[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.

My copy of the Modern Library edition of selected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson is inscribed “John Breithaupt December 29, 1964”, in the immature handwriting that within a year or two would change into the adult scrawl that it is today.

I read a half dozen of these essays over and over again; in “Self Reliance”, a favorite of mine, I had carefully underlined the sentence “To be great is to be misunderstood,” the slogan emblazoned on the banner behind which adolescence marches.

But I read hardly any of the poetry. Emerson was by reputation only an amateur poet with a defective ear. He tried to write like Longfellow, our greatest master of traditional English prosody (along with Robert Frost, a much greater poet) and failed. So it was said.

The little that I had read of his poetry seemed to back up this reputation.

But then there was “The Concord Hymn: Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837”:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept;
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare,
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

This poem may be no more than very good occasional poetry, but it does show that Emerson was perfectly capable of writing poetry that was conventional in form.

And there is also “The Rhodora”, a good poem that suffers from having been pickled in anthological brine (to borrow a phrase from E. A. Robinson):

The Rhodora: On Being Asked ‘Whence Is The Flower?’

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew:
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

Emerson’s best poems in conventional meter seem to me to be “Brahma”, “The Snowstorm”, and especially “Days”:

Days

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, 

Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, 

And marching single in an endless file, 

Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 

To each they offer gifts after his will, 

Bread, kingdoms, stars, or sky that holds them all. 

I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp, 

Forgot my morning wishes, hastily 

Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day 

Turned and departed silent. I, too late, 

Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn. 

This poem seems to me to be an expression of Emerson’s residual Puritanism, but instead of believing, as the Puritans did, that the important thing in life is to be unremitting in our application to the tasks that life has set us to, lest we find ourselves in occasions of sin, the important thing in life is to to live. This was one of Emerson’s most deeply held convictions, and one that was shared by his friend/disciple/son Henry David Thoreau. In Walden, Thoreau wrote:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Emerson’s best poem, in my opinion, and the one of his poems that has the best title to greatness, is “Threnody”, a profoundly felt lament for his first-born son Waldo, who died of scarlet fever in 1842. The poem is too long to quote and too good to carve up into samples. It is a poem that I read and reread and find always more moving and impressive.

But what of the bulk of Emerson’s poetry, which often departs from regularity in form and meter? I am still trying to get a clear sense of what he was up to; my best guess is that he was not stumbling, but exploring the possibilities of form for expressing the thoughts and emotions that, because they were his, were also everyone’s, and yet could not be expressed in conventional form.

I’ll keep reading.

Sometimes, when I am tired of being myself, I read biographies and become the subject of each biography as I read it. Of course fiction can help me escape myself, but that’s different. I don’t like to identify too closely with the characters in fiction. I have no desire to be either Huck or Jim, however wonderful it is to read about their progress down the Mississippi. But when I read biographies, I identify myself with the subject, eagerly. Of course, I read biographies only of people whom I admire.

Here are some great biographies that I have enjoyed. Feel free to mention your own favorites in the comments section at the end of this article.

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Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson is of course supreme in this branch of literature. James Boswell (1740 – 1795) was a lawyer from Edinburgh and a rather contemptible person with boundless literary ambitions. Fortunately for literature, Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784) was fond of odd, broken, disreputable people, and permitted Boswell to shadow him for much of the last twenty years of his life. During this time Johnson was able, thanks to a pension from the crown, to live for conversation. He “talked for victory” whenever he met with his drinking companions: David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, Edward Gibbon, and Edmund Burke, and others. (Edmund Burke, Johnson confessed, was the only one of his friends whose own powers of conversation inspired in him a degree of fear.)

Boswell’s great gift was for recording Johnson’s conversations with his friends — combative, learned, wise, and down-to-Earth conversation, a flow of opinion from the enormously well stocked mind of a man who had suffered in life most of what there is to suffer, and whose final months, which Boswell was to record, were to be harrowingly painful. It required very great gifts to make a convincing portrait of a man as complex as Johnson, who was both misanthropic and compassionate, and who was both a devout Christian and a tough-minded sceptic. Boswell had the gifts.

[John Gibson Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott is considered by many critics to be nearly as great a biography as Boswell’s Life of Johnson. I’ve thrown it on my stack.]

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Lord Charnwood’s Abrahan Lincoln (1916) is the best written and most intelligent biography of Lincoln that I know of. Godfrey Rathbone Benson, 1st Baron Charnwood (1864 – 1945) wrote at perhaps the ideal moment for a biographer of Lincoln: long enough after Lincoln’s death that most of the local and temporary controversies surrounding him had subsided, but soon enough after his death that there were still people to talk to who remembered his life and times. One of these people was Charnwood’s friend Henry James, whose family had been passionately attached to the Union cause.

