How to Write a Sentence (8 page)

At the first reading, the useful meaning, the surface meaning, is conveyed; but soon, as we sit looking at the words, they shuffle, they change; and we begin saying, “Windows, yes windows—casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.” And before we know what we are doing, we have leant out of the window; we are looking for Ruth in tears amid the alien corn.

From the physical fact of the window to a Keats poem to the Bible: leaps of intuition and association without causal links. Or, she continues, take the sign “Passing Russell Square”; repeat the words like mantras and their “sunken meanings” surface:

The word “passing” suggested the transience of things, the passing of time and the changes of human life. Then the word “Russell” suggested the rustling of leaves and the skirt on the polished floor; also the ducal house of Bedford and half the history of England. Finally the word “Square” brings in the sight, the shape of an actual square combined with some visual suggestion of the stark angularity of stucco. Thus one sentence of the simplest kind rouses the imagination, the memory, the eye and the ear—all combine in reading it.

And so it is with Woolf’s own writing, which corresponds precisely to her description of the nature of words. They have, she says, a “need of change . . . because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that.”

In the loose but finely controlled style of which Woolf is a master, the words can flash in and out of time frames and even flash from speaker to speaker as one consciousness gives way to another, without warning or editorial direction. This is what is usually called stream of consciousness, a term often used to describe Woolf’s prose. Here is an account of it by the great critic Erich Auerbach. Woolf, he observes, attempts “to render the flow and the play of consciousness adrift in the current of changing impressions” (
Mimesis
, 1946). She has reversed the usual relationship between interior events and narrative events, where the former has always been subordinate to the latter and where inner thoughts comment on or prepare the ground for the movement of plot. But, “in Virginia Woolf’s case,” Auerbach explains, “the external events have lost their hegemony, they serve to release and interpret inner events.”

Here, for example, is Mrs. Dalloway, walking toward Bond Street in London and thinking about her inevitable demise:

Did it matter then, she asked herself, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.

(1925)

Is this a sentence? It doesn’t have a beginning, middle, or end, and as you read it you can’t chart its progress toward a designed close. Who says “she was positive”? Is it Mrs. Dalloway, declaring her certainty to herself ? Is it Woolf, standing outside her character and pronouncing authoritatively on Mrs. Dalloway’s inner state? The questions are unanswerable, for as Auerbach observes, “we are given not merely one person whose consciousness . . . is rendered, but many persons, with frequent”—and, I would add, unannounced—“shifts from one to the other.” For a second, when “Did it matter then” is followed by “she asked herself,” we seem to be in the company of a conventional narrator-novelist who reports the speech of her character. But then “did it matter” is repeated, and it is clear that what we’re hearing is a musing. The perspective now ruling is an interior one; even though the third-person pronoun “she” carries the train of thought along, we sense that this is merely her form of self-reference. A sequence like “she survived, Peter survived” shows how it is done. “She survived” might be spoken by a narrator, but “Peter survived” is obviously uttered by someone who shares an intimacy with him; we cannot believe that the observation is made at a distance, by a third person, but then again, “lived in each other” seems to belong at once to Mrs. Dalloway and to her creator.

As the sentence continues, Mrs. Dalloway shares an intimacy not only with Peter but with everything—a house, trees, people, mist, branches—all of which “ebb and flow” with her and through her. Everything enters her, and she enters everything. Near its end the sentence names the action it is imitating; it spreads; she spreads, “ever so far, her life, herself.” Formally, the sentence is fragmentary; no, it
is
fragments, held together barely by a soft “but,” which is more like an “and,” many participles, many ofs, all tumbling forward, all jumbled up, yet unified somehow by her consciousness, streaming, variegated, and always the same. An anonymous critic for the
Glasgow Herald
in 1927 got it just right: “Mrs. Woolf never for a moment becomes the detached observer of the world which she is creating; therefore her people are entirely real without ever being tangible.” Inhabited, as it were, from the inside, Mrs. Dalloway receives no description of the usual novelistic kind, and yet, as a result of sentences like this one, the reader knows her better than if five paragraphs full of details and adjectives had been devoted to her.

Common sense might suggest that the loose, coordinating/non-subordinating style Woolf excels in is easier to manage than a style that requires the building of architectonic structures where words and phrases serve as foundations, stairways, bridges, basements, attics, and trusses, and the exertion and strain of control are felt at all times. But while the logic of subordination is demanding, it is also comforting precisely because of its demands. If the requirement is that every word or phrase you write must take its place in an unfolding design, that requirement is both a constraint and a guide; it gives you something to test yourself against. Have I gone off the track? Are some of my words and phrases operating in some alternative verbal universe? Are they striking off on their own, floating freely and untethered to any grammatical ground?

