His face was white with sudden fright,
And his syntax lily-livered.
“O dear Miss Mutch, leave down your crutch!”
He cried in thoughtless terror.
Short shrift she gave. Above his grave:
HERE LIES A PRINTER’S ERROR.
“Roll on, roll on, thou semicolon,” exhorts Chandler in one line of his impish little poem. And Chandler certainly knew how to let semicolons roll. The Atlantic article that prompted his letter and poem was a piece called “Oscar Night in Hollywood.” There are semicolons aplenty in it, and it has two examples of one of Chandler’s most characteristic uses of the semicolon: he loved to pound out a paragraph in which he dressed down someone or something in a series of clauses with more or less identical grammatical form.
If you can go past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of the human intelligence; if you can stand the hailstorm of flash bulbs popping at the poor patient actors who, like kings and queens, have never the right to look bored; if you can glance out over this gathered assemblage of what is supposed to be the elite of Hollywood and say to yourself without a sinking feeling, “In these hands lie the destinies of the only original art the modern world has conceived”; if you can laugh, and you probably will, at the cast-off jokes from the comedians on the stage, stuff that wasn’t good enough to use on their radio shows; if you can stand the fake sentimentality and the platitudes of the officials and the mincing elocution of the glamour queens (you ought to hear them with four martinis down the hatch); if you can do all these things with grace and pleasure, and not have a wild and forsaken horror at the thought that most of these people actually take this shoddy performance seriously; and if you can then go out into the night to see half the police force of Los Angeles gathered to protect the golden ones from the mob in the free seats but not from that awful moaning sound they give out, like destiny whistling through a hollow shell; if you can do all these things and still feel next morning that the picture business is worth the attention of one single intelligent, artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong, because this sort of vulgarity is part of its inevitable price.
The semicolon can be very effective in a paragraph-long sentence like this, where it can highlight and amplify parallel structure. All those clauses in Chandler’s list, which begin in the same way (“if you . . .”), sound like the authoritative repetition of a judge in a courtroom, the semicolon slamming down like a gavel between each indictment and its successor. Here Chandler created a steadiness of rhythm in his prose so that its structure and the words within it work seamlessly to create meaning.*
Rhythm is everything for Chandler. Consider one of his other uses of the semicolon in the same “Oscar Night” essay:
They insist upon judging it by the picture they saw last week or yesterday; which is even more absurd (in view of the sheer quantity of production) than to judge literature by last week’s best-sellers, or the dramatic art by even the best of the current Broadway hits.
Punctuation can let a sentence run or it can hold it in check. Either way the effect can be thrilling. Watch the videos of the great racehorse Secretariat competing for the Triple Crown in 1973. In the Belmont Stakes you see him set free to run seemingly unchecked by his jockey: almost from the first moment of the race it is just Secretariat, Secretariat, Secretariat. He accelerates and accelerates, pulling away until there is only him in the frame when he crosses the finish line. But in the Kentucky Derby, he is held back for most of the race. For a long while he barely figures in the race caller’s list of positions. Then suddenly he is let go and is away so quickly and effortlessly he appears to float. Chandler’s sentence just quoted is Kentucky Derby–style Secretariat: Chandler reins in that first clause nice and tight and short; and then he lets it go leaping forward, surging with energy and passion felt all the more keenly for the compactness of that first clause. There is a moment of transition between restraint and license to run, and that moment is made and marked by the semicolon.*
Reading Chandler’s essays, there can be no doubt that he knew how to use a semicolon and relished using them, given their relative frequency in his nonfiction. So why is it that his fiction might contain one or two semicolons, if any at all?* The key, as I hinted at the start of this section, lies in Marlowe’s character. Marlowe rarely allows himself either the kind of reflective pause or the uncertainty that a semicolon permits. Marlowe knows what’s what. He meets a person and within moments has usually drawn a bead on their innermost self. He’s good at chess; he can see clearly ahead several moves. He is unmoved by the blond hair and sweet smiles of countless femmes fatales. If he makes a mistake, he doesn’t spend much (if any) time on self-castigation. And perhaps most Marlowe of all is the practice of keeping his cards close to his chest. He is forever getting the players in his investigations drunk and confessional, while confessing nothing himself. Certainly a lot goes on in Marlowe’s mind, but Marlowe’s mind is quicksilver, all action, few pauses—often there’s not even enough time for a comma.
So it is a surprise when Marlowe has a moment of vulnerability midway through The Big Sleep.
I didn’t mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that. Nothing. Such as they were they had all my memories.
It is a poignant moment. Marlowe reflects on how tenuous is his sense of having any kind of home whatsoever. What takes the place of a family is “not much” and a short silence. The semicolon reads as Marlowe having to stop to think, perhaps being made to stop to think by his sense of loss. For once he seems unguarded. That semicolon could have been a colon or a full stop, but Chandler chose this moment to drop in one of the Marlowe books’ rare semicolons.
