classic guidebooks are a natural place to begin. They form a large and universal genre in which actual scenes and casts are almost identical to the model scene and cast of classic style. They accordingly require little covert substitution by the writer, and in that respect are simple to analyze. The Audubon Society Field Guide Series: Subjects include Birds; Butterflies; Fishes, Whales, and Dolphins; Fossils; Insects and Spiders; Mammals; Mushrooms; The Night Sky; Reptiles and Amphibians; Rocks and Minerals; Seashells; Seashore Creatures; Trees; Weather; Wildflowers. The Michelin Green Guide Series: Places include all the regions of France; many European countries, including Greece and Italy; and several metropolitan regions, including Paris, Rome, London, and Washington, D.C.
classic guidebooks include guides and descriptions of historical sites and monuments, for example, Branislav Brankovic’s Les vitraux de la cathédrale de Saint-Denis, a pamphlet by the curator of the former abbey church, meant to be used by visitors. Works of art history from a period before documentary photography became routine have a close affinity to guidebooks and are sometimes presented as guides to past mentalities. Émile Mâle’s foundation work on medieval Christian iconography, L’art religieux au XIIIe siècle en France (1898), is a prominent example. For inaccessible art works such as illuminated manuscripts, the style is still used, as it is in Virginia Wylie Egbert’s work on the reflection of everyday life in an illuminated manuscript: On the Bridges of Mediaeval Paris: A Record of Early Fourteenth-Century Life.
Sophisticated classic guidebooks often take the form of travel writing and the literature of places, including the political geography of the historic past and descriptions of imaginary places. Colin McEvedy, The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History. Jacques Hillairet, Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris. Georges Perec’s presentation of the street where he grew up, “Allées et venues rue de l’assomption,” L’Arc, volume 76, and his virtuoso presentation of an imaginary Paris apartment building, La vie mode d’emploi. Jonathan raban, Arabia: In the Labyrinth. Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad.
The following examples, arranged by period and topic, provide an overview of classic style.
Classic style in classical antiquity: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War. Plato, Apology. Euclid, The Elements of Geometry. Euclid is often overlooked as a master of classic style, although the Euclidean proof in The Elements is classic in almost every sense and received a detailed analysis from Proclus in late antiquity that specifies its classic features. The typical Euclidean proof makes something evident. Its motive is truth, its purpose presentation. There is symmetry between writer and reader. Reading The Elements is like reading La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes: both works imply that seeing truth requires consistent discipline, but that the discipline is possible and its results valuable. Like one of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims, a Euclidean proof is complete and self-contained. Although it prepares from the beginning for its end, and builds momentum as it proceeds, its end is not predictable, however evident once seen. The labor is hidden, and there is a delightful vigor and freshness in its shape.
Classic style in the French seventeenth century: Descartes, Discours de la méthode. Madame de Lafayette, La princesse de Clèves. Pascal, Lettres provinciales. The cardinal de retz, Mémoires. La Rochefoucauld, Maximes and Mémoires. Madame de Sévigné, Lettres. La Bruyère, Les Caractères. See also Sainte-Beuve’s classic nineteenth-century history, Port-Royal.
Classic style in Britain: The eighteenth century saw the development of a class of professional journalists and reviewers whose routine job was to produce something for print. These journalists sought to show the reader what they saw. Samuel Johnson is the most enduring of the first generation of such journalists. A line can be traced from his Rambler papers to Addison and Steele’s Spectator to the journalism of Bernard Shaw. Neither Johnson nor Addison and Steele consistently used classic style, which is not fully formed in British journalism until Shaw.
Classic style in America: Although Thomas Jefferson did not write consistently in classic style, it is fully formed in his writings when he chooses to use it, as it is in Mark Twain, another great writer who uses classic style, among others.
Biography and autobiography: Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi. Ralph Kirkpatrick, Domenico Scarlatti. Louise Brooks, Lulu in Hollywood.
Cultural anthropology: Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author.
