How to Write a Sentence (6 page)

It is a tremendous rhetorical achievement, a sentence for the ages, but again you can learn how to imitate it, if not to match it. Pick any topic, even a trivial one, say, getting up in the morning in the face of all the reasons not to: “When you’ve stayed up all night watching
Rocky
for the twentieth time, when the temperature is below freezing and you’re warm underneath the blanket, when the day promises only drudgery and humiliation, when the conclusion that your life has been for naught and no one will miss you seems self-evident, when everyone you have ever cared for is either dead or angry with you, when the only pleasure you can anticipate is a cup of coffee you can barely afford, when the thought of one more day doing something you absolutely hate is unbearable, then you remind yourself of what Scarlett O’Hara said: ‘Tomorrow is another day.’ ” The sentence is bathetic, even pathetic, but its form is the same as the form of King’s sentence, and if you learn how to master the form, you can employ it “naturally” when you have something important to say.

King’s sentence has affinities with what is known in the history of style as the Ciceronian period, a “long stately sentence which suspends the verb until the end . . . with chains of subordinate clauses and balanced antitheses” ( John R. Holmes,
Encyclopedia of the Essay
, 1997). Michael Sheehan offers as an example these lines from
Hamlet
. The speaker is Claudius, the brother of the hero’s murdered father: “Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen / Th’imperial jointress to this warlike state, / Have we, as ’twere with a defeated joy, / . . . With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage, / In equal scale weighing delight and dole, / Taken to wife” (Wordmall: A Blog About the English Language, 2006). Or, in short, I’ve married my brother’s widow shortly after his death. By delaying the verb, Claudius is able to provide his own analysis of the action he takes before he names it. He confronts the stigma against marrying one’s sister-in-law (see Leviticus 20:21) directly: once our sister, now our queen; he reminds his hearers that because she is his queen, she is theirs and a partner to his military power; he acknowledges the doubleness and dubiousness of the act with a series of paradoxical antitheses: defeated joy, mirth in funeral, dirge in marriage, delight and dole; he claims to have carefully considered what he is going to do (“In equal scale weighing”), and then, after all this buildup, he springs the simple, but not all that simple, fact of what he has already done: “Taken to wife.”

One scholar explains that the characteristic effects of this style were achieved by advance planning: “one knew from the outset of a period where it was going and how it was going to get there” ( Jonas Barish,
Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy
, 1960). This describes the achievement from the perspective of the writer. The reader, however, doesn’t know where the writer is going; he knows only that the person taking him there is in control. Control is what this style at once performs and announces, and no one does it better than John Milton. At a moment in his pamphlet
An Apology Against a Pamphlet
(1642), Milton rejects the praise of his writing style offered by an adversary and pushes away artfulness in a sentence that could hardly be more artful:

For me, readers, although I cannot say that I am utterly untrained in those rules which best rhetoricians have given, or unacquainted with those examples which the prime authors of eloquence have written in any learned tongue, yet true eloquence I find to be none but the serious and hearty love of truth, and that whose mind so ever is fully possessed with a fervent desire to know good things and with the dearest charity to infuse the knowledge of them into others, when such a man would speak, his words (by what I can express), like so many nimble and airy servitors, trip about him at command, and in well ordered files, as he would wish, fall aptly into their own places.

The basic structure of the sentence is “although . . . yet.” The “although” clause typically gives reasons why the statement or resolution in the “yet” clause is somewhat of a surprise or even a non sequitur. “Although I hate and fear this kind of situation, yet I’ll come with you.” “Although I don’t know what I’m doing, yet I’m going ahead.” (This is another formal structure that can be played with infinitely.) In Milton’s sentence the negative proposition that is supposed to throw the positive resolution “yet I can speak well” into relief is “I have no training in the arts of eloquence”: “Although I have no training in the arts of eloquence, yet I can speak well from the heart.” If the heart and the intention are good, the words will follow without the need of any rhetorical exertions. But Milton is playing rhetorical tricks from the beginning, and their effect is to take back the concession of the “although” clause even as it is being offered. “I cannot say that I am utterly untrained” neither claims nor disclaims training. “Utterly” is particularly coy. It says, well, I may have a little training, maybe even a lot. The phrase “or unacquainted with those examples” further undermines the supposed self-deprecation—yeah, I may have studied some of those virtuoso rhetoricians in many languages—and endows the speaker with the very credentials he is pooh-poohing. It’s as if a movie star were to get up and say, “Although I have only won four Academy Awards, yet I still have a modest talent to offer you.” So that when Milton gets to the hinge of his sentence—“yet true eloquence I find”—we are more than prepared for the self-praise that follows. He is obviously the one who is possessed by virtue and the desire to infuse it into others; it is his portrait that is being painted; he is “such a man” (“When such a man would speak”), and the false modesty of “by what I can express” is almost offensive. It is an “Emperor’s New Clothes” strategy in reverse: Milton is asking us to see him as rhetorically naked ( just plain old virtuous me, folks) at the moment when he completes a rhetorical triumph, the moment when his words perform exactly the action they are reporting, tripping about at his command. This is a textbook example of imitative form (sometimes called a fallacy, but it is not): Milton’s words do what they describe; they fall aptly in their own places just as those very words are being intoned. The note of triumph is unmistakable; the request for applause palpable and difficult to resist.

