One Fell Soup

by Roy Blount

  Mr. Perrin does have an odd tendency to wrap up otherwise crisp essays a bit too bouncily: “Doesn’t that sound almost as lively as the average conversation in a bar? Maybe even livelier than some? You know it does. If you want real talk, forget the city.” And the dialogue he occasionally puts in the mouths of animals lacks pungency: “Oh, Mr. Teaser, what strong teeth you have! And that blond mane is so cute!” His sensibility seems less richly manured than those of two very disparate country writers, E. B. White and Harry Crews.

  But Noel Perrin appreciates manure, and animals and wood and dirt, and the irony in the fact that he could have bought seven cows with the money that Newsweek spent getting a photograph of him without cows. (Time had run one of him with cows.) He cites any number of reliable friends and neighbors with whom he shares knotty chores. It might be more interesting if he were to characterize some of these folks more thoroughly, but then it might not be so neighborly. Though detached enough to be a student rather than an instinctive grasper of country codes, Mr. Perrin seems to belong where he lives, and it’s always remarkable to read a good writer who manages to do that.

  He says it is not true, incidentally, that farm kids grow up knowing all about the birds and the bees from watching farm animals. Farm animals, he says, are discreet. He has a Hereford bull who “must handle all his affairs between three and six on cloudy mornings.” An affectionate nine-hundred-pound cow, however, once came within an ace of mounting Mr. Perrin.

  This book did not make me want to go ahead and get cows.

  USED WORDS

  Just neat white paper covered with words

  Or are they turds or are they turds?

  —Elizabeth Smart,

  “CBS and JBP”

  IS THE POPE CAPITALIZED?

  The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual

  Edited by Howard Angione

  Associated Press, S2.95

  The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage

  Revised and edited by Lewis Jordan

  Quadrangle, $10

  The United Press International Stylebook

  Compiled and edited by Bobby Ray Miller

  United Press International, S3

  The Washington Post Deskbook on Style

  Compiled and edited by Robert A. Webb

  McGraw-Hill, $10

  IT WAS UNDER THE heading “A Sense of Style” that the late George Frazier led off one of his columns in the Boston Globe with this sentence:

  What I suspect may not be generally recognized is that beneath the sheen of hubris and swaggering insolence that colors my reflections on fashion there are a certain piety and high purpose—a caveat, a bit of consumer counsel designed to put you on guard against those who would exploit your naivete about clothes, cautioning you against submitting too sheepishly to the arrogance of ignorance of such cloak-and-suiters as the inexcusably tasteless Grieco Brothers, of such self-professed arbiters of elegantiarum as one Ralph Lauren, and of all such salespersons as tell you not to give it another thought, that’s the way the lapels on a double-breasted jacket are supposed to look when the hell it is.

  That kind of style, the joy of text, is rare in journalism these days. Occasionally, a nice touch crops up. A few years ago, Ray Swallow in WomenSports told of a day at Hialeah when jockey Eddie Maple was thrown by two different horses:

  “Eddie Maple [who wasn’t] must be drunk,” said a bettor behind us, who was.

  Much of the pleasure—advancement of world socialism aside—that Alexander Cockburn takes in his Village Voice “Press Clips” column, I suspect, is in his own style:

  And I liked my Scottish public school too. … The fear was not really of bullying or homosexual assault so much as whether one’s parents would make public spectacles of themselves on their periodic visits to the school, which was ten miles across the moors from the nearest point of civilization (Perth).

  Nice, that “(Perth),” like a percussionist’s closing, retroactively pervasive plonk.

  But few journalistic stylists today are half so playful. Tom Wolfe’s prose has flattened out considerably, and so has Hunter Thompson’s. It may be that Thompson’s full Fear and Loathing cry reached such a pitch that it is now, like the H-bomb, only unthinkably employable. In fact, he has fixed it so that no one can use such handy terms as bull maggot, king-hell, and wolverine with any real equanimity.

  I don’t mean to equate style with crazy shit. Mary McGrory’s syndicated column, though cool and level, is eloquent, whereas Pete Hamill’s, surging with intensified values, is usually schlock. On most news pages, vivid writing has made little headway, and that is doubtless a good thing. Certainly, writers of straight news copy are wise to avoid isolated special effects such as the one that closes this otherwise exemplary paragraph from the New York Daily News:

  Two correction officers, noticing his grandson, approached and asked: “David, what’s the matter?” With that, Berkowitz began trembling and screaming. The guards walked him 50 feet down a hallway to his room and placed him in his bed, where he thrashed around. Wildly.

  Now, the prose of the Daily News is generally a brisk, fluent, and pointed thing in the morning. That “Wildly” sentence is a break in form. However snappy it may become, daily-news-story English is quite a formal arrangement, almost as refined in its way as the language of “Mary Worth.” It takes a straight face to pull off something like this, from the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

  Pianist Hilde Somer, her audience, and even the critics winced when she played a concert recently in Tarrytown, N.Y. The music was not the usual Somer perfection.