Food: Jean-François Revel, Culture and Cuisine. Waverley root, Food and The Food of France. Prosper Montagné, Larousse Gastronomique is the classic encyclopedia on gastronomy. Its entries are small masterpieces of the genre. Under “chèvre” we find: “On consomme surtout la chèvre en Espagne, en Italie et dans le midi de la France, mais pour des raisons qui n’ont rien de gastronomique.” Under “lait” we find: “Malgré son état liquide, le lait doit toujours être considéré comme un aliment et non comme une boisson, et doit être mangé, plutôt que bu, c’est-à-dire mâché et insalivé, ingurgité lentement; de cette façon, il se coagule dans l’estomac en petits fragments facilement attaquables par les sucs digestifs; avalé au contraire tout d’un trait, il forme dans l’estomac un caillot volumineux, indigeste, parce que les sucs digestifs le pénètrent difficilement; pour la même raison, il est plus digestible sous forme de potages ou de bouillies, parce que son mélange avec des farines favorise cette fragmentation du caillot, aussi est-il mieux toléré sous cette forme, même par les entéritiques.”
Scholarship and academic writing: Frederick crews: The Critics Bear It Away. This book, mainly a collection of review articles from The New York Review of Books, aims at making academic disputes accessible to any intelligent reader and connects those disputes to larger political ideas and temperaments. It is not polemical in the sense that Pascal’s Lettres provinciales are, but it shares Pascal’s conviction that academic questions can be made accessible to a general audience and can have broad cultural relevance. There is a basic appeal to common sense as opposed to sophistic theory: “I believe that critics, without abandoning their sense of history, should . . . [put] preconceptions in abeyance and [follow] the writer’s individual path wherever it may lead.” Crews rejects the replacement of writers by “what Michel Foucault belittled as ‘the author function.’ Once writers have been discounted as the primary shapers of their works, critics are free to ‘liberate signifiers from the signified’—that is, to make a text mean anything or nothing according to whim.”
For a similar analysis of academic historiography, see J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History and Doing History.
Science: James Watson, The Double Helix. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Traité élémentaire de chimie. Richard P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law and QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Oliver Sacks, “A Neurologist’s Notebook: To See and Not See,” The New Yorker, 10 May 1993.
Sports: Queene Hooper Foster, Boating Etiquette; see especially “Care of the Seasick.” Bill Surface,The Track: A Day in the Life of Belmont Park.
Technical writing: It is a universal and accurate complaint that manuals that come with machines—from computers to automobiles—and books of instruction that come with everything from tax forms to garden furniture are unintelligible. Frustration at this unintelligibility is intensified by the certain knowledge that the writer of the manual or instruction booklet actually knows what the reader wants to find out. The reasons for this infelicity are many, but one of the most prominent is that no individual passage, not even the first one, seems to be independently intelligible. In a manual or instruction booklet that succeeds, the writer is trying to fulfill the classic scene: he is trying to put the reader where the writer is standing. He already knows how the thing works, and he is trying to position the reader to know the same thing. Because the official manuals and instruction booklets are worthless, there is an enormous market for unofficial manuals and books of instruction, the best of which adhere closely to the classic scene. A legendary example is Alan Simpson’s unofficial Mastering WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, which found a very large and eager audience. To understand why, check Simpson’s treatment of any individual function or procedure. Both the whole treatment and the individual sentences are almost always independently intelligible—a feature they share with Euclid’s proofs, La Rochefoucauld’s maxims, and the Audubon Field Guide’s descriptions of birds.
History: John Keegan, The Second World War and Six Armies in Normandy. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. Large historical topics have no perceptible shape and no perceptible borders, but the nature of a topic does not control the style in which it is presented. An event such as the Second World War, the Normandy Invasion, or the recovery of Europe from the devastation of the Second World War can be treated as a “thing” and so presented in classic style. The writers of such classic presentations in effect invent their subject, giving it an objective shape and definition it never had for participants. The books by Keegan and Judt are prominent recent examples of how a very large and complex network of events can be presented as something the reader can perceive as if it were a cedar tree in an arboretum.
