Writing III - Chomsky Re-invents Footnotes, Time For Attribution

By TRB

In writing One we coverered the basic rules for writing an essay. I shall repeat them here only to remind you that all writing is formula. With the essay for example, the following advice should be taken: First, tell the reader what you are going to tell him. Then tell him. Then tell him what you told him. Simple in three easy steps. And easy to remember too.

Writing Two was called "The Young Writer's Curse: Perfection." This was a sad tale about young writers who might still believe their prose is prototypical,  whole new versions of words strung together, sort of what was the case in prose for a young Ernest Hemingway and was equally true of the banker/poet TS Eliot. These two men virtually created styles that were stolen borrowed or simply picked apart by others over the years. Hemingway owed Jack London a lot for his style but not as much as you might think. Read them side by side and you will see what I mean.

Hemingway brought the real conversation, as expressed in the words or thoughts of the character in his or her head, to modern literature. The way people really think, all jumbled and mumbled up, and the way they really talk. Real people. He populated his novels with real people. He drank wine with them. He hunted. He made love with them. He even took them to church.

Eliot had the more difficult job in my opinion. Writing II, or as I like to call it "Youth Writing, is really a simple fish when you think about it. That accounts for there being no kettle. As a writing teacher, I have had occasion to speak with many young writers who truly believe they must be doing something awfully wrong because - and let us get to the point - they are not yet rich and famous. People are not coming by to measure their brains, no one has asked for an autograph. And worst of all it might never happen. It is "Me" writing. When you told a friend last week that you were a writer, he responded, Oh, still out of work? And you wanted to kill him but you didn't. However your chances for major publication and distribution rights on the sad story of his early demise would have increased dramatically if you had.

Elliot and James Joyce and many other writers of the mid last century were almost abstract impressionist in style. Eliot had a little of that. But his sense of the world as seen through human eyes was more intense, perhaps because of his daily work at the bank. Then he released his masterpiece "Wasteland" and writing poetry changed forever. All of this wonderful work, while the Writing II egotists were still butting heads over whether sentences needed actual structure or not.

This Writing II stuff did a hell of a job on me, too. One day a young woman, a strikingly beautiful young woman, in a writing II class I was teaching, a woman nearly less than half my age, was standing beside my desk. Everyone else had gone, you could hear them grunting away with their briefcases and back packs and she was just looking at me. I thought, Hell, they sent a spy from the Dean's office. They must know about the other one.

Finally she parted her perfect lips and said to me "I want to write about sex." 

So I married her.