'Everything That We Know About is Limited'

I’m generally allergic to style guides and how-to writing manuals, presumptuous vade mecums churned out by writers whose own writing you neither respect nor trust. E.B. White, for instance. In my experience, you learn to write well by reading and writing for many years. In a footnote to The Honest Rainmaker (1953), Liebling formulated the only writer’s credo I could ever endorse: “The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.” 

Still, it’s nice to find exceptions to general rules. Ambrose Bierce published Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults in 1909, five years before his disappearance and likely death in Mexico. It’s little more than a pamphlet between hard covers, seventy-four pages of alphabetically arranged entries. Bierce tells us in his introduction, “Aims and the Plan,” that his goal is “to teach precision in writing.” He defines good writing as “clear thinking made visible,” and adds a sort of disclaimer:

 

“In neither taste nor precision is any man’s practice a court of last appeal, for writers all, both great and small, are habitual sinners against the light; and their accuser is cheerfully aware that his own work will supply (as in making this book it has supplied) many ‘awful examples’—his later work less abundantly, he hopes, than his earlier. He nevertheless  believes that this does not disqualify him for showing by other instances than his own how not to write. The infallible teacher is still in the forest primeval, throwing seeds to the white blackbirds.”

 

That final sentence suggests Bierce was more than a cynic or a facile writer of gags. The book it most reminds me of in tone and organization – and in readerly amusement -- is Kingsley Amis’ The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage (1997). Actually, there’s another – Bierce’s own Devil’s Dictionary (1906). Few writers are better at slyly infusing comedy – often grim or philosophical – into what appears to be business-like prose. Here is his entry for “Limited for Small, Inadequate, etc.”:

 

“'The army’s operations were confined to a limited area.’ ‘We had a limited supply of food.’ A large area and an adequate supply would also be limited. Everything that we know about is limited.”

 

And more than a century ago Bierce was preaching against a grammatical misdemeanor I encountered just this morning in an online magazine article. Here is his entry for the simple word to:

 

“As part of an infinitive it should not be separated from the other part by an adverb, as, ‘to hastily think,’ for hastily to think, or, to think hastily. Condemnation of the split infinitive is now pretty general, but it is only recently that any one seems to have thought of it. Our forefathers and we elder writers of this generation used it freely and without shame—perhaps because it had not a name, and our crime could not be pointed out without too much explanation.”

 

Bierce is a subtly effective stylist who worked for decades as a journalist. His short stories about the Civil War are the best fiction written by a participant in the conflict. He served for four years in the Union Army, saw action at Shiloh and was severely wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. In his Devil’s Dictionary he defines war as “a by-product of the arts of peace.” Imagine if his prose  -- his sensibility -- had as pervasive an influence on American writing as did a later writer of fiction who also took war as his subject, Ernest Hemingway. No wonder Mencken loved him.