How to Write a Sentence
Page 13
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
The irony is that Dowell is incapable of understanding the story he tells, incapable of plumbing its true sadness, because there is nothing inside him, no human investment in relation to which the things he experiences can be made sense of. That is the saddest story, the story of what he can neither see nor feel. He says of himself, “No one is interested in me, for I have no interests” (a marvelous sentence in itself ). He is fixated on the act of composition because he thinks if he puts things down correctly the meaning he hasn’t got a clue about will emerge. In his eyes, the problem he faces is merely a technical one:
I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down—whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself.
The question, which he cannot really even approach, is what kind of “thing” this is. To him the story—of multiple betrayals, destructive passions, casual cruelties, monstrous sentimentalities—is simply a problem in composition; the “better” he seeks is the better order. (He is Faulkner’s Benjy, but under the misapprehension that he has a functioning brain.) The alternatives he considers—telling the story in an immediate present “from the beginning” or filtering it through the words of others and through the lens of time—are textbook alternatives from primers on how to construct a narrative. What “reaches” him are verbal and painterly memories of which he can make no final sense. And he knows it, knows that even after all is revealed, he remains uncomprehending, but he cannot even comprehend his incomprehension:
But the inconvenient—well, hang it all, I will say it—the damnable nuisance of the whole thing is, that with all the taking for granted, you never really get an inch deeper than the things I have catalogued.
This sentence is an example of Ford’s ability fully to present a character and allow us to see through him at the same time. “Inconvenient” is a word that marks Dowell’s deepest emotional level. When he announces that he will discard the politeness of the circumlocution and say something more raw and real, all he can come up with is “damnable nuisance,” a class-bound epithet even more conventional and empty than “inconvenient.” And what is the nuisance? Well, no matter how much he recalls and catalogues, he can never get beneath the surface. For him, never getting beneath the surface is the equivalent of not being able to get into a room or having to wait until a door is opened. It’s just a nuisance, not the occasion for a deep insight of the kind Conrad’s Kurtz has when he cries, “the horror, the horror.” Ford’s Dowell is as incapable of saying anything like that as he is of feeling more than annoyed or inconvenienced.
Still, the cataloguing of life’s details even by an unseeing person can generate great sentences that reveal much the cataloguer cannot see.
Whole castles have vanished from my memory, whole cities that I have never visited again, but that white room, festooned with papier-mâché fruits and flowers; the tall windows; the many tables; the black screen round the door with three golden cranes flying upward on each panel; the palm tree in the centre of the room; the swish of the waiter’s feet; the cold expensive elegance; the mien of the diners as they came in every evening—their air of earnestness as if they must go through a meal prescribed by the Kur authorities and their air of sobriety as if they must seek not by any means to enjoy their meals—those things I shall not easily forget.
The room comes alive in its deadness; its whiteness functions as a blank screen, which is then filled in by a succession of precisely realized details (it’s like painting by numbers), details that are resolutely inanimate even when human beings are brought in. Not fruits and flowers, but papier-mâché fruits and flowers; cranes that are golden against a background of black lacquer; waiters’ feet, which are as much objects as the tables (one doesn’t actually look at waiters, does one?); the appearance (“mien”) of the diners, who are nothing but appearance and who “go through” their prescribed forms without ever allowing them to spill over into emotions (like pleasure) they do not have. And the narrator? The clauses piled up and chock full of precise observations create a pressure for, and an expectation of, a response to the inertly busy canvas they fill out. But the response we get—“those things I shall not easily forget”—is underwhelming, anticlimactic, even bathetic. He won’t forget these things, but what does he think of them? Does he think anything of them at all?
Dowell finally solves his compositional problem by deciding to stop worrying about it and just tell the story as it occurs to him. The announcement of his intention to do so produces a sentence of great, and entirely impersonal, beauty:
And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars.
The low voice Dowell will speak in becomes lower and even inaudible as the s (or soft c) of “voice” is quite literally absorbed by “sea sounds in the distance.” “Sounds” is a verb here, but its noun sense is strongly felt: “voice,” “sea,” “sounds,” “distance”; as the words succeed one another, the muted murmuring of a human voice becomes indistinguishable from nature’s rhythms. In the second half of the sentence the now impersonal voice finds its impersonal audience in the wind and the stars. While the word “flood” is used metaphorically to describe the wind, its nonmetaphorical meaning reaches back to the sea and its sounds. Sea, wind, stars—all meld into a cosmic conversation in which there are no propositions, only sounds. The wind that polishes the bright stars is the representative in the sentence of the stylist (Ford sensed behind Dowell) who polishes the language until it shines with the diamond-like hardness the sentence displays; it has become an object.
