EDITOR’S NOTE A Writers’ Magazine

I don’t go, as boxing fans say, to the fights. I do, however, like a good dustup in the arenas of grammar and usage. Of course, who doesn’t enjoy a little roughhousing when comma placement is at stake? But these set-tos over punctuation and usage sometimes leave me feeling cheapened, as the crime of, say, confusing comprise and compose is prosecuted only, it can seem, for the self-validation found in the ridicule of common (or even debatable) errors. Then I come away wondering if this emphasis on the rules of grammar threatens to distract us from the more important task of giving great attention to our choice of words.

For improving one’s use of language, work, I find, is about the only thing that works. This seems true whether one is writing a grand address or a greeting card. William Carlos Williams wrote:

“so much depends
  upon
  a red wheel
  barrow
  glazed with rain
  water ”

So much goes into, I find myself thinking, red wheelbarrows glazed with rain water. So much attention, labor, care, irrational amounts, to say nothing of time or devotion, go into every red wheelbarrow you’d want to see glazed with rain water.

This issue of Humanities boasts contributions by more than one attentive, hardworking writer. The first is John Updike, who is delivering this year’s Jefferson Lecture. He discourses on his own literary career and the character of American art in a conversation with NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. He is represented also in these pages by a selection of excerpts from his art writing. These Updike chose himself.

Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker also lends some words to this issue, to make clear that Updike’s art writing is far more than a side hobby for America’s great man of letters. And we present an essay by Francis-Noël Thomas, coauthor of what must be the finest book in ages on the neglected subject of rhetoric. Thomas writes about A. J. Liebling (the third New Yorker writer to come up in this note, for those keeping count), whose excellent World War II reporting has just been republished in a new volume from the Library of America.

Reading good writing, I find, is far more salutary to the mind seeking clarity and refinement than going to the grammar fights. Still, I will go. I find it helpful to consider what rules I care about and what rules I should happily see flouted. But for culture, for literary aspiration, for what wonderful towers can be built with these rules of grammar, I am proud to say I will continue turning to, among others, the writers who appear on the Table of Contents in this issue of Humanities magazine.