“In summer all right-minded boys built huts in the furze-hill behind the College–little lairs whittled out of the heart of the prickly bushes, full of stumps, odd root-ends, and spikes, but, since they were strictly forbidden, palaces of delight. And for the fifth summer in succession, Stalky, McTurk, and Beetle (this was before they reached the dignity of a study) had built like beavers a place of retreat and meditation, where they smoked.”

This, the first paragraph in Rudyard Kipling’s book Stalky and Company, reveals a great deal about what is to follow. The stories in the book are set in an English public school; the boys who attend this school are fond of breaking the school rules; and three boys in particular — Stalky, McTurk, and Beetle — surpass the other boys in bad behavior and daring. They smoke. Just for starters.

Stalky and Company was published in 1899. It recounts the pranks played by Stalky, McTurk, and Beetle on their hapless masters at a British public school. The masters are no match for the boys’ ingenuity and rapidity of execution, as when they lure a hated master into being arrested for trespassing, or plant the pungently decaying corpse of a cat in the ceiling of the common room of a rival “form” — some of whose members had suggested that the three pranksters were paying insufficient attention to person hygiene.

The reviews of the book were mixed. H.G. Wells called the three boys “mucky little sadists.” Henry James thought the book “deplorable.” Teddy Roosevelt said that it was a book “which ought never to have been written, for there is hardly a single form of meanness which it does not seem to extol, or of school mismanagement which it does not seem to applaud.” Other reviewers, remembering what it was like to be a boy, commended the stories’ humor and realism.

The reviewer who called out the stories’ realism was not far wrong, for Stalky and Company is a semi-autobiographical tale of the adventures of Kipling and two close friends when they were students at a preparatory school that specialized in educating boys for jobs in the civil service and the army.

“Stalky” is the knick-name of a character based on a real person named Lionel Dunsterville. The knick-name means clever in the way that Odysseus was clever. Stalky in later life served in the army, and became a brilliant soldier.

Reginald (or Reggie) Beetle, is a bespectacled boy with a literary bent, based on Kipling himself.

William “Turkey” M’Turk (pronounced McTurk) is heir to a landed estate in Ireland. Normally quiet and modest, he can, to further the pranks of the group, affect the grand seigneur. His character is based on George Charles Beresford.

My favorite among the stories is “Regulus”, about a Latin class taught by a master named King. The class is working its way through the fifth ode of the third book of odes by the Roman poet Horace. Kipling prefixes to the story the following historical note:

Regulus, a Roman general, defeated the Carthaginians 256 B.C., but was next year defeated and taken prisoner by the Carthaginians, who sent him to Rome with an embassy to ask for peace or an exchange of prisoners. Regulus strongly advised the Roman Senate to make no terms with the enemy. He then returned to Carthage and was put to death.

We are no doubt right to assume that the following classroom exchange is drawn from life:

‘Beetle, the translation of _delubris_, please.’  [King speaking]

Beetle raised his head from his shaking arm long enough to answer: ‘Ruins, sir.’ 

There was an impressive pause while King checked off crimes on his fingers. Then to Beetle the much-enduring man addressed winged words: 

‘Guessing,’ said he. ‘Guessing, Beetle, as usual, from the look of _delubris_ that it bore some relation to _diluvium_ or deluge, you imparted the result of your half-baked lucubrations to Winton who seems to have been lost enough to have accepted it. Observing next, your companion’s fall, from the presumed security of your undistinguished position in the rear-guard, you took another pot-shot. The turbid chaos of your mind threw up some memory of the word “dilapidations” which you have pitifully attempted to disguise under the synonym of “ruins.”‘ 

As this was precisely what Beetle had done he looked hurt but forgiving. ‘We will attend to this later,’ said King. 

One of the boys in the class is found guilty of infraction of the rules and receives a caning as punishment. He accepts his fate without protest, like Regulus returning to Carthage because honor requires it. King, supposing this to be a sign that Horace has gotten through to at least one of his students, is delighted.

The last story in the book gives a glimpse of the horrid three in adult life — all of them grown into respectable responsible maturity, each of them an honor, in his own way, to Queen, country, and empire. That there is irony here was hard to miss, but what exactly was the point of the irony? Is it that looks deceive, and that the worst boys are really eggs that will hatch good citizens? Or is it that the very badness of bad boys, surviving in discreet form into their adulthood, is what makes them of such great service to their sovereign and empire? The latter possibility disturbed many readers and left them with a bad taste more unpleasant than the stench of a putrid cat in the ceiling of a form’s common room.