Milton’s sentence celebrates an inner virtue that resists and masters the apparent flux of temporal life. In the conclusion to
The Renaissance
(1873),Walter Pater makes the opposite point—there is only flux; perdurability is an illusion—but he conveys it in prose that is as controlled and controlling as Milton’s. Pater has been explaining that the impressions that make up our experience are momentary and that each of them is “infinitively divisible” into smaller impressions that are themselves infinitely divisible. Then comes the sentence that matches Milton’s in the artfulness with which it enacts what it describes:

To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our lives fines itself down.

In this sentence the main assertion—“what is real in our lives fines itself down”—is again delayed by a series of clauses laid side by side, and these clauses take away in advance what the independent clause promises: a stable reality. The reader is repeatedly teased with a stability of reference that barely survives the moment of its (fleeting) appearance. In the first clause the (relative) stability is compromised before it appears. A wisp is already a “fleeting trace” (
American Heritage Dictionary
), but it is preceded in the sentence by “tremulous”; so what we have (or don’t have) is a trace of something we know not what, and that trace is itself quivering and escaping from our grasp. The next word, “constantly,” mocks us with the root “constant”—steadfast—but the constancy asserted is the constancy of continually “re-forming”—that is, always in the process of becoming something else; and even that process is occurring in and on a fluid medium, itself always re-forming “on the stream.” The next clause brings a word that promises to arrest the flux—“sharp”—but the noun it modifies is “impression”; and then we are told that we don’t even have the impression, only a “sense” of it (an impression of an impression), and that sense is itself a “relic” (a trace again) and that relic of a sense of an impression is “fleeting”; “more or less” does not allow us even to fasten on “fleeing.” The sentence’s summary statement affords us the temporary ease of the word “moments,” but immediately those moments are said to be “gone by”—now you see them, now you never did. The sentence’s final tease is the phrase “real in our lives,” which names everything that has been taken away. The phrase shines there for an instant before it is refined (“fines”) into something that will then refine itself ad infinitum “down” into the ever-receding world of fleeting, dissolving, infinitely divisible impressions.

When the sentence is over, nothing is left but itself. Like Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and George Herbert’s “Church Monuments,” it scoffs at monumentality but is itself a monument. Although Pater and Milton proclaim antithetical messages in their sentences—one insisting on a unitary abiding truth, the other announcing that nothing abides—the two sentences are rhetorically similar: each leads the reader down a path that lies waiting for him or her; each says, in addition to the substantive things it says, you are in the company of a mind that has thought it all out and is delivering it to you with complete mastery.

CHAPTER 6
The Additive Style

Sentences like Milton’s and Pater’s are not bashful about foregrounding the process of their own construction. They flaunt their artfulness and invite readers to share in the verbal pyrotechnics they display. But suppose you wanted to achieve another effect, the effect not of planning, order, and control, but of spontaneity, haphazardness, and chance. Then you might avail yourself of another style, no less artful, but marked by the appearance of artlessness. The fountain of this style is the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), who announces (in “A Consideration Upon Cicero”), “I write naturally and without a plan; the first stroke of the pen just leads to a second.” (
Je commence volontiers sans project; le premier trait produit le second.
) Montaigne’s claim is to be expressing himself without premeditation or rhetorical design (Milton’s claim, but Montaigne actually means it): “I do not portray [finished] being; I portray passing . . . from day to day, minute to
minute . . . This is a record of various and changeable occurrences, and of irresolute and, when it so befalls, contradictory ideas” (“Of Repentance”). The word “essay” means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression the prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable. Rather than indicating the logical progression of thought, connectives such as “thus” and “so” are just place markers; “but” and “and” are the words that carry the experience forward, the first signaling a thought going in a new direction, the second saying “and, oh, this has just occurred to me.” The technical name for the style is parataxis: “a coordinate, rather than a subordinate, construction.” (Don’t worry about the term; you don’t have to learn it, but it might be useful at a cocktail party.) The units of this kind of prose, explains historian of style Morris Croll, are “connected with each other by only the slightest of ligatures, each one carrying a stronger emphasis . . . than it would have if it were more strictly subordinated” (
Style, Rhetoric and Rhythm
, 1966). Montaigne’s translator Donald Frame sums up the style and its effect: “Free, oral, informal, personal, concrete . . . spontaneous in order, ranging from the epigrammatic to the ambling and associative. It communicates the flavor of the man” (
The Complete Essays of Montaigne
).

