How to Write a Sentence
Page 6
Or so is the claim. Montaigne may have believed that a style that eschews formal structure and obvious design accurately mirrors the movements of a mind (his own) in free-flowing motion; but the “natural” style is a style nevertheless, not a transparent picture of psychological reality, but a representation of it, neither more nor less “true” than the representation of thought offered by the deliberative, subordinating style. There is certainly a difference between saying in response to the perennial question “What did you do today?” “I had five distinct experiences that seemed unconnected but were related in the following ways,” and saying, “Well, I got up and made coffee; and do you remember the day we bought the coffeemaker in that little shop; let’s go back there soon; and, oh yes, I went to the grocery store; they’re so rude, we really should find someplace else; and you’ll never guess who I met there—Sheila; and she told me that . . .” But it is a difference between ways of organizing experience, not a difference between a filtered experience and the thing itself.
It is also a difference between the experience the styles provide. Readers of Austen, James, Melville, Pater, and Milton will feel secure (if a bit condescended to) in the hands of a controlling intelligence who guides them with authority through the intricacies of a densely layered but finely ordered piece of prose. Readers of authors less intent on being seen as holding the reins will experience a degree of the same freedom, looseness, and, on occasion, disorientation the prose seems to be enacting. (Remember, it’s all art.) Here are two examples from the famous openings of two famous books, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1766) and J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951).
Tristram Shandy begins with our hero recounting a moment he could not possibly remember, the moment of his conception:
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were doing—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; and for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost—had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly—I am verily persuaded I should have made a different figure in the world from that in which the reader is likely to see me.
No preliminaries or ceremony here. The speaker just bursts upon our stage, wishing and revising his wish as he goes. First it is “either” his mother or father who is the object of his reproach; then he bethinks himself and says no, actually both; and then he gives the reason for his self-correction; they were after all equal partners in the act whose possible consequences are then rehearsed in a list that could have gone on forever. One thought leads to another and then to another, each provisional and not quite followed through, until, in an act of will—there is no natural stopping place—the speaker puts a (temporary) period to his musings by revealing the wish behind his wish: I might have been a different person than the one you now see.
But we don’t see him at all; what we see is an always receding “figure” whom we proceed to chase through the many pages that follow. Early and famous reviewers (Edmund Burke, William Hazlitt, Sir Walter Scott) called Sterne’s style careless, haphazard, shifting, rambling, and conversational, “a book without plan or order” (Walter Bagehot). There were complaints that nothing quite got finished. The author, Burke observed, “perpetually digresses; or rather having no determined end in view, he runs from object to object, as they happen to strike a very lively and irregular imagination.” In the end—there is no end—“the book is a perpetual series of disappointments.” A twentieth-century commentator (Lodwick Hartley) gets the style and its effect exactly right when he asks, “Who can tolerate the person who in ordinary conversation is forever backing and filling, embroidering and elaborating, detailing and digressing in a such a way as never to get his story told?” (Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Norton Critical Edition). Of course this is not ordinary conversation, but planned conversation designed to appear ordinary in an extraordinary way. The expectations Sterne’s prose repeatedly disappoints are the expectations that come along with a belief in a rationally ordered universe, a belief that is conveyed, even breathed, by the subordinating linear style we have seen in writers like Austen, James, Milton, Melville, and Martin Luther King Jr. In place of the unity and coherence attempted and achieved by these authors, Sterne puts “a seemingly new pattern of unity; not new but as old as humanity: the organic pattern of life” (Toby A. Olshin, in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Norton Critical Edition).
The organic pattern of life does not develop; it just grows, and representations of it often frustrate those who want to travel a straight line from the beginning to the middle to the end of a sentence, or of anything else. Sterne’s Tristram is well aware of his readers’ desires, and he comments on them even as he refuses to satisfy them. “I know there are readers in the world . . . who are no readers at all—who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of every thing which concerns you.” They are not readers at all because they are not trying to put things together or figure them out (two meanings of the verb “to read”); rather, they want it all to be given to them nicely tied up in a neat package. It is those (non)readers he aims to tease when he tells them what he won’t tell them: “Sir, as you and I are in a manner perfect strangers to each other, it would not have been proper to have let you into too many circumstances relating to myself all at once—you must have a little patience.” That is a straightforward sentence, but the Shandean style returns immediately, imitating what it urges:
Therefore my dear friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my first setting out—bear with me—and let me go on, and tell my story my own way—or if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road—or should sometime put on a fool’s cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along—don’t fly off—but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside—and as we jog along, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do any thing—only keep your temper.