Both this vulnerable semicolon and the racehorse semicolon we looked at prior to it are “illegal.” A semicolon, The Chicago Manual of Style opines, is to be used either when the items in a list are lengthy and have their own internal punctuation, or when separating two independent or coordinating clauses. Neither criterion applies here. “Which is even more absurd (in view of the sheer quantity of production) than to judge literature by last week’s best-sellers, or the dramatic art by even the best of the current Broadway hits” is not an independent clause. Nor does it contain so elaborate a series of punctuation of its own that it could not have been cordoned off with another punctuation mark. The same is true of “a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that.”
If you think of Chandler’s deployment of these semicolons as “breaking the rules”; if your first reaction is “Where the hell is the rest of the sentence?”; if you want to take out your red pen and start correcting; then you have missed the opportunity to feel something more meaningful than irritation. I remember watching those videos of Secretariat’s races for the first time as a child. My father had given me a copy of William Nack’s book Secretariat, and I wanted to see for myself the greatness described in its pages. In the Derby, when Secretariat was at last set free in the final stretch, I leapt to my feet and shouted. Watching the Belmont Stakes, a chill passed through my body to see such sublime athleticism let loose. Even though those races were run six years before I was born, I had the sense of something alive and unfolding, of momentum and power masterfully reserved and then unfurled, and my reaction to watching them again today, some thirty years later, is the same. Good punctuation, whether it reins in or lets go, can produce the same kinds of exhilarating effects if we aren’t unwisely reined in ourselves by a sense that language is somehow obliged to a set of rules.
Lynne Truss, our wittiest contemporary rule advocate, cheekily warns that “weak-charactered writers will be encouraged to ignore the rule that only full sentences should be joined b
y the semicolon.” Were Truss able to tease Chandler about his “weak-charactered” writing, I’d like to see what poetry might result from a face-off between the midcentury master of syntax and the modern maven of rules. But Chandler died in 1959. Beneath his name and the dates of his life, his gravestone in San Diego’s Mount Hope Cemetery says nothing about a printer’s error. It reads, simply, “Author.”
HEROIN ADDICTS EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME
Are semicolons always pauses, then? Moments of silence? Definitely not. There are other ways to think about the possibilities the semicolon offers a writer. To see some more semicolon tricks, it’ll help to look at two writers who don’t seem like they belong together in a sentence, or any other confined space: the essayist Rebecca Solnit, and the novelist Irvine Welsh. Solnit’s prose is all about clarity, precision, and penetrating intellect, while Welsh spews profanity-laced Scots-English in novels like Trainspotting, written in the voices of a group of heroin addicts. Radically different in styles, genre, and substance though they may be, Solnit’s and Welsh’s prose offer an antidote to seeing a semicolon only as a pause longer than a comma or as a precise logical signifier, which are the two most frequently deployed characterizations of the semicolon that you’re likely to find. A semicolon is sometimes not a pause, but the opposite: an instrument of quickness, a little springboard that launches you rapidly from thought to thought.
Trainspotting has one of these springy little semicolons in its very first sentence:
The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling. Ah wis jist sitting thair, focusing oan the telly, tryin no tae notice the cunt. He wis bringing me doon. Ah tried tae keep ma attention oan the Jean-Claude Van Damme video.
This amplification to the news that Sick Boy was sweating, that he was also trembling, has the air of a conspiratorial addendum, the way that good gossip is often quickly whispered. Sick Boy is irritating the narrator of this chapter, Mark Renton, so he talks a little shit about him to us readers.
It’s not like the semicolon was Welsh’s only option. He could have squealed to a complete halt:
The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy. He wis trembling. Ah wis jist sitting thair, focusing oan the telly, tryin no tae notice the cunt. He wis bringing me doon. Ah tried tae keep ma attention oan the Jean-Claude Van Damme video.
Instead, Welsh uses the semicolon to create energy and the kind of molten realism characteristic of his caustic prose. Renton’s voice has much more texture and life for having three different punctuation marks playing off one another in this paragraph than it would with only commas and periods.
It seems Welsh is fond of this strategy for opening lines, and who can blame him? For his books it works well to make his readers feel dropped into a racing river, swept into the action from the first moment. Welsh’s opening paragraph in “A Soft Touch” makes use of the same type of quick semicolon: “It wis good fir a while wi Katrina, but she did wrong by me. And that’s no jist something ye can forget; no jist like that.”
Rebecca Solnit, too, deploys semicolons that speed things up rather than slowing them down. In “Diary,” she reflects on the changes wrought by modern technology, and reminisces about a pre-1995 world: “That bygone time had rhythm, and it had room for you to do one thing at a time; it had different parts; mornings included this, and evenings that, and a great many of us had these schedules in common.” The sentence, like the day from the past that Solnit describes in it, is divided; but, like that past day, it has a flow and forward trajectory as a result of the divisions. The semicolons are responsible for both these syntactical virtues, which mirror the virtues of the “bygone time.” The effect is like a stone skipping across water, lightly touching it three times, just for a split second, before hopping on. Think about how different this sentence would be if Solnit had chosen to put a colon either after time or after parts, as she very well could have. That sentence would seem comparatively heavy and academic. The quick-skip lightness of Solnit’s semicolons, by contrast, has a pleasing breeziness that suits her nostalgic attitude towards the bygone time she describes.
