So, in desultory style, I bought another of Epstein\u2019s familiar essays (which he defines as a \u201cline out for a walk\u201d), and then before the summer was out I had read seven books of familiar essays and four books of literary criticism, and I was ready for any and all that he was writing or editing. So, I bought his The Norton Book of Personal Essays. Done with his (true) books, I mustered the courage to write him a note of appreciation and began to tell my friends to read him. My dad found him wonderful, and that matters because he is my dad and because he is a retired English teacher who likes authors who can make a page an anticipation of blessings. What Joseph Epstein does is make every page a delight to read, regardless of the topic \u2013 and he writes about everything. He does so with \u00e9lan, with wit, and a touch of gentle cynicism as his tarragon.<\/p>\n
\nAnother of his spices is a persistent nagging about style, vocabulary, and general writerly comportment. He calls it in one of his magnificent (and very early) essays, \u201cThe State of the Lingo.\u201d\u00a0 Nice Chicago-like bluster in that title. He says, \u201ca bad word seems to send for relatives soon after its arrival.\u201d Were he to read this essay, he\u2019d probably be shaking his head at me for thinking I avoid bad words and their relatives, but I make it my aim to learn from noble writers like Epstein. There are others, and I include those who talk about writing intelligently \u2013 like William Safire, John Simon, William Zinsser, E.B. White (with his teacher Will Strunk), Eric Partridge, Jacques Barzun, and the Cyclopean H.W. Fowler, whose recent biography, The Warden of English (by Jenny McMorris), reveals how he could enter every English home while remaining in his desolate, Gallic island home on Guernsey. Someone had learned from him well enough to say of him, after his death, that he was \u201ca Christian in all but actual faith.\u201d Bad theology, perhaps, but a great use of language and a stinging barb in several directions \u2013 and Fowler had plenty of barbs himself.<\/p>\n
He also had plenty of wishes, and he wrote a book about them. Originally called Si mihi (Latin for \u201cIf I had \u2026\u201d), the book was re-published (the hyphen looks better when writing of a Fowler who despised \u201cYankeefication\u201d) as If Wishes Were Horses where he lays down his wishes about frankness, imagination, opinions, charity, ideas, religion, a sense of beauty, manners, philosophy, cats and wishes themselves. The Morning Post called his morsel of thoughts a \u201ctrue autobiography of a second-rate soul\u201d. For all their punctiliousness about manners and especially the swashbuckling demeanor of Americans, the English can deliver the fatal punch. His may be a second-rate soul, but his grammar and thoughts are first-rate even for the snobbish Morning Post. Who else has spoken of the \u201cefficacy of finesse & bluff\u201d, or \u201cthree-quarters of my leisure (which is synonymous with my time)\u201d, or \u201cIt is, after all, the uncertainties of life that make it worth living\u201d, or the (rather gloomy) \u201chuman progress strikes me as practical, & immortality as moonshine\u201d\u201d? (I place my commas and period and question mark after the quotation marks because I like the English way, thanks in part to Fowler. The American choice of the double quotation marks [\u201c\u201d] is as overdone as Texas, but Texas has the oil and guns and we need to keep the latter there without losing the former, so I conform.) <\/p>\n
Some who write on writing are not full of moonshine, but some are \u2013 like Anne Lamott and Annie Dillard, who have done some nice writing but who are not yet up to snuff when it comes to telling us how to write. If I want to know what ought not to be written, I pay more attention to the likes of William Safire or Bill Walsh \u2013 who ought to know as Copy Desk Chief for the Washington Post \u2013 and whose title is worth the price of the book, Lapsing into a Comma. I confess to title seduction; I succumbed to Peter Bowler\u2019s snob-inviting The Superior Person\u2019s Book of Words and I occasionally dip into an entry or two on high-hat words. If you use \u201calliaceous\u201d after an Italian dinner and your hearer knows you mean \u201ctasting of garlic,\u201d you will be surprised and perhaps disappointed that you did not get a leg up. Since Bowler\u2019s book is arranged in an abecedarian order, I skip ahead to a later entry: \u201cTime,\u201d you say, \u201cis a nepenthe,\u201d and you mean that your sorrow will eventually dissipate over time \u2013 if you say this \u2013 you will have passed Bowler\u2019s test. Snobs are fond of what Anne Fadiman has described in her delightful \u201cThe Joy of Sesquipedalians\u201d (in Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader) \u2013 words of uncommon length, like making a point by using \u201cithyphallic\u201d or darkening the climate with \u201ckakodemon\u201d. Anne Fadiman is not a common reader and I don\u2019t use words like this, except in play and essays, but I favor writers who know their meanings.<\/p>\n
Does that make me a snob? Not according to Joseph Epstein\u2019s Snobbery: The American Version, even if he does quote a fair sampling of the English, who do know first-hand something about snobbery. Epstein: \u201cThe essence of snobbery, I should say, is arranging to make yourself feel superior at the expense of other people.\u201d We are all snobs now and again, but my love of language, of style, of vocabulary, and of the person who puts on paper a sentence that combines insight in a way that sparkles is not snobbery. But it does lead me to writers and thinkers that many simply don\u2019t read, and we are back to the shelves of Barnes & Noble where the common American does not stand.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, in desultory style, I bought another of Epstein\u2019s familiar essays (which he defines as a \u201cline out for a walk\u201d), and then before the summer was out I had read seven books of familiar essays and four books of literary criticism, and I was ready for any and all that he was writing or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1741],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-blogging"],"yoast_head":"\n