'A Feeling for the English Sentence'

“You speak of a ‘universal longing for a world beautiful.’ In the first place, this longing is by no means universal. It is rather exceptional. And don’t, please, speak of a ‘world beautiful!’ That is the only bad phrase in your letter. But it is bad. It is what I call ‘women’s club phraseology.’ You could have said that better, had you tried.” 

The son of a friend asked for help writing a college admissions essay. I asked him to prepare a first draft, something I could work with. My impression is that he’s gotten accustomed to others doing his work. He’s glib and ingratiating and has made a career, thus far, of coasting on charm. He’s not stupid and has read more books than most of his contemporaries, but his first draft was a tissue of airy nothings. He parrots what he thinks teachers want to hear. That’s how he has been taught, and up to this point it has been a strategy that worked. There was no evidence of critical thinking, of evaluating the worth of the ideas expressed. It was empty happy talk. The pieties of the day can be relied on to do the job.

 

The writer quoted at the top is Willa Cather. Her correspondent is a Mr. Phillipson, about whom little is known. Her letter is dated March 15, 1943. It suggests lazy, cunningly passive prose is nothing new among young people:

 

“I get hundreds of letters from college students, friendly and enthusiastic, but the weakness of their sentence structure is often appalling. They seem convinced that friendly and enthusiastic clauses need have no particular relation to each other or to the main stem of the sentence. Sometimes these letters show insight and a real feeling for literature. But how can these boys expect to play sonatas when they cannot play scales? I am chiefly interested in your letter because you seem to have a feeling for the English sentence. In writing, that is the beginning of everything.”

 

We’ve gone through four drafts. The kid is getting frustrated, though he remains mostly polite with me. His mother confides that her son calls me a “hard ass,” though I’ve made it clear I can drop out any time he likes. No hard feelings. Nothing personal. It reminds me that all of us had to learn how to write effectively, without padding or other bullshit. I’ve told him that often I don’t even begin to understand something until I have written about it. That puzzled him but also seemed to intrigue him.

 

[Good to see this in an annotation to the letter: “Cather had met [Rebecca] West by early 1927, and later that year West positively reviewed Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) for the New York Herald Tribune Books. Cather continued to cultivate West as a critic, ensuring that she got copies of her books, leading to West’s positive review of Shadows on the Rock (1931).” I could make a case for Cather and West as the finest, most important female writers of their time.]