'A Loquacious Scribacious Little Man'

“There, he became loquacious as well as scribacious.” 

That’s a word I first encountered more than forty years ago, though I’d forgotten where. I’ve tracked it down to Nora Sayre’s “A.J. Liebling Abroad” in the October 7, 1978 issue of The Nation. Sayre recounts her meetings in Paris and London in the nineteen-fifties with Liebling, a writer she extravagantly admired. She notes that “Liebling’s silences were legendary,” but in London “he astounded his New York acquaintances with his sudden volubility.” As to scribaciousness, Liebling was the New Yorker writer famed for laughing as he turned out copy at an industrial pace. He seems never to have been stricken with so-called “writer’s block” – living proof of Dr. Johnson’s observation: “A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.”

 

The OED defines scribacious as an adjective meaning “enthusiastic about or fond of writing,” a quality nicely corrective of those writers who like to complain about the onerous privilege of artfully arranging words. Sayre quotes Thurber on the author of Between Meals: “Liebling is the only fast-writing fat man I know.” Liebling bragged that he wrote better than anyone who wrote faster and faster than anyone who wrote better – a boast shared by good newspaper reporters and Balzac. He possessed the journalist’s essential gift: focus, regardless of his surroundings. Scribaciousness is a virtue I admire. It energizes the reader. In some you can taste the enthusiasm.

 

Scribacious is rooted in the Latin scrībere (“to write”). The one major writer cited by the Dictionary is Thomas “Mr. Sunshine” Carlyle. In a letter to Emerson on April Fools’ Day in 1840, he writes:

 

“You asked me about [Walter Savage] Landor and [John Abraham] Heraud. Before my paper entirely vanish, let me put down a word about them. Heraud is a loquacious scribacious little man, of middle age, of parboiled greasy aspect, whom Leigh Hunt describes as ‘wavering in the most astonishing manner between being Something and Nothing.’  To me he is chiefly remarkable as being still--with his entirely enormous vanity and very small stock of faculty--out of Bedlam.”

 

Emerson (described by Yvor Winters as “a fraud and a sentimentalist”) used scribacious in his journal in 1862:

 

“Talent without character is friskiness. The charm of Montaigne’s egotism and of his anecdotes is, that there is a stout cavalier, a seigneur of France at home in his château, responsible for all this chatting; and if it could be shown to be a jeu d’esprit of Scaliger, or other scribacious person, written for the booksellers, and not resting on a real status picturesque in the eyes of all men, it would lose all its value. But Montaigne is essentially unpoetic.”  

 

I concede that the first sentence, the one about “friskiness,” is pretty good. In Emerson, though, scribaciousness is not a virtue but a vice.