Eminentoes/The Great White
Mysak, Joe
more to the population. The June elections for parliament and local councils were a case in point. More than one candidate was allowed to stand for each seat. In the West, the voting was not taken...
...Indeed, it can be asked whether the master stylist ever wrote a vigorous sentence...
...The famed White style was suffused with a kind of effortless melancholy and reverie...
...He did all kinds of general editorial work, wrote short stories, fillers, humorous sketches, obituaries, often whimsical poetry, and the front-of-the-book features, "'Talk of the Town" and "Notes and Comment...
...The drama between ruler and ruled in Eastern Europe is being played out in its subtlest form here...
...White gave the professors a sword...
...True, the dissidents failed to elect candidates, but the party had to pack the caucuses in order to win...
...If his essays are paradigms of decency and politeness, they can also be perfectly precious and perfectly dull...
...He could have been a force for good...
...And it is unlikely that White will be remembered as more by history...
...White resurrected it in 1959, how-ever, and it has been a nuisance ever since...
...But as the facade gets taller, it becomes ever more fragile...
...At one nominating convention, dissident Laszlo Rajk forced Foreign Minister Peter Varkonyi into a public debate...
...There is a prevailing flavor of syrupy insincerity, an affectation of wholehearted truth-fulness, amounting to the worst kind of deception, which sickens as it surfeits...
...White was part of the New Yorker during its glory days, and he was also part of it in its decline...
...The combination is not uncommon...
...For years, he wrote the New Yorker's editorials...
...Not in the words of the memorialists, or the masters of graveyard prose, or the ridiculous geese who write for the newsmagazines with their weekly manias...
...How to remember E.B...
...The official attitude toward the dissidents keeps shifting...
...Perhaps only the misuse of it has turned it into a bane, some may say...
...The golden age of Marxist Hungary may be about to pass...
...It's a step in the right direction when the standards of Chicago replace those of Moscow," remarked a Western diplomat...
...At the local level, the elections served to rid many towns of old party hacks and replace them with younger, more popular men...
...In his latter days—and even he said once that it seemed he had been born old—he played the role of the crusty senior citizen, and in his last battle took on Xerox Corporation for "sponsoring" an article in Esquire by Harrison Salisbury...
...Doctorow is a great novelist and Garrison Keillor a great wit...
...Such was indeed the case with White A self-effacing sort, he would hardly have stood for some of the garlands heaped upon him...
...He claimed no more, the same way that Red Smith claimed that he was no more than a reporter and sportswriter...
...If writing is a mat-ter of attaining a good ear more than anything else, and White apparently gave this credence, a textbook should be the last book read by students...
...He himself con-ceded, in a foreword to an edition of his collected essays in 1977, that "the essayist . . . must be content in his self-imposed role of second-class citizen" in the world of letters...
...He was sincere, and well-meaning, and compassionate, and frequently a booby...
...White hardly needs introduction...
...Kadar has proved an exemplary front man for an Asiatic imperial power in the heart of Europe...
...Had he left this infernal little book alone, Lord knows how many people able to write in the English language we might have today...
...It was meant to be a text-book...
...While the new parliament has no real power, its new-found legitimacy, in the eyes of the people, could eventually turn it into a pressure group much like the unions...
...Remember the Great White, if you must, as a journalist who got on the firing line every day, and did his part...
...This may be fine for memoirs or obituaries, but it is hardly suitable for all subjects...
...The puffs were predictable, and caused a certain unease, coming as they did from the same kinds of experts who believe E.L...
...He even prepared a cover illustration, featuring a seahorse with a feedbag...
...Instead of encouraging trial and error and rewriting, The Elements of Style has been used by at least a genera-tion of academics on their more idiosyncratic stylists the same way their forebears used to use rulers on those fractious students who insisted on writing left-handed...
...As Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote, "Graveyard, or memorial, prose is among the least edifying and least pleasing forms of human composition...
...Perhaps it was the fault of the obituary writer...
...Nowhere does repression appear asrestrained and as sophisticated as in Hungary...
...After all, the dissidents serve a useful function: They are absolutely no threat to Kadar's regime, while their relatively unfettered existence secures his popularity in the West...
...Style aside, there is the White of the bully pulpit...
...Worst of all, perhaps, the book has in-directly caused any number of journalists and word-watchers to write their own fussy columns on the craft, profession, or art of writing...
...Because he wrote editorials, White said, he kept his politicking to the confines of a voting booth...
...He joined the New Yorker magazine in 1926, one year after its founding by Harold Ross, and worked almost continually for it, in one capacity or another, until his death...
...Not even the dissidents talked cynically about the elections...
...White...
...Perhaps, in order to steady Soviet fears at these and other developments,the official press has been striking a harder line against the United States, and the party has announced its intention to reinforce ideology in the schools through its Agitation and Propaganda section...
...No, not at all...
...EMINENTOES THE GREAT WHITE by Joe Mysak When E.B...
...His place is a secure footnote in American writing...
...Even at its angriest, White's writing rarely bristled, but...
...As Herbert Mitgang wrote in the New York Times, "his opponents often succumbed to the force of his purity," often in the name of freedom of the press and individualliberty...
...White died last October at the age of 86, he was eulogized as a master essayist and stylist, a "writer's writer," and "one of the nation's most precious literary resources...
...White was accomplished, but even the seemingly legitimate claims his admirers make for him now are suspect when they are not farfetched...
...El...
...In the West, the voting was not taken seriously...
...merely stiffened with resolve...
...He was occasionally a pest, but he did it passably well...
...Joe Mysak is assistant managing editor of the daily Bond Buyer...
...But in Hungary, it was seen as a real, evolutionary step...
...While in Poland the plot reads like a potboiler, in Hungary it is more like a nineteenth-century period novel...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1986...
...He was, it seems, a civilized man, but his ideas were in the main embarrassments: Typical of these were his wish for a world federal government and his editorials expressing fear instead of understanding of the nuclear age...
...But he did his worst damage with The Elements of Style, which he up-dated from his college professor Will Strunk's original text of helpful hints for writers...
...Of late, no crackdowns have been reported...
...He has been held up as the epitome: of the much-vaunted New Yorker style, and he must be held at least in part responsible for what the magazine became by the early 1960s—in the words of Tom Wolfe, "dull, lifeless, grossly overedited, over-rated," its sentences clogged with "amplifications, qualifications, modifications, and specifications...
...Remember that Matthias's successors turned out to be short-lived...
Vol. 19 • January 1986 • No. 1