These stories are really awful and a heck of a lot of fun to read.

I never felt so American as when I visited Northern England a few years ago. I often found myself trying to strike up a conversation with a stranger in a situation where there seemed nothing else to do — for example, while sitting with the stranger on a bench at a bus stop. In this situation, I found the silence between us to be barely tolerable. My stranger, I soon discovered, found anything other than silence to be barely tolerable. I checked my loquacity and became interested in an odd looking building across the street.

This incident is, one might say, merely the tip of the diverging sensibilities of Yanks and Brits iceberg.

This divergence, between two peoples puzzled by their sense of kinship with each other, can be illustrated endlessly, and has been, and will be. I recently became aware of a most radical and vivid disjuncture of Yank and Brit sensibilities in the matter of travel and travel’s literary by-product, travel literature.

Both Yanks and Brits like to travel. The difference is that Yanks like to travel where they can go without a passport, while the Brits go all over the planet.

When Dinah Shore sang “See the USA in your Chevrolet”, America listened. The newly built interstate highway system beckoned. Americans travelled hundreds, nay thousands of miles for the privilege of sitting at a lunch counter and enjoying a hamburger and a coffee just like the hamburgers and coffee at home. In fact, Americans perfected the art of traveling without leaving home. So passionate is an American’s attachment to home that he can now buy a true mobile home — in essence a three bedroom apartment on wheels.

American travel literature reflects the American passion for home. The journals of Lewis and Clarke record the wonders that they saw — buffaloes, plains Indians, wild rivers, prairies, stupendous mountains, deserts — all now incorporated into the immense and majestic space that Americans think of as home. William Bartram and John James Audubon left us classic accounts of soon to disappear wilderness east of the Mississippi. Mark Twain wrote a sublime book called Life on the Mississippi. Henry David Thoreau wrote another classic, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Theodore Dreiser and John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac and William Least Heat Moon wrote about the sort of travel made possible by the internal combustion engine. Henry Beston made travel an interior philosophical journey in The Outermost House.

Of course, certain foreign destinations remain popular with Americans: London, Paris, and Rome, in particular. But for the most part, Americans find America to be world enough.

The Brits are really different in this respect. Really different. They travel to places that are Not Home. Insularity is a British trait too: of course. A King of England once said “Abroad is bloody.” Still, the Brits are on the move.

Of course, until recently, they were the head of an empire on which the sun never set, and they were understandably curious about their possessions. But they not only traveled more, they traveled with a difference: they knew something about the lands and peoples that they visited, and they came home knowing even more. And they wrote books about the lands they traveled to — some of which have become classics of English literature.

I am 73 years old and when I consider how little of this remarkable planet I have seen with my own eyes, how little of it I have set foot on, how exceptionally few places I have left money behind in, I wonder what the hell I did with my decades. My only consolation as I reflect on the unpardonably insular life that I have led is to read the best books by traveling Brits.

So here is the list of British travel books that I intend to read if the Lord and kale grant me time.

Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, by George Dennis (1814 – 1898). This classic work is one of the earliest scholarly studies of the mysterious people who furnished Rome with some of its kings and its calendar and some of its religion and who paid dearly for being a mature civilization when Rome was still inventing the Cloaca Maxima. Rome got rid of its kings, declared itself a republic, and then, some think, went about systematically destroying any evidence that it had ever been dominated by the Etruscans or owed anything to them culturally. Dennis explored Etruscan tombs, pondered the remains of their art, and regretted the indecipherability of their language. He also wrote well.

Eothen, by Alexander Kinglake (1809 — 1891). The author was a friend of Tennyson and a successful London lawyer who was bored by the practice of law and who sought fulfillment in writing a highly regarded history of the Crimean War, in hating Napoleon III, and in traveling in the Levant and Egypt. Eothen (Greek for “from the east”) is the book that he wrote about his travels. The book is said to have been influenced by the Greek historian Herodotus. (Say it like a Brit: her o DO tus.). He wrote charmingly.

