'He Seemed to Think Lucidity All-sufficing'

“[T]here is a very widespread and comfortable belief that we are all of us born writers. Not long ago I heard that agile and mellifluous quodlibetarian, Dr. Joad, saying in answer to a questioner who wanted to write good letters, that anybody could write good letters: one had but to think out clearly what one wanted to say, and then set it down in the simplest terms.” 

Even that is a challenge for some. Clarity in writing, of course, reflects clarity of thought. Muddled prose suggests muddled thinking. It also helps to have some sense of style. “Dr. Joad” is C.E.M. Joad, not a member of the Okie family in The Grapes of Wrath but a one-time English radio philosopher and celebrity. The author is Max Beerbohm in a lecture he delivered in 1943 on the odious writer and human being Lytton Strachey, whom he knew and about whom he has reservations. Here, Beerbohm continues on the subject of Joad and facile writing:

 

“And a few weeks later, when the writing of books was under discussion, he said that the writers who thought most about how they should write were the hardest to read; and again he seemed to think lucidity all-sufficing.”

 

What grabbed my attention was that exotic word quodlibetarian. As usual, Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary is plain and concise: “One who talks or disputes on any subject.” We know the type. The OED’s definition requires further explanation: “A person who discusses or engages in quodlibets; a writer of quodlibets.” That word is obsolete and dates from the fifteenth century in English: “An academic exercise within a university in which a master or bachelor would discuss questions on any subject; the written record of such an exercise.” In short, a know-it-all, in fact or by self-proclamation, and a species never endangered.

 

Beerbohm’s own prose in the Strachey lecture is splendid. Take this passage, which out-Joads Joad and out-Stracheys Strachey:

 

“It takes all kinds to make a world, or even to make a national literature. Even for spirits less fastidious than Strachey’s, there is, even at the best of times, a great charm in the past. Time, that sedulous artist, has been at work on it, electing and rejecting with great tact. The past is a work of art, free from irrelevancies and loose ends. There are, for our vision, comparatively few people in it, and all of them are interesting people. The dullards have all disappeared—all but those whose dullness was so pronounced as to be in itself for us an amusing virtue. And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled. There’s nothing to be done about it—nothing but to contemplate it and blandly form theories about this or that aspect of it.”