William Zinsser (1922-2015)

I just learned today that one of my heroes is dead. William Zinsser, author of my writing bible, On Writing Well, passed away at his home in New York City on May 12. He was 92. 

I can only hope he died with pen in hand.

Mr. Zinsser worked as a journalist, then a teacher at Yale,  a freelance writer, again as a teacher, and finally, when he could no longer see due to glaucoma, he helped students and others by listening to their writing and offering guidance.

He wrote many books on a variety of subjects including baseball (Spring Training), historic American sites (American Places), jazz (Mitchell & Ruff), and American songwriters and their songs (Easy to Remember). All were written in the clear, uncluttered, personal style that his classic book on writing espoused.

I own two editions (second and third) of On Writing Well (I wrote about it here). I tracked down a hardcover copy of Spring Training many seasons ago. I also own Writing to Learn, a guide to using writing as a way to immerse oneself in an area of knowledge. The latest addition to my Zinsser bookshelf is The Writer Who Stayed, a collection of weekly essays he wrote for The American Scholar magazine (which I wrote about here).

Writing With a Word Processor is a humorous and helpful look at his trials and tribulations in learning to graduate from pen and paper to machine. It helped me understand my first word processor...oh, so many years ago.

I met him once. It was in 1997. The  30th anniversary edition of On Writing Well had just been published. He came to speak at the library and I took my well-used third edition of the book for him to autograph.

I remember thanking him, as he signed my copy, for the guidance and inspiration his books had given me. I gave him my business card. (For what reason I have no idea. I guess I just hoped he might remember me.) The morning after his appearance, I suddenly wondered if he had a ride to the airport. I phoned the hotel, but he had already checked out. I wish I had thought of that sooner. Wouldn't that have been a story to tell! 

Farewell, Mr. Zinsser. Thank you for your enthusiasm for writing and your generosity in passing on your knowledge of the craft. If I have ever managed to write one coherent, concise sentence, I owe it to you.

With Intention or Higgledy-Piggledy

James Norman Hall
enjoying his library
Tahiti
Photo source: Sylvie-Anne Gougeon

One of the places that William Zinsser visited and writes about in The Writer Who Stayed is the house in Tahiti where James Norman Hall lived and worked. Mr. Hall was the author, along with Charles Nordhoff who also lived in Tahiti, of Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), the true story of the mutiny in 1789 against Captain William Bligh of the British Royal Navy.

What interested me most about this essay was the description of Mr. Hall's library. The visit took place in 1956 and Hall's wife, Sarah, still lived in the house.

Hall had been dead for five years but he was still alive in the house, his hat hanging on a peg, his typewriter and falling-apart atlas waiting on an ink-stained blotter, his thousands of books spilling into the kitchen. The library contained 27 volumes by Joseph Conrad, who was Hall's hero and for whom he named his son. 

Keeping Joseph Conrad company were the complete works of Robert Lewis Stevenson, the 12-volume Works of Benjamin Franklin, the nine-volume Writings of Thomas Jefferson, and sets of Washington Irving, Thoreau, Emerson, Mark Twain, Thackeray  and Sir Walter Scott. Modern American literature was also represented: Thurber, Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the writer Hall most admired, Willa Cather. One entire wall was crammed with works of naval history.

Later in the essay, Mr. Zinsser's admits that now, some 60 years on, he still thinks of Hall's library. No such personal library will ever be assembled again, he feels. "The world's knowledge is being digitized, its literature is fast being Kindled. Does any architect still design a house with a 'library,'" he wonders.

Which brings me to the thought: do I have a library or do I just have some books? 

I would never consider my collection to be as encompassing as Mr. Hall's. I don't believe I have 'sets' of any writer's works. Well, OK, I do have a one-volume The Complete Works of Shakespeare with type so tiny I need two magnifying glasses to read the lines. I can hardly count that. 

I also have a sampling of Thoreau, Emerson, Twain, Thurber, Thackeray, Steinbeck and Lewis, but no Cather, Stevenson, Jewett, Conrad, or Scott. 

Have I filled my shelves with intention or just bought books higgledy-piggledy? Does one really need to have reference books on any one subject any longer?  When I die, will someone look through my books and think, "What a magnificent range of intellect and interests Belle had!" or will they wonder, "How quickly can we get rid of all this?"

How about chiming in on this subject. Do you consider your books just books or do you think of what you have as a library? 

The Writer Who Stayed by William Zinsser

Three things do I require from a personal essay: interesting information about something or someone; a spot of personal information about the writer of said essay; and, please, a bit of humor.

William Zinsser manages to include all three in his online essays written for The American Scholar and collected in his book The Writer Who Stayed.

Interesting information: Check

I learned about the many contributions of songwriters of the Great American Songbook: Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin and the Gershwin brothers, George and Ira, and how many of their song lyrics added phrases and idioms to America's language. They were the poets of America from 1926-1966. 

I found out a bit about the life of Patrick Leigh Fermor, traveler and author, who was a great friend of Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire (Counting My Chickens). In 1933, he traveled on foot from Holland to Constantinople and it took him two years to do it. He stopped and talked to everyone from Romanian shepherds to royalty and wrote two books about his odyssey - A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986). Leigh Fermor (who shows up in Lawrence Durrell's Cyprus saga Bitter Lemons) died in June 2011 at the age of 96.

Personal tidbits about the author: Check

I learned the Mr. Zinsser served in Africa and Italy during World War II; that he at one time was movie critic for the now defunct Herald Tribune; that he was bitten by the travel bug and visited Tahiti, Samoa, Burma and other places in the South Seas; that he created and taught a course in nonfiction writing at Yale. The wisdom of that course is contained in his book On Writing Well. Mr. Zinsser is not, if not quite a total Luddite, at least leans in that direction. He doesn't use email and is a great believer in the idea that a little boredom never hurt anyone. In fact boredom clears the brain of the "sludge of information" that we are so accustomed to having at our fingertips all the time.

A bit of humor: Check

After reading that Central Park (which he used to visit when sheep grazed there) in Manhattan had a mobile app, he fears that we will never actually 'experience' anything in real time...a day when every organization has an app and nobody goes anywhere. A time when one can experience, in the palm of the hand, a day at the beach without the sunscreen and sand!

"I already have an app for major league baseball," Zinsser writes. "It's called a television set."

I wish Mr. Zinsser had an app. Oh wait! He does. His books: On Writing Well, American Places, Spring Training, Writing About Your Life, and now, The Writer Who Stayed. All in the palm of my hand.

Pen, Typewriter, and Laptop

William Zinsser
Portrait by Thomas Buechner
Source: Smithsonian, April 2007

I recently wrote about William Zinsser and my absolute favorite book on writing, his On Writing Well (here). To my delight I discovered that Mr. Zinsser's columns written for The American Scholar's website have been collected in the book entitled The Writer Who Stayed.

I could not resist its bright red cover featuring the evolving tools of a writer: pen, typewriter, and laptop. I have used them all.

I feel a particular kinship to Mr. Zinsser...almost as if he were a personal writing professor of mine. I have met him and have read his book on writing so many times that when I write I sense he is standing over my shoulder whispering: Simplify, simplify.

The essays in this book published in 2012 cover culture and the arts; travel; baseball (he is a big fan of the sport, as am I); the good, the bad, and the ugly of technology; and, who knows what other surprises he has in store for me. 

I am so happy to have My Professor with me again in this new book and will be writing about it soon.