by Lydia Davis
The quotation is taken from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and I found it in a book that should perhaps become a young—or, in fact, any—writer’s bible, or should at least be firmly in place on a shelf of reference books (and I know some of us have abandoned actual shelves of actual reference books, but I think we should keep this one handy): Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. I’ve assigned this book to classes a few times now; some do adopt it as their bible. Others find it too difficult or frustrating. But it is worth it. It is full of wonderful quotations, and what Tufte is in effect doing is showing you all the various sentence constructions or fragment constructions that can go to create effective, moving style. She shows them all, systematically, and analyzes how they work, through a wonderful variety of quotations that may lead you to authors you never knew. She takes the mystery out of eloquence, I could say, by showing you how the magic works. I have said to classes: If you read this book from cover to cover, really absorbing and thinking about every example, you will be a better writer. That is certainly true, though it is true of quite a few other books, too, such as the complete works of Shakespeare.
The Jefferson sentence reads:
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
(“He” refers to the enemy, King George III of England.)
Tufte points out, apropos of the order in this list, (1) how the verbs, by their sequence, illustrate the increasing violence of the action. And if you look at the example again, you will see another pattern that is in place at the same time: (2) the violence is moving from out on the water in to the coast, into the towns, and then into the very lives of the people. There is one more pattern to be detected, which is that (3) the list, or series, is parallel in structure, consisting of verb-noun pairs, except for the last, which is a little longer than the preceding ones. The extra syllables at the end let us down gently by giving us a few more beats—a three-accented phrase—instead of abruptly, with a two-accented phrase. This is rhetoric, persuasion, eloquence. Jefferson could have given the list in a careless or arbitrary order, and without the parallel structure, and although the content might have been the same, the effect would not have been as powerful, enhanced by the two or, really, three patterns that can be heard, or felt, in the sentence.
I believe, by the way, that a close, conscious analysis of the best writing—the sort of analysis we’ve just done of this one rather short sentence, and that Tufte does throughout her book—will teach you in a useful way about writing well, not only on a conscious level but also on a subconscious or subliminal level, as the good patterns are imprinted in your brain. But you do have to bring patience to it.
* * *
Don’t worry about the order of your lists as you are writing your first draft, when you shouldn’t worry about much except getting your story or poem down on paper. But in later drafts, look carefully at your lists to make sure they are in the best order, whatever pattern it may be that will determine that order, whether from less violent to more violent, from past to present, from more particular to more general, from sea onto land, from few syllables to many, from short phrases to longer, etc.
Here is another example of order in a list, or series, but this time the order would seem to be incorrect.
I know the beginnings of quite a few poems by heart—and memorizing good poems, or fragments of them, is another thing I recommend for improving your writing. One of these poems is Shakespeare’s sonnet 73. It’s about old age, beginning with a comparison of old age to autumn:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
I can now recite these lines accurately, but for a long time I had a problem with the second line. I recited it in the wrong order. I said: “When yellow leaves, or few, or none, do hang.” By saying it wrong, I was giving that list the more logical progression in time, from leaves that are still there but have turned yellow, to few leaves (most having fallen off), to no leaves at all—the way it usually happens in nature. And yet the counterintuitive order is more interesting, and reflects the poet’s mind at work: he is seeing yellow leaves, then no leaves at all, then he is conceding that a few may remain. Now I relish the “out of order” order of that line when I say it.
Similarly, as I said, in an earlier version of “Nancy Brown Will Be in Town” I ended with two sentences that followed the more “natural” order and then saw that because of the character of the piece, which is somewhat absurd, I should reverse that order and end on a stranger note: “We will miss her friendship. We will miss her tennis lessons,” as though actually—come to think of it!—we may value her tennis lessons more than her friendship. It is a better order not only because it is more absurd but also because it is more surprising. Subtly, or less subtly, you always want to surprise a reader. You certainly don’t want the reader to predict exactly where you’re about to go. Or if you do—there are always exceptions—you want to put that expectation to good use.
* * *
I will describe two more revisions I made to improve an ending.
The first is in the story called “A Man from Her Past.” Here is the whole of it:
A MAN FROM HER PAST
I think Mother is flirting with a man from her past who is not Father. I say to myself: Mother ought not to have improper relations with this man “Franz”! “Franz” is a European. I say she should not see this man improperly while Father is away! But I am confusing an old reality with a new reality: Father will not be returning home. He will be staying on at Vernon Hall. As for Mother, she is ninety-four years old. How can there be improper relations with a woman of ninety-four? Yet my confusion must be this: though her body is old, her capacity for betrayal is still young and fresh.