The Historical Geography of the Holy Land by George Adam Smith (1856 — 1942). Smith was a Scottish theologian known for his commentaries on the book of Isaiah. He traveled widely in what is now Israel and Syria, and came to believe that the Old Testament cannot be understood without detailed knowledge of the physical nature of the land with which the Biblical narratives are concerned. He writes vividly about a part of the Earth that he assumed would be forevermore a “museum of church history”.

Travels in Arabia Deserta, by Charles M. Doughty (1843 – 1926). The books I have noted above are neither odd nor eccentric, unless you consider passionate curiosity about the past to be odd and eccentric, in which case it’s too bad you are a chump. Doughty’s book is odd and eccentric. It describes the time he spent in the Arabian peninsula circa 1880, accompanying a pilgrimage to Mecca and living with beduins. His life was often in danger and the rigors of life in the desert almost destroyed his health. He published the account of his travels, his masterwork, in 1888.

This book is written in pre-Elizabethan English, with a few Victorianisms thrown in. Doughty said that the style resulted from his quest for linguistic purity. Here is the first paragraph of Travels in Arabia Deserta:

A new voice hailed me of an old friend when, first returned from tbe Peninsula, I paced again in that long street of Damascus which is called Straight; and suddenly taking me wondering by the hand “ Tell me (said he), since thou art here again in the peace and assurance of Ullah, and whilst we walk, as in the former years, toward the new blossoming orchards, full of the sweet spring as the garden of God, what moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia ?

I don’t know how many of these books I will live to read, but I am optimistic. I believe that longevity is promoted not so much by kale in the diet or by exercise in the daily routine as by waking up each morning excited by the thought of all the great books that you are going to read.

Physicists and other such people whose profession it is to think deeper than the rest of us, have concluded that time travel is impossible. My hope, however, is that at a school called MIT, in Cambridge Massachusetts, a few people are still trying to get such a thing to work. MIT is just a few miles down the road from where I live, and when someone there gets time travel to work, I’ll be first in line to give it a try. I have literary projects that can be carried out only with the aid of time travel.

First, I want to be present at a performance of Hamlet in which Shakespeare plays the role of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Or find out that he never played that role. After the performance, I’d like to work my way backstage and tell Shakespeare that a lot of people where (when?) I come from think that Francis Bacon wrote your plays. What do you have to say to that? And of course I want to hear how he pronounced English. Would I be able to understand him? And how did he say his lines? Did Olivier and Gielgud get it right? And what about his audience? Did they actually understand what was being said and done up there on the stage? Too many questions, maybe.

Next, I would like to be in Lord Chesterfield’s parlor when he picks up and reads the letter that Samuel Johnson wrote to him, declining Chesterfield’s offer to help Johnson, now when he had finally, after years of poverty and toil, published his dictionary of the English language. Chesterfield had rebuffed Johnson when he asked for help at the start of his work on the dictionary. Johnson’s letter is the greatest eff-you epistle in the English language, and perhaps in any language. Johnson wrote, in part:

Seven years, my lord, have now past since I waited in your outward rooms or was repulsed from your door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before. . . . Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind: but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it.”

Lord Chesterfield is thought to have been impressed by the letter and to have said something like “My word, Johnson really is an able man!” Yeah, right.

After that, I would like to be present at one of the lectures by Henry David Thoreau that made the members of his audience laugh until they had tears in their eyes. That’s right. Thoreau had ‘em rolling in the aisles. This is according to his recent biographer Laura Dassow Walls.

Thoreau liked to try out his writing on audiences, and much of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and Walden, and the posthumous Cape Cod was first delivered as lectures before his neighbors and townspeople. They relished his sarcasm, hyperbole, and deadpan wit. This raises an important question of interpretation. We don’t think of Thoreau as a funny man. To the extent that we don’t, we fail to understand him.

Finally, I would like to be standing next to Lincoln when he deliveres his Second Inaugural Address. He is said to have had a tenor voice, which carries far. Still, he could have expected to reach only the closest part of his huge audience. Did he raise his voice? And how did he deliver that sublime speech? It would have challenged a professional actor. Walter Bagehot, who edited the London Economist during Lincoln’s presidency, wrote after Lincoln’s death that the speech had extorted an “involuntary outburst of admiration” from the editor of The Times, a long standing critic of Lincoln.

What did his voice sound like? We would know very likely, if Edison had invented the phonograph fifteen years earlier. Lincoln was fascinated by technological advances and would have invited Edison to the White House for a recording session.

