ON • • • • • • Explit:ative and Hortcllo1} E.~·J·r1y.s· 1 ' Chicago Guides to IV~. Edltln~ and Publishing Already Published Writing for Social Scientists How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article Howard S. Becker, with a chapter by Pamela Richards The Craft of Translation Edited by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte Chicago Guide to Preparing Electronic Manuscripts For Authors and Publishers Prepared by the Staff of the University of Chicago Press Getting into Print The Decision-Making Process Walter W. Powell A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations Fifth Edition Kate Turabian, revised and enlarged by Bonnie Birtwistle Honigsblum Tales of the Field On Writing Ethnography John Van Maanen A Handbook of Biological Illustration Second Edition Frances W. Zweifel· Jacques Barzun On Writing_, Editing_, and Publishing Essays Explicative and Hortatory Second Edition With a Foreword by Morris Philipson The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 T he University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1971, 1986 by T he University of Chicago All rights reserved Published 1971 Second edition, expanded 1986 Printed in the United States of America 95 94 93 92 91 go 5 "Calamophobia, or Hints toward a Writer's Discipline" copyright 1950 by the Authors League of America, Inc. "English As She's Not Taught" copyright © 1953 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. "A Few Words on a Fe"" ' i\Tords" © 1974 by TI1e Columbia Forum. "Food for N.R .F., or '1vfy God! '.Vhat 'i\Till You Have?'" © 1953 by Partisan Revie,v. "Lincoln the Literary Genius"© 1959 by The Curtis Publishing Company. "A Note on the Inadequacy of Poe As a Proofreader and of H is Editors As French Scholars"© 1970 by Columbia University Press. "The Book, the Bibliographer, and the Absence of i\1ind" © 1969 by J acques Barzun. "Behind the Blue Pencil: Censorship or Creeping Creativity?" © 1985 by T he American Scholar. "Quote 'em Is Taboo" © 1945 by The Saturday Review Associates, Inc. "TV in the World of Letters"© 1960 by J acques Barzun. "Of Making Books"© 1946 by J acques Barzun. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barzun, J acques, 1907- 0 n \Vriting, editing, and publishing. 1. Authorship-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Authors and publishers-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Title. PN149.B295 1986 808'.02 85- 16562 ISBN 0-226--03857-2 (cloth) ISBN 0-226-03858-o (paper) Contents Foreword vii Introductory: Advice to a Young Writer I A W riter to H is lWates 1. A Writer's Discipline 5 2. English As She's Not Taught I8 3. A Few Words on a Few Words 33 4. Food for the N RF 4I Writers and Editors 5. Lincoln the Writer 65 6. Poe As Proofreader 82 7. The Bibliographer and His Absence of Mind 88 8. Behind the Blue Pencil Io3 W riter contra Medium 9. Paradoxes of Publishing 5 I I 10. Quote 'em Is T aboo I25 11. The Screening Mimis 3 I 2 Envoy: Of Making Books r45 Acknowledgments 47 I Foreword Of making many books there may be no end, but of mak ing them any better there is almost no means. Publish ing, editing, and writing remain cottage industries in which apprenticeship offers the only approximation to specialized training. Publishing, being a business, offers the most objective conditions for teaching and for evalu ating how successfully the trainee is learning his job; editing, too, less sharply defined but seeking to be a pro fession, offers some opportunities for knowing whether one is learning one's trade; but writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult of all to learn. Nevertheless, standards do exist and guides are avail able. They may be partial and personal and as difficult to come by as the autobiographical essays of the Russian writer Zamyatin, in A Soviet Heretic, or as impersonal and encyclopedic and readily available as the Chicago Manual of Style. But the hints, the counsel, the advice are so profoundly needed that anyone who is interested in the written word-even those who already may know Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Strunk and White's Elements of Style, Gowers's Complete Plain W ords, Follett's Modern American Usage-may now re joice in having available this collection of fugitive essays, these exposes, plaints, and onslaughts, from the pen of one of the wittiest of wise men, one of the best writers •• Vll ... Foreword Vlll who ever set himself to (as it looks only at the outset) the unrewarding task of writing about writing. In the autumn of 1970 I read a review by Jacques Barzun in the American Scholar which started me think ing again of the number of scattered articles of his, read over the past two dozen years, which sounded variations on the common theme of the glories and miseries of writ ing-editing-publishing. It struck me that it would be well worth while to bring the fugitive pieces together as a book. Though responsive to the suggestion, Mr. Barzun felt strongly that unless I would