Or so is the claim. Montaigne may have believed that a style that eschews formal structure and obvious design accurately mirrors the movements of a mind (his own) in free-flowing motion; but the “natural” style is a style nevertheless, not a transparent picture of psychological reality, but a representation of it, neither more nor less “true” than the representation of thought offered by the deliberative, subordinating style. There is certainly a difference between saying in response to the perennial question “What did you do today?” “I had five distinct experiences that seemed unconnected but were related in the following ways,” and saying, “Well, I got up and made coffee; and do you remember the day we bought the coffeemaker in that little shop; let’s go back there soon; and, oh yes, I went to the grocery store; they’re so rude, we really should find someplace else; and you’ll never guess who I met there—Sheila; and she told me that . . .” But it is a difference between ways of organizing experience, not a difference between a filtered experience and the thing itself.

It is also a difference between the experience the styles provide. Readers of Austen, James, Melville, Pater, and Milton will feel secure (if a bit condescended to) in the hands of a controlling intelligence who guides them with authority through the intricacies of a densely layered but finely ordered piece of prose. Readers of authors less intent on being seen as holding the reins will experience a degree of the same freedom, looseness, and, on occasion, disorientation the prose seems to be enacting. (Remember, it’s all art.) Here are two examples from the famous openings of two famous books, Laurence Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
(1759–1766) and J. D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye
(1951).

Tristram Shandy
begins with our hero recounting a moment he could not possibly remember, the moment of his conception:

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were doing—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; and for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost—had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly—I am verily persuaded I should have made a different figure in the world from that in which the reader is likely to see me.

No preliminaries or ceremony here. The speaker just bursts upon our stage, wishing and revising his wish as he goes. First it is “either” his mother or father who is the object of his reproach; then he bethinks himself and says no, actually both; and then he gives the reason for his self-correction; they were after all equal partners in the act whose possible consequences are then rehearsed in a list that could have gone on forever. One thought leads to another and then to another, each provisional and not quite followed through, until, in an act of will—there is no natural stopping place—the speaker puts a (temporary) period to his musings by revealing the wish behind his wish: I might have been a different person than the one you now see.

But we don’t see him at all; what we see is an always receding “figure” whom we proceed to chase through the many pages that follow. Early and famous reviewers (Edmund Burke, William Hazlitt, Sir Walter Scott) called Sterne’s style careless, haphazard, shifting, rambling, and conversational, “a book without plan or order” (Walter Bagehot). There were complaints that nothing quite got finished. The author, Burke observed, “perpetually digresses; or rather having no determined end in view, he runs from object to object, as they happen to strike a very lively and irregular imagination.” In the end—there is no end—“the book is a perpetual series of disappointments.” A twentieth-century commentator (Lodwick Hartley) gets the style and its effect exactly right when he asks, “Who can tolerate the person who in ordinary conversation is forever backing and filling, embroidering and elaborating, detailing and digressing in a such a way as never to get his story told?” (
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Norton Critical Edition
). Of course this is not ordinary conversation, but planned conversation designed to appear ordinary in an extraordinary way. The expectations Sterne’s prose repeatedly disappoints are the expectations that come along with a belief in a rationally ordered universe, a belief that is conveyed, even breathed, by the subordinating linear style we have seen in writers like Austen, James, Milton, Melville, and Martin Luther King Jr. In place of the unity and coherence attempted and achieved by these authors, Sterne puts “a seemingly new pattern of unity; not new but as old as humanity: the organic pattern of life” (Toby A. Olshin, in
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Norton Critical Edition
).

The organic pattern of life does not develop; it just grows, and representations of it often frustrate those who want to travel a straight line from the beginning to the middle to the end of a sentence, or of anything else. Sterne’s Tristram is well aware of his readers’ desires, and he comments on them even as he refuses to satisfy them. “I know there are readers in the world . . . who are no readers at all—who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of every thing which concerns you.” They are not readers at all because they are not trying to put things together or figure them out (two meanings of the verb “to read”); rather, they want it all to be given to them nicely tied up in a neat package. It is those (non)readers he aims to tease when he tells them what he won’t tell them: “Sir, as you and I are in a manner perfect strangers to each other, it would not have been proper to have let you into too many circumstances relating to myself all at once—you must have a little patience.” That is a straightforward sentence, but the Shandean style returns immediately, imitating what it urges:

Therefore my dear friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my first setting out—bear with me—and let me go on, and tell my story my own way—or if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road—or should sometime put on a fool’s cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along—don’t fly off—but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside—and as we jog along, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do any thing—only keep your temper.