Recent biographies of Lincoln can take advantage of the never ending research into Lincoln’s life; outstanding among these is Michael Burlingame’s amazingly detailed Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2013). But no one had a more sympathetic understanding of America’s representative common man than Baron Charnwood. My opinion, of course.

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Henry James, Jr. wrote so much and so well that it is somewhat surprising to learn that he had time apart from his writing for — a life. Leon Edel’s justly esteemed five volume biography shows James to have been a kind and gregarious man who indeed had and loved a life apart from his writing. Any biography of Henry James has also to be a biography of the entire James family, to the great enrichment of the subject, and Edel manages to include the immensely gifted family without losing sight of his principal subject. Somewhat scanted is the question of James’ sexuality, and this is fine with me, because I cannot see how having a certain answer to this question could in any way increase my understanding or enjoyment of his writing.

James’ life is of interest to us because of what he wrote, and Edel had to find a way to incorporate discussion of his writings into the narrative of his life. I never felt in reading the biography that the discussion of his works was ever an intrusion into his life’s story, or that the discussion of the works was scanted to return to the life. I never felt, in reading this biography, that I was reading gossip, no doubt because Edel maintained his respect for James’ life even as he investigated it. In the end, James appears as a heroic character who worked steadily toward the same goal all his life, which was to elevate the English novel to the same aesthetic level with the west’s greatest music and painting. He died in the assurance that he had succeeded, and it is my paltry opinion that he was right.

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I recently had a minor medical procedure performed on me at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts. I took along with me a copy of Emerson’s first book, Nature, to read in the waiting room. When I showed it to my doctor, he said, “I see, that’s funny. Your man there has the same name as this hospital.”

No, Ralph Waldo Emerson isn’t as well known today as he was in his lifetime, and he is less well known than his mentee and friend Henry David Thoreau.

But both men received something close to the attention they deserve in intellectual biographies by Robert Richardson. Richardson’s preparation for writing his books was the same: to read everything that his subject is known to have read. His subjects being great readers, Richardson needed about ten years to prepare to write each book.

Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986) reveals Thoreau to have been a scholar, something you might have guessed from reading Jeffrey Cramer’s wonderful annotated editions of his works. At Harvard, he read widely in Latin, Greek, French, Anglo Saxon, and middle and old English. After college, he studied German with Orestes Brownson, and began to read Goethe’s Italiensche Reise (Italian Travel Journals) in the original. He also translated Aeschylus’ play Prometheus Bound. (One of Aeschylus’s easier plays, which isn’t saying much.) And he continued his loving study of Homer’s Iliad and Vergil’s Georgics. Thoreau’s love of the Latin and Greek classics — he devoted a chapter of Walden to a defense of reading them in the original — set him somewhat apart from the other members of the transcendentalist set, who were in love with the German romantic writers. Thoreau’s classicism may account for his superior grasp of the demands of form that he displayed in Walden, certainly a more written book than anything that Emerson was producing.

Thoreau’s interests, as Richardson showed, were wide ranging and changed constantly throughout his rather short life. One of his convictions was constant, however. The lives of men and women were greatly impoverished for being estranged from nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Mind on Fire is more likely to change a reader’s idea of its subject that Richardson’s book on Thoreau. Thoreau was in fact somewhat like the popular conception of him — a rugged outdoor type. But Emerson is shown by Richardson not to have been the etherial type lost in contemplation of his oversoul that he is taken for. He too was rugged, outdoorsy, athletic. He was attached to the common joys of life, had a gift for friendship and an enormous love of family. [Personal note: I once worked as a technical writer in the same department as a great granddaughter of Emerson and am happy to be able to report that she was friendly, kind, and immensely likeable.)

Emerson was, like Thoreau, enormously well 8read, although he preferred to read foreign literature in English translation. He was hospitable to ideas from all sources, although he had one great idea to which he returned again and again all his life: that the human mind was not a tabula rasa but was brimming with a native fund of ideas — thus taking his stand with Kant against Hume. Emerson may have been on fire with ideas but he was passionately attached to the homely goodness of the world. It was no accident that his greatest disciple should be Walt Whitman, the connoisseur of leaves of grass.

The first Modern Library Giant that I bought and read was William Hickling Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico. It was a couple of grades above my reading level at the time, but I remember liking its descriptions of Mexican scenery, and of course, being a normally bloodthirsty American boy, I was engrossed by its description of Cortes’ destruction of the Aztec empire.

