The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  The nineteenth century didn’t think the dash on its own was nearly enough. Dr. Parkes ends his brief discussion of “The Mimetic Ambitions of the Novelist and the Exploitation of the Pragmatics of the Written Medium” with Virginia Woolf, so he (pardonably) avoids treating the single most momentous change in twentieth-century punctuation, namely the disappearance of the great dash-hybrids. All three of them—the commash ,—, the semi-colash ;—, and the colash :— (so I name them, because naming makes analysis possible)—are of profound importance to Victorian prose, and all three are now (except for certain revivalist zoo specimens to be mentioned later) extinct.

  Everyone used dash-hybrids. They are in Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Brontë, and George Meredith. They are on practically every page of Trollope—

  He was nominally, not only the heir to, but actually the possessor of, a large property;—but he could not touch the principal, and of the income only so much as certain legal curmudgeons would allow him. As Greystock had said, everybody was at law with him,—so successful had been his father, in mismanaging, and mis-controlling, and misappropriating the property.

  Rapid writing will no doubt give rise to inaccuracy,—chiefly because the ear, quick and true as may be its operation, will occasionally break down under pressure, and, before a sentence be closed, will forget the nature of the composition with which it commenced.

  The novels of a man possessed of so singular a mind must themselves be very strange,—and they are strange.

  They are in Thackeray—

  […] the Captain was not only accustomed to tell the truth,—he was unable even to think it—and fact and fiction reeled together in his muzzy, whiskified brain.

  And in George Eliot—

  The general expectation now was that the “much” would fall to Fred Vincy, but the Vincys themselves were surprised when ten thousand pounds in specified investments were declared to be bequeathed to him:—was the land coming too?

  The toniest nonfictional Prosicrucians—De Quincey, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Doughty—also make constant use of dashtards, often at rhetorical peaks:

  It is well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life;—these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University: I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them; but still, I repeat, they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for conscientiousness, they may attach to the man of the world, to the profligate, to the heartless,—pleasant, alas, and attractive as he shows when decked out in them.

  Pater, though he has been charged with over-sonorous purism, and is unquestionably at times a little light in his Capezios (to steal a phrase from Arsenio Hall), depends on punctuational pair-bonding to help him wrap up his terrific essay on style and his “Conclusion” to The Renaissance. Sydney Smith wrote that if Francis Jeffrey were given the solar system to review—Francis Jeffrey being the sour critic who said “This will never do” of Wordsworth’s Excursion—he would pan it: “Bad light—planets too distant—pestered with comets—feeble contrivance;—could make a better with great ease.” Emerson was a huge user of the semi-colash; in fact, of the fifty-two dashes in “The American Scholar,” only four, by my count, appear unaccompanied by either a semi-colon or a comma.

  Hybrids become somewhat less common, though they are still easily found, after the turn of the century. Henry James employed a few in his early writing, but revised them out in the édition de luxe that began appearing in 1907. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, a good test bed of Edwardian norms, resorts to them fairly frequently:

  A large screw can, however, be roughly examined in the following manner:—(1) See whether the surface of the threads has a perfect polish … (2) mount it between the centres of a lathe … (4) Observe whether the short nut runs from end to end of the screw without a wabbling motion when the screw is turned and the nut kept from revolving. If it wabbles the screw is said to be drunk.

  And Edmund Gosse’s 1907 Father and Son has a lovely comma-softened dash that can be read as a wistful farewell to a form of punctuation in its twilight:

  These rock-basins, fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life,—they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and emptied, and vulgarised.

  They pop up here and there in Norman Douglas, early J. B. Priestley, and Cyril Connolly. J. M. Keynes used a scattering of all three forms in his 1920 Economic Consequences of the Peace. For instance:

  The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable,—abhorrent and detestable, even if it were possible, even if it enriched ourselves, even if it did not sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe.

