STYLIZED
You should read it
STYLIZED
A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style.”
By Mark Garvey
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 Johnn Lenon 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.
Many people already know that in 1957, White received from a friend a 43-page version of “Elements,” which William Strunk Jr., 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.’ 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.
White didn’t really hate grammar, of course, even if his patience was tried by various “outraged precisionists and comma snatchers.” 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. 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 (Frannk 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.
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