Anyway, Lincoln spent much of his youth in southern Indiana and would have formed his speech patterns and accent there. This makes it likely that he sounded like another tenor from southern Indiana, the Hall of Fame power forward of the Boston Celtics, Larry Bird.

And that is why I need a time machine.

Everyone knows that people today read less than than their parents and grandparents did; best selling books have been written to deplore this fact. Several groups of people, however, read as much as anyone ever did, because their professions require them to. These are college professors and critics in and out of academe. But according to Robert Alter, a distinguished scholar of Hebrew scripture at the University of California Berkley, many people who are professionally committed to reading no longer believe that literature, whether novels, stories, or poetry, can be a legitimate source of inspiration, knowledge, or pleasure. They see literature either as a mirage without substance, an exercise in solipsism without connection to objective reality, or an inexcusable self-indulgence in a world still tormented by injustice, poverty, and war. In his essay “The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Ideology”, Alter argues that the fate of literature rests with people who will keep on reading it because — of all things — they like it!

I can’t help but believe that I am right in enjoying works like Don Quixote or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” even in this rotten world, but I also take comfort in the words of critics who believe that the reading of literature is an indispensible part of our enjoyment of life. And my favorite among such critics is George Saintsbury.

A recent biographer, Dorothy Richardson Jones, calls Saintsbury the “King of Critics”. I would call him the king of readers because of the astonishing number of writers whose works he knew well. His tastes were truly catholic. Jones wrote that “He loved equally the purest lyrics of Shelley and the complexity of Donne, the richness of Rabelais, the panorama of Scott and medieval romance, and the profound depths of irony in Swift and Ecclesiastes, and always urged upon the reader the joys of minor writers.”

As for his manner of writing about them, I defer to Edmund Wilson, who wrote:

Saintsbury was a connoisseur of wines; he wrote an entertaining book on the subject. And his attitude toward literature, too, was that of the connoisseur. He tastes the authors and tells you about the vintages; he distinguishes the qualities of the various wines. His palate was as fine as could be, and he possessed the great qualification that he knew how to take each book on its own terms without expecting it to be some other book and was thus in a position to appreciate a great variety of kinds of writing. 

His greatest enthusiasms were what you might expect; he wrote:

The plays of Shakespeare and the English Bible [the King James Version] are, and will ever be, the twin monuments not merely of their own period, but of the perfection of English, the complete expressions of the literary capacities of the language.

And woe to anyone who tampers with his literary gods! I would quote his excoriation of the “dunces” who tampered with the King James Version to produce the Revised Version, but my copy of the book in which he lays them out, his Short History of English Literature, is up in our attic, I don’t know where.

Needless to say, Saintsbury’s style of criticism has become unfashionable: he proposed no theory of literature or of criticism; he wrote clearly and with obvious enthusiasm; and he believes in the worth of literature. His taste has turned out to be as close to infallible as a critic’s can be; I would praise John Keats more highly than he did, but still, he praised Keats. He never as far as I know mistook a poetaster for a poet, as did a certain Victorian critic who wondered in print whether time will judge the great lyric genius of the age to be John Keats or Dorothea Felicia Hemans.

His book about wines, Notes on a Wine Cellar, is said to be delightful, but I haven’t read it. I gave up drinking when I found that I didn’t read much when I drank. All the more reason to be in awe of Saintsbury, who could still read a vast amount when he drank. I’m drinking coffee as I write this.

Politically, Saintsbury was a reactionary who had contempt for the poor and scorn for governmental attempts to lighten their misery. It would have pained me to read what he would have said about the New Deal, but he died in 1933, too soon to become acquainted with it.

I can think of only one recent critic who had something like Saintsbury’s vast reading and his unsystematic intuitive love of literature: the poet Randall Jarrell. Both of these critics help me see things that I wasn’t seeing on my own. And they prove to me their genuine worth as critics by making me eager to stop reading them and start reading the poems, stories, and plays that they have been writing about with so much knowledge, understanding, and love.

The Library of America is an independent non-profit organization dedicated to keeping in print the best works of America’s best writers. It recently published Rachel Carson’s first three books — Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955) —  in a single volume titled The Sea Trilogy.  