  But hybrid punctuation was doomed by then. Proust used two pre-war semi-colashes in the enormous “bedrooms I have known” sentence in the opening of A la rehash; Scott Moncrieff removed them in his post-war 1922 translation. (Terence Kilmartin, good man, restored the original punctuation in 1981.) The dandiest dandy of them all, Vladimir Nabokov (who, I think, read Father and Son just as closely as he read Proust, drawn to its engaging combination of literature and amateur naturalism), used over sixty excellent comma-dash pairings in his first and quite Edwardian English-language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). (For example, “ ‘A title,’ said Clare, ‘must convey the colour of the book,—not its subject.’ ”) He used none at all in Speak, Memory: The New Yorker had sweated it out of him. In all of his later work I have noticed only one precious semi-colash: Humbert writes, “I remember the operation was over, all over, and she was weeping in my arms;—a salutary storm of sobs after one of the fits of moodiness that had become so frequent with her in the course of that otherwise admirable year!”

  More precious still, to the punctuational historian, are the two instances of reversed commashes in Updike’s early novels—one in the Fawcett edition of The Centaur, and one on page 22 of the Fawcett Of the Farm:

  As Joan comforted him, my mother, still holding the yardstick—an orange one stamped with the name of an Alton hardware store—, explained that the boy had been “giving her the eye” all morning, and for some time had been planning to “put her to the test.”

  This extremely rare variant form hearkens back to forties Mencken—

  My father put in a steam-heating plant toward the end of the eighties—the first ever seen in Hollins Street—, but such things were rare until well into the new century.

  And again to Proust: “Que nous l’aimons—comme en ce moment j’aimais Françoise—, l’intermédiaire bien intentionné qui” etc.

  But Updike, our standard-bearer, never stands up for dashtards now. Even John Barth’s eighteenth-century pastiche, The Sot-Weed Factor, where they would have been right at home, doesn’t use them. (They were everywhere in the eighteenth century, too.) What comet or glacier made them die out? This may be the great literary question of our time. I timidly tried to use a semi-colash in an essay for The Atlantic Monthly in 1983: the associate editor made a strange whirring sound in her throat, denoting inconceivability, and I immediately backed down. Why, why are they gone? Was it—and one always gropes for the McLuhanesque explanation first—the increasing use of the typewriter for final drafts, whose arrangement of comma, colon, and semi-colon keys made a quick reach up to the hyphen key immediately after another punctuation mark physically awkward? Or was it—for one always gropes for the pseudo-scientific explanation just after McLuhan—the triumphant success of quantum mechanics? A comma is indisputably more of a quantum than a commash. Did the point-play of the Dadaists and E. E. Cummings, and the unpunctled last chapter of Ulysses, force a scramble for a simple hegemony against which revolt could be measured?

  The style manuals had been
somewhat uncomfortable with hybrid punctuation all along—understandably so, since it interferes with systematization. The most influential Victorian antibarbarus, John Wilson’s A Treatise on English Punctuation, which went through something like thirty editions in England and America, tolerated mixed points; indeed, later editions offered pages of exercises, written and oral, intended to help the student refine his dexterity with the commash. But “the unnecessary profusion of straight lines,” Wilson warned, as others had warned before him, “particularly on a printed page, is offensive to good taste, is an index of the dasher’s profound ignorance of the art of punctuation …” In “Stops” or, How to Punctuate, Paul Allardyce, the Edwardian successor to Wilson, was more severe: “There is seldom any reason for the use of double points.” G. V. Carey, in Mind the Stop (1939), was unequivocal: “The combination of other stops with dashes is even less admissible than with brackets.” There was a glimmer of hope in Eric Partridge’s You Have a Point There (1953)—he advised that, yes, compound points should be used with “caution and moderation,” but he had the courage to admit that “occasionally [they] are, in fact, unavoidable.”

