The Quality of Writing

   I want to make two sets of comments that have impressed me about very different sets of writing. The first, unexpectantly, is about the Readers’ comments that follow New York Times articles on the paper’s internet incarnation. There are sometimes an inordinate number of those—one thousand and more—and there are seldom far more than just a few. Needless to say, I sample only a small number of these, as far as I know the earliest ones submitted. I also believe that except for the elimination of obscene or libelous ones they are unedited by the editors of the Times. I say that because I want to declare that a large majority of them are to the point, often smart, and mostly stylistically literate. A sample of the public? I don’t know, but certainly a sample of Times readers.

   The second set of writings of which I want to take note is vastly more formidable. I’m just done with the Robert Blake biography of Disraeli. As a major work about its hero, it quotes an enormous number of letters, written over a period of decades of the Disraeli century. They are all in English, meaning good English; not flowery, but clear and at times eloquent and often better even than that.

   While I am sure that many members of the cast of character of that book were (for the time) well educated, I am very doubtful that they could all produce such error-free felicitous prose. It would be most interesting to have an account—and there may be such a one, though unknown to me—of the behind the scenes (literate) scribes that polished those letters. What’s for sure is the fact that the telephone and other contemporary ways of communicating has deprived the public of much of a valuable store of communications by a huge cast of characters.