Literary Styles in the English Language

by William H. Benson

September 26, 2013

     “September 30, 1659. I, poor, miserable Robinson Crusoe, being shipwrecked, during a dreadful storm in the offing, came on shore on this dismal unfortunate island, which I called ‘the Island of Despair,’ all the rest of the ship’s company being drowned, and myself almost dead.”

     So writes Daniel Defoe in his classic tale, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. I have always liked Defoe’s book, ever since I first read it. I like Robinson Crusoe’s resourcefulness, his ability to thrive despite adversity and isolation, elements that make a great story.

     But I also like Defoe’s literary style, his no-nonsense and straightforward English, without embellishment. Pick a sentence, any sentence, and you will see and hear his sense of pace, his rhythm, his workmanlike style, his matter-of-fact explanations.

     “But being now in the eleventh year of my residence, and, as I have said, my ammunition growing low, I set myself to study some art to trap and snare the goats, to see whether I could not catch some of them alive.” Forty-three words, all Anglo-Saxon, except the French words ‘residence’ and ‘ammunition.’ 

     I am partial to the writers, like Defoe, who work the English language, like a craftsman who chisels a wooden block, who shape and form an image.

     Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it that he feels in listening to the necessary speech of men about their work.” Emerson’s style is wise, gentle, and cerebral.

     On the other hand, the curmudgeon H. L. Mencken observed, “Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination—and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats.” Note his exaggeration in one direction and then his quick reversal. Two extremes contrasted and then the blazing image of alley cats, pure Menckenesque.

     Literary style is comparable to a fingerprint, a palm-print, or a face, individual and unique.

     Yet, an author’s style should not overshadow the content of his or her words. A “bad good writer” has important ideas to share, but expresses them in a haphazard manner. A “good bad writer” phrases his words and sentences with care, such that they sparkle, but alas, their content is empty, meaningless, misguided, or just plain wrong.

     The historian Jacques Barzun writes that “English has a great advantage over German” because ‘it possesses two vocabularies, nearly parallel” to each other: the first is Anglo-Saxon and the other is French derived from Latin. We can write “concede” or “give in;” “assume,” or “take up;” “deliver” or “hand over;” “insert” or “put in;” “retreat” or “fall back.” The French gave to modern English the first of those pairs, and the Anglo-Saxons gave the latter.

     Barzun says that “the existence of the quasi duplicate makes for a wide range of coloring in style and nuances in thought.” In other words, a writer in English can display shades of meaning and distinctions of thought that writers in certain other languages may not.

     Most composition teachers encourage students to stick with the more concrete Anglo-Saxon word and avoid the more abstract and stilted French word, but Barzun cautions that “Only a mechanical mind believes that the so-called Anglo-Saxon derivatives should always be preferred.”

     Mark Twain, who knew a few things about an English literary style, hated the German language and suggested that it “ought to be trimmed down and repaired.” He disliked the way that German relies upon the parenthesis, that it capitalizes its nouns, that the verb appears last in a sentence, that the gender classification makes no sense, and that it builds long words by splicing together other words.

     For example, Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen means, according to Twain, “Declarations of Independence.” Where an English-speaking man or woman drops a preposition between words to convey meaning, the Germans sew together a series of words and create “a mountain range” of a word.

    Twain wrote as a critic would write, pointing out mistakes, finding fault, and suggesting improvements. I would suspect that at least one German critic in turn criticized Twain’s literary style.

     The English stylist Peter Elbow writes in his book “Writing with Power,” that “Scholars like to tell the history of language as a story of things we gained that our forebears lacked—in terms of the stupid mistakes the ancients made.” Elbow sees the opposite, and asks, “But how about what we lack and what they had? They had power in language that’s hard to capture now.”

     Consider Homer, the other ancient Greeks, and the early Anglo-Saxon writers. They displayed a style, a power, and a magic that casts a spell upon their readers, as does Daniel Defoe.

     Elbow believes that the great writer “paralyzes the reader, prevents him or her from moving away, and compels him or her to experience the words, the story, and its meaning.” That, he says, is  magic.

