A Sentence Of One's Own.

Besides a conventional dictionary and thesaurus set, an observer of personal habits would note copies of the following books propped and lined up on my writing desk: the invaluable Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable; the slightly dubious New York Public Library Desk Reference; and those two useful volumes rub bindings with, for more inspirational purposes: Julian Maclaren Ross's The Funny Bone (first, and probably only, edition, published simultaneously in England and Canada); Anthony Powell's Afternoon Men (first American edition); Robert Byron's Road To Oxiana (some weird British re-print, possibly from the 50's).
On any given day it is more likely that I will reach for Maclaren Ross' collection of satires and parodies than for my thesaurus or dictionary. Flicking at random through his book - or Powell's or Byron's - makes excellent writing seem such an easy thing to achieve that one can't help but feel an enormous and immediate desire to seize a pen and begin composing a sentence of one's own.

Comments

[Jan Bear]

I'm getting that effect from Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. I haven't flipped back and forth so much in a novel in years, at least not without finally throwing the volume into a used-bookstore box. With Eco, I know the fault is my short attention span. But the short attention span is partly his fault, because I keep setting his book aside to go work on my own.

It's fun the way Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland is fun. Too old-fashioned to be seriously menacing, but offering a surprise around every corner and a sense that a personality both jovial and mysterious lives in every upright and every electric wire.