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.

Reading One Book One Hundred Times

I read with interest a piece written by Stephen Marche and published in The Guardian this past week. In it Mr. Marche states that there are two books that he has read at least one hundred times. 

The first is Shakespeare's Hamlet full of murder and madness. The second is P.G. Wodehouse's The Inimitable Jeeves full of merriment and mirth. The first he read for his dissertation and the second for his amusement. 

He calls this centireading and writes about the process: By the time you read something more than a hundred times, you've passed well beyond "knowing how it turns out". The next sentence is known before the sentence you're reading is finished. 

Here is the link to the original article if you would like to take a look.

Of course, this got me to thinking of books that I have read multiple times. There are not that many. And are there any - or even one - I might be willing to read one hundred times?

I went to my shelves.

The first one that I saw that I might consider was To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. It is so beautifully written and the characters are so dear and I have read it at least three times so I would be on my way.

Or what about 84, Charing Cross Road? That one by Helene Hanff I have read at least five times. Then there is On Writing Well by William Zinsser, a fine treatise on writing non-fiction that I have read four or five times at least. 

But three or four or even five times is a far cry from one hundred. I must say that I feel a tiny tingle of excitement considering the prospect of choosing a book and reading it over and over. I think it would have to be a small book - 200 pages or so. Or perhaps I could find a book with a mere 100 pages and read it one hundred times.

84, Charing Cross Road fits that bill at 97 pages. My copy of To Kill a Mockingbird is 323 pages, and my third edition of On Writing Well runs to 238 pages.

Knowing my fondness for essays, perhaps I should consider the Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb. I have a copy that contains the original twenty-eight essays first published in 1823. If I read an essay a day I could finish the book in that number of days which means I would have read the book thirteen times by the end of a year. I can't do any more math but I still would be a long way from one hundred.

How long before I grew weary of the words? Would I even live long enough to read a book that many times? If I read the same book once a month it would take me over eight years to reach my goal.

Would you care to chime in on this? Is this idea just too weird to even contemplate? If you would attempt to read one book one hundred times, what would it be? 

Belles-Lettres: Brilliant, Blue-Ribbon Books 2013

Biggest Surprise of the Year -  I Loved This Book! 

So Big by Edna Ferber; published in 1924

Top Three Non-Fiction Books That Were Entire Educations in Themselves: 

At Home by Bill Bryson; How to Live, Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell; The Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey

Top Three Fiction Books (not mysteries): 

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster; Equilateral by Ken Kalfus; Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury.

Author Most Read: 

Donald Westlake - Six of his Dortmunder capers

Most Delightful Reread: 

Counting My Chickens... by The Duchess of Devonshire

Brothers I Would Most Like to Meet: 

Reggie and Nigel Heath of The Baker Street Letters, The Brothers of Baker Street, and The Baker Street Translation by Michael Robertson

Best Foreign Location: 

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen and West With the Night by Beryl Markham

Most Laugh-Out-Loud Dysfunctional Family: 

The Spellman Files and The Curse of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz

Dreamiest Tale: 

The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys

Best Road Trip: 

The Lost Continent - Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson

Mystery Writer I Am So Glad I Found: 

Peter Lovesey - The Last Detective, Diamond Solitaire, The Summons, and Bloodhounds. 

As If I Needed More Reasons Not To Go On A Cruise: 

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace.

Proof That The South Shall Rise Again: 

Mama Makes Up Her Mind by Bailey White.

Authors I Have Met and Their Books I Read This Year: 

Duffy Brown (Killer in Crinolines), William Zinsser (The Writer Who Stayed), and George S. McGovern (Abraham Lincoln)

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.

On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Of all the books on writing that I have read - how to; how not to - there is one that I return to time and again: On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser.

Mr. Zinsser started his career writing for  newspapers, became an editor, taught writing at Yale in the 1970s, and for two years wrote an award-winning column on the arts for The American Scholar website. 

He has written 18 books covering jazz, memoir, travel, baseball, and songwriters. All that in addition to his lively treatises On Writing Well and On Writing to Learn.

I read recently in the New York Times that Mr. Zinsser has retired at the age of 90. He no longer goes to his office in Manhattan because, due to glaucoma, he can no longer see. So now, according to the article written by Dan Berry, he meets with writers one-on-one in his apartment and listens and counsels.

What cannot be read can be heard.

Mr. Zinsser is not a fan of pretentious, overwrought, cluttered writing. 

To wit:
Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Re-examine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful?

Simplify, simplify.

I love this book. All the more because I met Mr. Zinsser in 1997 at a library event and he autographed my copy of the book's third edition. (I also have a copy of the second edition because one can never have enough copies of this book.) 

It was first published in 1976 and is still the cleanest, most direct book on writing I have read. Even if you are not a writer, you will be entertained as it is full of examples and quotes and witty admonitions. His guidelines will help you better compose even the simplest note. And make you a better reader for you will immediately spot gobble-de-gook. And we hate gobble-de-gook!

On Writing Well is a classic. 

Look for it. Buy it. Read it. It will be money and time well spent.

To Reread, or not to Reread, that is the question

I am not a re-reader. Once I finish the book, that is pretty much it for me. But I recently watched an interview with Shelby Foote and he said rereading was when you got to study what the author did. You know by now where she is going and you get to see how she gets you there.

Anna Quindlen said the same thing. She is a big fan of rereading. I could probably count on two hands the number of books I have found compelled to read again.

One is Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman. Another is To Kill a Mockingbird. One summer I reread all of the Annie Dillard books that I own: Teaching a Stone to Talk, An American Childhood, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I have read William Zinsser's On Writing Well multiple times.

Within the past few years I also reread Travels With Charley by Steinbeck. That is the book that made me want to be a writer. I was afraid to read it again - the last time was in high school - because I didn't want to be disappointed or finish it and say, "What was I thinking? This is the book I based my entire life on?"

Fortunately it was just as compelling as I remembered it.

I feel like rereading a book you loved the first time is risky business. The emotions that you felt may be entirely missing the second time and that would be so disheartening. It is like visiting the house you grew up in now that someone else lives there. The images that you hold dear are superseded by the green carpet and the yellow wallpaper that the new owners have installed in your bedroom.

How do you feel about re-reading a favorite book?