The next Modern Library Giant that I bought was Don Quixote, with illustrations by Gustave Doré. I didn’t read Don Quixote until years later, but I spent hours looking at the Doré illustrations, which to this day make me incapable of enjoying any others.

I continued to acquire titles in this noble series. I have the Modern Library Giants for the complete works of Lewis Carroll and for the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe and Thomas Mann. I just bought the Giant that includes the essays of Charles Lamb. Someone recently gave me the complete works of Keats and Shelly, in one Giant.

I will go to my grave not having read everything in my Modern Library Giants, but I do take them up from time to time. There are excellent to have around.

Used Giants — that’s all there are anymore — cost between $20 and $25 dollars. This brings Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in three volumes, within the reach of modest book-buying budgets.

How did such a good thing as Modern Library Giants come to be?

Modern Library Giants are descendants of books published by the firm of Boni and Liveright, starting in 1917. The intention of this firm was to provide the American self-educating public with affordable high quality reprints of the classics, along the lines of the British series Everyman Books. In 1925, Bennet Cerf and an associate bought out Boni and Liveright and founded the Modern Library Company.

In 1931, Cerf decided to publish War and Peace under the Modern Library imprint, but the book was too long for the Modern Library format. So Cerf created the Modern Library Giants line.

Cerf then founded a subsidiary of the Modern Library Company to reprint some of its titles, chosen more or less at random, in more expensive bindings. The subsidiary was accordingly named Random House. This subsidiary did so well that it became the controlling imprint in 1936.

The Modern Library Company continued to publish books until 1970. Until that melancholy moment, it kept true to its original purpose, to provide inexpensive but high quality versions of great books.

Unfortunately, copies of Modern Library books have become collectible, which is driving up the prices of individual volumes. This can only thwart the intentions of Boni, Liveright, and Cerf. Collectors of Giants are to be encouraged whenever possible to consider the joys of collecting glass telephone pole insulators instead.

But who is to say that the noble intentions of Boni, Liveright, and Cerf are no longer bearing fruit? Somewhere in this broad land there is a boy or girl, lonely and bored and without playmates, who will turn on a rainy afternoon to the parental bookshelf and perhaps will pull down the first Modern Library Giant in a set of three and begin to read therein the sonorous words of Edward Gibbon:

In the second century of the Christian Æra, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence: the Roman senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government. During a happy period of more than fourscore years, the public administration was conducted by the virtue and abilities of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the two Antonines. It is the design of this, and of the two succeeding chapters, to describe the prosperous condition of their empire; and afterwards, from the death of Marcus Antoninus, to deduce the most important circumstances of its decline and fall; a revolution which will ever be remembered, and is still felt by the nations of the earth.

And perhaps that boy or girl, enthralled by the panorama of history set before them by Gibbon in unforgettable periodic prose, will resolve to become an historian. And who is to say that they will not become a great one?

Did Abraham Lincoln really say all that stuff that they say he said?

Short answer: no.

Long answer:

Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, edited by Roy P. Basler, is a better introduction to Lincoln’s life and thought than any biography of Lincoln that I know. The editor, Roy Basler, wrote an introduction to each selection in the book that explains its context in Lincoln’s life or American history. All these introductions come close to being a connected narrative. And then, of course, there are Lincoln’s own words, lucid and sharp from his earliest days, and slowly maturing into greatness.

After reading Basler’s anthology, you will have a good sense of the qualities of Lincoln’s prose: its tautness, logical rigor, and and the peculiar music that is Lincoln’s unmistakable signature. And very likely, you will wonder whether Lincoln could actually have been the author of this aphorism, which is commonly attributed to him:

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

You would be right to wonder, because Lincoln never said this. Two resources enable you to verify that he didn’t say it:

— The online version of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, which is easily searchable, does not include this statement.

— The historians Donald E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, in The Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, their study of sayings attributed to Lincoln after his death, found it very unlikely that Lincoln ever said this.

But having read Basler’s anthology, you will recognize this aphorism as a fake on your own, for the following reasons:

1. It is mere assertion, to be accepted on the authority of the person saying it. But Lincoln never spoke to his readers or hearers as an oracle. He tried to convince them of the truth of what he was saying by providing evidence or demonstrating the logical necessity of what he was saying.
2. Lincoln was a very busy man who did not time to think up platitudes à propos of nothing. He was not an author of refrigerator magnet wisdom.
3. The complacent, self-satisfied cuteness of this aphorism is more characteristic of the late radio broadcaster Paul Harvey (1918 – 2009) than of Lincoln.

