Op-Ed

If genuine, the recent discovery of a series of letters written by the early 20th century academic William Strunk, Jr., provides an intimate glimpse into the passions and the peccadilloes of a man whose life itself has hitherto been seen as a reflection of the austere and unimaginative writing style he still represents.

Strunk first published The Elements of Style for his students at Columbia University in 1918. After his death, his edition was edited and updated by his former student E.B. White, and published in 1959 as Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. Several editions later, this slim tome remains the severe school marm of disapproval most responsible for the stilted writing style employed by the best and brightest pupils at the most prestigious universities in the United States. In the form of this book, Professor Strunk still tarries many a late night at the bedside of young women and men in college dorms across the country.

The series of letters is said to have been written by Strunk to a student of his, Dorothy L. Dalrymple, from October 1923 through May 1924. No copies of letters written by Miss Dalrymple to Professor Strunk are known to have survived. Miss Dalrymple would have been twenty-two years old at the time of the first letter, while Professor Strunk was 54 and a married father of three children. His reputation for a sort of Calvinistic moral propriety–particularly in his relationships with the increasing numbers of female students at Columbia–was beyond reproach.

While some scholars have accepted the letters as genuine, others dismiss them as a hoax. At least one researcher who has examined the collection feels that the Englishman Henry Watson Fowler, who published the first edition of his Fowler’s Modern English Usage in 1926, is responsible for the forgery. Others point out that the letters appear to be written with a type of felt-tipped pen that would not have been available earlier than the 1970s. This would of course rule out either man.

What follows is a short selection of the purported correspondence. The first two notes are typewritten on Columbia University letterhead. Subsequent notes are handwritten on plain, quarto-sized paper.

October 21, 1923

Just eight days later, the notoriously reticent Professor Strunk is clearly intrigued by his pupil.

October 29, 1923

The access promised to Miss Dalrymple was a dramatic departure for the famously rigid and unaccommodating professor, and only one day after this second note, Miss Dalrymple seems to have taken the Professor up on his offer. He is extraordinarily affected. If indeed this note is genuine, this is the first known specimen of a handwritten communication from Professor Strunk to one of his pupils.

Phrases such as “breathless anticipation” and “I kiss your hand” would have amazed the staid professor’s students. His wife also, perhaps, would have been surprised. But evidence of a much more intense relationship with Miss Dalrymple, and a corresponding linguistic and grammatical freedom were soon to erupt from the pen of Professor Strunk.

An undated note, which was likely written less than a month later, shows the besotted professor already equating personal and grammatical freedom.

Though Professor Strunk long professed a love for poetry and edited editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems for his students, he himself has not been known to have practiced it. Moreover, he was publicly very critical and dismissive of free verse. If these writings to Miss Dalrymple are his, however, he was an enthusiastic if closeted dabbler in some of the freest of free verse. He throws all strictures out of the window.

In this example, he celebrates his liberation:

Reams of this increasingly experimental verse make up a large part of this correspondence with his “Dearest Dot” over the next few months. Some of it directly confronted the strict grammarian that he continued to cultivate as his public persona. Many combined sexual and grammatical imagery in odd and awkward ways. One example is entitled “A river of commas.”

We don’t know what Miss Dalrymple made of his versifying. The above examples, incredibly, are possibly the best of the lot. Perhaps she was not impressed, for the relationship would soon come to an end.

In the last letter in the series, the relationship between teacher and pupil has changed. Dorothy has grown aloof. Professor Strunk speaks of her “absence” and pleads with her to “teach him again.” That this letter is the first to be typewritten since his communication with Miss Dalrymple grew personal seems to signal that he has accepted that this affair of the pen has run its course.

Questions will remain unanswered even if this series of writings is ultimately accepted to be genuine. Was this an affair of the pen only? Did Dorothy Dalrymple return Professor Strunk’s enthusiasms? Her writings to him–if she wrote any–might answer this question. But there is no evidence that she did. None of his notes or poems refer to anything personal that she has written to him. They refer sometimes to her writings, but these writings seem to be only the essays and papers that she was assigned to write in the course of her academic studies.

In fact, while the writings of other students (including E.B. White) have been found among William Strunk’s papers, nothing by Miss Dalrymple has been identified. She remains a cipher. Was it her creativity or her beauty that taught Professor Strunk to write “outside the lines” as he put it in one of his letters? A little of both, perhaps? Somehow, anyway, the pupil managed to teach the instructor to explore another side of his severe and structured self.

Unless, that is (and if we can discount the supposed evidence of the felt pen), an English grammarian and schoolmaster, born in the reign of Queen Victoria and more severe and unbending even than William Strunk Jr., imagined and manufactured the whole episode.

Steve Bachman is Steve Bachman is aging like cheap wine in Saint Paul, a quiet suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He spends at least 40 hours a week toiling as a UNIX systems administrator, while metaphorically wearing a large bumper sticker that reads "I'd rather be traveling, birdwatching, playing Scrabble, reading, listening to music, playing volleyball, basketball, or softball, finishing a crossword puzzle, or taking a nap." Occasionally he writes down some nonsense, but he discards most of it. He wears a beard.
Email this author | All posts by Steve Bachman