Much later Dowell apologizes for telling his story “in a very rambling way”: “One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places . . .” Characters, incidents, episodes, moments appear and then appear again in a manner that seems haphazard but is really designed, if not by Dowell then by Ford, and if not by Ford then by life itself. In his masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–1975), Anthony Powell presides over not one but twelve novels in which characters, motifs, and concerns move in and out in what might be a bewildering array were it not for the control the author exerts; and it is all laid out in a master sentence at the very beginning. Powell’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, has been thinking about Nicolas Poussin’s great painting Dance to the Music of Time (1640), “in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays”:
The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality, of human beings, facing outwards like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape, or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle, unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the dance.
The image of time provokes Jenkins to thoughts of mortality and human beings, because only mortal beings experience time as a shaping medium, which means that only mortal beings write, or need to write, sentences. Mortality is the condition of being able to die, regarded by many as a curse, but more properly appreciated as a gift, the gift of design and choice, of gain and loss, of hope and desperation, of failure and redemption, all modes of being that are available only to creatures who, like sentences (and novels), have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is the inevitability and shadow of death that provides life with a narrative arc, and provides moments in that narrative with a meaning; for the meaning of a moment—its distinctiveness—is a function of the place prepared for it by a past and the place waiting for it in a future that has (again, like a sentence) a terminal point.
We say to ourselves, “Yes, this is where it was all leading” or “This is the beginning of something that will, I hope, flower.” Without the specter and period of death, there would be no urgency of accomplishment, no expectations to be realized or disappointed, no anxieties to be allayed. Each moment would bear an equal weight or equal weightlessness, the ideal, you will remember, to which Gertrude Stein aspired. Significance would not be in the process of emerging, sometimes clear, sometimes not; rather, it would be evenly distributed and therefore not be significance—a concept that requires that some moments stand out—at all. In short, there would be no sentences, no temporal ordering of events in an attempt to make sense of them and of life. The meaning of things would be immediately and transparently present and it would be everywhere and always the same. This is the condition of eternity, a state of being we mortals can know only by negative inference, by imagining, in time, the negation of time, as Donne does in this magnificent sentence:
Eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is a short parenthesis in a long period, and eternity had been the same as it is, though time had never been.
(Devotions)
Time is an artificial breach in eternity (Donne calls it “this imaginary half-nothing”), an imperfection that springs from the nature of an imperfect, finite, transitory creature. The same imperfection and finitude require from us the writing of sentences (as opposed to the instantaneous knowledge of everything), and some of those sentences, like this one of Nick Jenkins’s, reflect self-consciously on the conditions of their performance. Jenkins imagines human beings, mortal men and women, moving through the narratives of their lives in uncertain, halting, yet purposeful rhythms, which are also the rhythms of his sentence. At first the partners in this dance participate in an intricate measure, a phrase that suggests order and control. But then the measure, while methodical, slows down, loses some of its precision and becomes awkward; it begins to evolve, that is, change in ways of which those living out the change may be unaware. Still, there remain “recognizable shapes,” at least for an instant, before some of them become meaningless as connections (“partners”) disappear and patterns are lost. But not forever; patterns reemerge, partners reconnect, the dance continues; the melody, which sets the pace and guides the steps, can still be heard, but just who or what controls it is not clear. Yet despite all this faltering and hesitancy, meanings do develop, and even, as the next sentence says, “become in due course uncompromisingly clear,” at least in the evanescent instances Conrad bows before and every committed stylist of sentences prays for.
The tension (a weak word) between the temporality of sentences and the eternity that would render them and the strivings they portray superfluous is powerfully captured in my final example, a sentence from Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Although I have read and taught this sentence hundreds of times, it never fails to knock my socks off. Bunyan’s hero, Christian, has become aware that there is a burden (original sin) on his back and he will do anything to rid himself of it. He is told that he must fly from the “wrath to come”—that is, from eternal damnation—and in response he begins to run:
Now he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it, began crying after him to return, but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying, Life! life! eternal life.
