How to Write a Sentence

by Stanley Fish

  Argumentative first sentences are not always so straightforward. Often the argument is implicit, as it is in the first sentence of George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861):

  In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses—and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak—there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men who, by the side of the brawny country folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.

  The sentence begins as if it were going to be an elegiac description of a bygone day (“In the days”), but it is quickly complicated and made more serious by a parenthetical observation that introduces irony, social satire, and class conflict. The leisured ladies who play at spinning with wheels that are polished toys aestheticize a genuine activity; they are the antithesis of “the brawny country folk” who do real work; they do not make the silk and lace they wear. And in the rest of the sentence a third group is introduced or half introduced. They are neither brawny nor clothed in silk. In fact they are difficult to see, small (“undersized”) and so pale that they seem to emerge from some underground world “deep in the bosom of the hills.” The description of them as “the remnants of a disinherited race” links them to the cursed children of Cain and the outcast wandering Jew. Who are these men? Who or what has disinherited them? What was their original sin? Can they be saved? Suddenly at the end of a sentence that began as an idealized portrait of country life we find ourselves at the beginning of a morality play and of a dissertation on class, labor, and the nature of wealth.

  The morality and the argument are even more explicit in the first sentence of Booth Tarkington’s The Gentleman from Indiana (1899):

  There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagrarian Eastern travelers, glancing from car-windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying caparisons of a Pullman to the monotony without.

  The first part of this sentence is built on the understated (we do not notice it at first) tension between “fertile” and “unagrarian.” “Fertile” is undoubtedly a positive word; it goes along with the flatness the travelers will find boring; “unagrarian” seems merely descriptive when we encounter it, as does the phrase “Eastern travelers.” Things begin to sharpen with “glancing”; the Eastern travelers don’t engage the fertility of the Indiana landscape; they see it out of the corners of their eyes, and they immediately recoil from it (“shudder”), from its uninteresting (to them) flatness, and turn their attention to something that is the opposite of fertility, “interior upholstery,” something manufactured by turning nature’s bounties into dead and meretricious—because prideful and ornamental—objects. When the sentence, in a final participial clause, makes the preference of the Eastern travelers explicit—they prefer a swaying canopy to the swaying of tall corn—we have learned to scorn their scorn. “Eastern” is now an epithet, and “unagrarian” is now an accusation that means “incapable of appreciating or even seeing the beauties of a midwestern landscape.” The final phrase, “the monotony without,” is understood to be the judgment of those who look but do not see, those whose souls harbor a monotony far flatter, in a deep sense, than the fields they turn away from. The entire sentence is a judgment on them, and it pressures us to value everything they scorn.

  The pressure and judgment are even greater in the first sentence of Increase Mather’s A Brief History of the War with the Indians in New-England (1676), because its argument is presupposed and the risk of dissenting from it is made clear:

  That the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightful Possession, have at sundry times been plotting mischievous devices against that part of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the Sun, no man that is an inhabitant of any considerable standing, can be ignorant.

  The argument proceeds by declaring there is no need to mount one and daring its reader to disagree on pain of being cast out. The possible objections to Mather’s confident assumption of God’s favor—that the land belongs to the Indians, that the English settlers are the aggressors—are disposed of briskly in a long dependent clause that, because of its “That” (such is the case) construction, forestalls disagreement. The acknowledgment that it is the settlers who live among the Indians is blunted before it is made when Mather describes the native inhabitants as “heathen people,” unbelievers who because they are uncivilized and unenlightened have no rights. The phrase “whose land” gives the heathens possession for an instant, but then the syntax makes the land the object of God’s having given it to someone else (The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away), to the English Israel, to the remnant of the faithful. God’s chosen move ever westward (“in these goings down of the Sun”) in an effort to escape the persecution of the ungodly, but the ungodly are now encountered again in the form of the native Indians, who, like Pharaoh, vainly resist Heaven’s will and hatch plots that can only come to naught. All this (and more) is assumed as an undoubted fact by the sentence’s syntax. And when the independent clause finally appears, it consigns anyone who would disagree with what precedes it to the category of the ignorant, the same category to which the heathens, ignorant of the true God, themselves belong.

  The form of Mather’s sentence imitates the judgment of God. It is implacable. Nothing is going to stand in its way. The reader doesn’t have a chance or a choice. At first glance, the opening sentence of Jeremy Taylor’s The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650) places the reader in a more independent position, but that doesn’t last:

  He that is choice of his time will also be choice of his company, and choice of his actions, lest the first engage him in vanity and loss, and the latter by being criminal, be a throwing his time and himself away, and a going back in the accounts of eternity.

