How to write: old style . . .

BLITHE SPIRIT Oak Park IL 4/24/96

Zeno, the third-century B.C. Greek and founder of Stoicism, cited five qualities of good (more or less formal) speech and writing:

* Language faultless in grammar and free from "careless" vulgarity

* Lucidity, that is, presenting thought so it's easily understood

* Conciseness, using no more words than necessary

* Appropriateness, using a style akin to the subject (which moves up and down on the formality scale

* At least semi-formality, avoiding colloquialism.

Firm in his sense of excellence as a Greek, he cited "vices of style" -- barbarism, which is violation of usage of Greeks of good standing, and solecism, in which a sentence has an "incongruous" construction. In other words, follow rules and respect tradition. We can't communicate without them.

It's advice to chew on, based on (a) his sense of excellence in being who he was and (b) his sense of going by rules, not being bigger than the world about him.

How to write: new style . . .

Henry James, American stylist par excellence, loved the novels of H.G. Wells, English producer of best-sellers. He read Wells's novels -- War of the Worlds and the like -- casting off his usual attention to critical norms "with the most cynical inconsistency," so enthusiastic was he for Wells's talent without art. He told Wells that too.

Can you see James, the patrician, explaining that to Wells? With steady gaze. Or Wells reading it in a letter, looking off after he did so, wondering whether to laugh or cry? Or not caring a fig.

James believed in reporting as an art form, said it took imagination "of a very high order" to "extract importance" for events while remaining faithful to them, "free only to select and never to modify or add." Oh my, news people pay heed.

Of course. No writer is a stenographer. Everything gets filtered. It's silly when people emphasize having something on tape, as if how the exact words decided all. "The facts, sir, are nothing without their nuances," Norman Mailer told the dictatorial judge at the Chicago conspiracy trial. Much more does context decide. No electronic marvel replaces overall understanding brought by the writer to the scene at hand.

Writing as medicine . . .

When the 18th-century cleric Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy, wrote, it was part of his "constant endeavor to fence against the infirmities of ill health," he said in its dedication. Fencing against sickness, he furthermore wanted to "beguile (the reader) of one moment's pain," since "every time a man smiles . . . it adds something to this Fragment of Life."

That's writing and reading as doing much for mental health. He also called writing, "when properly managed . . . a different name for conversation." So as a reader, you can sit with Laurie Sterne and listen. Or to Samuel Johnson, his contemporary, who did not approve of him, or to lots of other people, conversing with them.

Try Hannah Arendt, by the way. Her Totalitarianism is not 100% easy to follow, it's so packed with details. But she's definitely conversing with you, or giving a great classroom lecture; and you pick up the essence of the woman as you go along. She's judicious, but without a too careful unwillingness to judge.

Her footnotes are great too. She reports how the Nazis usurped the designation "German," so that you weren't really German if you didn't buy Nazi thinking. It's called getting the psychological upper hand. You seize the high ground and won't give it up. Your moral superiority depends on it. And without moral superiority, where would you be?

Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em . . .

As much as I reject a romantic approach to problem-solving, I still fall for those Englishmen who took over (were given) the name for themselves. That's where "blithe spirit" came from after all. "Hail to thee . . . Bird thou never wert. . . " More later on this.

For today's romantic, consider Shelley on self-integration, though he does not use that 20th-century term. [I wrote in ‘96, but looking it up, I find it’s been in use, if not with current self-help intonations, since before 1610, being One of the 40% oldest English words!]

Shelley: "We want [i.e., lack] the creative faculty to imagine (what) we know . . . the generous impulse to act (on what) we imagine; . . . our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest . . . (all) for want of the poetical faculty . . ."

We're on a head trip, as 1960s critics used to say. There's an edge to everything we know, a sharpness. So we're brittle -- another shrink's term. We haven't time for Omar Khayyam's jug of wine, loaf of bread and thou down by the riverside. (Try the Fox River on a mild summer's day, just off the main drag in Geneva.)

Thing is, we love that ideal but can't achieve it. Which is where reading comes in, the quiet conversation that heals. Unless we read junk, of course.

Own your own books . . .

. . . says Ruskin. Mark them for referral, "as a soldier can seize weapons in his armory."

Robert Louis Stephenson on his deathbed in Samoa, to a visitor: "My God, man, have you a Horace?" He meant a copy of Horace the Roman poet. Mother's milk for the creator of Treasure Island, solace for his final hours.

Malcolm X would cab it between planes to a big city's public library, rushing to look up a word in the reference section, he told his autography ghost writer, the author of Roots. Words had a fascination for him. Some rush to a bar. Not Malcolm, whose mind was working hard.

Wit, anyone? . . .

In his "Defense of Poesy," the 16th-century English poet Sir Philip Sidney speaks of the poet "freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit." Point is, there's a whole world in there. Writing corrals it. Writing calls for freedom and discipline, insight and craft.

Plumbing it, you become part of the human race's effort at explaining itself.