The sentence is about two levels of “perceiving,” two kinds of crying, and two kinds of lives. Christian’s wife and children perceive the head of their household abandoning them. The obligations he pushes away with a “but” (you can feel it) are great; that is why he puts his fingers in his ears. But the pull of what he runs toward is even stronger, even though he does not yet see where it is to be found. (He just runs, we have been told, “towards the middle of the plain.”) His family’s crying has its source in all the human ties that bind; his crying has its source in Eternity’s severe requirements and the reward it holds out, however obscurely, to those who are faithful to them: “Life! life! eternal life.” The sentence names the reward, but cannot bestow it; it can, however, make us feel both its inestimable price and the price we, as mortal sentence makers, time-bound creatures, are asked to pay. And given a choice between eternity and some of the sentences we have lingered over together, who knows?
Epilogue
Of course there are more sentences to celebrate and many more authors to praise. The list of writers who didn’t but could have made it into these pages is considerably larger than the list of writers who did. My hope is that this discussion will be continued, and I invite those readers who can’t believe I failed to include their all-time favorite sentence to send it to me; perhaps there will be a second edition. Meanwhile, there is much to enjoy; there are many sentences to read, to take apart, to caress, and to write. As I said when we began, sentence craft and sentence appreciation are not trivial pursuits. They engage us in the stringent and salutary exploration of the linguistic resources out of which our lives and our very selves are made. As usual, Gertrude Stein said it best:
I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. I suppose other things may be more exciting to others when they are at school but to me undoubtedly when I was at school the really completely exciting thing was diagramming sentences and that has ever been to me since the one thing that has been completely exciting and completely completing. I like the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves. In that way one is completely possessing something and incidentally one’s self.
(Lectures in America)
When Stein says that she likes “the everlasting feeling,” it seems for an instant that what she likes is something she, as an active agent, is doing. But as her sentence continues, we discover that the feeling she likes belongs to the sentences she is diagramming, and that, moreover, they are diagramming themselves. She is just along for the (rigorous and demanding) ride. The reason diagramming sentences is completing is because the completing is being performed by the sentences themselves; they do it; all we have to do is attend. And if we attend faithfully, surrendering to the unfolding logic of predication, not only the completing, but the excitement of its having been done, will be ours by proxy. The reward for the effacing of ourselves before the altar of sentences will be that “incidentally” (what a great word!)—without looking for it—we will possess a better self than the self we would have possessed had we not put ourselves in service. Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more?
Acknowledgments
I am first of all grateful to HarperCollins editor Julia Cheiffetz, whose idea this book was. She also gave it its title. My wife, Jane Tompkins, provided the subtitle. The book took shape as the result of extensive conversations with Julia; she told me what she had in mind and I tried to come up with it. A first draft didn’t quite work and Julia and I had another long talk. At the same time I asked my wife and my friends Jerry Graff and Cathy Birkenstein to help. They read the manuscript and told me what was wrong. I followed every suggestion they made and produced the version you have in your hand. It is customary to say that Julia, Jane, Jerry, and Cathy bear no responsibility for the finished book, but they do. An incredibly careful and talented copyeditor smoothed out many of the rough spots and caught enough errors of citation to embarrass me. Throughout all of this, my agent, Melissa Flashman, kept track of everything and functioned as an honest broker. It doesn’t take a village, but it certainly takes friends.
Index
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.
Aristotle, 40
Auerbach, Erich, 80–82
Austen, Jane, 46–48, 63, 65
Austin, J. L., 38, 90–91, 95
Bacon, Francis, 141–42
Barthes, Roland, 8
Beatles, 36
Brontë, Emily, 128
Bunyan, John, 156–57
Burgess, Anthony, 2
Burke, Edmund, 65
Burton, Robert, 89
Carroll, Lewis, 27–28, 32
Cato, 40, 41
Cézanne, Paul, 70
Chomsky, Noam, 26–27
Christie, Agatha, 100–101, 102, 106
Cicero, 42–43, 55
Conrad, Joseph, 125–26, 127, 145–48, 150, 156
Crawford, Joan, 4
Croll, Morris, 62
Dickens, Charles, 120
Dillard, Annie, 1, 3
Donne, John, 8, 142–45, 155
Eliot, George, 112–13, 128–30
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 109–11
Faulkner, William, 132, 149
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 124–26
Flaubert, Gustave, 2, 3, 70
Ford, Ford Madox, 85–87, 88, 148–53
Forster, E. M., 130–32
Frame, Donald, 62
French, Tana, 87–88
Goodman, Nelson, 40
Graff, Gerald, 29, 30
Hartley, Lodwick, 65
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 106–7, 109
Hemingway, Ernest, 73–76, 121
Herbert, George, 60, 71
James, Henry, 49, 63, 65, 122–23, 148
Joyce, James, 38
Keats, John, 80
Kenner, Hugh, 8
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 52–55, 65