  But that was 1953, in fault-tolerant England. According to the Chicago Manual of Style (¶ 5.5), dash-hybrids are currently illegal in the U.S. In the name of biodiversity, however, I stuck a few of them in out-of-the-way places in my first novel, over the objections of the copy-editor, in 1988. I thought I was making history. But Salman Rushdie had beaten me to it, as it turned out: The Satanic Verses, which appeared a few months before my book, uses dozens and dozens of dashtards, and uses them aggressively, flauntingly, more in the tradition of Laurence Sterne than of Trollope. Brad Leithauser’s arch, Sebastian Knight-like frame-narrator, in Hence (1989), uses many commashes; and Leithauser discussed Rushdie’s “Emily Dickinsonian onslaught of dashes” in a New Yorker review that same year—although somehow Emily Dickinson doesn’t seem quite right. But we’re just playing at it now, the three of us—we aren’t sincere in our dashtardy;—we can’t be.

  It would be nice to see Dr. Parkes or Dr. Lennard (of parenthetical fame) attempt a carefully researched socio-historical explanation of the passing of mixed punctuation. Unfortunately, a full explanation would have to include everything—Gustav Stickley, Henry Ford, Herbert Read, Gertrude Stein, Norbert Weiner, Harold Geneen, James Watson, Saint Strunk, and especially The New Yorker’s Miss Eleanor Gould, whose faint, gray, normative pencil-point still floats above us all. And even then the real microstructure of the shift would elude us. We should give daily thanks, in any case, to Malcolm Parkes, for offering us some sense of the flourishing coralline tide-pools of punctuational pluralism that preceded our own purer, more consistent, more teachably codified, and perhaps more arid century.

  (1993)

  A Novel by Alan Hollinghurst

  Alan Hollinghurst is better at bees than Oscar Wilde. On the opening page of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde has them “shouldering their way through the long unmown grass.” A bee must never be allowed to shoulder. Later that afternoon, Dorian Gray, alarmed by Lord Henry Wotton’s graphic talk of youth’s inevitable degeneration, drops a lilac blossom that he has been “feverishly” sniffing. Bee numero due appears, taking most of a paragraph to “scramble all over the stellated globe of the tiny blossoms” and further interrogate the “stained trumpet of a Tyrian convolvulus.” Here again, when you’re talking about bee-legs and their prehensile dealings with plant tissue, “scramble” doesn’t quite do the trick.

  In The Folding Star, on the other hand, Alan Hollinghurst’s narrator (who has several traits in common with Wilde’s disillusioned, youth-seducing Lord Henry) describes lying on a bench in the sun, “breathing the seedy vanilla smell of a bush on which half a dozen late bees still dropped and toppled.” “Dropped and toppled,” with its slumping music, is brief and extremely good: avoiding the mention of blossoms altogether, it nicely captures the heavy, dangled, abdominal clumsiness of those end-of-shift pollen-packers.

  There are things like this, and better than this, to be grateful for on almost every page of Hollinghurst’s new book—in almost every paragraph, in fact. And yet it isn’t glutting to read because its excellences are so varied and multiplanar. Hollinghurst, it seems, has an entirely sane and unmanic wish to supply seriatim all the pleasures that the novel is capable of supplying. The conversation, especially, is brilliant, but everything—depraved or refined or both—is tuned and compensated for, held forth and plucked away, allusively waved at when there’s no time for a thorough workover, and neatly parsed when there is. The narrator is a sad man, past-besotted, unachieving and “drinky” if not drunken, with moments of misanthropic Larkinism (“Books are a load of crap,” he unconvincingly quotes near the beginning), but his lost-youth mood is the opposite of depressing because he describes whatever suits him with an intelligence that cheers itself up as it goes.