  The Baldwin Piano Co. checked the complaint and found that David Saphra, the technician who was supposed to have tuned the piano that day, was instead jumping off the Throgs Neck Bridge. …

  The conventions of a personal column are somewhat different, of course. But, even there, I doubt that an American will ever be as rowdy and experimental as Flann O’Brien was in his Irish Times column (a column whose many felicities included the occasional intervention of a chorus, “the Plain People of Ireland,” who would exclaim things like, “What in the name of goodness is all this about?”), or as “Li’l Abner” and “Pogo” were at their best.

  Newspaper prose is too hard to control. For one thing, there is the problem of typos. A recent story by sports columnist Mike Lupica in the Daily News, about what New Jersey Nets coaches discuss while commuting from home on Long Island to work in Piscataway, New Jersey, ended like this:

  “You’re always optimistic in this game,” said Loughery. … “We beat them. It wasn’t a situation where we got lucky. We beat ’em.” I made pleasant conversation on The Ride.

  One title t is dropped from the first word of the last sentence and Lupica is rendered self-congratulatory. It is hard to say what gremlins caused the same paper’s Dick Young to call Howard Cosell “an articulate diuretic” in a recent column. Since a diuretic is an agent that promotes the flow of urine, an articulate diuretic must be a well-spoken beer salesman. What Young doubtless meant was that Cosell had logorrhea, and what he intended to write—in euphemistic reference to the inelegant but functional phrase “diarrhea of the mouth”—was “an articulate diarrhetic.” But that, too, would have been inapt, since I never heard of any such noun as diarrhetic and, articulation properly implies almost anything but gush. “Articulate diarrhetic,” ironically enough, sounds Cosellian.

  But Young usually abstains from large phrases, and, though often objectionable, is a newspaper stylist of note. Unlike, say, Rex Reed, Max Lerner, or Steve Dunleavy, Young has worked out a crisp here-I-am-and-here-it-is voice, a prose that belongs on a tabloid page but also jumps off it. Style is presence, or, as Swift said, “proper words in proper places.”

  Style is also how many e’s in employee or employe, and whether or not to uppercase “the Pope.”

  “The Plain People of Ireland”: Can there be any question, then?

  No, I don’t think there can be any question. If you are going
to acknowledge the existence of the Pope at all, I think you have to capitalize him. There is only one, isn’t there? “Is the pope Catholic?” looks funny. The new New York Times Manual of Style and Usage agrees with me “if a specific individual is referred to,” but the new Washington Post Deskbook on Style, the new United Press International Stylebook, and the new Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual do not. They say it’s “the pope,” and “the queen of England,” and “the president of the United States.” I don’t know, it doesn’t look right to me. “The wizard of Oz.” Sign of a faithless time.

  The next thing we will see is the lowercasing of “Perth.” But, however much we may quibble with them, these are important books. One or another of them is probably used by most of the papers in the country. What is the effect when millions of voters see “the president” uncapitalized every day? Maybe the effect is such presidencies as we have had lately.

  At any rate, consistency is the hobgoblin of large publications. Can’t have one correspondent saying “The Pope,” another “the pope,” another “th’ poap.” Personally, I resent the various stylebooks I have labored under, which have caused my Okay to become O.K., my grey to be reshaded gray, my barefooted to go barefoot. Maybe such things don’t bother you, but they make me feel messed with.

  For the New Orleans Times-Picayune, I had to call Bourbon Street “Bourbon st.” And I was living on it. I would have suffered emotionally, I believe, had I ever worked on the Chicago Tribune, writing thru and altho day in and day out. All those suppressed gh’s must back up on a person and fill his dreams.

  The more I think about stylebooks, the more I wonder whether they should be imposed upon a free press. Just one minute before we get back to the specific books at hand. Read this excerpt from the Saint Petersburg Independent:

  … Elmore is retired from a lifework as a lather.

  He sat, worn work hands on each dark trousered knee, and looked up at the stage … with the grin always there. On came Welk in his plum double knits, looking down at the group, waving sometimes, talking with the homefolk talk which so many love.

  … then white lights, spots on drums and the full ensemble came out in watermelon pink to sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic while spots hit the mighty-size American flag stretched on the ceiling.

  “Look, Dad,” said Solene, nudging him to see the flag. All their boys were in Service: “Jack, Dick and Bob were Navy. Herbie was Army. He was shot down in a helicopter and is full of shrapnel. Danny was a paratrooper and married a beautiful Eskimo girl. … Billy was Air Force and married a beautiful Japanese girl. She’s the mother of my brightest grandchild.” Then she looked at her crew-cut husband and put her hand over his. They smiled at each other then both looked back up at Welk.

  Ah. You can’t do a phenomenon like Lawrence Welk justice in institutionally styled prose. You’ve got to have prose with the spirit in it, even prose which raises questions such as how many worn work hands—or, once that question opens up, how many dark trousered knees—this Elmore has.

  If they are procrustean, though, stylebooks are also helpful. There are other things to be written about than Lawrence Welk, and some of those things require a mastery of such distinctions as these four new books treat valuably—the distinctions between phase and faze, apprise and appraise, commas and colons, fewer and less. These books are devoted not only to uniformities but also to clarity. Thus we read, in the book of the Post:

  Use a colon preceding direct quotation of two or more sentences. The President put it this way: “We shall win.”

  The close reader will notice that, in the example, the direct quotation is only one sentence long. The closer reader will notice that President is uppercased, in violation of the Post’s style.

  Well, of course there are many things in these books more helpful than that. I shouldn’t be so picky, even with regard to self-professed arbiters. But, while I am at it, I might as well point out a few other flaws in the Post’s book. It is organized in such a way that looking something up in it is at least twice as much trouble as finding something in any of the other three books. It errs on the side of purism when it says self-deprecating shouldn’t be used to mean self-depreciating. It errs on the other side when it says the use of comprise to mean constitute is no worse than considered loose. Editor Ben Bradlee, in his chapter “Standards and Ethics,” makes a good point.

  No story is fair if reporters hide their biases or emotions behind such subtly pejorative words as “refused,” “despite,” “admit,” and “massive.”

  But there is hardly any discussion in the book of just how these words are loaded and how they might be unloaded.

  The AP book and the UPI book do explain the trouble with admit.

  AP: A person who announces that he is a homosexual, for example, may be acknowledging it to the world, not admitting it.

  UPI: A person who announces he is a homosexual, for example, may be proclaiming it, not admitting it.

  The admit entry is a good example of how similar the AP and the UPI books are, and of how much sharper and terser the UPI book generally is. The AP book never breathes a word of what the UPI book acknowledges freely: that the two of them were, in large part, written by a joint committee. But the UPI’s Bobby Ray Miller—which is a refreshing damn name for an authority on usage—evidently took the committee’s draft home and tightened it up, and also added quite a few of his own touches. Of the four books, UPI’s is distinctly the clearest on among/between. The Times, for instance, says

  between is correct in reference to more than two when the items are related severally and individually: The talks, between the three powers ended in agreement to divide the responsibility among them.

  UPI says

  use between for three or more items related one pair at a time: Bargaining on the debate is under way between the network and the Ford, Carter, and McCarthy committees.

  The UPI book also has the best joke.

  burro, burrow. A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a journalist you are expected to know the difference.

  On the other hand, old Bobby Ray propounds some strange notions. His is the only one of these books, praise God, which approves dialoguing as a verb and media as a singular. “The news media is resisting attempts to limit its freedom” is acceptable, to Bobby Ray. This is just dumb. Would you say, “The people is resisting attempts to limit its freedom”? “The livestock is resisting attempts to limit its freedom”?

  I like Bobby Rays book, though. It’s the only one of these stylebooks that has style. The Post’s is ill-focused, the AP’s lacks personality, and the Times’s is about what you would expect. Sound. Avuncular. I don’t suppose there is such a word as “great-avuncular.” The Times, incidentally, seems highly conscious of its responsibility to dog shows. Entries such as clumber spaniel and keeshond abound.

  The UPI is not going to get left behind by the evolving language, I’ll tell you that. In fact, it may be out ahead of it. Bobby Ray goes so far as to say that like is “acceptable to mean as or as if” and that, aside from “certain idiomatic expressions” such as “for whom the bell tolls,” who is acceptable in all references. “It was just like you said” is cited as correct and no bar is laid to “each of who.” These guidelines are vulgar, but probably not too vulgar for the UPI (surely someone would find an excuse to fix “each of who”), and they do clear the air. After all, the most prevalent who/whom mistake—you see it even in the Times—is the undue whom, as in, “The Pope listed all those whom he felt would rise from the dead.”

  According to a friend of mine, who is a woman frequently mentioned in the press (not Elizabeth Taylor), the UPI is also ahead of the Times on the matter of women.

  The gist of all four of these books’ treatments of sexism (which are wholly called for, but as embarrassing in their necessity as laws against “Colored” restrooms) is that women should no longer be referred to gratuitously as mothers, wives, grandmothers, or objects of desire, as
though the reporter felt obliged subtly and indirectly to imply an erection somewhere along the line every time a member of the female sex is taken note of.

  But my woman source took one look at the first sentence of the Times’s women entry—

  In referring to women, we should avoid words or phrases that seem to imply that the Times speaks with a purely masculine voice, viewing men as the norm and women as the exception

  —and said, “That’s a man writing to other men.”

  The UPI and AP entries, on the other hand, begin simply.

  Women should receive the same treatment as men in all areas of coverage.

  If I look at that for too long, I begin to sense libidinous undertones (what were the original post-Edenic areas of coverage?), but the undertones are evenhanded.

  Not that I oppose bias in a book on words. I am all for bias openly arrived at, as in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary. (He defined pension as, in England, “pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.”) But the Times book’s bias is repressed, shrouded in dignity. Note that almost every time this book mentions a person’s name in an example of usage, his or her last name is Manley. John P. Manley, Joan Manley, Honest John Manley, Air Chief Marshal Manley, John P. Manley of Queens, the Borough President.

  The Times also says this:

  … it is no more appropriate to slide casually into parenthetical references to a woman’s appearance—comely brunette, petite, pert, attractive, bosomy, leggy, sexy—than it is to speak of the tiny Councilman.