Reading Style

by Jenny Davidson

  Reading Style is not my own 99 Novels. It has less to say about which books must be read than about how to read. That said, the book does offer a sort of anthology of prose styles, the primary logic for inclusion being strong personal preference rather than representative selection. In that sense, it’s not a genealogy or taxonomy so much as it is a sampler of sentences I have loved. (Beckett is a notable omission, perhaps because I love his plays much more passionately than his prose fiction; play texts are outside the scope of this book, although I have long had a yen to write a little book on the history from earliest times to the present day of the stage direction, which seems to me to bear an interesting relationship to the forms of notation novelists would come to develop for representing human movement in third-person narration.)

  The unit of taste in this case is the sentence, sometimes the paragraph, its structure and sensibility, its fugitive feel on the tongue. I strongly experience the allure of a certain type of box of chocolates not so much because of the chocolates themselves as because of the exquisite nature of the choice offered in map or legend. In my mother’s family, that paper guide was known as a “suggester”: a chart of sorts representing each chocolate’s exterior and signaling (graphically, verbally) the delights contained therein. If I were choosing a box of Jacques Torres chocolates for someone else, I would pick the dark-chocolate selection because of its clear gastronomical superiority, but if I were buying it just for myself, a decadent and unlikely prospect, I would choose milk chocolate; dark chocolate may be aesthetically preferable to milk, but I like it much less than its sweeter, less pungent counterpart. My taste in prose differs from my taste in chocolate, but it similarly lacks a sense of proportion (“Truth is disputable, taste is not”). I love anchovies, I hate dill, but it would be absurd to construe my preferences as objective verdicts on the respective merits of those two foodstuffs. When I loathe a book, though, my passionate contempt is colored partly by my conviction that it’s morally as well as aesthetically pernicious. I feel furious or even outraged by, say, the sentimentality of Markus Zusak’s young-adult Holocaust novel The Book Thief or the cultish paranoia of Mark Danielewski’s intricately self-protective House of Leaves; this is one of the ways in which morality enters into even the most stringently formalist ways of reading, and I will return later to the complex antagonisms and interdependencies that unite reading for the sentence and reading for the heart.

  2

  Lord Leighton, Liberace and the Advantages of Bad Writing

  Helen DeWitt, Harry Stephen Keeler, Lionel Shriver, George Eliot

  These pages treat the inner workings of sentences and paragraphs as they function in novels. To read for the sentence risks becoming trivial or pedantic: what about character, plot, imagery, the host of other pleasures prose fiction lavishes upon its readers? But the shape of any given sentence—its arc, to use the visual metaphor; its cadence, to rank ear before eye—produces part of its meaning, sometimes the most important part. The aspects of meaning contributed by word choice, by diction, by syntax are sometimes neglected by people who write about novels, and this book is designed partly to redress that balance, offering a modest manifesto in aid of reading for the sentence. Sentences can be verbal artifacts of untold complexity, and I am especially interested in ones that are hidden, like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, in plain view: in novels, which tend to be thought of as being made up of larger units (scenes, chapters, episodes) rather than as the accumulation of a number of sentences large enough that one would not want to have to count them by hand.

  The term style derives from the Latin stilus, a pointed instrument for writing. Style conjures up the little black dress, a world of haute couture and Audrey Hepburn, but it also invokes William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White’s Elements of Style and the grammatical prescriptions of the style sheet; though grammar may seem less glamorous than fashion, glamour is etymologically speaking a corruption of grammar, by way of a set of related terms (gramarye, grimoire) that refer to a body of occult knowledge. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that style may refer to the manner in which something is written, including a writer’s characteristic mode of expression, but a pattern of tension soon emerges from its series of definitions. Is style merely something superficial, referring to features “which belong to form and expression rather than to the substance of the thought or the matter expressed”? Or do we instead adopt the wisdom embodied in the old adage “The style is the man,” which implies that every aspect of character is written into each sentence a person writes?

  My own suspicions gibe better with the second notion. Style is not extraneous, style is everything; one need not be a pure Wildean aesthete to adhere to such a view. To some extent I believe this is true for all writing, not just for literary writing, and I would use the word temperament to sum up the complex set of intellectual, emotional, political and cultural traits that make up a given person’s identity as it is expressed in words. Temperament can be discerned with extraordinary clarity and economy in certain sentences or paragraphs (“The theatre is a better school of moral sentiments than churches”), and a reader’s selection of which bits of a writer’s work to foreground itself serves as one way of presenting an argument about that writer’s deep nature. It has always seemed to me (but then I have the soul of a copy editor) that the sentence is the key to the heart: that sentences embody ethos in a way that renders deeply ingrained habits of thought visible to the naked eye. As a corollary, a particular passage’s fissures and self-contradictions, its peculiar force or suppleness or stringency, may become the most interesting and revealing object of literary scrutiny, with style both subjecting itself to and facilitating acts of judgment. This way of reading may equally provide traction on the prose of writers such as Thomas Hobbes and Edward Gibbon and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but my self-imposed mandate here involves a more specific question about writing: what can be learned by attending closely to the sentences of some of the great imaginative fictions of the last couple hundred years?