  The form of the sentence is sententious; it is crisp and confident and promises to tie things down in neatly patterned parallels linked by the word “choice.” But “choice” has two meanings: that which is best or prime (a choice piece of land) and the act of choosing one thing or action over another. The first meaning suggests that the scale of value is already known and obvious; the second puts pressure on the “he” who must do the choosing. Will he—will the reader—choose well? The clause sets up a triple requirement: use your time well, do what you do in the company of right-thinking companions, and perform right actions. The dependent clause (beginning with “lest”) lists the dangers that await the man who fails the requirements, who wastes his time in the company of ne’er-do-wells. The dangers are parallel. Those who hook up with bad companions will be led into actions of vanity; their actions will be criminal because both time and the self will be wasted; the occasion for self-improvement will have been missed. All very neat, everything accounted for in a ledger and economy of virtue. But then the last clause, “a going back in the accounts of eternity,” widens the sentence’s perspective to the point where its apparent concerns are left behind. While “accounts” suggest the kind of balancing the sentence has so far been performing, the invocation of the vistas of eternity overwhelm, supersede, and cancel all accounts. In eternity’s accounts all man’s choices are less than froth. Why bother? What does it matter?

  To assume the perspective of eternity is to ask these questions. If in the end everything we say or do will fade into insignificance in the vast panorama of eternity, why do anything? Why write sentences? The issue is squarely joined in the first sentence of Taylor’s The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651):

  A man is a bubble (saith the Greek proverb); which Lucian represents with advantages and its proper circumstances, to this purpose; saying, that all the world is a storm, and men arise up in their several generations, like bubbles descending à Jove pluvio, from God and the dew of heaven, from a tear and a drop of rain, from Nature and Providence: and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of
their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water, having had no other business in the world, but to be born, that they might be able to die, others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear, and give their place to others: and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy, and being crushed with the great drop of a cloud sink into flatness and froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than it was before.

  Instead of “dust unto dust,” this sentence enacts (over and over again) “water unto water.” There are bubbles, storms, dew, tears, rain, deluges, sheets, drops, clouds, froth—distinct names for an element that is always the same. These words are embedded in what offers itself as a narrative of the generations of man, and they have the effect of denying the distinctions the narrative is supposedly establishing, between men who die shortly after they are born, men who live for “two or three turns,” and men who live long. Even these longest-lasting men live only on the face of the waters and can scarcely be said to have an identity because they are “in perpetual motion” before they sink into froth, distinguishable from those who “instantly sink into the deluge of their first parents” only by the length of the time it takes them to dissolve. Indeed, all men, however short or long lived, sink into the deluge of their parents, that is, into the original sin whose fatally and massively debilitating effects bring all men to the same abysmal level no matter what the duration of their lives or their apparent accomplishments. The sentence ostentatiously offers different forms of water, and different forms of men, and suggests (momentarily) that they are distinguishable, but in the end (and in the beginning) they are all the same, and in its final clause, the sentence openly declares what it has all the while been doing, when it tells us that the change from mortal form to water and to annihilation is no change at all, “it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than it was before.” Here is a long first sentence that tells us that there was never any place for it to go, that its forward motion is only apparent, that each moment in it is as important, or unimportant, as any other. A while back I suggested that Gertrude Stein’s desire for a language that by defeating linear composition gives readers the experience of a continuous present is implicitly theological. Here is the thing itself in a first sentence that is also the last sentence and everything in between.

  CHAPTER 9

  Last Sentences

  First sentences, as we have seen, are promissory notes. Whether they foreshadow plot, sketch in character, establish mood, or jump-start arguments, the road ahead of them stretches invitingly and all things are, at least for the moment, possible. Last sentences are more constrained in their possibilities. They can sum up, refuse to sum up, change the subject, leave you satisfied, leave you wanting more, put everything into perspective, or explode perspectives. They do have one advantage: they become the heirs of the interest that is generated by everything that precedes them; they don’t have to start the engine; all they have to do is shut it down. This means that they often come across as elegiac: the reader is leaving something he or she has grown fond of, and will therefore be inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the author’s parting statement. That may be the explanation for the good reputation of some last sentences that aren’t really all that good, like the famous last sentence of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859):

  It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done before; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

  This one we could imitate forever: “It is a far, far better burger that I eat than I have ever eaten before; it is a far, far better digestive experience I go to than I have ever known.” “It is a far, far better house I buy than I have ever imagined; it is a far, far better zip code I go to than I could have hoped for.” The sentence is just too formulaic, mechanical, and stagey; were it not for the emotions built up in the course of the novel, no one would ever have taken note of it. (I have the same opinion of the novel’s even more famous first sentence.)

