It
wasn't what they said, but the way they said it.
There
are some writers you love to read, whatever the subject, whatever their views,
simply because of the way they write. But how do you learn to write in such a
way as to hold the reader’s attention long enough to say what you want to say?
There
is much debate about how the Web has changed the way people write, and
how the reader becomes ever more reluctant to give time to what they are
reading. Try Kevin Kelly, Reading in a Whole New Way; Patrick Kingsley, The art of slow reading, and Jonah Lehrer, The Future Of Reading.
And
when it comes to social media such as Twitter and Facebook, suddenly the old
skills of the tabloid sub-editor would seem to be at a premium – say it as
clearly as possible, but in the shortest number of words!
However
the unwillingness of the reader to indulge the writer has been going on for a
very long time. In 1906 the first edition of The Oxford Book Of English Verse
was collated by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Q taught first at Trinity College,
Oxford where he had been an undergraduate, later becoming a Professor of
English at Cambridge. He was a controversial figure for his time - to put it
crudely he taught 'language' not 'literature', the current usage to which a
language was put rather than the classical tradition of great past writers -
outrageous! But then he was a Cornishman, and horror of horrors, had been
educated at somewhere called Newton Abbot College. The Oxford Book Of English
Verse was criticised for its inclusion of 'modern' writers, that is those from
the last one hundred years - in his case the nineteenth century. He was also,
allegedly, the inspiration for the character of Ratty in The Wind In The
Willows!
But
it is two of Q's students I really want to talk about, two people I believe to
be unacknowledged experts in writing concisely, now much needed on the Web. At
the end of the 1920's a young man who had been born in Salford and grown-up in
Blackpool called Alfred Cooke turned up in Cambridge. Q was his personal tutor
and by all accounts gave him a hard time because he was potentially so good,
but spent most of his time on amateur dramatics. In 1933 Alfred, who by this
time had changed his name to Alistair, made his first trip to America and the
rest, as they say, is history. Through his almost 60 years of radio broadcasts
(Letter From America 1946-2003) he gave several generations of British people
their first taste of America. He pioneered 'writing for talking' in which the
broadcaster speaks directly and personally to what he imagines is an audience
of just one, or two people at most.
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| (photo by Nick Hewling) |
A
few years after Cooke had sailed into New York at sunset, a young woman from
Philadelphia made her way there in the hope of making it on Broadway as a
playwright. It would be more than thirty years before she found success, but
she educated herself at various public libraries and there discovered Q's
writing. Indeed one of her books is entitled Q's Legacy. It's not as well-known
however as the book that made her name - a very short book of personal
correspondence, made up of brief letters between herself and a man called Frank
Doel who worked as a buyer for one of the second-hand bookshops that once
defined the Charing Cross Road (84 Charing Cross Road) Helene Hanff wrote very
direct, powerful and funny letters, sometimes of only a few sentences, which
would not look out of place on any social media or networking site...
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| (photo by Nick Hewling) |
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