I have doubts about some of the writers that the Library of America has helped to literary apotheosis by publishing a volume or two of their work. H. P. Lovecraft? Are you kidding?

But the decision to print Carson’s first three books together in one volume was inspired. Despite their differences in subject matter, the books form a whole, united by their author’s reverence for and wonder at marine life in its immense complexity, extension, and interrelatedness.

Rachel Carson is remembered most of all for her book Silent Spring (1962), which called attention to the harm done to many forms of life by the overuse in agriculture of DDT and other pesticides.  But her earlier books, with their emphasis on the fragility as well as the resilience of marine life, are also basic texts of the environmental movement.

Rachel Carson wanted to be a marine biologist, not a writer of books.  Circumstances led her to become both.

In 1936, the division chief of the United States Bureau of Fisheries asked Rachel Carson, then a biologist on his staff, to write an introduction for a pamphlet that the bureau was about to publish.  Carson was not only an accomplished marine biologist but also a gifted writer who was often called upon to write pamphlets for the bureau.

The division chief, however, rejected the 11-page introduction that Carson submitted to him several days later.  “This is too literary for our publications,” he said. “I think you should submit it to The Atlantic.”

Carson needed to make some extra money so she followed her chief’s suggestion and submitted the introduction to The Atlantic, which published it next year, with the title “Undersea.”

The article so impressed an editor at Simon and Schuster that he offered Carson a contract to write a book about marine life.  He was certain that the beauty of Carson’s prose and her almost magical ability to enter into the lives of sea dwelling animals would be sure to find an audience.

The book that Carson’s wrote, titled Under the Sea Wind, focused on the lives of a sand piper, an eel, a mackerel, and other creatures. The critics loved it, but it didn’t sell. It was published just days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which left few people in a book buying mood.

Her publishers retained their confidence in her, however, and offered her another contract.  Her second book, The Sea Around Us, was published in 1951. In this book, Carson drew on her mastery of a variety of scientific disciplines to create what one reviewer called “a biography of the sea”.  The book won the National Book Award for non-fiction, became an international best-seller, and created such a demand for Carson’s writings that Under the Sea Wind also became a best seller.

Carson’s third book, The Edge of the Sea, is about the marine life on beaches and in tidal pools.  It was published in 1955 and was both a critical and popular success.

These books are good reading not only for the grace of their prose, but also for Carson’s ability to enter into the lives of sea creatures.  Her procedure is the opposite of anthropomorphism. Her sand pipers do not become people. She becomes a sand piper, looking for things to eat and on the alert against predators.  

Her rich poetic imagination was both nourished and rigorously controlled by scientific knowledge.   

Under the Sea Wind begins with a description of the arrival, on a warm June evening, of migrating black terns, genus Rynchops, on a sandy island on the coast of North America. The terns had migrated to the island from Yucatan in order to lay and hatch their eggs. 

I cannot read this chapter without thinking of William Cullen Bryant’s poem To A Waterfowl, about a  seabird  reaching, at sundown, its a place of safety and rest after a long migratory  journey. In Bryant’s poem, the waterfowl is guided and protected by a benevolent deity. Carson shares Bryant’s wonder at and love for seabirds, but her black terns are not guided or protected by a benevolent deity.  They are on their own in a world that is as dangerous as it is beautiful. 

Rachel Carson died in 1964, at the age of 56.  When she wrote  the books now published as The Sea Trilogy, she was largely unconcerned about the threat posed to marine life by human activity.  Charles Keeling would not set up his laboratory for sampling and measuring the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere until 1958, and it would be years before his measurements showed evidence of increasing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. 

She wrote: “To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”

Had she lived to see that marine life, and indeed all life on Earth, is being imperiled by mankind’s burning of fossil fuels, her loving heart would have grieved.  Her scientific mind, however, would have counted the cost of our heedlessness with damning precision, and her eloquent voice would have been raised in defense of all life on Earth. That voice is missed.

[Note: This essay replaces my earlier essay “How to Write”, which I accidentally published when it was still a draft.]

I used to write software manuals for a living. After spending many years in that line of work, I concluded that it is not possible to write well about software. It is not possible to write well about murk — that is, to write about it with pleasing clarity.