In an earlier version, the last sentence read: “Yet my confusion must be this: her capacity for subversion and betrayal is quite young and fresh, if her body is not.” In the earlier version, the content of the ending is more or less the same, but the way the ending is written needs to be tightened up and the order changed. The very last word, not, with the implied “young”—“not young”—is weak here, certainly not as strong and clear as the word old. But even if I replaced not by old—“if her body is old,” the order is wrong. We already know she is old, her body is old, so in the very last words I’m not offering any new information.
In the earlier version, the new information, the narrator’s revelation, is given first, then the familiar information—that her body is old—is given second, and concludes the piece, which is anticlimactic. Whereas when the familiar information is given first—that her body is old—that is all right, especially because it is preceded by the word though—“though her body is old”—signaling to the reader that after this familiar information, something else will be coming. And when it comes, it is surprising: “her capacity for betrayal is still young and fresh.” First of all, I have tightened up the clause by taking out subversion and as well as quite. (And you should always be on the lookout for qualifying words like quite and rather and very—you probably could benefit by taking them out.) I have prepared, earlier in the story, for this idea of betrayal by saying that she is flirting. But then, at the very end, come the words young and fresh, which are surprising because they are usually associated with something more positive. And so with these words comes a new concept: that betrayal, or the capacity for betrayal, can be young and fresh, and that something we don’t consider a good thing, like betrayal, can be qualified with adjectives that are usually positive.
In this case, it was a simple matter of reversing two elements so that the known came first and the more surprising came second—which more or less follows a piece of advice I remember from my adolescence, when I was attempting to write a poem in rhymed couplets and I was told: Alway
s put the stronger rhyme second. That often works well, not only with rhymed couplets but also with elements in a sentence or sentences in a paragraph or paragraphs in a story. (And I hope you noticed the parallel structure in that last sentence, as well as the progression of the list from smaller units to larger.) So consider the order when you are revising the very last words of a piece of writing: consider changing the order to end with the more surprising or stronger element.
* * *
Before I go on to the last example of the order of an ending, I’d like to quote some perhaps helpful advice about endings from a New Yorker article by John McPhee on his strategies for structuring a long piece of nonfiction. He earlier makes another helpful—to me, anyway—observation that in seeking a structure for a piece, he has often found himself with the choice of organizing it chronologically or thematically, and that the pull of the chronological has usually been stronger.
Now, about endings, here is what he says, close to the end of this essay:
William Shawn [longtime editor of The New Yorker] once told me that my pieces were a little strange because they seemed to have three or four endings. That surely is a result of preoccupation with structure. In any case, it may have led to an experience I have sometimes had in the struggle for satisfaction at the end.
Look back upstream. If you have come to your planned ending and it doesn’t seem to be working, run your eye up the page and the page before that. You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were.
To go on to the somewhat similar situation in which the previous sentence or sentence fragment is the one you should end on, I will talk about the last two lines in my poem “Head, Heart.” But first I will say something about how it came to be—and here we’re back to inspirations or influences—via Old English poetry and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
* * *
I’m calling “Head, Heart” a poem because it was written to be a poem, unlike other poem-like pieces I have written. One example of these other poem-like pieces would be “The Fly,” four lines long:
THE FLY
At the back of the bus,
inside the bathroom,
this very small illegal passenger,
on its way to Boston.
This piece started out as a prose piece and is still intended as a prose piece, of sorts, but ends up looking like a poem because it has line breaks. I added line breaks in order to control the pace and rhythm with which it was read. I thought of it not as a song, but as a matter-of-fact statement. I’ll point out something about the function and importance of the title here, too, which is almost always true of the very shortest pieces: the title is essential to place the reader before the beginning of the piece. I name what I’m writing about, so that the reader knows what it is before going on to see the creature in a different light—as a passenger with a destination.
Another kind of poem-like piece is the piece that is written to be a poem but is a poem in prose, and so looks like prose with justified lines, as in the case of “Traveling with Mother,” in prose with justified lines and arranged in six numbered sections, each having two groups of prose lines. Each group of prose lines, I could say, functions in the same way as a single line in a more conventional-looking poem with line breaks.
