Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog

by Kitty Burns Florey

  —and it paid off. Oates’s writing tends to be pretty lucid—sometimes unnervingly so:

  John Updike could hardly have escaped diagramming in Pennsylvania in the ’30s. Amid the magisterial wealth of reminiscence he has committed to print, he doesn’t say much about his schooldays, but he does describe his school’s appearance—it sounds much like my own—in detailed, evocative prose:

  Across Lancaster Avenue stood the Shillington Elementary School, a stately edifice built seamlessly in two stages, in 1901 and 1912, as the Shillington School, with many tall windows and a rather Byzantine recessed front entrance.

  Updike also recalls that he was an obedient student who loved school, and so we can assume that he was one of the champion diagrammers who marched fearlessly up to the blackboard, eager to demonstrate a grasp of the predicate nominative.

  Thirty years or so before Sister Bernadette’s dog barked at me in Syracuse, Jack Kerouac was growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts, a student at St. Louis Parochial School. (The school is still there, a red-brick fortress on Boisvert Street, but its most famous alumnus is not mentioned on its website.) As a precocious kid who was allowed to skip sixth grade, Kerouac might have missed out on learning diagramming from the good Sisters of the Assumption if the subject had been taught there. But that order of nuns was from Quebec, and the school served Lowell’s French-Canadian community. Most of the teaching was in French—Kerouac’s first language, which his family spoke at home. Diagramming was not part of the curriculum. Kerouac probably learned how to construct his astonishing sentences through his extensive reading: he haunted the local library, gobbling down everything he could get his hands on. (What would he think of the current school’s assurance on its website that the Computer Lab has been upgraded “to provide students with the ability to surf the Internet safely”?) Some of Kerouac’s sentences are lush, endless, twisting constructions—a diagrammer’s nightmare—but even in their stream-of-consciousness meanderings they are perfectly grammatical, like this gorgeous portion of the final long, sad sentence of On the Road:

  The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old.…35

  F. Scott Fitzgerald was almost certainly taught diagramming at the private St. Paul Academy—upscale Anglo light-years away from Kerouac’s working-class Catholic school—where he was enrolled from 1908 to 1911. Can we attribute the elegance of the last sentence of The Great Gatsby—

  So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

  —to some tweedy Minnesota professor? Did diagramming actually have an effect on the prose of anyone who was taught it? Are American writers from diagramming’s heyday the writers they are because they learned to diagram sentences when they were kids? My guess is that they—we, since, my generation was the last to be steeped in it—were given a thorough, strict, daily grounding in the basics of English grammar, with or without diagramming, for most of the twelve years of their schooling, and that it stuck.

  Maybe even the teaching of grammar is beside the point in some cases. William Faulkner, writer of sometimes obscure but undeniably powerful sentences, was surely exposed to the joys of diagramming. But around the sixth grade—that prime diagramming year—he began to get bored with school (after years of incorrigible truancy, he finally dropped out entirely in eleventh grade). If he was taught diagramming, he may very well have responded by gazing out the window and thinking about writing poetry or going fishing. And yet—direct speech, which is often in dialect, aside—Faulkner’s grammar is impeccable, even when he’s inside the slow and uncomprehending mind of Benjy in The Sound and the Fury:

  But when I breathed in, I couldn’t breathe out again to cry, and I tried to keep from falling off the hill and I fell off the hill into the bright, whirling shapes.

  I could see the achieved sentence standing there, as real, intact, and built to stay as the Mississippi State Capitol at the end of my street.

  A hundred miles away and a few years later, Eudora Welty, that giant of American letters, was terrified into correct grammar by the stern teachers at the Jefferson Davis Grammar School in Jackson, Mississippi. In One Writer’s Beginnings, she makes it clear that, while she may have learned to tell her whos from her whoms, she didn’t learn to love and appreciate the intricacies of language until she got to high school and studied Latin, which made her understand “the beautiful, sober accretion of a sentence”:

  Dawn Powell is one of the great (though to some extent unsung) American writers, a writer of wonderfully robust vernacular prose.36 But though she was undoubtedly force-fed diagramming at her school in Mount Gilead, Ohio, she was a precocious but inattentive student, and ran away from home—and school—at thirteen to escape her evil stepmother and live with her aunt, who ran a boarding house where Dawn helped her aunt feed the guests. She eventually changed her mind about education, and graduated with honors from high school, where she was editor of the yearbook and capable of statements like this one from the diary she kept at the time:

  I must make myself strong for the knocks that are to come, for no matter what you tell me something in me says that life for me holds more knocks than joys, and the blows will leave me crushed, stunned, wild-eyed and ready to die, while the joys will make me deliriously, wildly, gloriously happy.

  Few people would deny that students need to master grammar in order to write decently. But there are other places to acquire it than in sixth-grade grammar classes. And where brilliant writing “comes from” is always a mystery—the simple answer is that it comes from deep in the psyche of the writer who perpetrates it—but there’s a lot more to it than correct grammar.

  The fact is that a lot of people don’t need diagramming or anything else: they pick up grammar and syntax effortlessly through their reading—which, in the case of most competent users of words, ranges from extensive to fanatical. The language sticks to them like cat hair to black trousers, and they do things correctly without knowing why.