take the responsibility for editing these papers and seeing them through the press, he was not disposed to make a gathering of them. Respecting all three activities to which the essays are ad dressed, and in which I could become engaged simulta neously, I found the invitation irresistible. True to the classic conditions of publishing, the au thor and the editor then fell into a disagreement. I wanted to call the book Advice to Would-be Writers, Editors, and Publishers. The author wrote back saying, "Advice to strikes me as wrong and misleading. Except for the one paragraph written ad hoc, there is no advice given in my pieces, but description, expostulation, and fantastication. Nor can I be represented as advising now with old pieces. Something like Wisdom for would seem more exact and, curiously enough, more modest." In effect, you see Barzun in operation. The overriding con cern is for precision, rightness of tone, and effectiveness of communication. But of course in conflicts between publishers and authors, while the publisher's first con cern may be for what is most attractive commercially, the author's first concern, frequently enough, is for ac curacy-and sometimes for modesty. • Foreword ix Now consider the difference between advice and wis dom. To my mind, wisdom is what enables one to bear the inevitable; it offers the solace of recognizing and ac cepting the limits of doing. With wisdom one can endure what is necessary, inescapable, unchangeable. It is retro spective and essentially theoretical. Advice, on the other hand, is prospective and essentially practical. It offers counsel on altering for the better what is still subject to change. Deliberate counsel given through wise judg ments, enabling one to alter future actions, makes advice useful. If these essays by Jacques Barzun are not advice in the explicit sense-rules, programs, statements of standards - they most certainly are that by implication. They in variably teach us by examples which entertain as they instruct, for just as they deflate pretension and excoriate ignorance, so do they extol honesty and honor integrity. (As to the conclusion of the conflict between author and publisher with regard to the title of this work, you have the answer in your hands.) Are honesty and integrity then the concepts these es says are ultimately founded upon? I think so. Because, as I read them, they are stal,vart by virtue of being grounded in the most significant purpose of language: communication people-or, ideally, commu bet'~veen nion among people. Barzun's crucial terms of evalu ation are moral, not aesthetic. What is execrable is what misleads, what traduces, what injects error, what cloaks the absence of thought or feeling, what pretends to be something other than it is, what is false. Barzun's aesthetic concern is al\vays to use language as a transparent medium. The ideal is for the medium to have no message at all. The only message of any im- x Foreword portance whatsoever is the feeling or thought to be com municated. The metaphor in the phrase "clarity of ex pression" names the condition that enables one to "see through" flawlessly to what is meant. Where transparency of the medium is coupled with density of thought or richness of feeling, Barzun argues, the contrast yields eloquence, the greatest power inher ent in the artful use of language. In personal relations the analogue of eloquence is the power to charm. Charming another (unlike merely en tertaining him) enriches that person through such fasci nating communication as enhances his sense of vital ex perience. He is made wiser or warmer for it- "more alive." The opposite of charm is not dullness, it is spite: for a spiteful remark diminishes the other person, and in wreaking spitefulness one deliberately goes out of the way to make someone else feel poorer or smaller or weaker-"less alive." We are offered precious little in our formal or informal education to help us cultivate the power to charm, and, similarly, there are all too few counsels to help writers cultivate the power of effective ness, let alone eloquence. Both activities require one to "go out of the way" in order to achieve the desirable purposes, especially if the conventional "way" is clut· tered with obstacles making for muddiness or cloudiness or phoniness- as, in personal relations, there might be obstructive attitudes of meanness or unkindness or other variations of viciousness. By concentrating on the meanings which a writer wishes to communicate, Barzun instructs by remaining always true to the principle of "protecting the work and not the self." By setting his sights always on the ultimate purpose of enhancing the \Vriter's power to see things Foreword xi plain and to express them clearly, he offers the wisdom of recognizing accurately the powers and limits of verbal communication. In the compassion of his wisdom and the eloquence of his exposition lie the seeds of advice for every fertile mind. Director MORRIS PHILIPSON , The University of Chicago Press