Short shot #22: Fitzgerald and Strunk

What do F. Scott Fitzgerald (the American writer) and William Strunk Sr. (the father of the Cornell English professor who was the author of  the original The Elements of Style) have in common?

Meticulous record-keeping.

Here’s Arthur Krystal, in the November 16 New Yorker (p. 38):

Fitzgerald always had a plan. He liked to draw up schedules; he kept meticulous records; he made numerous lists; and he recorded every penny earned, borrowed, and paid back. For a man who led one of the messiest lives in literary history, on paper he was as organized as Felix Unger’s sock drawer.

As for Strunk Sr., from Mark Garvey’s recent Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style (p. 1):

An energetic record keeper all his adult life, William Strunk Sr., in a flowing, nearly calligraphic script, filled ledger after ledger with the details of Strunk family life–expenditures of every kind, from the cost of his own wedding to the annual expenses of child rearing [including those for Will Strunk Jr.] …

Garvey fills more than a page with further details. He doesn’t offer similar details about Will Strunk Jr., though he does touch several times on Strunk’s passion for order.

Maybe it was the spirit of the times.

The Safire watch

Since the death of William Safire, the linguasphere has been full of obits, reminiscences, appreciations, and  so on: a short obit by Ben Zimmer on Language Log (with links to Languagehat, Mr. Verb, Wishydig, and Grant Barrett); a longer version (of September 28) by Ben on Word Routes; Ben back on Language Log with some further thoughts on Safire and links to another Word Routes column of his (of October 6, mostly about WS on could care less), to a Fresh Air piece by Geoff Nunberg, and to Ben’s NYT “On Language” column on Safire (to be published in hard copy on October 11, but available on-line from October 5); and Geoff Nunberg on Language Log about his Fresh Air piece, with links to Jan Freeman, Todd Gitlin, Aaron Britt, and David Bromwich.

If you have other pieces you’d like to suggest, Nunberg has invited readers to add these as comments on this last posting. None of us is trying to assemble a full inventory of this material, of course, but we could easily have missed things of  interest; if so, Nunberg’s posting is the place to take notice of them.

John Hope Franklin

(I post on this blog occasionally on matters that are not really about language, as in this case. If that’s not to your taste, pass on.)

The American historian John Hope Franklin, of Duke University, died on 25 March at the age of 94. There are obits and remembrances all over the place.

Some people are like the gingko tree: you think they’ve been around for an immense amount of time and will go on into the indefinite future. But of course they’re just people, not a species of tree, and their time comes to an end.

Franklin was a pioneer black presence in the elite American academy, perhaps best known for his book From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, first published in 1944. He combined a courtly manner — he was a truly charming man — with a steely resolve.

I met him when he was on the board of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, an institution for which I have great affection. Its current director is Claude Steele, who is, in fact, African American (which is, these days, both utterly inconsequential and also still enormously significant).