Since Brad found Hemingway to be a poor role model, I decided to look
at E.B. White, author (with Will Strunk) of “Elements of Style” and
arguably one of the premier stylists in the language. The essay,
chosen since I’m teaching it in a few weeks, is “Once More to the
Lake,” which has been anthologized numerous times in best essay
collections.
   I found twenty-three past perfect verb phrases in an essay of moderate
length. I was actually surprised that I did not find more, but most of
those that do show up are used to great effect.
   To those of you who don’t know the essay, it’s about going back with
his son to a lake he had visited as a child with his father. He is
struck by how little everything has changed, and he begins to feel like
his son is himself and he is his father. I find it rich and moving,
perhaps because I made annual visits to a lake in Maine with my family
as a child. I taught it last year, though, and found most students,
even my urban students, liked and admired it.
   I don't want to defend every use of the past perfect, but we should at
least begin with an acknowledgement that it has a functional role
within discourse.
    Here are some of the sentences, not a full list, but an attempt at a
representative one.

    “I took along my son, who had never had any fresh water up his nose
and who had seen lily pads only from train windows.”

     “The lake had never been what you would call a wild lake.”

    “But when I got back there, with my boy, and we settled into the kind
of summertime I had known, I could tell that it was going to be pretty
much the same as it had been before--…”

     “It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt
that everything was as it always had been, that the years were a
mirage and that there had been no years.”

    “It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times and
those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving. There had
been jollity and peace and goodness. The arriving (at the beginning of
August) had been so big a business in itself….”

     “Inside, all was just as it had always been, except there was more
Coca-Cola and not so much Moxie and root beer and birch beer and
sarsaparilla.”

   “It was like the revival of an old melodrama that I had seen long ago
with childish awe.”

    “He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all
through the shower and wrung them out.”

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