The Long and Short of It

This apology is attributed by turns to such fine minds as Blaise Pascal, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin and even Marie Curie. Between them they must have a point. Here are some brief thoughts on length:

Lord Sandwich appears to have been a busy man. He had no time for a full lunch, or to read a lengthy brief, if such is not a contradiction in terms. One page had to suffice, even if the matter required more than one page to do it justice. When Lord Sandwich praised brevity, he was pleading time constraints.

Hawkeye, in the comedy M*A*S*H, has clearly heard a convoluted sentence that he cannot understand, and he suspects that he is not meant to understand it. Brevity, for Hawkeye, is a corrective to pomposity.

here:

Whenever I return to England from abroad, which is often, a very troubling question comes insistently into mind: why are the people here so ugly?

I do not mean by this that I think all foreigners are handsome or beautiful, far from it. One of the tricks that Stepmother Nature has played on humanity is to give it an idea of beauty in its own kind, and then deny the thing itself to so large a proportion of the race.

this column, he revels in the “quite transcendent vulgarity” of a stranger:

Was he? Perhaps, but the case is not made, and cannot be made in the mere five hundred words dictated by the space allowed. Dalrymple is an excellent essayist who combines moral and verbal clarity, but he generally needs space to develop his arguments. His thoughts are too big to squeeze into half a page.

Homi K. Bhabha, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, uses fifty-five words to say nothing at all:

Romney came of age thinking Bad Thoughts, and led a secret life with other boys. The badness made him feel guilty, but it was also exciting. So in a way the badness was good.

She and Jules got on great, which was annoying.

Jules went bald. Deprived of the goodness of badness, they developed erectile dysfunction issues. After seven tedious years, they split.

Alack, alack! Methinks Romney and Jules might have made a fabulous tragedy, if only someone had tried to keep them apart.

The Story of You by Julie Myerson. It was gripping to start with, very good until towards the end of the first half, and then went off. All her novels are like that. So are those of Anita Brookner, Maggie O’Farrell and countless others.

This Amazon reviewer suggests not:

Rule 1: Always leave them wanting more.

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Mary Jackson contributes regularly to The Iconoclast, our Community Blog. Click here to see all her contributions, on which comments are welcome.