Using Google, I searched for Lincoln quotations to find out just how bad is the problem of fake Lincoln quotes. I came across a web site named AZ Quotes, which lists the “Top 25” quotations from a variety of famous people (George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, etc.) or on a variety of topics (Leadership, Motivational, etc.). This web site thinks highly enough of itself to show how it can be referenced in the standard citation formats.

Here are the first five quotations that AZ Quotes provides for Lincoln:

1. Nations do not die from invasion; they die from internal rottenness.
2. We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.
3. America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
4. Great men are ordinary men with extra ordinary determination.
5. The most reliable way to predict the future is to create it.

Not a single one of these quotations is genuine. Well, maybe the list maker just got off to a bad start, so I examined two more quotations from the remaining 20:

7. Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.

11. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

Two more fakes.

I searched the Internet for more lists of Lincoln quotations and found fakes, fakes, and more fakes.

For comparison, here are several genuine Lincoln quotations:

— Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself. Fragment on slavery, April 1, 1854

— We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth. Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862

— As a general rule, I abstain from reading the reports of attacks upon myself, wishing not to be provoked by that to which I can not properly offer an answer. Last Public Address, April 11, 1865

The wording in these genuine quotations is not stale, the ideas that they express are not trite, and all have a controlled urgency.

The best article on Lincoln’s style, that I know of, is “Abraham Lincoln and the Art of the Word”, by the poet Mariane Moore. This article, and Basler’s anthology, will make you an authority on Lincoln’s style, ready to go forth and call out imposters wherever you find them, starting with the door of your refrigerator.

Henry David Thoreau is probably the least popular of our classic American writers. For many, he is too cocky or cranky or preachy. He seems to mock people for doing only what they have to do to get by in an unforgiving world. A very intelligent and well read young woman of my acquaintance said, after reading Walden on school assignment, “Thoreau is a jerk.”

I would reply to my acquaintance that I understand why you say that, but still I must disagree. He was not a jerk.

True, his manners could be forbidding, and he was, on occasion, cocky: literally, for he likened himself to chanticleer, crowing to wake up his slumbering fellow townsmen. “No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof,” he writes. Like Socrates, he believes that the unexamined life is not worth living. Like Socrates, he becomes unpopular by goading people into examining their lives.

But he was often kind and generous; he was true to his word in all his dealings with others; of all the transcendentalists, he alone had a sense of humor; for years he worked to support his family; he loved his brother John and was bedridden with grief when John died of tetanus poisoning; he quit a teaching job, which he badly needed, rather than cane his pupils; he risked a prison sentence helping a fugitive slave escape to Canada.

He was, in addition to all that, a beautiful prose stylist, our greatest nature writer, a courageous fighter for social justice, and a philosopher in the sense that Socrates understood the term, someone who lives philosophy rather than preaching it.

He was still other things, too: a reader of the literatures of Latin, Greek, German, Italian, French, and of Old, Middle, and modern English, a surveyor whose services were sought after because of his accuracy, and the inventor of a superior kind of pencil.

And I would add what I find especially admirable: he alone of the transcendentalists could do things. There was a reason Emerson’s wife liked having him around the house. He could make almost any needed household repairs.

I believe, no, I know, that most people would abandon their dislike of Thoreau on better acquaintance. Making a better acquaintance with Thoreau has become much easier in recent years with the publication of new editions of his works and books about him.

Walden, his masterpiece, is available in numerous paperback editions, with introductions by distinguished writers such as John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates. A fully annotated edition has been produced by Jeffrey Cramer.

Jeffrey Cramer also produced an annotated edition of The Maine Woods.

The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861, selections by Damion Searls, is a treasury of patient and loving observations of nature.

A single volume edition of Thoreau’s essays and occasional writings has been published in the Library of America series. This volume is somewhat expensive but look for change behind the cushions of your couch — it is well worth it to have his great essays all in one volume.

Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, by Robert Richardson, is a brilliant, beautifully written intellectual biography.

Henry David Thoreau: A Life, by Laura Dassow Walls, is another brilliant biography.

But what was the point of the millions of words that he left us in books, essays, and journals? It is, I believe, that mankind cannot truly flourish when estranged from nature. This is, of course, a commonplace that has enabled outfitters of weekend outdoor enthusiasts such as L. L. Bean to create commercial empires. But for Thoreau, this was no commonplace. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he wrote. His beautiful words brace us to our task, which is to preserve wildness itself from the effects of our radically disrespectful spoliation of nature — that nature of which we are, like it or not, inescapably a part.