Skunked: How to Not Write Bad/Reflections on Ben Yagoda's New Book

Readers of this blog may not be able to guess that I am a lover of books not just about words, but about their placement between marks of punctuation.  From where I sit I see (on my shelf) Karen Elizabeth Gordon (Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness, Torn Wings and Faux Pas), Roy Blount Jr. (Alphabet Juice), Roy Peter Clark (The Glamour of Grammar), Patricia T. O'Conner (Woe is I), Kitty Burns Florey (Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog), Peter Bowler (The Superior Person's Book of Words), and all manner of thesaurus and dictionary.  I've actually read these books.  I have learned from them.

I also own three Ben Yagodas:  When You Catch an Adjective Kill it, Memoir: A History, and, as of two weeks ago, How to Not Write Bad.  A professor at the University of Delaware, an historian of The New Yorker, a man who can talk knowledgeably about many things (we have shared a place at Elizabeth Mosier's table, we have chatted over Facebook, we have talked about truth and my own long-in-the-making Handling the Truth), Ben is a conversationalist of the first order.  He has stories to tell, and he tells them wit-fully.

(There I go, making up words again.)

Ben's new book is an advice book aimed toward those who hope to "not write badly."  It was inspired by his students' work, he tells us—by their penchant for using misunderstood words, dangling clauses, spliced commas, homophones, and poorly placed possessives, among other things.  Ben has seen bad writing flare.  He has returned to tell us about it.  He is asking (mostly politely) if we could please do better.

How to Not Write Bad is intentionally full of the basics, in other words.  That little reminder to set the right apostrophe in the right place.  That hope that we will put "lie" and "lay" to proper use. That gentle corrective regarding I, myself, and me.  It is a book that asks us to be mindful, to look back over own shoulders at the language trail we leave, to be our own best copy editors, to read, to look things up.

My favorite parts of the book are those that trace the history of phrases or words.  Those parts that decode what was once wrong but is not necessarily wrong now, or could be right tomorrow.  It is the transitional nature of language that gets us most confounded, I would suggest.  The "certain grammatical constructions [that] are considered okay by some or most authorities but retain an offensive odor for many readers (and, crucially, for teachers and editors), and should be avoided."  Ben is well aware of the pitfalls and the trapdoors, and he leads us through his understanding of both in a way that could be helpful when talking with a client, say, about that word "alright," or the streamlining of adjectives, or any other number of things.

Packed with student examples, percolated with Ben's trademark style, easy to read and easy to remember, How Not to Write Bad will now join the other word books on my shelf.  I will hope to get more right here in the future—despite my penchant for longish sentences and odd little words, despite my tendency (I'm sorry; there are pressures; I will do better when I can) to blog too fast.   

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The DeWitt Henry Evening, in photos and introduction

Radnor High graduates of the class of '59 came out in force last night to welcome DeWitt Henry home.  Pamela Sedor, the ever-young, always-beautiful mistress of the Radnor Memorial Library, did what she does to make the evening seamless.  Elizabeth Mosier and Chris Mills brought Ben Yagoda, Kelly Simmons, Cynthia Reeves, and me to their warm hearth; Kathye Fetsko Petrie brought her most ineffable self. And I was given the honor of introducing a man who has given stories—his own, those of others—a place of permanence. 

This was his evening.

When DeWitt Henry turned 30 years old, he wrote the following in a journal he was keeping:

“I can’t get a job.  I can’t have the things that normal people my age enjoy.  I can’t afford a family.  When I was twenty-five, that was clearly a matter of choice.  I was trying to be an artist, and I could always give up that ambition and still succeed by worldly standards.  But here I am skilled, educated, and living alone on $4,000 where any stiff can make $10,000.”

It’s classic DeWitt.  Self-effacing.  Never murky.  Sentences built of particulates.  It’s also preamble.  Because DeWitt Henry wasn’t actually just moping around in his thirtieth year.  He was on the verge of a next great thing, a brand new future—not just for himself, but for all us readerly stiffs.

So he was frequenting a bar called Plough.  So, in the early fall of 1971, $2,000 were played against 1,000 copies of what would become the first issue of Ploughshares, now one of the most esteemed literary magazines in the world.  What writer doesn’t know Ploughshares, or lust after a Ploughshares page?  The intention was, to quote DeWitt quoting Gordon Lish, to make “a distinct contribution to the national adventure in writing” and, to now quote DeWitt quoting Ted Solotaroff, “to convey the bright hope” of contemporary writing.

DeWitt has brightened the bulb of hope in many ways throughout his career—teaching at Harvard before becoming the Chair of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College, and publishing his own essays and stories, pieces that the great Tim O’Brien called “flat-out wonderful.”  He has made a career of launching careers while steadily tending his own.

Through the thickness and the thinness, DeWitt Henry never forgot his roots.  The house on Bloomingdale Avenue.  Howard, the butcher at Espenshade’s.  Kay’s Dress Shop.  The Anthony Wayne Theater.  St. David’s Golf Club. St. Martin’s Dam. The halls of Radnor High.  These memories are the stuff of Sweet Dreams, the memoir he’ll be sharing tonight.

