The Working Writer Book

I decided to read these century-old lectures because I was curious to check out the source of the dictum "murder your darlings," made famous by Stephen King. The lectures contained some interesting insights mixed with stretches of what struck me as benign babbling.
Most jarring is Quiller-Couch's invariable address to his listeners as "gentlemen." A stark reminder that, although Cambridge had begun to permit women to attend lectures a decade or two previously, they were not allowed to sit for exams or take a degree. So they are not among Quiller-Couch's addressees. No, he speaks to elite males in the making, whom Quiller-Couch will form by exposure to the "masculine, objective writers" he admires.
Not that I have much to quibble about with the authors he holds up for admiration and emulation, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Thomas Wyatt (which Quiller-Couch spells with one "t"). There are others he admires less, for example, Samuel Johnson and Wordsworth, but Jane Austen rates no mention and George Eliot but one, a passing mention not as an author but as a responsive reader.
Equally risible is his survey, spread over two lectures, of the lineage of English literature. He is as allergic to the notion that Chaucer owed anything to Beowulf or other Anglo-Saxon poetry (other than the language, no small matter!) as he is to the suggestion that Great Britain should be reckoned among the Teutonic nations. Context, I remind myself. He gave these lectures in 1913, when the sound of saber-rattling filled the air. And he is reacting to the equally suspect Romantic Nationalism of the generation before him.
Nevertheless, it strikes me as nothing less than cranky that he devotes a lengthy portion of one of twelve lectures to speculation that some Romans who settled in Britain may still have descendants. The fact that newest DNA evidence confirms this suspicion doesn't change Quiller-Couch's lack of demonstration that this has anything to do with the influence of the Greek-Roman tradition on English literature.
Balanced against these oddities are other things I did like. These include Quiller-Couch's instinctive mistrust of the "-isms" often used to lump writers into categories and his emphasis that language is living, ever-changing, and that therefore good style can't be reduced to rules. On the other hand, it is a bit of a letdown to hear in the final lecture that good style is merely a matter of politeness toward your reader.
From the outset, he declares that he will aim to have students read great literature "absolutely," by which he means the texts themselves in preference to commentary and other secondary literature. He does allow that, with certain highly allusive writers such as Milton, notes on the references might be necessary for beginning students.
Quiller-Couch seems confident that in this "absolute" encounter with the texts it will be possible to discern authorial intent. A century on, we are less sure, but he also seems to recognize the role of what is now called reader-response: "the success of [literature] depends on personal persuasiveness, on the author's skill to give as on ours to receive."
Quiller-Couch's aim is not only that his students will learn to appreciate great literature, but that they will become, if not great, at least good writers. Although chary of rules, he does set out four hallmarks of good writing. Aim to write, he urges, with accuracy, perspicuity, persuasion, and appropriateness. He might have helped his case had he said "lucidity" or "clarity" instead of perspicuity. Perhaps he thought his formula would be more memorable if two words began with the prefix "per-" alongside two that began with "a."
I also liked his suggestion that the key to the Dark Ages was the suppression of literature. This was not done because the church had something against it as literature, nor'at first'because it was voluptuous, but because it was imbued with the polytheistic religion of the Greeks and Romans, something the church had only recently and narrowly overcome.
His fifth lecture, on jargon, is lamentably as relevant now as it was then. He decries it not because it is ugly, but because it is "a dead thing, leading no-whither, meaning naught. There is wickedness in human speech, sometimes. You will detect it all the better for having ruled out all that it naughty."
One of the things I liked most about these lectures: although Quiller-Couch has his favorites, as well as writers he doesn't admire, he is charitable toward all. It is not easy to write, he stresses, and all struggled to express themselves in language. This earns his respect and merits ours. In spite of my criticisms of parts of this book, this respect is something I'm glad to accord Quiller-Couch as well.
He seems to bristle that Chesterton, in a review of one of Quiller-Couch's books, calls his tone "avuncular." I smiled when I read this since that's an adjective that already crossed my mind before I reached that point. But that's not all bad. I think I would have enjoyed an evening and a sherry with him. These lectures, however, because of their unevenness, can be passed over in favor of other good books on writing. It's not a bad book'I enjoyed much of it'but it's not essential.