Terror on New York’s Streets

by William H. Benson

September 12, 2013

     A bomb exploded at noon sharp, on September 16, 1920, at 23 Wall Street, at the intersection of Broad and Wall Streets, the address of the J. P. Morgan Bank. The perpetrator had strapped 100 pounds of dynamite to 500 pounds of cast-iron slugs and weights used in window sashes, loaded it on a horse-drawn wagon, driven to the scene, lit the fuse, and escaped the carnage before the dynamite detonated.

     At the moment of impact, the crude bomb “tore arms, legs, feet, hands, and scalps from its victims.” One witness said, “It was a crash out of a blue sky, an unexpected, death dealing bolt [that] turned into a shambles the busiest corner of America’s financial center.” Thirty-nine people died that day, and hundreds more suffered wounds in what was the worst terrorist attack in American history, that is until the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995.

     In 2009, a Yale history teacher named Beverly Gage published an account of this 1920 terrorist act in a book she entitled “The Day Wall Street Exploded.” In it, she wrote that most of the victims were innocent bystanders, “messengers, stenographers, clerks, salesmen, drivers,” the workers on Wall Street, “a place to make a modest living by selling milk, driving a car, typing reports, recording sales.”

     Lawmen believed that the perpetrators directed their attack at the J. P. Morgan Bank, but only one person employed in the bank was killed, a 24-year-old clerk. Most other employees were bandaged and back at work the next day. Cleanup crews obliterated crucial physical evidence that afternoon, and so authorities failed to apprehend, arrest, bring to trial, or convict anyone, not ever.

     A visitor to the city can still walk up to the building’s marble walls to see and touch the pock marks.

     Who would commit such a crime and why? Most detectives believed that an anarchist was behind the bombing. A series of bombs exploded in 1919 and 1920, and most were linked to anarchists. On June 2, 1919 a bomb exploded outside the house where Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, lived. He flew into action, tossed aside the Constitution, rounded up some six thousand men suspected of radical thoughts, and deported 556 aliens. The Red Scare was on.

     These anarchists were for very little, but against everything. They opposed industrialization and the state’s power to protect and regulate it. They did not waste time quibbling over their ideology’s finer points, but preferred to act, calling their dynamite bombs “propaganda by deed.” They “never developed a coherent vision for a society without state power” or without industrial strength.

     If that same visitor to New York City would walk the two blocks west of 23 Wall Street to Broadway, then north on Broadway four blocks, and then one block west on Liberty Street, he or she would stand on the southern edge of the World Trade Center, the 16-acre site where the cruelest act of terrorism occurred in our nation’s history on September 11, 2001.

     Today that visitor would not see an ugly empty lot, because on its northwest corner, stands a new skyscraper, 104 stories tall, its address One World Trade Center, its spire reaching to a height of 1776 feet, making it the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, the fourth tallest in the world. Topped out a year ago on August 30, workers installed the spire’s final piece on May 10, 2013. The 1776 feet was symbolic. Its cost was $3.9 billion, the most expensive building project in the world at this time.

     Other planes had flown into skyscrapers before. At 9:40 a.m. on July 28, 1945, a B-25 bomber flown by William Franklin Smith hit the north side of the Empire State Building, at the 79^th floor and killed fourteen people: Smith, his two crewmen, and eleven others inside the building. Then, on May 20, 1946 a C-45 Beechcraft flew into the 58^th floor on the north side of the Bank of Manhattan building at 40 Wall Street, killing five people on board, but all inside survived.

     Authorities blamed the two crashes on fog, poor visibility, and pilot disorientation, but the crashes on 9-11 were no accidents. The perpetrators’ intent was self-destructive and cruel destruction on a massive scale, and they succeeded in both.

     What defeated those determined and violent 19^th and 20^th century anarchists who were so in love with dynamite?  The Newsweek writer David Wallace-Wells answered that question. “Enlightenment values have triumphed over terroristic ones before, not by defeating [them] but by absorbing them through progressive legislation, unionization, rising wages and the formalization of civil liberties.”

