps you can relate. But would you believe it if I told you the
writer was E. B. White, as in half of Strunk and White, those august ambassadors
of precision and clarity behind "The Elements of Style"? This grain of wit is
one among many unearthed by Mark Garvey in "Stylized," his "slightly obsessive"
history of "Elements," which is much more than basic history and undeniably
obsessive.
Garvey, a writer and editor apparently drawn to minutiae (a previous book was
"Come Together: The Official John Lennon Educational Tour Bus Guide to Music and
Video"), gives us Strunk's and White's lives and credos; a meticulous record of
"Elements" emendations ; a survey of the shifting theoretical winds in English
departments; expositions on the morality of writing - a whole lot for a 200-page
book. (Then again, "Elements" is no lightweight tract, and it is half as
long.)
Many people already know that in 1957, White received from a bangles
a 43-page version of "Elements," which Strunk, a professor of his at Cornell,
had self-published in 1918. In a "Letter From the East," White introduced New
Yorker readers to what was known on campus as "'the little book' ... stress on
the word 'little.'" It was meant to relieve the tedium of correcting papers
(teachers could jot in the margins "See Rule 9!"). White admired "Elements" for
the "audacity" of its author, for its "clear, brief, bold" advice leavened by
"Strunkian humor."
But now we have the full back story. Strunk, a philologist versed in
Sanskrit, Icelandic, Old Bulgarian and "the history of French verbs," met White,
a gifted student with no time for dreary courses he got a D in English before
finding Strunk - in 1919. Kindred spirits who talked shop while sipping
"shandygaff" (diluted beer), they stayed in touch as White's star rose, until
Strunk's death in 1946.
Over a decade later, White's New Yorker essay charmed Jack Case, an editor at
Macmillan who imagined that "Elements" could catch fire in an age when English
instructors had gone "whoring after strange gods." Letters were written,
revisions and additions were made, and soon a double-bylined "Elements" was
inflaming (in positive and negative senses) readers, its success unequivocal:
200,000 copies sold in its first year. (Now 50 years in print, it has sold more
than 10 million copies.)
A high point of "Stylized" is the White-Case correspondence. With apologies
to my colleagues, I must say that few editors today can match the drollery with
which White detailed his recasting of Strunk's text: "The first two sections of
the 'Composition' chapter sustained the heaviest attack . . . they were narrow
and bewildering. (In their new form they are merely bewildering.)"
White didn't really hate grammar, of course, even if his patience was tried
by various "outraged precisionists and comma snatchers." He simply believed that
one must know, or at least intuit, the principles of lucid writing before one
can flout them artfully. I've heard plenty of writers dismiss "Elements" as
pedantic, limiting, hypocritical, repressive, "a little bow-tie-wearing book,"
as the writer Will Blythe says to Garvey. Yet while one may raise an eyebrow at
some of Garvey's pronouncements ("to believe in Strunk and White is to believe
that truth exists"), he argues convincingly that critics who malign "Elements"
miss the point. Think about it: a humorless man wouldn't write about radiant
pigs and talking spiders, and a strident prescriptivist wouldn't declare
language "rings
in flux ... a living stream."
For a book extolling brevity, "Stylized" is baggy in parts. Between chapters,
Garvey trots out extended meditations from a few of his "favorite writers,"
which contain amusing bits (Frank McCourt, we learn, was "terrified of
semicolons") but disrupt the flow and leave one pining to return to Strunk and
White. So if you read "Stylized," stick to the meat of it. Skim or skip the
bumper sections. Linger over White's letters. And do not resist the urge to go
back and read the little book.
