Sir Harold Evans Sneers at a Book He Has Not Read

Sir Harold Evans. Note the salient absence from his bookshelves.

I’ve decided I don’t agree with Lord Henry’s quip (in The Picture of Dorian Gray) that “there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

One thing that is worse than not being talked about, at least for an academic, is being shamefully misquoted by someone who thinks he should cite your work but can’t be bothered to read any of it. Sir Harold Evans, former editor of The Times and The Sunday Times in London, has just paid me this uncompliment, and — sorry to be so easily riled — I’m annoyed.

Sir Harold’s dreadful book on how to write (Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters) appeared in May 2017. I held my peace and did not comment (while Oliver Kamm, in The Times, called it “newsman’s balderdash“).

My reward for self-restraint is that this execrable book is now out in a paperback edition, with slight revisions and additions, including a misguided sneer at The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) plus a misattributed quote.

When someone made Sir Harold aware of the existence of CGEL, he glanced at the first two sentences of the first chapter, which state that the book is “a synchronic, descriptive grammar of general-purpose, present-day, international Standard English”; added the book to his bibliography; and then (it would seem) closed it and never looked at it again. After that, for some reason, he added a mistargeted insult.

Early in his book (Page 11) he pothers predictably about Shakespeare’s fine language, quoting “to the ending of the world . . . we in it shall be remembered” from Henry V without noticing the passive be remembered; but later (in Chapter 4, “Ten Shortcuts to Making Yourself Clear”) he drones on for many pages about the awfulness of the passive, charging innocuous phrases like “several shops were burned” with being bad writing. He speaks warmly of Richard Mitchell’s charge that passives are pretentious; he reminds us that William Zinsser called the distinction between active and passive “the difference between life and death”; and then, without any rationale, comes the sneer:

I would like to have heard them [Mitchell and Zinsser] on The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, a collation by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum (2002). It describes itself as a “synchronic, descriptive grammar of general purpose, present-day, international Standard English.” It’s comprehensive, supposedly averse to prescription, but the authors cannot contain their rage at advocacy of the active voice. They describe Strunk and White “as a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don’t what is a passive and what isn’t.”

CGEL is not a “collation”; it is a carefully written 1,860-page academic reference work. I served as second author, under the direction of the world’s greatest living English grammarian, Rodney Huddleston. In a 20-page section that Sir Harold never looked at (Pages 1427–1447) CGEL meticulously describes the structure of the various kinds of passive clauses, and distinguishes their contextual effects from those of actives. It never expresses “rage at advocacy of the active voice” or any other emotions. And it never mentions Strunk and White (when we were writing, Huddleston had literally never heard of them).

Sir Harold must have heard somewhere else about my allegation that Strunk and White were grammatical dunces. The quotation that he falsely associates with CGEL is from a polemical article of mine (nothing to do with Huddleston) published in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2009 (the 50th-anniversary year of White’s revision of The Elements of Style). I said:

What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don’t know what is a passive construction and what isn’t.

(I understated S&W’s cluelessness back then — as ever, I was too kind. Correcting myself in a later article, I noted that of the four examples that Strunk and White give to illustrate what are supposed to be passives in need of correction to active transitives, “The jaw-dropping fact is that not a single one of the pairs involves the replacement of a passive by an active transitive. In the second example the replacement verb is not transitive, and in the others the replaced sentence is not a passive.” The prosecution rests.)

Sir Harold couldn’t be bothered either to turn beyond page 2 of CGEL or to source-check his quotes. You may think, with Lord Henry, that I’m lucky just being talked about. But I don’t feel that way. I wish Sir Harold’s pompous and ill-informed book hadn’t mentioned me at all.