Now that I am retired, I am trying to learn how to write about subjects that are less murky than software. The possibility of success — at least my subject matter doesn’t preclude it any more — has stimulated my interest in writing to a degree that I have started to buy how-to-write books. The shelf above the desk where I do most of my writing holds several of them. Their presence admonishes me to do my best as I add word to word to make sentences, and sentence to sentence to make paragraphs, and so on. Do I read these books? Not very often.

I write the way I do, no better or worse, because of all that I have read. I believe that I am typical in this. When people write they draw on the words, phrases, and rhythms that they have stored in their minds as they were reading. All this borrowing and using goes on half consciously, of course. Conscious and deliberate plagiarism is another matter. Here nothing is recast in the writer’s mind to make it his or her own. It is this recasting that redeems a writer from being a thief.

Anyway, I can mention three books about writing that have in fact helped me write better. All are in print and available online. The three are:

The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White, is probably familiar to everyone reading this. Its great popularity is owing to two of its qualities, charm and brevity.

The charm is the impress of the personalities of both its authors: Will Strunk, the ardent and humorous English professor who wrote the book for his English classes at Cornell University, and his student, E.B. White, who revised the book for publication many years later. White had become a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and the author of Charlotte’s Web and other classic children’s books.

When White revised The Elements of Style, he was careful not to add much to its length. Strunk had had no objection to using however many words are needed to say what needs to be said. Still, the more words a writer uses, the greater the risk the writer runs of failing to heed Strunk’s command, “Omit needless words!”. White summarized the contents of the book: “Seven rules of usage, eleven principles of composition, a few matters of form, and a list of words and expressions commonly misused — that was the sum and substance of Professor Strunk’s work.”

And the brevity of The Elements of Style is what prevents it from being truly helpful, at least for me. Because it is so brief, it has nothing to say about many of the problems that a writer faces in the work-a-day world, where regulations are to be explained, warnings are to be given, and rapture must be embodied in plain English.

“Writing is hard, even for authors who do it all the time,” wrote Roger Angell in a preface to the most recent edition of The Elements. “Less frequent practitioners — the job applicant; the business executive with an annual report to get out; the high school senior with a Faulkner assignment; the graduate-school student with her thesis proposal; the writer of a letter of condolence — often get stuck in an awkward passage or find a muddle on their screens, and then blame themselves. What should be easy and flowing looks tangled or feeble or overblown — not what was meant at all. What’s wrong with me, each one thinks. Why can’t I get this right?”

The Elements of Style assures me, however, that I can get it right. Professor Strunk speaks to us in our despair:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.*

This noble paragraph points the way out of confusion.

The Economist Style Guide: the Essentials of Elegant Writing is more helpful than Strunk and White because it is more detailed, as you would expect of the guide that is in daily use by the staff of that much admired publication, The Economist. The guide is divided, like Caesar’s Gaul, into three parts: a style sheet used by the people who edit the magazine; a guide to the differences between British and American spelling and usage; and a reference section that lists standard abbreviations, terms of address, and so on.

The Style Guide aims to redeem daily English usage from the usages of Twitter and the Internet, with all their resulting loss of clarity and euphony. It also calls attention to misuse of common phrases, such as:

“To beg the question  is to adopt an argument whose conclusion depends upon assuming the truth of the very conclusion the argument is designed to produce. All governments should promote free trade because otherwise protectionism will increase. “

I wish that the Guide had also explained what is wrong with the phrase “Please RSVP”.

The Guide encourages its readers to develop “ a genuine, familiar or truly English style”, which is “to write as anyone would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command or choice of words or who could discourse with ease, force and perspicuity setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.”

And by “English style”, they do not mean “British style”, for they quote with approval the words of the most American of writers:

“Mark Twain described how a good writer treats sentences:  ‘At times he may indulge himself with a long one, but he will make sure there are no folds in it, no vaguenesses, no parenthetical interruptions of its view as a whole; when he has done with it, it won’t be a sea-serpent with half of its arches under the water; it will be a torchlight procession.’”

Let our sentences be torchlight processions!

The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose, by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge

Graves and Hodge began to write The Reader Over Your Shoulder in 1940, just after the fall of France and the evacuation of British forces from Dunkirk, and they regarded their book as a contribution to the war effort. They deplored the way that their countrymen, even the best educated, had taken to expressing themselves in prose that was “loose, confused and ungraceful.” Poor communication could lead to wasted effort or even fatal mistakes. “We regard the present crisis as acute enough to excuse this book,” they wrote in its introduction.

