Strunk & White & Me

When asked in interviews as I travel the globe–oh, wait. That’s my fantasy life. Were I to be asked in interviews as I traveled the globe posing as a famous writer, who my greatest influences were, I would have to put among the foremost William Strunk and E.B. White, whose Elements of Style had as profound an effect on my writing style as anything. I discovered this tiny tome when I was 18 and taking a year off between high school and college. I had entered the work world as a gas jockey, pumping gas and washing windshields. Since I was still living with my folks, cash was plentiful, and my friend Tom and I would haunt the East Side of Providence at every available opportunity. We walked endlessly around College Hill and talked of the things that bright 18-year-olds talk about: Who am I? What the hell am I going to do with my life? Why won’t the world just submit to my brilliance? Throw in a dash of juvenile philosophy and whining about girls and their general distaste for me, and you get the idea.

Interspersed with our walks, along with the occasional spontaneous trip to various parts of southern New England, were movies. There was a repertory movie theater, the Avon, and we submerged ourselves in movies both classic and foreign several times a week. After the movie, we’d often stop next door at the College Hill Bookstore (which I just found out closed in 2004) and peruse the stock. Virginia Woolf was all the rage at the time, and piles of books both by and about her were littered about the store.

On one trip, I picked up the slenderest volume I ever held that didn’t have drawings in it, The Elements of Style. I think I caught E.B. White’s name on the cover, and that’s what drew me in. As I flipped through it, Tom looked over and said, “You should get that. It’s good.” And so I did.

I, of course, devoured it. It was straightforward and precise, and kept to its precepts with vigor and charm. Unlike most books in its field, it was entertaining and just a good read. I always particularly enjoyed both E.B. White’s Introduction and the chapter he added to Professor Strunk’s stark four chapters of rules and imperatives called “An Approach to Style (with a list of reminders).” Paul Krugman recently cited an essay by George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” as being “the best essay on writing ever written.” I hate to disagree with the learned professor, but Chapter V of The Elements of Style is far superior and more useful than Orwell’s essay. It’s also far more entertaining, and one of my main criticisms of Orwell is this: If the essay is so damn good, why does it put me in deeper and deeper trance the further I get into it? Good writing is interesting writing (which is why I don’t read Henry James), and Orwell’s essay is dull and pretentious. White’s essay, on the other hand, sweeps the reader along on a humorous and trim journey past the shoals and reefs that lurk hoping to sink any piece of writing. He persuades without polemic and encourages through his own shining example. He recognizes the genius of both Hemingway and Faulkner and understands that using Latinate words is no sin as long as those are the words that a writer requires to make his own sort of music.

In my first spasm of enthusiasm for “the little book,” I pared away mercilessly at my prose until just the bones remained. I experimented in minimalism, even though I did not become familiar with that term until some years later. Since then, as with my frame, I’ve added weight to my prose. There is more often a roll to my sentences than there once was. Still, even with the passage of time and the influence of Raymond Chandler and Samuel Johnson and a hundred others on my prose, The Elements of Style holds a special place in my heart. It started me on the road to being the writer I have become, and I will continue to do my best to omit those needless words and to write with nouns and verbs.