I will quote just the beginning of “Traveling with Mother,” sections 1 and 2, which are quite prosy in syntax and vocabulary, rather than poetic:
TRAVELING WITH MOTHER
1
The bus said “Buffalo” on the front, after all, not “Cleveland.” The backpack was from the Sierra Club, not the Audubon Society.
* * *
They had said that the bus with “Cleveland” on the front would be the right bus, even though I wasn’t going to Cleveland.
2
The backpack I had brought with me for this was a very sturdy one. It was even stronger than it needed to be.
* * *
I practiced many answers to their possible question about what I was carrying in my backpack. I was going to say, “It is sand for potting plants” or “It is for an aromatherapy cushion.” I would also have told the truth. But they did not search the luggage this time.
So, all this justified prose, with fairly prosaic content—backpacks, Sierra Club, Cleveland—doesn’t necessarily look like a poem, but in my mind it is intended as a poem, whereas, as I said, “The Fly” was not intended as a poem but looks like a poem. In this case, I’m thinking of, or defining, a poem as a song—more ceremonious, more rhythmical, more punctuated than prose. Although in this case, again, the prose in “Traveling with Mother” is rather flat, the long lines, for me, cry out into the spaces around them, maybe because each statement is somehow broken off. The narrator or reciter must keep stopping.
* * *
Now I’d like to turn from that prosy, nonlyrical poem to the quite lyrical, “singing” poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. When I was striving hardest, in my twenties, to learn to write well, I liked to read Kafka’s diaries to see the work and the thinking that went on behind his finished writing, and also the rough drafts or the false starts and the unfinished pieces. Similarly, while I was engaged on my translation of Madame Bovary, about five years ago, I liked to read Flaubert’s letters for the same reason.
There was also a time when I liked to delve into Gerard Manley Hopkins’s journals and read, especially, his detailed and thorough descriptions of natural things—the movement of eddies of water in a brook, for instance. This journal writing of his was done in a compensatory sort of way during the seven years in which he did not allow himself to write poetry, having become convinced that it conflicted with his devotion to religion—he had recently converted to Catholicism and eventually entered the Jesuit order and was ordained a priest. (Similarly, the objectivist poet George Oppen, an American of the twentieth century, stopped writing poetry—in his case for more than twenty years—because he, too, felt that it conflicted with his discipline, though his discipline was not religious belief but political activism and for a while the programs of communism.) It is fascinating to see how the extensive and detailed descriptions in Hopkins’s journals become concentrated into the economical images in his finished poems.
The poem “Pied Beauty,” well-known to many, can be summarized as a poem in praise of God for all the great variety, complexity, and changeability of the physical world he has created, in contrast to the unchanging beauty of God himself:
PIED BEAUTY
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches x2019; wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced x2014;fold, fallow, and plough;
And xE1;ll tr xE1;des, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Here’s another well-known poem by Hopkins:
SPRING AND FALL: TO A YOUNG CHILD
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
An explicator at an online site (David Coomler at
the site Hokku) goes through the poem in a cogent, sensible manner—his commentary is enjoyable to read, though this is not an especially difficult poem. I happened upon his site because I was looking for the meaning of wanwood, which he interpreted to mean just what the word if separated into two words would mean: wan, meaning “pale” (i.e., fading, dying), and wood, meaning “woods” or “forest.” He had some good things to say about leafmeal:
“Leafmeal,” as Hopkins uses it here, is a very interesting term, formed by using the Old English word mael, meaning a “measure” of something. When used as a suffix, it means something is happening “measure by measure,” that is, gradually, like saying a field of grain was cleared “sheafmeal,” that is, “sheaf by sheaf.” So here Hopkins is saying that all the autumn forests lie “leafmeal,” that is, falling and piling up leaf by leaf, countless scattered leaves. “Meal” of course also means grain ground fine—as in “cornmeal”—so we have an undertone in this word of the leaves gradually falling apart as they decay—transforming from leaves to soil.
But when he came to the end, he expressed an opinion that I disagreed with, as to whether or not a couple of lines were “poetic” or not. Here are the last four lines of the poem again:
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
I had particularly always liked the first two of these lines, especially the first one:
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
But the commentator, Coomler, says that he feels these lines are left for the reader to “somewhat laboriously unravel” and that they “are not very poetic in their complexity.”