Essays of E. B. White (42 page)

“Omit needless words!” cries the author on page 21, and into that imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul. In the days when I was sitting in his class, he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having short-changed himself, a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill, a radio prophet who had outdistanced the clock. Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times. When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class, he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his coat lapels in his hands, and in a husky, conspiratorial voice said, “Rule Thirteen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!”

He was a memorable man, friendly and funny. Under the remembered sting of his kindly lash, I have been trying to omit needless words since 1919, and although there are still many words that cry for omission and the huge task will never be accomplished, it is exciting to me to reread the masterly Strunkian elaboration of this noble theme. It goes:

There you have a short, valuable essay on the nature and beauty of brevity—sixty-three words that could change the world. Having recovered from his adventure in prolixity (sixty-three words were a lot of words in the tight world of William Strunk, Jr.), the Professor proceeds to give a few quick lessons in pruning. The student learns to cut the deadwood from “This is a subject which . . .” reducing it to “This subject . . .,” a gain of three words. He learns to trim “. . . used for fuel purposes” down to “used for fuel.” He learns that he is being chatterbox when he says “The question as to whether” and that he should just say “Whether”—a gain of four words out of a possible five.

The Professor devotes a special paragraph to the vile expression “the fact that,” a phrase that causes him to quiver with revulsion. The expression, he says, should be “revised out of every sentence in which it occurs.” But a shadow of gloom seems to hang over the page, and you feel that he knows how hopeless his cause is. I suppose I have written “the fact that” a thousand times in the heat of composition, revised it out maybe five hundred times in the cool aftermath. To be batting only .500 this late in the season, to fail half the time to connect with this fat pitch, saddens me, for it seems a betrayal of the man who showed me how to swing at it and made the swinging seem worth while.

I treasure
The Elements of Style
for its sharp advice, but I treasure it even more for the audacity and self-confidence of its author. Will knew where he stood. He was so sure of where he stood, and made his position so clear and so plausible, that his peculiar stance has continued to invigorate me—and, I am sure, thousands of other ex-students—during the years that have intervened since our first encounter. He had a number of likes and dislikes that were almost as whimsical as the choice of a necktie, yet he made them seem utterly convincing. He disliked the word “forceful” and advised us to use “forcible” instead. He felt that the word “clever” was greatly overused; “it is best restricted to ingenuity displayed in small matters.” He despised the expression “student body,” which he termed gruesome, and made a special trip downtown to the
Alumni News
office one day to protest the expression and suggest that “studentry” be substituted, a coinage of his own which he felt was similar to “citizenry.” I am told that the
News
editor was so charmed by the visit, if not by the word, that he ordered the student body buried, never to rise again. “Studentry” has taken its place. It's not much of an improvement, but it does sound less cadaverous, and it made Will Strunk quite happy.

A few weeks ago I noticed a headline in the
Times
about Bonnie Prince Charlie: “
CHARLES' TONSILS OUT
.” Immediately Rule 1 leapt to mind.

Clearly will Strunk had foreseen, as far back as 1918, the dangerous tonsillectomy of a prince, in which the surgeon removes the tonsils and the
Times
copy desk removes the final “s.” He started his book with it. I commend Rule 1 to the
Times
and I trust that Charles's throat, not Charles' throat, is mended.

Style rules of this sort are, of course, somewhat a matter of individual preference, and even the established rules of grammar are open to challenge. Professor Strunk, although one of the most inflexible and choosy of men, was quick to acknowledge the fallacy of inflexibility and the danger of doctrine.

“It is an old observation,” he wrote, “that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules.”