Let me go on, he says, as he goes on, and drags us with him. The work of the sentence is done by those loose connectives “and,” “or,” and “but,” each of which signals a new turn or detour and all of which conspire to keep the reader—mockingly referred to as “my dear friend and companion”—off-balance. The message is either keep up with me or keep quiet.
J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield does not even pretend to be solicitous of his reader. His opening sentence announces that whatever the reader might want, he’s not going to get it. Holden refuses to begin at the beginning and “tell you my whole goddamn autobiography or anything.” (The dismissiveness of “or anything” is a thing of insolent beauty.)
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
The sentence lists the information it won’t provide, stringing the items it will withhold on a bead of ands—none of that and none of that and none of that either. The art of the sentence consists in its ability to convey two voices: the breathless, unrehearsed voice of the teenager and the reflective, quasi-philosophical voice of the author. When Holden throws out “lousy” he intends nothing more than a contemptuous filler (today a teenage narrator might say “f ******”), but Salinger wants to raise the questions of just what kind of childhood his young hero had. In Holden’s mind, “if you want to know the truth” is a throwaway that means “I don’t care what you want,” but Salinger is telling us that
the truth of his novel will not be the David Copperfield kind (“To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born [as I have been informed and believe] on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night”). It will be something else, and that something else will not be revealed by dates and orderly sequences.
Catcher in the Rye not only exhibits but is about the continuous and unpredictable stream of experience in relation to which clean, formal demarcations, either in life or in prose, are artificial impositions. Later in the book, Holden recalls why he flunked Oral Expression; he couldn’t stomach the instructor’s insistence that speakers not digress from a stated point. “The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses,” and he illustrates his preferred style of speaking (and thinking) with the speech of a boy who got a D-plus because he said he was going to talk about his father’s farm, but then:
What he did was, Richard Kinsella, he’d start telling you all about that stuff—then all of a sudden he’d start telling you about this letter his mother got from his uncle, and how his uncle got polio and all when he was forty-two years old, how he wouldn’t let anybody come to see him in the hospital because he didn’t want anybody to see him with a brace on.
Richard’s style is associative, as is the style of the sentence that recalls his performance and mimes it. “Then,” “all of a sudden,” “how”—these are classic paratactic connectives; they just get you from one piece of prose to the next without insisting on the priority or superior importance of any of them. Holden pronounces the effect “nice” and elaborates: “It’s nice when somebody tells you about their uncle. Especially when they start out telling you about their father’s farm, and then all of a sudden get more interested in their uncle.” Just go with the flow, either in life or in writing; don’t stop to put events and objects in ordered relationships to one another.
The great modern theorist of the additive, or coordinating, style is Gertrude Stein, who explains in an amazing sentence why she doesn’t employ punctuation that carves reality into manageable units of completed and organized thought:
When I first began writing I felt that writing should go on I still do feel that it should go on but when I first began writing I was completely possessed by the necessity that writing should go on and if writing should go on what had colons and semi-colons to do with it, what had commas to do with it what had periods to do with it what had small letters and capitals to do with it to do with writing going on which was at the time the most profound need I had in connection with writing.
(Lectures in America, 1935)
Colons, commas, periods, and capital letters segment a reality that is continuous and made up of discrete, intensely realized moments. Immediacy, not linear reflection leading to a conclusion, is the goal here, and to reach it Stein must at once write sentences and somehow defeat the deferral of meaning—the sense of building toward a completed thought—that is the very nature of a sentence. Usually a sentence does not deliver its meaning until the end, and only at the end do its components acquire their significance and weight. But what Stein wants is meaning to be present at every instant, to be always the same in weight and yet different as each word is different. Before Flaubert and Cézanne, she explains, “composition had consisted of a central idea to which everything else was an accompaniment and separate but was not an end in itself.” But then “Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole, and it impressed me enormously,” and as a consequence, she continues, “I tried to convey the idea of each part of a composition being as important as the whole” (“A Transatlantic Interview,” 1946). Indeed, it is composition itself—arranging elements in a linear design—that is the enemy of this effort in Stein’s eyes: “Everything is the same except composition and time” (“Composition as Explanation,” 1926), that is, before composition—putting things together to form a larger whole—spoils it by relating and subordinating.
