Golden Words at Dartmouth

In the late 1940s, Dartmouth thought of David Lambuth as a campus character, the compleat English professor in his white suit and black cape, his white beard and black beret, driving his white Packard as absentmindedly as he graded green freshmen. Older generations knew better. Professor Lambuth had a passion for precision in writing; he abhorred the vague and verbose, the prolix and pompous. And in 1923, when his beard was black and his energy abundant, Lambuth compiled The Golden Book on Writing, a 50-page bible that sounded positively Mosaical.

"Simple words for big ideas," barked the little book. "Exact words for exact thoughts." "Verbs are the sinews of speech." "Obscurity is not profundity. Neither is it art."

To Police the Prose. Such maxims honed the pens of such famed Lambuth proteges as Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Novelist Budd Schulberg, Poets Richard Eberhart and Richmond Lattimore. The book was long out of print when Lambuth died in 1948, but old grads treasured old copies, and not long ago Adman S. Heagan Bayles ('33) lovingly printed a new edition of 1,000 to police the prose at his Manhattan agency, Sullivan, Stauffer, Colwell & Bayles. This fall, courtesy of the ad agency rather than the English department, the Dartmouth business school joyfully revived The Golden Book.

Lambuth focused on the sentence, "the way in which mankind naturally thinks," calling its movement from subject to predicate "a sort of moving picture of thought." To follow the mind's natural order, he said, "keep your subject close to the beginning of your sentence" and "keep your verb as close to its object as possible." Avoid too many verbs; evoke the reader's imagination. "The fewer the words that can be made to convey an idea, the clearer and the more forceful that idea." Not We walked down the main street, which was very long, but We walked down the long main street.

A first draft should go as fast as the writer can think, said Lambuth. "Snail-pace writing never catches up with spontaneity--which is one of the greatest of the literary virtues." But rewriting is crucial--for example, to strengthen the beginning and the ending of each sentence, paragraph and the larger whole. Especially the endings: "What we hear last is usually the most vivid to us." Avoid grammatical fussiness: "In certain cases a preposition is the most emphatic word to end a sentence with." But worry about words: "There is rarely more than one right word to express an idea exactly. See that you get that one right word."

Lambuth despised inert verbs: "To be is the weakest of all verbs because it merely joins two ideas together with a colorless glue." He liked verbs that are "busy doing or making something." Not When Elizabeth was queen, but When Elizabeth reigned. He sought concrete words standing for "material things which may be seen, touched, tasted, smelled or heard." No Lambuth student could write that a man indulged in an act of generosity; he wrote that a man gave a dollar to a tramp. Abstract: He gave vehement and conclusive expression to his anger. Concrete: His fist landed squarely on the man's chin and put him down and out.

To Transpire. As a product of Vanderbilt, Columbia, and Oxford, Lambuth had his scholar's quibbles. To transpire means "to come to light," he cried, not "to happen."* In hope of, he insisted, not in hopes of. Owing to means "because of," he warned; due to means "the result of." In hope of making the difference between will and shall transpire, Lambuth brandished the Anglo-Saxon words, willan (to wish, to be about to) and sculan (to be obliged). If an act is owing to free will, he ordered, use "I will." If it is due to an outside force, use "I shall." I will be married, but I shall be drafted.

Still, the professor was no pedant. A China-born Southerner, he was the son of a Methodist missionary and the grandson of Nathan B. Forrest's chief of staff; he came to Dartmouth in 1913 after teaching in Brazil and ranching in California. For three decades, Lambuth asked only that students think hard and write straight, looking to such models as Belloc, Conrad, Chesterton and the English Bible. "Clear thinking and not a mastery of rules and a memory full of difficulties is what makes good writing," Lambuth summed up. "If you have a nail to hit, hit it on the head."

* Webster now accepts "to happen" as a synonym, but gives "to emit moisture, vapor, perfume, etc." as the first definition.

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