  This is a formalist project in the sense that I will focus very persistently on linguistic details, but I’ve already started to make the case for the ethical freight of formalism and its reading practices. There seems to me little point in considering style apart from morality, and Helen DeWitt’s novel The Last Samurai offers an exceptionally clear and appealing version of the argument that style may itself serve as a kind of morality. The novel’s two narrators are Sibylla Newman and her son Ludo, a child of prodigious intelligence and learning who is desperately eager for Sibylla to reveal the identity of his father, a well-known writer who impregnated Sibylla during a one-night stand that came about chiefly as a consequence of her being too polite to tell him what she really thought of his prose style. The pseudonym Sibylla gives to the writer in question is Liberace:

  Liberace the musician had a terrible facility and a terrible sincerity; what he played he played with feeling, whether it was Roll Out the Barrel or I’ll Be Seeing You, and in sad pieces a tear would well up over the mascara and drop to the silver diamanté of a velvet coat while the rings on his hands flashed up and down the keyboard, and in a thousand mirrors he would see the tear, the mascara, the rings, he would see himself seeing the mascara, the rings, the tear. All this could be found too in Liberace (the writer): the slick, buttery arpeggios, the self-regarding virtuosity as the clever ring-laden hands sparkled over the keys, the professional sincerity which found expressiveness for the cynical & the sentimental, for the pornographic, even for alienation & affectlessness.1

  “He liked I expect the idea of effortless excellence, & being unable to combine the two had settled for the one he could be sure of,” Sibylla concludes, aphoristically (Oscar Wilde is one of the talismans with which she wards off an existential despair). At Liberace’s flat, she is horrified to note the presence of “a brand new book by Lord Leighton”:

  By Lord Leighton, of course, I don’t mean the Hellenising late-Victorian painter of A Syracusan Bride Leading Wi
ld Beasts in Procession and Greek Girls Playing at Ball, but the painterly American writer who is the spiritual heir of that artist. Lord Leighton (the painter) specialised in scenes of antiquity in which marvellous perplexities of drapery roamed the canvas, tarrying only in their travels to protect the modesty of a recruit from the Tyrone Power school of acting. His fault was not a lack of skill: it is the faultlessness of his skill which makes the paintings embarrassing to watch, so bare do they strip the mind of their creator. Only the pen of Lord Leighton the writer could do justice to the brush of Lord Leighton the painter, for just so did Lord Leighton (the writer) bring the most agitated emotions to an airless to a hushed to an unhurried while each word took on because there was all the time in the world for each word to take on the bloom which only a great Master can give to a word using his time to allow all unseemly energy to become aware of its nakedness and snatch gratefully at the fig leaf provided until all passion in the airlessness in the hush in the absence of hurry sank decently down in the slow death of motion to perpetual stasis: a character could not look, or step, or speak, without a gorgeous train of sentences swathing his poor stupid thoughts and unfolding in beautiful languor on the still and breathless air. (70–71)

  Sibylla’s war on cliché and bad writing is the crusade of a person who believes that human ethical life depends on the clear and effective practice of rational thought, including clarity of language (it is related to the argument Orwell made in “Politics and the English Language,” but with a less political and more aesthetic and intellectual slant). Those gorgeous trains of sentences aren’t just in bad taste, they’re an offense against humanity, and style here is seen to be the repository of character, something we have an obligation to judge: to judge, and to cry out against when we find it wanting.

  This version of the argument about style rests, really, on sensibility, a word I like because of the way it opens up more to ethos than style does while retaining the sense of what’s at stake being a matter more of texture or tact or feel than first and foremost of ideas or arguments. The novelist Lydia Millet has made what seems to me a related argument, only this is the “hard” version, which goes further in terms of mandating an ethics of fictional subject matter as well as style. Millet took issue, in a piece published in the Globe and Mail in 2006, not so much with Alice Munro’s canonization as “the Grande Dame of Canadian realism” as with the consequences of that canonization (in the New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen had recently called her “the best living writer in North America”).2 Her objection rested on the extent to which Munro’s prose, so skillful and precise, makes “insistent choice of the purely personal, the proximate world of the self and its near relations,” with the individual and his or her relationships with friends and family at the heart of this world’s “cosmology” and even Munro’s depiction of the land she knows so well serving as “a setting primarily for a specific subset of us, for the foibles and discoveries and preoccupations of the social self.” The shortcoming of “the broader, dominant literary culture of realistic and personal fictions,” Millet goes on to say, in which Munro leads and others follow, is that almost everything else “drops away entirely in favour of a massive foreground of people with problems”:

  These problems are rarely starvation or war; they tend to be adultery or career disappointment, say, which leaves us with a literary culture whose preoccupation is not meaning or beauty, not right or wrong, not our philosophies or propensity for atrocities or corrupt churches and governments, but rather our sex lives, our social mistakes, our neighbourhood failures and sibling rivalries. Enlightenment humanism finds a kind of perfect expression here: If our deliberations about our personal lives, consisting of a near-infinite scrutiny of the tiny passages through which we move in relation to friends and lovers, constitutes the best calling of art, must such self-scrutiny not also be our own highest calling and rightful task?