In an essay called “On Aging,” about running the Boston marathon, DeWitt writes “There is the lesson of self-awareness and acceptance, beyond unrealistic ambition....” and then:  “There is the lesson of celebrating, from your individual limits, the glory of full human possibility.”  Tonight we celebrate DeWitt Henry—self aware and wholly accepting, the absolutely full human.

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What they're saying (about Memoir, Neil Gaiman, and James Patterson)

I chose to spend my two stolen hours of the week not with The Girl with Glass Feet (a glorious-seeming book that I hope to finish reading during my train ride to Manhattan tomorrow), but with recent issues of The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Newsweek.

Or The Three News, as I think of them here at my house.

I have (and I'm more surprised by this than anyone else could be) written five memoirs and one autobiography of a river that is more memoiristic than a casual reader might guess. I therefore began my readerly escapades with Daniel Mendelsohn's "But Enough about Me," which appears in the January 25, 2010, issue of The New Yorker and uses as its diving platform Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History. The second paragraph begins thusly:

"Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupcon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family."

I'm not pretending that the black sheepedness is news to me, but let me just say this: what a line-up of adjectives, adverbs, and accusations we have here, all in one place. In my own self-defense I might say that my memoirs are not of the juiced-up, slicked-down, you can't-top-this-one, commercially successful sort (I'm too boring a person to even attempt such a seige). Still, wow. That's some mirror to find oneself staring into. (Read the whole article to see how Mendelsohn, who has also published memoir, adjusts and alleviates this description by the end of his piece.)

I moved on, in the same issue, to "Kid Goth: Neil Gaiman's Fantasies," by Dana Goodyear. Neil Gaiman, I'm thinking. Love Neil Gaiman. Was even voted one of the top five author bloggers alongside Neil Gaiman. Gonna love this story. But, well, I'm not certain that my idea of Neil Gaiman has been well-served by meeting this particular version, in which Goodyear quotes Gaiman as saying, among other things, "I have at this point a critic-proof career" and Coraline is a "beloved text," and "When I try to explain that I attracted more attention than [Angelina Jolie at a convention], people say, 'Oh, ho, he's being funny.' I'm not." We also learn that, whenever Gaiman Twitters fans telling them to buy a certain book on a certain day, they readily comply. "It means I'm nobody's bitch," Goodyear quotes.

Update: Karen Mahoney, a dear reader, indicates that Gaiman has perhaps been misquoted re the "nobody's..." business. I am fervently hoping so.

Onto the Jonathan Mahler "James Patterson Inc." profile in today's The New York Times Magazine. The story of the ad-man with the stable of co-writers (five co-writers!) who produces up to nine new books each year (an increasing number of them in the YA category) and has several Little Brown employees dedicated just to his brand is familiar fodder. I did not know, however (did you?), that since 2006 "one out of every 17 hardcover books bought in the United States was written by James Patterson," nor that he has had (to date) 51 books on the Times bestseller list. "Each of Patterson's series has its own fan base, but there are also plenty of people who read everything he writes," Mahler tells us. "His books all share stylistic similarities. They are light on atmospherics and heavy on action, conveyed by simple, colloquial sentences. 'I don't believe in showing off,' Patterson says of his writing. 'Showing off can get in the way of a good story.'"

My Sunday reading has come to a close, and I'm feeling a bit bashed up and bruised. I will, nonetheless, still be reading the gorgeously literary Glass Feet on the morrow, I will not give in to any urge to command my friends to purchase my books right now (or ever), I will always be second to Angelina Jolie, and when I get to write again (I hope I'll get to write again), I'll try not to think of a well-formed sentence as simply showing off.

Unseemly, mendacious, meretricious, and unpalatable, I am also, as it turns out, impossibly stubborn.

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Tangled up with Memoir

Judith Shulevitz reviews Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History in this week's New York Times Book Review, and I read, with fascination, lines such as these:

Yagoda uses the words 'memoir' and 'autobiography' interchangeably. But they are not the same thing; practitioners know this.

If the flux of life conforms so readily to the constraints of convention, and conventions come and go, then how do you draw a line between truth and art? The last time I checked, truth wasn't boxed in by convention.

... maybe what makes a memoir edifying is not truthfulness but the memoirist's ability to justify a life appealingly. In the five memoirs I have written I don't ever recall working toward or away from a justifying impulse. I recall wanting to understand, wanting to reach out, wanting to write my life in a manner that opened doors for readers, set them thinking about their own journeys, their own choices. The memoirs that I love to read do the same thing. Is, to use our Penn class examples, Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family a justification? Is The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? If so, what are they justifying?

Truth is the least of memoir, he suggests, though truth can't be dispensed with. (There's that little matter of having to speak in good faith.) The power to persuade is all. Is it all about persuasion, then? I'm wagering that the best of memoir aspires to something greater, something more.

I respond here to a review, of course. Ben Yagoda is a terrific writer; I need to read this book for myself.

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