It is encouraging to see how perfectly a book, even a dusty rulebook, perpetuates and extends the spirit of a man. Will Strunk loved the clear, the brief, the bold, and his book is clear, brief, bold. Boldness is perhaps its chief distinguishing mark. On page 24, explaining one of his parallels, he says, “The left-hand version gives the impression that the writer is undecided or timid; he seems unable or afraid to choose one form of expression and hold to it.” And his Rule 12 is “Make definite assertions.” That was Will all over. He scorned the vague, the tame, the colorless, the irresolute. He felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong. I remember day in class when he leaned far forward in his characteristic pose—the pose of a man about to impart a secret—and croaked, “If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!” This comical piece of advice struck me as sound at the time, and I still respect it. Why compound ignorance with inaudibility? Why run and hide?

All through
The Elements of Style
one finds evidences of the author's deep sympathy for the reader. Will felt that the reader was in serious trouble most of the time, a man floundering in a swamp, and that it was the duty of anyone attempting to write English to drain this swamp quickly and get his man up on dry ground, or at least throw him a rope.

“The little book” has long since passed into disuse. Will died in 1946, and he had retired from teaching several years before that. Longer, lower textbooks are in use in English classes nowadays, I daresay—books with upswept tail fins and automatic verbs. I hope some of them manage to compress as much wisdom into as small a space, manage to come to the point as quickly and illuminate it as amusingly. I think, though, that if I suddenly found myself in the, to me, unthinkable position of facing a class in English usage and style, I would simply lean far out over the desk, clutch my lapels, blink my eyes, and say, “Get the
little
book! Get the
little
book! Get the
little
book!”

As a boy, Edward Howe Forbush, the ornithologist, was up and away
at daybreak every fine spring morning, exploring the woods and fields of West Roxbury. At thirteen, he stuffed a song sparrow—his first attempt at taxidermy. At fifteen, he gave up school in favor of birds. At sixteen, he was appointed Curator of Ornithology of the Worcester Natural History Society's museum—undoubtedly one of the youngest curators anywhere about. He began “collecting,” which means shooting birds to get a closer look at them, and he continued to experiment with taxidermy after reading a book on it. “Such mummies,” he wrote of his mounted birds, “have their uses, but later I came to see that life, not death, would solve all riddles; that an examination of the dead was merely a preliminary to a study of the living, and that it was more essential to preserve the living than the dead.”

Even when he ate a bird (he was a hungry man and ate his share of birds), Mr. Forbush always saved the skin to further his scientific researches. His life was bound up with everything on wings, and his career culminated in the great
Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States
, a three-volume summation of the avian scene. Mr. Forbush died in 1929, aged seventy-one, when the work was within a few pages of completion.

When I am out of joint, from bad weather or a poor run of thoughts, I like to sit and think about Edward Howe Forbush. I like to think of him on that June morning in 1908 when, marooned on a sandy islet near the elbow of Cape Cod, his stranded skiff awash, his oars carried to sea, a stiff sou'wester blowing, drifting sand cutting his face, sea rising, he allowed himself to become utterly absorbed in “an immense concourse of birds” resting on the sands, most of them common terns. I see him, again, concealed in the lowest branches of a spruce on a small island off the Maine coast—a soft, balmy night. He is observing the arrival of Leach's petrels, whose burrows are underneath the tree—eerie, strange birds, whose chucklings and formless sounds might have been the conversation of elves. Or on that night when he visited a heronry among the sand dunes of Sandy Neck, Barnstable: “The windless air was stagnant and fetid; swarms of stinging midges, deerflies, and mosquitoes attacked at will; and vicious wood-ticks, hanging from the vegetation, reached for me with their clinging claws, and crawled upon my limbs, seeking an opening to bury their heads in my flesh.” In such uncomfortable situations, birds being near, Mr. Forbush found the purest delight.

