Below, Raymond Chandler writes to his close personal secretary, Juanita Messick, lamenting the improper use of present participles and the decline of the American mind. The exchange was occasioned by a newspaper column entitled “Take My Word”, in which the columnist condemns writer James Tidwell for “infelicitous phrasing and misplaced emphasis.”
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TO JUANITA MESSICK
November, 1951 , La Jolla
JM
The use of present participles to avoid relative clauses should be very cautiously approached. “A man wearing a green hat came up the steps.” This is fine because a lot simpler and less cumbrous and doesn’t make too much of the green hat. “A man who was wearing a green hat came up the steps.” Seems to hit it too hard. It seems that Tidwell’s trouble is not poor syntax (what he writes is correct enough) but lack of feeling for the weight of the words. A statement as portentous should not be made with such light and passing construction. It’s getting towards a thing like: “De Musset was thirty three years old that day, being guillotined at two in the afternoon.”
Obviously what is wrong what that is the style, not the grammar. His age is made more important than the fact that he had his head chopped off. I should say—correct me if I am wrong—that this, next to the cliché, is the greatest fault of writing, important enough in its content, which is turned out by scientists, some scholars, and technical writers generally, and is the result of the separation of the Humanities from the special departments of knowledge. Not true of the best, of course. A really first class mind can always express itself.
Why do we go on wasting our school years, the only years we have in which to learn how to use our brains and minds and tongues? Why? Is it a question of money, of politics in the schools, or are we really intellectually a second-class people? And if so, do we want to be? Do we think it more manly to stumble over simple syntax provided we can reassemble a Ford or throw a football 45 yards?
RC
Why don’t I shut up!
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