  Some last sentences do deserve the fame they enjoy, not because they are stand-alone achievements, but because they rise to the last-sentence occasion and do the requisite summing up. A good example is the last line of the movie Some Like It Hot (1959)—“Well, nobody’s perfect.” It is spoken by Joe E. Brown, playing a millionaire who has been courting Jerry ( Jack Lemmon) in drag. Jerry has been trying to explain to Osgood (Brown’s character) why they can’t marry, but Osgood deflects and rebuts each reason. Finally, thinking that he has an argument Osgood cannot rebut, Jerry rips off his wig and declares, “I’m a man.” The reply, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” entirely undoes the game of giving reasons by upending the assumptions that were supposedly driving the plot—that men and women are different, that it matters, that anything matters. Of course those assumptions were always being put into question in the movie, with its cross-dressing, reversal of gender roles, and boundary-blurring wit. It is just that “Well, nobody’s perfect” reprises these (sometimes subterranean) themes and puts the “perfect” cap to them.

  Other famous last lines do something of the same for the works they conclude. “After all, tomorrow is another day” is of course the last line of the movie Gone With the Wind (1939), and the last of the declarations by Scarlett O’Hara that the world will not defeat her. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” the final line of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), is just as famous for its rueful and succinct expression of the novel’s mixture of romanticism, cynicism, and flinty realism. (“Pretty” is the word that does most of the work; it suggests something attractive and something meretricious at the same time; it is at once an affirmative statement and a judgment on it.) “He loved Big Brother” is the celebrated last line of Orwell’s 1984 (1949); in just four words it announces the dark inevitability of totalitarianism’s triumph.

  But these sentences will not serve my purpose here, because any assessment of their impact depends on a full knowledge of what has preceded them. Standing alone, “Nobody’s perfect” is a cliché; “Tomorrow is another day” is a banality; “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” an unremarkable question; and “He loved Big Brother” an apparent piece of sentimentality. What I’m after in this section are last sentences that yield their riches (or at least some of them) to an analysis that focuses on them in relative isolation. I say “relative” because “last sentence,” like “first sentence,” is both a formal and a content category. Last sentences are formal items because they can be picked out with no reference to anything that is being said; but it is only because of the things that have been said before they appear that last sentences are resonant. So in the parade of last sentences that follows, formal and thematic analysis will mix promiscuously. I shall be reading in full appreciative mode and looking for sentences that would make an impression even on those who did not know the works they bring to a close.

  They needn’t be long or even very serious. In the last line of the movie The Professionals (1966), Ralph Bellamy’s character calls Lee Marvin’s character a bastard. Marvin replies:

  In my case, an accident of birth, but you, sir, you’re a self-made man.

  The sentence plays on the meanings of “bastard,” a person born out of wedlock and a person of bad character. “Self-made man” is usually a compliment, but here it is a sardonic and witty comment on a nominal gentleman’s ability to achieve a (negative) status he wasn’t born to. (The most insulting word in the sentence is “sir.”)

  The last line of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902) is even shorter and decidedly serious. “We shall never be again as we were” records the realization by Kate Croy that she and Merton Densher have made for themselves a quite different future than the one they imagined they could build on Millie Theale’s fragility. But you don’t have to recall that to be taken by a sentence that, while short, unfolds in ever more devastating stages. “We shall” seems to predict a future, but that future is immediately t
aken away by “never,” a word that not only bars access to a better time, but, as the construction continues, negates being itself: “We shall never be.” And neither shall they ever have an “again”; time cannot flow backward and give them repeated being; they can only experience themselves as horribly different from what they were. The sentence would be an accomplishment even if we didn’t know the story it brings to an end.

  Ditto for the last sentence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818):

  He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.

  To be sure, it helps to know that “he” is the monster and that he has stepped onto an ice raft after having declaimed over the dead body of his creator. But even without that knowledge the sentence communicates the desolation and finality of his journey. There are two stages to it. Because “soon” precedes “borne away,” we have a sense of rapid movement before we know what kind of movement it is; and then when we find out it is already movement “away.” (Think how different it would be if the sentence read, “He was borne away by the waves soon.”) Since waves are themselves movement (that’s all they are), the swiftness of passage is even more heightened. “Soon” is carried over silently from the first part of the sentence and attaches itself to “lost,” at once literal and the final allusion in the novel to Milton’s great epic. So lost is he that his loss is described in two measures that alliterate, “darkness and distance,” words that themselves have double meanings: he is dark in that he cannot be seen, and he is dark in his interior; he is distant in the literal sense of being far away and in the metaphorical sense of being apart from all other beings.

  In the last sentence of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1926), the rhetorical effect is also carried by alliteration—a figure of speech often used to intensify emotions and assertions—but in this case the repeated consonant is b rather than d.