Solnit seems to like semicolon duos and trios, and they are usually fleet-footed semicolons like the ones just quoted, but they enact a subtler kind of speeding-up as well. Have a look at these three separate semicolon sequences, each of which fires off data supporting Solnit’s central argument:
Instead, we hear that American men commit murder-suicides—at the rate of about twelve a week—because the economy is bad, though they also do it when the economy is good; or that those men in India murdered the bus rider because the poor resent the rich, while other rapes in India are explained by how the rich exploit the poor; and then there are those ever-popular explanations: mental problems and intoxicants—and for jocks, head injuries.
Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the US military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, aren’t likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds.
Good things came about with the new technologies. Many people now have voices without censorship; many of us can get in touch with other ordinary citizens directly, through every new medium, from blogs to tweets to texts to posts on FB and Instagram. In 1989, Tiananmen Square was the fax revolution. Email helped organize the Seattle WTO shutdown in 1999; Facebook was instrumental in the Arab Spring’s initial phase in 2011; Occupy Wall Street was originally a Twitter hashtag.
We readers leap from fact to fact, but I would lay down a decent chunk of change that Solnit didn’t. Each of these facts and figures required research, possibly even several hours of research in order to dig up a relevant statistic, verify that the methodology that produced it was sound, and survey any competing data that might challenge its veracity.*
A great essay is like a great nature show. Sir David Attenborough, his plummy voice suddenly sharp with excitement, narrates a dramatic chase scene on Fernandina Island in the Galápagos. Fernandina is a foreboding volcanic landscape that’s home to over seven thousand seafaring marine iguanas, which can hold their breath up to half an hour as they dive and graze the sea grasses. A newly hatched marine iguana cautiously lifts his head out of the island’s pebbly substrate, just enough to roll one bright little eye around his surroundings. Almost as soon as he decides it’s safe to emerge, dozens of racer snakes dart from the shadows of the rocks. The iguana seems almost impossibly light on his brand-new feet, but there are too many snakes, hordes and hordes of them spilling out from under every overhang, and soon the iguana has disappeared into a greedy knot of them. The same fate befalls a second tiny iguana. And it seems a third is destined for the same gruesome end . . . but this one improbably slips free, soaring to safety on the rocks near the shore as one last racer snake flails his fangs at the iguana’s heels. The entire chase sequence lasts less than six minutes. But a few minutes of what is “wild” and “natural” in these shows takes hundreds of hours of filming to achieve: the Planet Earth crew staked out the iguana’s hatching ground dawn to dusk for two weeks to gather footage. Indeed, the hour-long “Islands” episode as a whole required three and a half years to plan, shoot, and produce—all to give us a glimpse of business as usual in the natural world.
Likewise, a really great essay puts on display the seemingly natural movement of the author’s thoughts which, in reality, required supernatural effort and umpteen takes to collect and edit. “Remember that writing is not typing,” Solnit advises. “Thinking, researching, contemplating, outlining, composing in your head and in sketches, maybe some typing with revisions as you go and then more revision
s, emendations, additions, reflections, setting aside and returning afresh, because a good writer is always a good editor of his or her work.” Reading a good essay is a bit like watching a well-edited nature show. It gives the illusion of thought spilling naturally and fluidly onto the page. In Solnit’s case, semicolons are quick cuts keeping things exciting and saving the reader from the sense of labor and drudgery that the author herself no doubt expended.
Having managed to run the gauntlet of racer snakes, the baby marine iguana is in position to make his first dive into the sea, where he’ll swim deftly through the currents to nip at a green carpet of plants. Now we, too, dive into the sea, in search of more semicolons.
BLUBBER AND BLATHER
At the time of Herman Melville’s death in 1891, his novel Moby-Dick had sold only a few thousand copies. When the book’s publishing house burned down in 1853, two years after publication, there were still first-run copies of it stacked in the warehouse, feeding the flames. Melville spent much of his working life as a customs inspector after finally throwing in the towel on writing.
No doubt the generally negative reviews that Moby-Dick received contributed to its floundering in bookshops. Its thick and thorny prose clambered down one page and onto the next in long paragraphs studded with every word between the covers of Webster’s, plus a few more that Melville had invented for the book. One reviewer, having managed to slash through this thicket and come out the other side of the novel alive but not unscathed, minced no words of his own in concluding his testy review: “But if there are any of our readers who wish to find examples of bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English, we will take the liberty of recommending to them this precious volume of Mr. Melville’s.” He was not alone in his assessment: most reviewers seemed perplexed and frequently infuriated by Melville’s elliptical, meandering prose. “The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English,” lamented a critic for the London Athenaeum.
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