Let me go on, he says, as he goes on, and drags us with him. The work of the sentence is done by those loose connectives “and,” “or,” and “but,” each of which signals a new turn or detour and all of which conspire to keep the reader—mockingly referred to as “my dear friend and companion”—off-balance. The message is either keep up with me or keep quiet.

J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield does not even pretend to be solicitous of his reader. His opening sentence announces that whatever the reader might want, he’s not going to get it. Holden refuses to begin at the beginning and “tell you my whole goddamn autobiography or anything.” (The dismissiveness of “or anything” is a thing of insolent beauty.)

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

The sentence lists the information it won’t provide, stringing the items it will withhold on a bead of ands—none of that and none of that and none of that either. The art of the sentence consists in its ability to convey two voices: the breathless, unrehearsed voice of the teenager and the reflective, quasi-philosophical voice of the author. When Holden throws out “lousy” he intends nothing more than a contemptuous filler (today a teenage narrator might say “f ******”), but Salinger wants to raise the questions of just what kind of childhood his young hero had. In Holden’s mind, “if you want to know the truth” is a throwaway that means “I don’t care what you want,” but Salinger is telling us that the truth of his novel will not be the
David Copperfield
kind (“To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born [as I have been informed and believe] on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night”). It will be something else, and that something else will not be revealed by dates and orderly sequences.

Catcher in the Rye
not only exhibits but is about the continuous and unpredictable stream of experience in relation to which clean, formal demarcations, either in life or in prose, are artificial impositions. Later in the book, Holden recalls why he flunked Oral Expression; he couldn’t stomach the instructor’s insistence that speakers not digress from a stated point. “The trouble with me is, I
like
it when somebody digresses,” and he illustrates his preferred style of speaking (and thinking) with the speech of a boy who got a D-plus because he said he was going to talk about his father’s farm, but then:

What he did was, Richard Kinsella, he’d
start
telling you all about that stuff—then all of a sudden he’d start telling you about this letter his mother got from his uncle, and how his uncle got polio and all when he was forty-two years old, how he wouldn’t let anybody come to see him in the hospital because he didn’t want anybody to see him with a brace on.

Richard’s style is associative, as is the style of the sentence that recalls his performance and mimes it. “Then,” “all of a sudden,” “how”—these are classic paratactic connectives; they just get you from one piece of prose to the next without insisting on the priority or superior importance of any of them. Holden pronounces the effect “
nice
” and elaborates: “It’s nice when somebody tells you about their uncle. Especially when they start out telling you about their father’s farm, and then all of a sudden get more interested in their uncle.” Just go with the flow, either in life or in writing; don’t stop to put events and objects in ordered relationships to one another.

The great modern theorist of the additive, or coordinating, style is Gertrude Stein, who explains in an amazing sentence why she doesn’t employ punctuation that carves reality into manageable units of completed and organized thought:

When I first began writing I felt that writing should go on I still do feel that it should go on but when I first began writing I was completely possessed by the necessity that writing should go on and if writing should go on what had colons and semi-colons to do with it, what had commas to do with it what had periods to do with it what had small letters and capitals to do with it to do with writing going on which was at the time the most profound need I had in connection with writing.

(
Lectures in America
, 1935)

Colons, commas, periods, and capital letters segment a reality that is continuous and made up of discrete, intensely realized moments. Immediacy, not linear reflection leading to a conclusion, is the goal here, and to reach it Stein must at once write sentences and somehow defeat the deferral of meaning—the sense of building toward a completed thought—that is the very nature of a sentence. Usually a sentence does not deliver its meaning until the end, and only at the end do its components acquire their significance and weight. But what Stein wants is meaning to be present at every instant, to be always the same in weight and yet different as each word is different. Before Flaubert and Cézanne, she explains, “composition had consisted of a central idea to which everything else was an accompaniment and separate but was not an end in itself.” But then “Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole, and it impressed me enormously,” and as a consequence, she continues, “I tried to convey the idea of each part of a composition being as important as the whole” (“A Transatlantic Interview,” 1946). Indeed, it is composition itself—arranging elements in a linear design—that is the enemy of this effort in Stein’s eyes: “Everything is the same except composition and time” (“Composition as Explanation,” 1926), that is, before composition—putting things together to form a larger whole—spoils it by relating and subordinating.