     Yes, the morning and evening news reminds us daily that we live in a dangerous era, but the historians observe that in the history of humankind that fact is not unique. All eras were and will be dangerous. What is remarkable is that Enlightenment values can overcome and absorb its foes.

     Because life goes on, even after a premeditated terrorist act, New York City built a new skyscraper.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

by Bill Benson

August 29, 2013

     Back in my preschool years, I and my brothers listened to a stack of 45 rpm records again and again. One was “Oh Danny Boy,” another was Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races,” but a favorite was Mahalia Jackson’s “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Her amazing voice mesmerized me then, just five-years-old, and still does.

     This Wednesday marks the fiftieth anniversary of the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” and Mahalia Jackson was there. She sang “How I Got Over,” possibly “I’ve Been ‘Buked and Scorned,” and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

     Behind that march lay two decades of planning. A. Philip Randolph, the dean of civil rights leaders, first planned a rally during Roosevelt’s administration, in 1941, but he called it off after FDR relented and prohibited further discrimination among the defense contractors.

     Yet, the discrimination persisted. “In the spring of 1963, the rate of unemployment for whites was 4.8 percent. For nonwhites it was 12.1 percent.” The blacks understood that the whites excluded them from the best paying jobs, and they saw the connection between the economic opportunity that a job represented and civil rights. Hence, their march was for “Jobs and Freedom.”

     Also in the spring of 1963, President Kennedy called the civil rights leaders—A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others—into the White House and asked them to discontinue their plans for the march. “They politely rebuffed him.” This time they would march.

     The civil rights leader Bayard Rustin built a successful organization of staff and volunteers, and he expected 100,000 people to gather next to the Washington Monument and then march west beside the reflecting pool to the Lincoln Memorial. There the people would listen to speakers who would demand that Congress pass civil rights legislation. King said that the march would “arouse the conscience of the nation over the economic plight of the Negro.”

     People in Washington D. C. were terrified. Law enforcement officials called it Operation Steep Hill. Helicopters were fueled and ready. Sales of alcohol were banned. The law authorities and the courts expected a number of arrests, and in case of an inflammatory speech, they installed a kill switch on the microphone, and were prepared to play Mahalia Jackson’s “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

     None of that happened, even though over 200,000 people arrived that day, including 60,000 whites.

     Ten people spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that day. The first was A. Philip Randolph, who said, “We know that we have no future in a society in which six million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty.” Mahalia Jackson’s songs captivated the audience, and then the final speaker, Martin Luther King, Jr., stood behind the microphone.

     That morning he was undecided about what he would say. In 1963 he gave 350 speeches and used similar words and ideas in most of them. Like most Baptist preachers, he could cut and paste as he spoke, incorporating certain phrases and words and dropping others from his prepared text.

     He said, “In a sense, we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.” The founding fathers “were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. . . . It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note. . . . America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.”

     Mahalia Jackson, who stood only twenty feet away, called out to King. “Tell them about the dream.” Often she performed with Martin Luther King, Jr., and months before in Detroit she had heard him talk about his dream. King laid aside his text, and someone nearby said, “Those people don’t know it, but they’re about to go to church.” King continued,

     “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

      When he would pause, the crowd would remain silent, but then they would stir when he would say again, “I have a dream.” His was sweeping oratory, mixing Biblical themes and the founding fathers’ words, and overlooking his shoulder was the huge statue of Abraham Lincoln, seated on a chair, his arms stretched forward, resting on the armrests. It is a moment etched in most Americans’ minds. Like Lincoln before him, King may not have had the whole world, but he had his audience in his hands.

     Historians rank King’s “I have a dream” speech the second best in America’s history, just behind Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” and both men were assassinated, as was Kennedy three months later.

     “Let freedom ring!” King said, as he closed his speech and the march that day. May it ever be so.