I managed to acquire a set of
Birds of Massachusetts
about twenty years ago, and have been reading around in the books ever since, for refreshment and instruction. The first entry in Volume I is Holbœll's grebe (grebes seem to rank nearest to the reptiles from which birds sprang). The last entry in Volume III is the golden-crowned sparrow, an accidental visitor to New England. In between these two entries are descriptive accounts and anecdotal reports of all the species known to visit New England, whether on business or on pleasure or through the accident of great storms. Although not a student of birds, I am thrown with them a good bit. It is much the same sort of experience as being thrown with people in the subway: I gaze at a female, and am filled with curiosity and a wish to know more than I do about her nesting site, breeding habits, measurements, voice, and range. In the subway, gazing at an interesting face, I have nothing to help me but my imagination. But among birds, when I encounter a new face or renew my acquaintance with an old one, I turn to Forbush for help in comprehending what I have been looking at. The information he imparts is, of course, reliable and often fascinating, but for the casual reader his great gift is his immense enthusiasm for anything that has feathers. I suppose all ornithologists rather approve of birds or they wouldn't pursue the thing, but Edward Howe Forbush during his long and busy life was obviously enchanted with them. He was the champion of birds as well as their interpreter.

A certain tidiness infects
Birds of Massachusetts.
The arrangement is calming to the nerves. You always know what you are going to get and the order in which you will get it. Let us say you wish to satisfy an idle curiosity about the barn owl and you take out Volume II and turn to page 189. First, the Latin name. Then the common name. Then the “other” name (or names)—in this case, monkey-faced owl. Then comes a section in small type: description, measurements, molts, field marks, voice, breeding, range, distribution in New England, and season in Massachusetts. This fine-print section goes into great detail. The barn owl, for instance, is such an infrequent visitor to New England that Mr. Forbush lists the names of the persons who have observed him or taken him, and the dates (“Lexington, June 10, 1915, female taken by Chas. Fowle,” and so on). When it comes to describing the sounds a bird makes, Mr. Forbush is seldom content with giving his own rendition; instead, he assembles a company of listeners and lets each one do an imitation. The voice of the barn owl, depending on who is trying to get it on paper, is “a weird scream; a nasal snore; a loud, prolonged rasping
sksck;
a series of notes
click, click, click, click, click
, resembling in character the notes of a Katydid, but delivered with diminishing emphasis and shortening intervals during the end of the series.” The song of the black-throated green warbler: Bradford Torrey translates it as “trees, trees, murmuring trees,” a pleasing, dreamy, drawling, reedlike lay; others change it to “cheese, cheese, a little more cheese”; and Dr. C. W. Townsend sets it down as “Hear me, Saint Theresa,” (Mrs. M. M. Nice recorded two hundred and seventy-four repetitions of the song in one hour.) If you have any questions about nesting sites, eggs, period of incubation, breeding habits, breeding dates, appearance of young in juvenile plumage, range, or distribution, the answers will almost certainly be here in this section.

But when he's all through with the monumental task of delineating his bird in fine print, Mr. Forbush cuts loose with larger type and wider thoughts. Under the heading “Haunts and Habits” he writes an essay about the bird, dropping his tight scientific detachment and indulging himself as stylist, enthusiast, and footloose reporter. It is in these free-swinging essays that the fun is—for me, anyway. The style of the pieces is peculiarly the author's own—a rich prose occasionally touched with purple but never with dullness or disenchantment. A devotee of the periodic sentence, he often begins his report by setting the stage, leaving the bird out of it for a few moments, as in the very first entry (Holbœll's grebe): “A bright clear day in January, a gentle breeze, a river mouth where the rippling flood flows into the sparkling sea, a lazy swell washing gently on the bar where a herd of mottled seals is basking in the sun, Old-squaws and Golden-eyes in small parties—such a scene at Ipswich is a fit setting for the great Grebe that winters on our coasts.” Or the entry for the ivory gull: “In spring dawns, fair and rosy, when the sun rising over the blue Arctic, magnificent with floating ice, reveals scene of gorgeous splendor; where ice lies in innumerable shapes, some sparkling like gems and prisms, others rearing vast, white, phantasmal forms; on the edge of the ice pack where the wind opens vast sealanes; where the mirage shows towering mountains that never were on land or sea; in summer or winter, in storm or sunshine, there dwells the white Gull, bird of the ice and snow.”