  Others understand their own language only when they study a foreign one: seeing it from the outside makes it come clear, particularly—as in the case of Eudora Welty—with the study of Latin, which is a bit like an encyclopedia of grammatical principles. Once you’ve mastered, for example, the elegantly succinct ablative absolute in Latin (and, incidentally, seen how clumsy its English equivalent can be: With the dog barking furiously, the girl drew a diagram versus Cane fortiter latrante, puella descriptionem describat), you probably will never have trouble with your own language again.

  For many of the world’s great literary writers, diagramming would seem to be seriously beside the point. Gertrude Stein, after all, was steeped in diagramming in school and clutched it happily to her bosom, but it didn’t prevent her from writing like Gertrude Stein.

  * * *

  19 Gertrude Stein was fond enough of this pronouncement to state it in several different ways in her works, beginning with a comment about a woman named Rose—in her poem “Sacred Emily”—and going on later, in her American lectures, to state: “When I said ‘A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose …’ I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.”

  20 “Papa dozes, Mama blows her noses” has been lilting through my head for almost 40 years.

  21 I agree with Hemingway, who said, after meeting her, “It was a vital day for me when I stumbled upon you.”

  22 “Don’t call me Miss Stein,” she once said. “Call me Gertrude Stein.”

  23 “Interesting” is one of Gertrude Stein’s favorite words; she uses it over and over, reminding me of Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass: “When I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra.”

  24 “It really does not make any difference who George Hug
net was,” she tells us, but it does no harm to add here that he was a French surrealist poet, critic, and collagist (1906-1974). He and Gertrude Stein met in 1926 and were involved in a very intense friendship until 1930, when they collaborated on a book of poems. He wrote them in French, she translated them into English, and she apparently took liberties with his text, then demanded equal billing on the title page. Her response to the inevitable—and lifelong—rupture was Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded—and there, a comma is useful but certainly detracts from the title’s rhythmic perfection.

  25 I wonder if Gertrude Stein would laugh at a satirical piece on the McSweeney’s website, a parody of Strunk and White called “The Elements of Spam,” by Jason Roeder. His advice: Form the possessive of nouns by adding’s, just an apostrophe, just an s, a semicolon, a w, an ampersand, a 9, or anything.

  26 The Making of Americans is, perhaps, Gertrude Stein’s magnum opus. Written in the first decade of the 20th century but not published until 1925, it is a long-winded, punctuation-free history of three generations of an American family—but anything less like the conventional multigenerational saga would be hard to imagine. As Gertrude Stein commented, “In The Making of Americans I was making a continuous present a continuous beginning again and again, the way they do in making automobiles.…”

  27 She asks, question mark-less, “So why make a fuss about it.” And answers, comma-less, “However one does.”

  28 In terms of paying for favorite words, she probably should give “completely” an extra five bucks, too.

  29 As Dave Barry would say, “I am not making this up.”

  30 Both James Laughlin and Paul Bowles called it “that awful dog.” There were several Baskets—she was hung up on the name—but the one everyone seems to remember was a large white standard poodle. Gertrude Stein said he was a great watch-dog “when he thinks about it,” which he apparently did not often do, and had “blue eyes, a pink nose and white hair”—a “large unwieldy dog” who nonetheless was allowed to sit on his mistress’s lap.

  31 And according to James, the two most beautiful words in the English language were “summer afternoon.”

  32 A poster that circulated in the ’70s features a monumental diagram of what is said to be Proust’s longest sentence: in translation, 958 words, from Sodome et Gomorrhe, the fourth volume of his magnum opus. My friend Sara Kane, on whose wall it prominently hangs, tells me that it is a sentence without a subject: “the descendants of the inhabitants of Sodom,” the apparent subject, is displayed by the anonymous diagrammer in parentheses as “understood.”

  33 I am unable to resist the opportunity to reference Monty Python’s skit, the “All-England Summarize Proust Competition,” in which each contestant gives a brief summary of A la Recherche, “once in a swimsuit and once in evening dress.”

  34 The “Proust Questionnaire” is now a regular feature in Vanity Fair, which asks celebs to respond to it.

  35 This example also illustrates vividly the limitations of the Reed-Kellogg system: The first clause—up to prairie—is the antecedent of which, and there is no way to show this. All one can do is set the relative clause (i.e., the which-clause) in the general area of the part of the sentence it relates to.

  36 Among her best novels are Dance Night (1930—her own favorite), and The Locusts Have No King (1948—mine).

  chapter 5

  YOUSE AIN’T GOT NO CLASS

  The world’s most famous—maybe only famous—copy editor was Eleanor Gould Packard, who worked in that capacity at The New Yorker for nearly 55 years and merited not only an admiring obituary in the Times but also a thank-you from E. B. White in The Elements of Style. She was known to sometimes go too far: one of her claims to fame was the finding of four grammatical errors in a three-word sentence.37 As the magazine’s longtime fiction editor, Roger Angell, has commented, if all her recommendations had been carried out, the magazine’s famously lucent prose “would be like the purest water—absolutely tasteless.” And yet she was revered for her abilities, and generations of New Yorker writers claimed that she was vital to the magazine’s excellence.