The French Revolution

by William H. Benson

August, 15, 2013

     King Louis XVI welcomed 1201 delegates into his Hall of Mirrors at his palace in Versailles, ten miles west of Paris, on Saturday, May 2, 1789. The king had called this Estates-General to assist him in resolving his government’s financial crisis. It was bankrupt, drowning in debt, and unable to borrow additional funds from any bank or country.

    The king recognized that he needed additional tax revenues now. For centuries, France’s kings had exempted the aristocrats and clergymen from paying any taxes, even though they received income and owned property. The noblemen and bishops rejected each of the king’s finance ministers’ plans to tax them, and there matters stood when the delegates filed into the king’s splendid Hall of Mirrors.

     Over the next three months, the Estates-General’s members transformed themselves into a National Assembly, a legislative body of delegates determined to write a constitution.

     The delegates soon heard the dire news that on July 14, a mob in Paris had stormed into the Bastille, freed the seven prisoners held there, and murdered the guards. The common French people hated the Bastille because it represented the king’s oppressive rule, a place of torture and confinement.

     In the days that followed, the peasants and common people across all of France learned of the Storming of the Bastille, and they too rushed into their manors’ households and confiscated their bread and belongings. Because society’s bottom echelon attacked the top, the nobility and clergymen were terrified, and so a Great Fear swept over France. No longer would peasants defer to their oppressors.

     On August 4, the National Assembly’s delegates decided they must act now if they wished to stop the riots. That day and into the night, they passed nineteen decrees that abolished France’s ancient feudal system. They freed the serfs, who for centuries had been bound to the land and forced to pay duties to the landowners. The delegates abolished all mandatory tithes to the church. They decreed that all French citizens would pay taxes equally. They announced that all citizens were eligible to serve in the government or military.

     The August decrees calmed the people, causing the Great Fear to subside.

     Three weeks later, on August 26, the National Assembly’s delegates adopted seventeen articles in The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens. The second article defines these rights as “liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.” The fourth defines liberty as “the power of doing whatever does not injure another.” The tenth states that the government cannot harass any man “on account of his opinions, not even on account of his religious opinions.” The eleventh states that “every citizen may speak, write, and publish freely.”

     The thirteenth declares that taxes are “to be divided equally among the members of the community, according to their abilities.” The fifteenth states that “Every community has a right to demand of all its agents, an account of their conduct.”

     In that summer of revolution in 1789, the August decrees and the Declaration transformed France. They eradicated the aristocrats’ privileges. Gone were their titles. Henceforth, France was a meritocracy where all would work, pay taxes, and permitted to voice their opinions. Also, the state would not force people to pay tithes to support the clergy, and the peasants were free to move off the farm.

     Unless you are a French citizen, none of these decrees or rights apply to you. If you are an American, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights apply to you.

     Does any man and woman in truth possess any of these rights? I say that people do have rights, but only if their current government says they do. If a dictator, such as a Robespierre or Napoleon, assumes the reigns of power, he will stomp them into the ground. People’s rights exist so long as that government that instituted them exists. If it fails, so too do the rights.

     In the preamble to the Declaration, the National Assembly’s delegates said that “ignorance, neglect, or contempt of human rights, are the sole causes of public misfortunes and corruptions of Government.” The reverse is believed true. Recognize the people, their right to rule and pass self-governing laws, and misfortunes and corruption will dissipate.

     George Will, the columnist, said that “the business of America is not business. The business of America is liberty, and securing the blessings of freedom.”

Aware of Where We Are

by William H. Benson

August 1, 2013

     In May 1986 at Harvard’s graduation, an interviewer asked twenty-three graduates a simple question: “Why is it warm in the summer and cold in the winter?” Nearly all the graduates answered that during the summer the Earth is nearer the sun, and they were wrong. Only two knew the correct answer. Because the Earth tilts, the sun is more directly overhead in the summer than in the winter.

     Farmers know that, as does anyone who works outside. They watch the sun. A week ago a writer in the New York Times named John Edward Huth wrote that even “a Neolithic farmer could . . . explain that the sun was low in the winter and high in the summer.” Huth makes the point that when we divide knowledge into minute slices and pieces, we miss seeing the “larger conceptual framework.” Without that context, “we surrender meaning to guardians of knowledge, and it loses its personal value.”