Their book, they wrote, is “concerned partly with the secure conveyance of information and partly with its decent, or graceful, conveyance, and have been suggested by our recent examination of a great mass of miscellaneous writing.”

This great mass of miscellaneous writing consisted of magazine articles, official memos, letters to the editor, and books on current topics. The authors of the great mass included members of England’s literary and intellectual elite, such as T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, John Maynard Keynes, Cecil Day-Lewis, Ezra Pound, Stephen Spender, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw.

The faults that they found in this great mass suggested to them twenty-five principles of clear expression and sixteen of graceful expression. They annotated selections from the great mass to point out violations of these principles. And then they rewrote each selection to illustrate how it should have been written, according to their principles.

Yep, they corrected and rewrote stuff by John Maynard Keynes and George Bernard Shaw.

Evelyn Waugh, in his review of The Reader Over Your Shoulder, wrote that “as a result of having read [it]…I have taken about three times as long to , write this review as is normal, and still dread committing it to print“.

It is easy to mistake the point that Graves and Hodge were trying to make, however. It is not that to write clear and graceful English, you must possess gifts greater than those possessed by T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and company. If such were the case, there would be no point in writing handbooks for writers of English prose.

Their point, rather, is that if you don’t pay close attention to what you are doing when you write, you will make mistakes that will confuse and frustrate your readers, no matter how gifted or experienced a writer you are.

There is a message of hope here, too. If you do pay attention, you can avoid confusing and frustrating your readers, however modest your gifts.

The Reader Over Your Shoulder is by far the most helpful handbook for writers that I know of. (Hmmm . . . do I want to write “know of” or “know about”? See? I’ve read The Reader Over Your Shoulder.)

Everyone knows that when a book is banned, it acquires a mystique that other books can only envy. While other books have all the mystique of a faithful husband who remembers to pick up milk and bread on his way home after work, the banned book has the mystique of the newcomer in town who has a curious scar on his cheek, about whom inarticulate rumors hint at a disgraceful past, and whose manners have a sinister unforced elegance.

Everyone also knows which books everyone wants to read.

So, on the theory that banned books are the most read, I urge all schools to ban these dark, dangerous, corrupting books:

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
Green Mansions, by W. H. Hudson
The Odyssey, by Homer
Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott
The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass
Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain
The King Arthur Trilogy, by Rosemary Sutcliff
The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne
The Jungle Books, by Rudyard Kipling

There are libraries upon libraries of other books that should be similarly banned, but let’s not overwhelm our furtive young readers. There will be time in abundance to ruin them.

I recently “unpublished” an article about the Iliad shortly after publishing it. This is because when I read my article online, I found that it didn’t say what I wanted and needed to say. A friend made some astute criticisms of the article that confirmed my feeling that the article needs more work.

I’m 72 years old and still learning how to write a term paper.

I hope to publish a revised article about the Iliad in a week or two. Don’t wander off.

The other day I came across a large-print copy of Kenneth Grahame’s ‘’The Wind in the Willows’’ in our garage, while looking for something else. This discovery is a blessing to me, for now I have something that I can read while waiting to have cataract surgery next week. (I can read it online, thanks to the larger point sizes, but I don’t like to read long stuff online.)

I had read The Wind in the Willows before, but long enough ago that it is new to me now. As I started to read it, I thought about what Robert Frost said was his aim in creating a reading list for his English students at Pinkerton Academy in Derry New Hampshire: to teach them ‘’the satisfaction of superior speech.’’ ‘’Superior’’ is a word that today’s ‘’educators’’ avoid if they can, but there’s no getting around it — some writing is better than other writing. The Wind in the Willows is better than almost anything that is being written for young people today, I would guess.

Here is a paragraph from the beginning of the story; the innocent and sheltered Mole, taking a break from spring cleaning in his underground home, runs across a field and happens upon something he has never seen before — a river:

‘’All was a-shake and a-shiver- glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.’’

It is not long before the mole meets the benevolent poetry-loving Water Rat. They become friends. The Water Rat invites Mole join him for lunch and brings out his picnic basket:

‘’What’s inside it?’ asked the Mole, wriggling with curiosity.
‘There’s cold chicken inside it,’ replied the Rat briefly; ‘coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrolls resssandwichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater-
‘‘O stop, stop,’ cried the Mole in ecstacies: ‘This is too much!’’