  I was caught up short when I first read this precisely because of how vividly and clearly it seemed to articulate something that has been on my mind as long as I have been reading short stories. The literary short story, in North America, suffers especially pervasively from the sort of self-absorption (to use the term literally rather than pejoratively, describing simply an involvement with individual self) that Millet discerns and deplores. I have always liked Muriel Spark especially because of how she bucks the trend of novelists being interested primarily in individuals in couples, traditional families, parents and children. Spark’s novels tend to be set in schools and boardinghouses and convents—in short, in places where the fundamental unit is not the couple or the nuclear or extended family but rather the small- to medium-sized group: Spark is the great novelist of small groups! In contrast, the tradition of John Updike and John Cheever and Alice Munro seems to me excessively centered on an aspect of life that would seem to be woefully narrow, at least in the greater context of political struggle and institutional service and global migration and passionate religious belief or intellectual commitment, to name just a few of the things that make lives interesting.

  This is a digression, but it happened that in the same month that Millet weighed in on the problem of tiny passages, Joan Acocella published an encomium in the New Yorker on Alice McDermott’s latest novel. I must confess that I have never read a word of McDermott’s fiction beyond the bits Acocella quoted in this piece, but those passages, eminently skillful and quoted lovingly by Acocella, aroused my deepest suspicion and dislike.3 Here the protagonist is coming out of lunchtime Mass in New York just after World War II:

  Leaving the church, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks…. And all before her, the lunch-hour crowd bent under the April sun and into the bitter April wind, jackets flapping and eyes squinting, or else skirts pressed to the backs of legs and jacket hems pressed to bottoms. And trailing them, outrunning them, skittering along the gutter and the sidewalk and the low gray steps of the church, banging into ankles and knees and one another, scraps of paper, newspapers, candy wrappers, what else?—office memos? shopping lists? The paper detritus that she had somewhere read, or had heard it said, trails armies, or was it (she had seen a photograph) the scraps of letters and wrappers and snapshots that blow across battlefields after all but the dead had fled?4

  I’m not crazy about the rather grandiose rhetorical gesture in the last part of the passage, but that’s neither here nor there. What struck me was that this is a kind of language I strongly associate with the literary short story (though obviously novels are written in this mode as well, and this is a novel rather than a story); the problem I have with it—the thing that makes it leave me cold—is that it is so much concerned with sensation at the expense of thought or even emotion. I’m not enthusiastic about that aspect of Woolf’s writing either—it seems to me that the challenge the modernists imposed on themselves, of radically extending what sentences could do vis-à-vis the physiological moment-to-moment intensity of lived experience, was not in the end a really fruitful one. I find myself not very interested even in my own sensations, and not at all interested in sensations and physical observations supposedly filtered through the consciousness of this character of McDermott’s. I would rather know what the character thinks, thinks about something interesting or funny or important or irrelevant. The abstract quality of this perceptiveness about scraps of paper and skirts pressed to the backs of legs (the word “skittering” strikes me in this context as excessively and self-consciously literary) isn’t sensible; it’s not funny, either, and I expect it’s really the sensation-freighted-with-significance thing that alienates me rather than the focus on sensation in itself. This is always the problem I have reading Alice Munro or William Trevor. Both are wonderfully good writers, and if I am going to read that kind of thing, I would take Munro or Trevor over almost anyone else I can think of, and yet I find myself as a reader having really no need for that kind of thing.

  What am I proposing as a model instead, or rather what
sort of fiction attracts me as strongly as this repels me, in the cool core sense of pushing me away? I would offer two different answers, the first slightly perverse and the second more in earnest. My perverse counterexample to the McDermott-Munro-Trevor school of fiction-writing, a writer as profoundly antithetical to that mode as anything one can imagine, is the cult favorite Harry Stephen Keeler. Keeler has some passionate detractors. Crime fiction publisher and provocateur Otto Penzler, writing for the New York Sun, called Keeler “the worst writer in the world”: “Keeler is to good literature as rectal cancer is to good health. He makes the J. D. Robb novels seem as if they were written by Shakespeare. Given the choice of reading three Keeler novels back to back or being imprisoned in an Iranian jail, you’d need to think about it.”5 Penzler’s hyperbole is counterbalanced by the equally hyperbolic advocacy of a coterie of prominent Keelerites. Paul Collins edited The Riddle of the Traveling Skull (1934) for a McSweeney’s reissue in 2005, and the novelist and critic Ed Park is another influential supporter (his younger son is named Keeler!). While I would not call myself a full-blown Keelerite, I am undoubtedly taken with Keeler’s prose style. Certain novels are famous for having invented their own idioms: 1984, A Clockwork Orange, The Catcher in the Rye. Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler both developed highly recognizable idioms, and so did Dickens; it would be a mistake to think of this as a twentieth-century phenomenon, as on some level any really good novel does this, so that it is only the case that some examples are more exaggerated or obviously remarkable than others.