     To observe a phenomenon and arrive at a conclusion is a valid skill, not needing a teacher. Which direction is the wind blowing, and which direction is north, or south, or east, or west? Where is the sun in the sky? Where is the moon? What is its shape? What are the ocean’s waves doing? Where is the tide? Some are unaware of their surroundings; others pick up those clues without effort.

     In Australia’s Outback lives a tribe called the Guugu Yimithirr. These aborigines are unusual because they speak a language that is geographic oriented, that relies on cardinal directions. Because they maintain a keen sense of where true north is, they describe items by directions. “Look out for that big ant just north of your foot,” they might say, and “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” If blindfolded and spun around twenty times in a darkened room, they will still point to north.

     To be aware of the physical is one thing, but a separate universe is human emotion. People feel emotions as well as think thoughts, often simultaneously. We walk on planet Earth and stare up at a star-littered sky, at a sun, and a moon, but we also feel things inside. We feel the pain when we lose our job, our home. We feel joy at a wedding, a win at a ball game. We feel relieved when we missed a disaster, an accident. We feel envious of others success, of their skills.

     Great writers, especially the superb novelists, include the range of emotions in their prose. Plot may be a story’s skeleton, but the emotions are its skin and features and the force that keeps people reading late into the night. Readers feel what the characters feel: shame, ambition, sorrow, and love.

     When conversing with another, some may miss what others are feeling, but others catch the cues, the facial features, the body language, and the voice’s tone. They read others like some read a book.

     Jane Austen’s character, Emma, in her book by the same name, asks Mrs. Weston why their friend Jane Fairfax spends so much time with Mrs. Elton, a silly person. Mrs. Weston says to Emma, “Well, before we condemn what she chooses, we have to consider what she quits.” If Jane stays at home, she has to hang out with her aunt and grandad, which Mrs. Weston believe would not be time well spent.

     An economist would say that Jane’s decision to visit a silly and inane person is an “opportunity cost.” Indeed, an economist named Michael Chwe published a book this year called Jane Austen, Game Theorist, and in it he pointed out how Jane Austen’s characters think and feel. Mrs. Weston is aware of why people choose as they do. She places her thoughts and feelings inside Jane Fairfax’s and considers her alternatives. Mrs. Weston is aware that when one chooses between two bad alternatives, he or she will choose the one least distasteful.

     The movie, Much Ado About Nothing, was released on June 7. Although I have not seen it yet, I read that the director filmed it in just twelve days and followed to the letter Shakespeare’s script of his better comedy. Beatrice and Benedick are young and single. Whenever they meet, they antagonize each other, they kid each other, and they put each other down. Their verbal battles are great sport.

      Then, Benedick’s friends whisper so that he can hear and convince him that Beatrice loves him, and Beatrice’s friends do the same and convince her that Benedick loves her. The two meet on stage, stare at each other, and wonder. Who do we trust? Others’ words, or our own feelings? They try to write and recite love poems, but the repartee was more fun. They examine their feelings, and the realization dawns upon them that, yes, they do love each other, and so they marry.

     Benedick ends the play, “a college of wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humour. Man is a giddy thing and this is my conclusion.” So it is much ado about nothing.

     Why is it hot in the summer? Which direction is north? Why did Mrs. Watson know what Jane Fairfax was thinking? Why did Beatrice and Benedict fall in love once they ceased teasing each other? To know is one thing, but to experience a feeling is another. The gaps in our knowledge and in our awareness of other’s feelings is huge. Man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.

Egypt and Conquerers

by William H. Benson

July 18, 2013

     Conquerers love Egypt. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte each in their own time invaded Egypt, walked upon Egypt’s sand, sailed on the Nile River, and stared at the relics.