  He—Edward Manners—has come to a mythical, silt-choked, fallen Flemish city (Ghentwerp? Brugeselles? some hybrid, anyway) to start fresh by tutoring two boys in English. One is the son of an art historian who has been plugging away at a catalogue raisonné of a minor (and fictional) Burne-Jonesite Symbolist and syphilitic with the wonderful name of Orst—Edgard Orst, that is, depicter of fabric-draped interiors, spare seascapes, and allegorical women with orange hair and racy chokers made of Roman medals. But this first boy has asthma and is plump, so forget him. The other “lad,” Luc Altidore, seventeen, he of the wide shoulders and wondrously puffy upper lip, is the descendant of an eccentric luminary named Anthonis Altidore, a sixteenth-century printer (Christophe Plantin?) who, so we learn, successfully traced his ancestry straight back to the Virgin Mary. (“One imagines some pretty murky areas around, say, the third century,” somebody comments.) Despite the presence of a bewildering array of men and their variously sized and angled organalia in Edward Manners’s gay bar-coded sensibility, young Luc, though he may possibly be a heterosexual (mixed blessing!), and though the thought that he is related to Jesus Christ is “slightly unnerving,” utterly appropriates our likable if occasionally glum hero’s romantic imagination. Luc is no rocket scientist. “I could have impressed him, even gently squashed him with my knowledge,” Manners thinks, but allowances must be made for the language problem, and anyway, as Lord Henry Wotton explains, “Beauty is a form of Genius—is higher, indeed, than Genius as it needs no explanation.” Manners, in a fever of early-thirties infatuation, can’t stop thinking about that cursed “molten trumpeter’s lip” which blows all the available competition away; like some “creepy old hetero,” he finds himself sniffing used lad-undies and crusty lad-hankies, tasting dry toothbrushes and stealing negatives in order to get closer to this unattainable Altidorian Gray, who though he is at his best in white jeans can “ironise” even a pair of khakis, leggy piece of work that he is.

  Like Hollinghurst’s great first book, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star has many characters but few women. The author takes pains to greet them and make them feel welcome in a chapter or two, and he clearly bears them no ill-will, but he can’t focus on them for longer than half an hour. It’s too bad that we don’t have a little more time with the charming (and page-boyish) Edie, for example, who is willing to listen to any lurid sketch of gay fetishism with “the open-minded expression of someone on holiday good-naturedly learning the rules of a foreign national game.” But Edward is fundamentally suspicious of, or at least uninterested in, the “never fully plausible world of heterosexual feeling.” An awed or intrigued reference to the male “genital ensemble” occurs every fifteen pages or so, as well it should. (For instance: “sometimes modest and strong, sometimes lolloping and heavy-headed, its only constants an easy foreskin, a certain presence, and a heather-honey beauty”; or, he “pissed fiercely in the bushes; then stood for a while slapping his dick in his palm as a doctor smacks a vein he wants to rise.”) An analogous visual insatiability within the straight world, however, Edward views with fastidious distaste. Presented wit
h some antique dirty pictures of a laundrywoman, he says: “I made my interest scientific, dimly thinking what a prig I was when it came to women and the indignities men demanded of them.”

  All this seems both true and funny—there is a deep chasm, no doubt essentially vulval, of reciprocal incomprehensibility that normally separates the gay cosmology from the prevailing straightgeist; we might as well recognize the obvious cleavage and wrest some entertainment out of (for example) our mutually baffling pornography. Manners, with refreshing intolerance, goes so far as to say that “there was always something lacking in those men who had never had a queer phase as boys, it showed in a certain dryness of imagination, a bland tolerance uncoloured by any suppression of their own, a blindness to the spectrum’s violet end.”

  Blind and violet-deprived though we few remaining creepy heteros are (and sleep-deprived, as well—Hollinghurst includes a glimpse of a new father, who “yawned like a dog, with a whine too”), we nonetheless do our best to learn as much as we can about our cross-pollinating betters, and we welcome, or ought to welcome, with foot-stamping and cheers and the earnest rattling of our model-airplane kits, the inspired historical verisimilitude that Hollinghurst brings to bear in both his books on the making of an alternative creation-myth of artistic evolution. The retroactive homosexualization of poetic history, and especially of the tradition of pastoral elegy and rustic reflection as it works its way down through Milton, William Collins, Wordsworth, and Shelley all the way to the fictional Georgian poet “Sir Perry Dawlish,” is accomplished with astonishing ease and plausibility in The Folding Star.