The insight is theological, although Stein probably doesn’t intend it that way. In a world created and presided over by an omnipresent God who fills all the available spaces, the distinctions between things, persons, and events are illusory, a function of a partial, divided, and dividing consciousness. The seventeenth-century English poet George Herbert says it succinctly: “We say amiss / This or that is, / Thy word is all if we could spell” (“The Flower”). If we would only stop spelling, stop laboring to put discrete significances together in an effort to combine them into a larger whole, we could see, theologians tell us, that the larger whole we seek is already everywhere and that our very efforts to apprehend it themselves signify it. But this would mean giving up or letting go of consecutive thought, of the impulse to predication and sentence making. And how in the world (a phrase meant literally) could we do that? It is impossible. Nevertheless, that impossibility is pretty much Stein’s project. I was groping, she says, “toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again and then everything being alike then everything very simply everything was naturally simply different and so I as a contemporary was creating everything being alike was creating everything naturally being naturally simply different, everything being alike” (“Composition as Explanation”). In this sentence likeness and difference, the basic constituents of a discourse that anatomizes and ranks, change places, go in opposite directions, come together again, are in the end made one. By insisting on the alikeness in value of every word, Stein also insists on the difference or uniqueness of every word. “I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word” (“A Transatlantic Interview”). The result is sentences that circle around again and again to words that simultaneously stand alone and take their place in the ongoingness that is at once proclaimed—“writing should go on”—and enacted.
The very word “sentence” means a finished thought, a verdict, a judgment, a piece of wisdom—all of which meanings Stein’s prose refuses in a brilliant effort to make language perform (these are her words) “like a cinema picture made up of succession and each moment having its own emphasis that is its own difference, and so there was the moving and the existence of each moment as it was in me” (“Portraits and Repetition”). She wanted, she says, “the pleasure of concentrating on the final simplicity of excessive complication.” If the complication of a sentence was less than excessive, the prose would stop on a single point and not be ongoing. She wanted to defeat subordination. “A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it” (Lectures in America). The difficulty of negotiating such a sentence has as its reward both the knowledge composition will obscure—the knowledge of words and things before they are subordinated to some “central idea”—and the knowledge of that in you which desires the wrapped-up closure a Stein sentence will not deliver. The trick, Stein explains, is to have “done something that was not leading to anything.”
Now, doing something that is not leading to anything would seem to be a description of the kinds of sentences I was saying at the beginning you shouldn’t write because they degenerate into lists and fragments. If a sentence is a structure of logical relationships—the mantra I urged on you only a short while ago—what exactly is a sequence of words that, like Stein’s, pushes logic and coherent, consecutive thought away? At its furthest reaches the additive style may achieve a degree of looseness, of associative nonconnectedness that is radically antithetical to sentence making, at least as I have wanted you to understand it. I raise the issue, but I will put off taking it up until we have a few more examples on the table.
Stein was an acknowledged influence on another master of the coordinating style, Ernest Hemingway. But Hemingway’s views on writing were less philosophical than hers and stemmed mainly from his early career as a journalist. Hence his famous pieces of advice to writers: use short sentences, write clearly, use simple Anglo-Saxon words, don’t overwrite, avoid
adjectives (a lesson he learned from Ezra Pound), and leave yourself out of it. The result was a style that has been described as realistic, hardboiled, spare, unadorned, minimalist, and lapidary. The last two words are particularly apt: a lapidary style is polished and cut to the point of transparency. It doesn’t seem to be doing much. It does not demand that attention be paid to it. It aspires to a self-effacement that allows the object to shine through as a master stonecutter allows the beauty of the stone to shine through by paring away layers of it. Hemingway’s sentences, unlike Stein’s, do not “force themselves upon you.” There is no “excessive complication.” There is no complication at all, just (or so is the claim) the thing itself, limpidly presented.
Here, for example, is the second sentence of A Farewell to Arms (1929):