'More Talkative But Less Writative'

Lately I’ve been reading the Swift/Pope correspondence. Long ago I adopted the author of Gulliver’s Travels as the most useful model for prose style in English. It’s not the only way to write but it’s the best if we judge clarity the supreme virtue. Sloppy prose, unless purposely written that way for parody's sake, is always symptomatic of sloppy thinking. No one is immune to it but some are unable to write any other way. Now I’m learning that Pope – always on the short list of the greatest English poets – commanded an impressive prose style, at once clean and witty. Dr. Johnson contrasts the prose styles of Dryden and Pope: 

“The style of Dryden is capricious and varied, that of Pope is cautious and uniform; Dryden obeys the motions of his own mind, Pope constrains his mind to his own rules of composition. Dryden is sometimes vehement and rapid; Pope is always smooth, uniform, and gentle. Dryden's page is a natural field, rising into inequalities, and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, and levelled by the roller.”

 

This is from the letter Pope wrote to Swift on August 17, 1736: 

“I find, though I have less experience than you, the truth of what you told me some time ago, that increase of years makes men more talkative but less writative; to that degree, that I now write no letters but of plain business, or plain how-d’yes, to those few I am forced to correspond with, either out of necessity, or love, and I grow laconick even beyond laconicism; for sometimes I return only yes, or no, to questionary or petitionary epistles of half a yard long.”

 

First, yes, laconicism. Never too many words. From decades of newspaper writing I learned the lesson that any copy can be tightened and trimmed, if only by a single word. We strive for concision without sacrificing precision. It turns out Pope coined the nonce word writative and it entered the language. Just nineteen years after Pope wrote his letter, Johnson included it in his Dictionary (1755) with this note: “A word of Pope’s coinage; not to be imitated.” Johnson’s advice is solid. I remember one of my English lit professors who loved Tristram Shandy and passed on her love of Sterne to me, strongly cautioning against trying to ape his manner. Sterne’s prose is sui generis, a flawless reflection of his sensibility, for good and bad. To copy it would be to announce one’s thievery and absence of self-respect. So it is with writative – a word to admire and leave alone.

 

The OED defines it as “fond of writing; characterized by a strong inclination or liking for writing, esp. letter writing.” It gives six usages, including Pope’s original, one by Edmund Burke and another by, of all people, John Dos Passos. Pope continues in his letter to Swift:

 

“You and lord Bolingbroke are the only men to whom I write, and always in folio. You are indeed almost the only men I know, who either can write in this age, or whose writings will reach the next: others are mere mortals. Whatever failings such men may have, a respect is due to them, as luminaries whose exaltation renders their motion a little irregular, or rather causes it to seem so to others.”

While I was writing this post a friend who is visiting Ireland texted me a photograph he took in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, where Swift served as dean from 1713 to 1745: