Category: Writing

I want to know WHY I find the essays of one such as Stephen Jay Gould to be more accessible, and therefore of greater power, than that of the essay A Perfect Game by David B. Hart. I know I prefer the one. The question is “Why?”

The literary world will grimace when I invite Stephen King to serve as an arbiter.

Another favorite essayist of mine, whose pen has now grown silent, is Cullen Murphy who wrote for the Atlantic Monthly (and produced, for a time, the epic Sunday comic staple “Prince Valiant“). In a humorous but perceptive essay, Murphy came to King’s defense, I think, when King was taken to task by Harold Bloom for making no contribution to humanity other than “keeping the publishing world afloat”.

King’s book On Writing is more a memoir than a handbook on style (and is therefore a book that many can read and enjoy), but he did make some comments about style that have stuck with me. In short, he, like many stylists, praised the active voice and eschewed unnecessarily complex sentences and tendentious uses of modifiers. (“The adverb is not your friend,” he says.)

I’d like to go through the essays by Hart and Gould, mark the use of adjectives and adverbs, the complex sentences, and the use of the passive voice. My guess is that Gould would have far fewer of each. This would be fun, but I despair having the time to do it.

I’m just a lowly pastor and consumer of the written word. And I may be an arrogant one at that, setting myself in judgment over one who not only thinks, he writes, and not only writes, but writes with sufficient merit to be published. But when good ideas, ideas I want to embrace, are wrapped in obscurity, that makes me sad. I’d like to see them set free.

I argue that David Hart, in his essay “A Perfect Game”, made a beautiful swing for the fences, but managed only to pop out to first. Others of you no doubt disagree.

Is there a way to judge between the two opinions?

To judge a steak, I compare it to a really good steak, one which I have eaten before, one on another plate before me, or an ideal I have imagined. Though my judgment is ultimately one of taste, I’m certain that a really fine food critic would make his judgment based upon factors of which I would be unaware. The critic’s judgment would either explain why I preferred the one to the other, or I, in deference to the background and expertise of the critic, would be forced to train my taste to recognize the superior quality of the one I did not choose.

Writing is not all that different. If I set Hart’s piece next to other baseball writing, how does it hold up? If I find it in comparison far less tasty than some of the best out there, the objective criteria of my literary elders would either explain why I find it superior or would force me to reassess my judgment.

This question made me think of a man whom I consider to be one of the best essayists in recent generations: Stephen Jay Gould, of both Harvard University and the American Museum of Natural History. These credentials alone suggest that he, too, like David Hart, is a fairly sharp guy.

I was first introduced to Gould through the pages of Natural History magazine in which he would write a monthly essay when I was subscriber 30 years ago. As a paleontologist Gould would often aim his sharp and piercing verbal arrows at the Biblical account of creation. His essays were challenging, sometimes disturbing, and always accessible.

Though I often disagreed with his conclusions, Gould, like a good essayist, did not (to make a paleontological allusion) bury his bones under impenetrable sediment of verbiage, but exposed them in such a way that forced me to deal with them.

Gould was as well a lover of baseball (and of the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, for which I pity him). I was reminded of this recently when reading the introduction to the book Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series which Gould wrote.

To sample writing in which Gould weaves his love for baseball and his contemplations about origins, perhaps this essay, The Creation Myths of Cooperstown, will serve as a ‘second steak’ to set alongside Hart’s The Perfect Game.

I’m not on a crusade do denigrate David Hart. But I am asking if there is such a thing as ‘good’ writing and ‘poor’ writing and how to judge the difference.

Two friends, knowing my love of baseball, sent me the very same recent essay A Perfect Game by David B. Hart, in which the author finds in the game of baseball a sublime reflection of the ideal unmatched by any other sport. They knew that my heart would resonate with such a thesis.

Ever since being soundly defeated by a friend in a public debate in which the proposition was ‘baseball is a game superior to football’ I have looked for ammunition to buttress what was even then a sound, but poorly presented, argument. I looked forward to reading the essay with enjoyment.

If only I could understand what he says.

I think I’m smart enough, and though my education is spotty at best I should be able to understand and enjoy an essay on baseball, even if that essay is wed to Greek philosophical reflections. But this essay felt all wrong.

I know that if a man looks at the Mona Lisa and finds it uninteresting, the problem is not with Leonardo or with his painting, but with the looker. I’m willing to accept that the problem here may be me. But maybe, just maybe, the problem is poor writing? I wonder.

Reading Amazon.com reviews of John Coltrane’s magnum opus “A Love Supreme” the other day I found a guy who honestly admitted to not liking and not ‘getting’ this piece which, he said, was unlistenable. But in making his case, he exposed his flank by saying, “I have built a small but quality jazz library the last few months.”

Oops. A few months of song collecting does not make one a jazz critic.

So, similarly, I admit the problem could be me. But I have been reading for some time, and so I hesitate to say this, as an unpublished nobody, that just perhaps the author is just a deep thinker who is a poor writer. In suggesting this to one of my friends, he said that the author IS a very smart man. I said he needed a good editor.

And there the argument rests.

Is there a way of judging style? Are there credible standards by which I could justly award this man a D- without being laughed out of the academy?