I quote these two passages to show that the language of The Wind in the Willows is something more than the plain speech used by two neighbors who fall into conversation in the aisle of a supermarket, which is assumed by many writers and their readers today to be a style adequate for all purposes. This language adds wit and imagination and playfulness. It is language for the pleasure that can be taken in language.

Finding this copy of the Wind in the Willows made me rummage around — in the house this time — for the other books by Grahame that I have: The Pagan Papers, Dream Days, The Golden Age, The Headswoman, and Bertie’s Escapade. I won’t get around to reading these again until I can take the eye patches off.

Note: ‘’The Collected Works of Kenneth Grahame’’ has been published in the Scholars Select series of reprints, for a reasonable price. This includes all the titles I mentioned.

I also found my copy of the biography of Grahame by the British classical scholar Peter Green. Before I ran across this book, I disliked the idea of biographies of Grahame and analyses of his writings. Can’t you just leave our day dreams alone? But Peter Green is a graceful writer and a sensitive reader of Grahame. He has much of real interest to say to any lover of Grahame’s works.

Green writes that Grahame was divided between his desire to be ‘’the fellow that goes it alone’’ — to spend his days on the river bank, listening to the current and the wind in the willows — and to submit to the discipline of being a responsible member of society. Grahame was, in fact, for many years an important official of the Bank of England, and Green suggests that his work at the bank was something that he needed. It’s possible that Mr. Toad — wildly irresponsible, well heeled, and free to do anything he wants — was an expression of Grahame’s fear of unlimited freedom.

Mr Breithaupt
Thank you for your interest in visiting the Bank of England next year.
I am afraid that it is not possible to view the office where Kenneth Grahame worked during his time in the Bank as this was demolished when the Bank was rebuilt in between the two world wars by Herbert Baker.
You would, however, be very welcome to visit the Bank of England museum which has two small showcases dedicated to Kenneth Grahame. I have attached a link to our website which has more details. http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/museum/visiting/default.aspx
Kind regards
Shona
Education and Museum Group
Bank of England | Threadneedle Street | London

The Wind in the Willows contains a curious chapter titled ‘’The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’’, that seems like a digression — if so, it is a very beautiful one. Mr. Otter’s son Portly has gone missing. Portly has done this before — he likes to explore the river on his own — but he has never been gone this long, and Mr. Otter has not slept all the while. Mole and Water-Rat set off down the river to find him, paddling through the night, until just before dawn they come to and island in the river and are drawn to it by the sound of piping, of the good god Pan:

Perhaps he [the Mole] would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.
‘Rat!’ he found breath to whisper, shaking. ‘Are you afraid?’ ‘Afraid?’ murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. ‘Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet- and yet- O, Mole, I am afraid!’ Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.’’

This is an extraordinary description of intense religious experience. The description is all the more extraordinary in coming from a writer who was an offshoot of a Scottish family and still very much a Scot. Calvinism was productive of dread, but far less of ecstatic outbursts of fear and love.

The description that Grahame gives here of the ‘’numinous’’ — of the overwhelming impression that the objective reality of the Holy makes on a mere mortal — is very much that which was given by the German scholar Rudolph Otto in his classic study The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen), published in 1917, nine years after The Wind in the Willows.

Professor Otto was a very great scholar and thinker; but poets and dreamers get there first.

I am 73 years old and I like to read. A glance at the actuarial tables makes me realize that I need to think carefully about what I read. I’ve always read a certain amount of stuff simply in order to kill time. But now, when I appreciate more vividly than ever before that time intends to kill me, I think twice before picking up a juicy bestseller.

OK, more Shakespeare and Dickens and Cervantes. Resolved. But I also realize that I’m not going to have time to read everything that I might have read. This thought at first gives rise to a sort of panic — the panic of the student a week before final exams with mountains of reading still before him.

I recently read Milton’s short poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso”, and they seemed as fresh to me as ever. But I couldn’t stop with simply enjoying them. I had to reproach myself with not knowing more Milton or knowing him better.

Knock it off, foolish old man! No matter how dedicated and disciplined a reader you had been, you still would have left more unread than read.

Resolve simply to read something of the very best every day. Let the reading of it be an end in itself. You love this stuff. Give it a chance to love you.