The other part of writing

 I have been trying to think about writing — not the craft of writing but the part that comes before it.

E.B. White got at the idea with this line: “Writing is an act of faith not a trick of grammar.”

I think we tend to start projects before we find the foundations. We teach people the craft of writing without spending much time helping them find what it is they have to say.

But this idea is fuzzy. I haven’t been able to get a wrench on it, as my grandfather would say.

The best I can do now is to give a bad example, to cite a case where things went wrong.

The best teller of this tale is Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau’s biographer from an earlier era. In Thoreau’s day, English Composition was a continuing course, rather than something to be endured in your freshman year. The course was heavily weighted. Perhaps the point of college was to learn to express yourself.

When Thoreau went to Harvard, he was taught English Composition by Edward Tyrrell Channing, described by Canby as “a first-rate teacher of rhetoric who made or marred more important writers than any other American professor.”

Channing’s students included Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Edward Everett Hale, Charles Sumner and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Thoreau had good marks at Harvard except in English Composition.

Channing taught the craft of writing as it was practiced. He demanded a logical, orderly exposition. Consider the order and logical structure of Thoreau’s great works and you’ll see the problem. A basic Thoreau story is about a week on the water or a saunter on Cape Cod. He gives us a narrative of an excursion, with insights that seem to grow out of the material naturally, almost as if they were growing out of the landscape. He doesn’t chop the insights up, organize them into topics, and present them in some kind of order. As Canby put it:

 

If any man alive could have taught Thoreau to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, it was Channing, but he failed. 

 

Here’s Canby on the effect on Thoreau:

 

Harvard made a scholar out of him but nearly ruined him as a writer. It took him approximately ten years to put his Harvard rhetoric behind him, and write steadily on his own.

 

Canby does not make Channing the villain. In academia, professors make judgments about grades. In the less real world of journalism, editors make judgments about employment.

I’m not thinking about blame. But something is wrong when Thoreau can’t get near the top of a writing class.

The problem is that our notion of writing is not complete, I suspect. What we say about craft might be logical, but logical systems that don’t account for all the facts aren’t complete and are thus not sound. A wise person doesn’t ignore facts to preserve some system, no matter how elegant that system might be.

To me, the part of writing that is most interesting is the part before you get to the question of craft. I wish I understood it better.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 53 and 54.