Craig - One of the greatest essays ever! Every time I read it, I get chills - the last line is, quite literarally, a killer. Thanks for pointing out how grammar makes this piece work.
Geoff
> Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 10:00:20 -0500
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Past perfect phrases, E.B. White
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> 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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