`Everything is Interesting'

Could anything be duller than a book that presumes to teach one how to write? Perhaps a how-to manual on being funny. Somewhere, about 10 years ago, I read that a volume dedicated to “writing classic prose” had been published and its authors held up A.J. Liebling as a model of clarity and stylishness. No writer, except perhaps Whitney Balliett, has had so practical and decisive an impact on my own work as Liebling, so I overcame my distaste and read Clear and Simple As the Truth, by Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, published by Princeton University Press in 1994. The book’s effect was not so much to teach me something new about writing; rather, it prodded me to rededicate myself to what I already had learned from decades of writing and reading: Strive ruthlessly for clarity, concision and exactitude. Eliminate the needless and self-indulgent, and keep it interesting, vigorous and true. Thomas and Turner are not school marms, as this excerpt from their book demonstrates:

“Classic style, a general style suitable for presenting the truth of anything, conceived as discrete and self-contained, has no continuing evolutionary history. It can be found in its perfect form in Thucydides, in Madame de Sévigné, in Jane Austen, in A.J. Liebling. It is not the style to which all previous writing aspires. Classic style is one style among many mature and consistent styles. Its virtues follow from its particular stand on the elements of style. They include the clarity and simplicity that come from matching language to thought on the motive of truth. Other styles have other virtues.”

Liebling is in fine if unaccustomed company here. Thomas and Turner append “The Museum” to their book – samples of prose from diverse sources, many not literary, that illustrate their notion of prose written in the classic style. Among the authors cited are Jefferson, Borges, Tanizaki, Michael Oakeshott, Milton, Alan Greenspan, Philip Larkin and The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Eastern Region. I recommend Thomas and Turner’s book not as a quick-fix to lousy prose but as a useful mental tonic.

So I was pleased to learn Thomas has not lost his appreciation for Liebling: In the May/June issue of Humanities, he writes less a review than an essay based on his reading of World War II Writings, recently published by the Library of America. It is, in effect, applied epistemology. Thomas seeks to distinguish journalism from history, and not to the detriment of either. He contrasts Liebling’s eye-witness account of the Allied invasion with historian John Keegan’s Six Armies in Normandy, published 38 years after D-Day. Thomas describes Keegan’s book as “a masterpiece of military and political analysis juxtaposed with a compelling narrative of events.

“What Liebling writes about is limited to what happened when he was there. This means that the resulting story cannot have the scale and coherence of history. In his afterword [to Mollie & Other War Pieces, written shortly before his death in 1963] Liebling says, `I have been advised to write an epilogue to this book to ‘give it unity’ and ‘put it in perspective,’ but I find this difficult because war, unlike drama, has no unities classical or otherwise. It is discursive, centrifugal, both repetitive and disparate.’”

Thomas quotes this passage with approval. I would add that “discursive, centrifugal, both repetitive and disparate” is also an apt description of Liebling’s method, or rather his style, and of such prose masters as Burton, Browne, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Lamb and Melville. It’s a style that to the naïve seems simple to ape but proves unforgivingly difficult. Liebling never bemoans his limitations as a limited observer. He revels in them. Unlike the historian armed with hindsight and documentation, Liebling relies on his intelligence, experience and moxie. Thomas writes:

“His account of the Normandy Invasion is pretty much limited to a single cross-channel trip by a single landing craft. Its art is almost the inverse of Keegan’s. It begins in boredom, unacknowledged anxiety, uncertainty; its later moments of danger and violence are realized largely after the fact. It is so small a fragment of the gross event that it has almost no significance in the success or failure of the invasion. Liebling later found out that of the ten landing craft that were part of the group with which he went in, four were sunk before they had unloaded the men they were carrying, `a high proportion of whom were killed.’ It is an account that claims nothing but referential accuracy. The writer’s tacit claim is, `This is what you could have experienced had you been there; I know because it is what I experienced when I was there.’”

The glory days of conventional journalism are long past. The nation will never again make a hero of an Ernie Pyle. But nonfiction in other forms, some as yet unborn, will soon take advantage of the new technologies. Journalism, essays and other nonfictions, in the hands of gifted writers, inevitably will mutate into something new and powerful. Thomas’ final paragraph is worth reading and rereading in toto:

“Liebling’s war reporting, along with his postwar work as a press critic, have come to lend him a certain cultural respectability. The Second World War is, of course, an officially interesting subject—as is the institution of the American press—and it is possible to think that Liebling’s claims to our attention are based upon his subjects, as if certain subjects somehow carry their own interest. In reading about officially interesting subjects, we sometimes overlook how much the writer’s perception and judgment are what we are following. The strung-together clichés that make up the worst sort of newspaper `coverage’ can make any subject trivial because they create separate `significant’ stock events, made false by their discontinuity with the nature of ordinary experience. Subject matter does not determine style; a writer’s conception of truth, presentation, scene, cast, and the relationship between thought and language determine style, and style, in this rigorous sense, creates interest. Held in close focus, by a concentrated intelligence, everything is interesting.”