The reader may find it helpful to consider a few works on the intellectual foundations of styles. Although the view of styles as deriving from conceptual stands is now uncommon in writing manuals, it has been the foundation of seminal analyses from Aristotle to Claude Rawson. The indispensable sources from classical antiquity are Longinus, On the Sublime, and Aristotle, Poetics and Rhetoric. Morris Croll’s essays on Renaissance topics, collected in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, offer an extended analysis of prose style as a branch of intellectual history. The identical conception of style can be found in a surprising range of analyses from the scholarly to the mordant. Claude Rawson, in “The Character of Swift’s Satire” (in Order from Confusion Sprung), contrasts the styles of Swift’s and Samuel Johnson’s satire as manifestations of their underlying conceptual dispositions. Rawson deals with specific differences at the level of verbal choice by uncovering the conceptual reasons for these differences: Johnson’s “rectitude so open and so doggedly committed to plain palpable fact . . . cannot lightly allow itself the distorting obliquities of verbal wit. . . .” in Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain identifies a particular style as the central catastrophe in American intellectual history. Beginning from the fixed verbal phrase, “the beauty and the chivalry of New Orleans,” Twain traces the surface marks of what he calls “the southern style” back to their source in a complex of ideas he calls “the Sir Walter disease”—a conceptual monstrosity combining contemporary observation with an atavistic chivalric ideal derived from Ivanhoe. Twain demonstrates that the faults of the “the southern style” have nothing to do with verbal skills. When a Southern writer is not enchanted by Walter Scott’s “sham chivalries,” he is capable of “good description, compactly put.” Verbal blemishes at the surface derive from systemic intellectual disease at the core. “The beauty and the chivalry” is a surface eruption of an intellectual disease whose effects are only incidentally verbal—in Twain’s account, this underlying conceptual stand was also “in great measure responsible for the war.”
While this list could be extended indefinitely, we would like to close with the largely overlooked career of a master in a largely undervalued form: modern American literary journalism. A. J. Liebling (1904–1963) is a major American writer, all of whose work falls into the category of reporting and journalism. His subjects include the Second World War (Mollie and Other War Pieces, The Road Back to Paris); American politics (The Earl of Louisiana); urban scenes (The Jollity Building,The Telephone Booth Indian,Chicago: The Second City, Back Where I Came From, The Honest Rainmaker); boxing (The Sweet Science, A Neutral Corner); gastronomy (Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris); memoir and historical retrospective (Normandy Revisited); and social institutions (The Press).
Almost all of this material originally appeared in The New Yorker. Liebling’s reputation suffers because of a deeply entrenched prejudice against journalism as literature. His eccentric range of interests and his ability to treat the observational temperament as a “thing”—itself the subject of reporting—would not have been readily welcomed in any other American magazine published in his working lifetime. The New Yorker published writers in many styles—such as John Updike, Roger Angell, and E. B. White, the finest contemplative stylist of his era. But it was especially receptive to classic style, and its own self-presentation was essentially classic almost from its inception. Many of its writers—whether their form was reporting, cultural criticism, fiction, memoir, casual essay, political commentary, or any of the other conventional forms available to contemporary writers—were classic stylists: James Thurber, Ann Beattie, Joseph Mitchell, Richard rovere, Harold Rosenberg, Susan Sheehan, Donald Barthelme, Philip Hamburger, Audex Minor, Xavier Rynne, Jorge Luis Borges—the list could be extended at will.
Three successive editors—Harold Ross, William Shawn, and Robert Gottlieb—opened its pages to a remarkable variety of writers on an equally remarkable variety of subjects. Its stance was always that it found a contribution interesting because its writer made it so, and the editors decided to pass such a piece on to readers because of its intrinsic interest, not for any practical reason. The famous covers, many of them by major artists, were not keyed to current events except in the most oblique ways and ordinarily had no tie-in with any specific piece in the magazine. There was no overprinting on the covers, except for the magazine’s name, date, and price, and under these editors, there were no photographs in the magazine except for those in advertisements. At one time, The New Yorker refused advertisements it thought were too strident or otherwise not suited to the ethos of the magazine—which was never commercial, and was always, in its own idiom, casual. “Nature is coming to an end,” the magazine might announce in unsensational language—Bill McKibben’s small book The End of Nature first appeared as an article in The New Yorker; John Hersey’s Hiroshima was almost the entire editorial content of one issue of the magazine—but in classic fashion, the magazine wanted nothing from the reader but her attention. It never asked its readers to do anything, above all never asked its readers to buy anything. This attitude gave the magazine unparalleled respect among readers, especially if those readers were themselves writers, but it proved to be ultimately impractical in a commercial enterprise.
In 1985, the magazine was purchased by a company that publishes many other magazines, all of them vehicles for commerce, all of them engaged in conventional ploys to get the reader’s attention and divert it to the interests of its advertisers. The New Yorker that writers and readers respected above all other contemporary magazines and whose back issues are an anthology of distinguished writing and graphics no longer exists. While many of the classic writers associated with The New Yorker would have flourished without it, Liebling was perhaps the magazine’s preeminent gift to American literature. The New Yorker allowed this reporter the time, space, and scope he needed to become the outstanding classic stylist in modern American literary journalism. Liebling is the great successor in American classic style to the Mark Twain of Life on the Mississippi.