Good Works On Earth — Letters Series
In 1939, the Wetzel Publishing Company of Los Angeles issued a 267-page novel of but moderate literary merit but so distinctive that in its way it stands unrivalled by any other work in the entire history of the English language.
Editor Note — Good Works On Earth
This is a profound claim to make, well worthy of reading it twice or thrice.
The title divulges the novel's distinction: Gadsby, A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter E. It is an amazing tour de force. Let the skeptical reader see how long it takes to compose even a sentence without an e. The author of Gadsby, a persevering, dauntless, white-haired old gentelman named Ernest Vincent Wright, enumerated some of the problems of his self-imposed task. He had to avoid most verbs in the past tense because they end in -ed. He could never use the or the pronouns he, she, they, we, me and them. Gadsby had to omit such seemingly indispensable verbs as are, have, were, be and been and such basic words as there, these, those, when, then, more, after and very. A purist, Wright refused to use numbers between 6 and 30, even as digits, because an e was implied when they were spelled out. ("When introducing young ladies into the story, this is a real barrier," Wright complained, "for what young woman wants to have it known that she is over thirty.") Similarly, he banned Mr. and Mrs. because of the e in their unabbreviated form. One of the most annoying problems would arise, when, near the end of a long paragraph, he could find no eless word with which to complete the thought, and had to go back and rewrite the entire paragraph. So frequently did Wright find himself wanting to use a word containing an e that he had to tie down the e typebar of his typewriter to make it impossible for one to slip in.
“"And many did try to do so," he says in his preface. "As I wrote along, in long-hand at first, a whole army of little e's gathered around my desk, all eagerly expecting to be called upon. But gradually as they saw me writing on and on, without even noticing them, they grew uneasy; and, with excited whisperings amongst themselves, began hopping up and riding on my pen, looking down constantly for a chance to drop off into some word; for all the world like seabirds perched, watching for a passing fish! But when they saw that I had covered 138 pages of typewriter size pages, they slid off onto the floor, walking sadly away, arm in arm; but shouting back: 'You certainly must have a hodge-podge of a yarn there without Us! Why, man! We are in every story ever written, hundreds of thousands of times! This is the first time we were ever shut out!'"
The story required, Wright declared, "five and a half months of concentrated endeavor, with so many erasures and retrenchments that I tremble as I think of them."