     Alexander, a Macedonian Greek, was only 24 years old in October of 332 B.C. when he arrived in Egypt. Because the Egyptian people hated their Persian rulers, they welcomed Alexander with open arms, called him their Savior and Liberator, a “son of the gods.” He and his troops gaped in amazement at Egypt’s religion, its ritual, its obelisks, its immense “temples not built to human scale,” and at the Great Pyramids at Giza. Alexander conquered Egypt, but Egypt conquered Alexander.

     Three hundred years later, in 48 B.C., the Roman general Julius Caesar invaded Egypt, but the Egyptian people resisted him. They pinned him down in Alexandria, at the mouth of the Nile, but he maintained his naval supply lines and waited for reinforcements. When they arrived, he attacked and destroyed his enemies at the Battle of the Nile in February of 47 B.C. With Egypt in his hands, Caesar placed Egypt’s queen, Cleopatra, upon the throne, and he fell in love with her.

     Napoleon Bonaparte, France’s general, invaded Egypt on July 2, 1798. On July 21, he and his French troops attacked the Mameluks at a site near Cairo, in what is now called the Battle of the Pyramids. As the battle commenced, Napoleon shouted at his troops, “Forward! Remember that from those monuments yonder forty centuries look down upon you.” His troops won the battle that day.

     However, the British Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson, had followed Napoleon to Egypt, and at a second Battle of the Nile on August 1, 1798, near Alexandria, Nelson destroyed Napoleon’s naval fleet. The French general marched his troops north into Palestine and Syria where he battled local armies at Jaffa, Acre, Nazareth, and Mount Tabor before he returned to Egypt, and then to France.

     Egyptians can point with pride at a spectacular ancient past that lasted for millennium, that built the Great Pyramids at Cheops, but they despise the foreign conquerers—Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon—who invaded and subdued their country’s citizens.     

     Today Egypt is in chaos. The Egyptian people are so desperate for food that they may welcome another foreign conquerer, one from Greece, Italy, France, Great Britain, or the United States, because, according to the columnist Thomas L. Friedman, Egypt “is falling apart,” “is in a deep hole,” suffers “from deep economic dislocation and distress,” and may be “ungovernable and the job of president impossible.” “[G]as lines and electricity shortages are everywhere.”

     Eighty million people depend upon the Nile River for their water, bread, and hydroelectric power. With global warming, the Mediterranean Sea’s level has risen, and that has pushed saltwater high into the Nile River’s delta. Mahmoud Medany, an Egyptian agricultural researcher, said, “The Nile is the artery of life, and the Delta is our breadbasket, and if you take that away, there is no Egypt.”

     This economic disaster is matched by political chaos. Following the Arab Spring in 2011 and the overthrow of long-time President, Hosni Mubarak, the new government has struggled. In recent days the people took to the streets to protest President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party’s despotic rule. Although elected by popular vote, the Egyptian army removed Morsi from power, and put him and his gang into jail, where they are held on the charge that they ruined the economy.

     His supporters have sat down in the streets since to protest his imprisonment.

     Friedman admits that Morsi was not capable. “Morsi was not focused on governing and appointing the best people for jobs. He was focused on digging himself and his party into power. There was no chance that Morsi was going to rise to this moment.” Instead, Morsi sought to solidify his own control.

     Friedman answers the question, “Can Egypt pull together?” with a solution. Egypt, he says, needs a leader who inspires “a spirit of inclusion,” who can “strengthen education, shrink the state, stimulate entrepreneurship, empower women, and reform the police and judiciary.”

     That is a solution typical of a journalist from the West, where education is strong, where women are empowered, where entrepreneurship is prized, and where the military defers to the civil government, but it may not be a solution appropriate for the Egyptian people today. They must discover their own solutions for their numerous economic and political difficulties. They must take ownership in their own future. They must muddle through until solutions appear.

     They do not need a foreign conquerer, who will sweep in on his horse and dictate orders. That action overwhelms and disgusts people, and they will rebel.

     Egypt is a land of enchantment, a mecca for tourists, a wonder, an astonishment, the country with the longest history. The Egyptian people will muddle through, as they have for millennium.