  I have not always been a copy editor. I’ve considered myself a writer since I was a kid and have been publishing fiction and essays for twenty-five years, but it was only a few years ago that I became a professional copy editor—i.e., someone who messes with other people’s prose and gets paid for it. For me, transforming an almost good sentence into a very good sentence is a satisfaction equivalent to dipping strawberries into whipped cream.

  The downside is that I can’t relax: surrounded by English, much of it wandering to some degree from the path of linguistic perfection that meanders through my mind, I spot problems everywhere I look. I worked in a New Haven bookstore back in the ’80s, and to this day I can’t go into a Borders or a Joe’s Book Shack without compulsively straightening the books on the shelves. And when I spot an error (like this egregious misspelling from—yes—The New Yorker: “[A]fter drinking it I wondered for several moments if I would wretch”38), my blood begins to boil, or at least come to a simmer you could poach an egg in.

  I’ve often wished I could diagram a sentence to illustrate for its writer exactly what the problem is. Would it work? Meaning, would a diagram stanch the flow of dangling modifiers and whomlessness and it’s confused with its in which the average person’s writing is awash? Probably not. The diagram depends solely on its constructor’s knowledge of grammar. Those intersecting lines always look just fine, but what’s on them, as we have seen, could be flat-out wrong. The limitation of diagramming is that it’s so limited! What distresses a good copy editor most, I think, is the failure of the prose to match the cogency of the ideas it’s trying to express. People are often smart; writing is often dumb. But forcing people up to the blackboard with a piece of chalk isn’t going to help much.

  Fortunately for me, the solution many people turn to is: hire an editor. But that requires a certain amount of humility. Language permeates our lives—it’s crucial to nearly everything we do, from buying a shovel to sustaining a relationship, but it’s something we’ve all been intimately connected with since we started babbling our dadas and googoos. It’s not easy to admit that we’re not as expert at it as we are at, say, walking and using the bathroom, which we were mastering around the same time that our language skills were kicking in. And, after all, everyone knows what you mean (to quote two recent sentences that came across my desk) when you write “She lost her mother as a child to cancer” or “Although believed to have been a suicide, the detective finds himself compelled to look deeper into the case.” Or do they? Diagramming might help. But only if the writer has been given a solid grammatical training by a Miss Peckham, a Mrs. Dietz, or a Sister Bernadette.

  Diagramming, of course, is only one of the more recent attempts to reform the English language, an objective that is far from new. It probably began with the invention of the printing press, which brought books to the masses and saw the beginnings of attempts to codify the big sloppy mess that was English. By the eighteenth century, dictionaries had been written, grammarians were being born, language snobs were rampant, and confusion continued to reign—as it does today. During its first many hundreds of years, as the language sorted itself out, it had been allowed to do anything it liked. Who and whom were interchangeable, more better was perfectly acceptable, and Shakespeare never really could decide how to spell his own name. (Shakspere? Shaksper? Shakspear? Schakspere?)39 But eventually, the people who like things to be neat and tidy began to get on the case of people who just want to let it all hang out as long as they, like, express themselves. It was decreed that splitting infinitives40 was a crime and that ending sentences with prepositions was something up with which we should not put. I love E. B. White’s example, in a 1962 letter to his publisher, of a sentence that ends with five prepositions: “A father of a little boy goes upstairs after supper to read to his son, but he brings the wrong book. The boy says, ‘What did you br
ing that book that I don’t want to be read to out of up for?’ ” (On the other hand, when White—let’s call him a stickler with a great sense of humor—asked his granddaughter when she was moving into her new apartment and she replied, “Hopefully, on Tuesday,” he reports that he nearly choked on his lunch.)

  It’s an ongoing dilemma. How important is “correct” English? Isn’t the important thing getting one’s thoughts on paper? The process is not always easy, and maybe such considerations as subject-verb agreement and parallel construction are silly, irrelevant, artificial concerns that accomplish little and hinder much.

  For anyone involved in the English language biz, it’s impossible to entirely escape the dispute between the two schools of thought on the subject. There are the prescriptivists—sometimes called not only language snobs but grammar police, elitists, meanies, pedants, undersexed schoolmarms, racists, and worse—who go back far beyond not only Eleanor Gould Packard but also Kellogg and Reed. The first English grammar book was published in 1586, and in 1712 Jonathan Swift proposed the creation of an English Academy, on the model of the French, to keep English pure and unsullied.41 (The chief of the American language police, John Simon, resurrected this idea in his 1980 book Paradigms Lost.) The prescriptivists insist that there is a right way and a wrong way to speak and (especially) to write English, and that words like finalize and prioritize are fit only for bozos and barbarians.

  And then there are the descriptivists. They came tripping out of the closet in 1961 with the publication of the ultra-permissive Webster’s Third International Dictionary, which includes not only finalize (considered by purists to be bureaucratic gobbledegook)42 but irregardless and alright because that’s how people use them or spell them. For a descriptivist, as for an eighteenth-century Deist, “whatever is, is right”—sometimes shortened in our world to a plain “whatever.”