But that experience—of being free-floating, in flight, on the wing, not tied down—is precisely what the additive style is trying to achieve, although “achieve” may not quite be the right word, because, in the art practiced by Woolf, effects seem not to be achieved, produced after arduous labor; they just—or so is the desired impression—emerge. So if you are testing yourself against anything, it is the danger of looking as if you were trying too hard to be the kind of writer whose labors show. Although it might seem as if writing in the additive style is just a matter of putting one thing after another in no particular order (how can that be hard?), it is in fact the more difficult style to master; for the relative absence of formal constraints means that there are no rules or recipes for what to do because there are no rule or recipes for what not to do. (Remember “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room”; they do fine because of, not despite, being confined in a narrow space.) But that itself is a rule of a (negative) kind; don’t forge bolted-down connections, don’t put everything in its one and proper place, don’t maintain a consistent time frame, don’t sustain the integrity of the speaker’s voice, don’t make things clear. Before you can follow these “rules,” which amount to the flouting of the decorums of hypotactic prose, you must first master those decorums; you can’t depart from something with confidence unless you are fully practiced in the something you are departing from. Behind every paratactic, additive, associative sentence—even the ones written by masters like Woolf and Stein—is the subordinating, tightly designed, and controlled sentence that is
not
at the moment being written. You have to know how to write “do not lean out of the window” before you can riff on it. The answer to the question raised a while back—Are sentences written at the furthest reaches of the additive style really sentences?—is yes; they are sentences in which the logical structure of components firmly tied to one another is self-consciously relaxed. (Whew! Formalism saved again.)

How do you learn to write sentences like that? Not by trying to imitate Stein and Woolf. You need training wheels. There are writers less experimental and more conventional (in a good sense) who might serve as beginning models, not because they are un-artful or simple, but because their artfulness is (relatively) accessible and therefore available for imitation. Here is a sentence in the additive style by a truly great novelist, from what he himself considered his finest novel. The novelist is Ford Madox Ford (friend and publisher of Stein and Hemingway), and in this scene from
The Good Soldier
(1927), a man and a girl sit on a bench amid trees, unaware that a jealous woman is spying on them:

Anyhow, there you have the picture, the immensely tall trees, elms most of them, towering and feathering away up into the black mistiness that trees seem to gather about them at night, the silhouettes of those two upon the seat, the beams of light coming from the casino, the woman all in black peeping with fear behind the tree trunk.

The reader is told in advance what is going to happen: the words will paint a picture, adding detail to detail. At first the picture is sketchy, even imprecise; we just see “immensely tall trees,” and then the trees are given a name, but not all of them. Ford wants the scene to be more suggestive than photographic, and so the trees he gives us are less and less in focus and they recede as we look upward at their “towering.” “[F]eathering away up” is a stroke of genius; it describes by making its object more indistinct and more distant. By the time it arrives, “the mistiness” attributed to the trees as something they attract and somehow produce (“the mistiness that trees seem to gather about them at night”) is spreading over the entire picture; it extends to the two sitting on the bench, who are seen in silhouette because the light emanates from a distant source (from the casino). What exactly is happening? We strain to see, and our straining has its counterpart in the sentence where a woman in black—impossible to see in the mistiness—is “peeping,” that is, prying and spying as we are, a stance that would seem to bear a threat until we realize that what she can’t quite see is a threat to her, for she peeps “with fear.”

The economy of the sentence—it packs so much in—is remarkable; the apparent ease of it is deceptive. But we can at least imitate Ford’s form even if we cannot approach his achievement. Begin with a scene you might want to portray, say, a cocktail party in June, and then choose the first detail: “the agitated conversations”; which can then be filled in a bit, but just a bit: “mostly on politics”; and then comes the first present participle: “ebbing and flowing in intensity with passions surprising to those who voiced them.” Now return to a static mode of description: “the music in the background incongruously soft and light”; and then put in the reader’s surrogate observer: “the children listening in shadows on the staircase wondering who these people, so familiar to them as parents, uncles, doctors, and shopkeepers every day, could possibly be.” Or, in sum:

The agitated conversations, mostly on politics, ebbing and flowing in intensity with passions surprising to those who voiced them, the music in the background incongruously soft and light, the children listening in shadows on the staircase wondering who these people, so familiar to them as parents, uncles, doctors, and shopkeepers, could possibly be.

As always, it is a matter of identifying the form: here a succession of phrases strung together in the mode of apposition—each presenting itself as an equivalent of or an addition to what precedes it—with no attempt to subordinate one to another. As with the other exercises we have entertained, you can do this forever, and when it comes time to do it for real—to put this style in the service of a point you passionately want to make or an idea you want to champion—you will be ready.

If Ford is a bit daunting, here is a sentence in the additive style from a high-level thriller,
The Likeness
(2007), by Tana French. French’s protagonist-narrator is living with four housemates in a scene of heightened emotional intimacy. She is summing up their life together:

Cherry blossom falling soft on the drive, quiet smell of old books, firelight sparkling on snow-crystalled windowpanes at Christmastime and nothing would ever change, only the five of us moving through this walled garden, neverending.

Phrases powered by present participles (“falling,” “sparkling,” “moving”) succeed one another to create the still but moving picture this style is so good at. Halfway through, the sentence comments explicitly on the message its form has been delivering—“nothing would ever change”—before continuing on to a final participle, “neverending,” which names the impossible aspiration of both the prose and the speaker. Pretty good, and again, it can be imitated. Just imagine a scene of contentment and repose, say, sitting in a restaurant after a hard day’s work, and then string together a few participial phrases: “Music playing softly in the background, the smell of steaks sizzling on the grill, waiters being attentive to our every wish”; sum up the essence of the pleasure: “and no one calling or e-mailing”; and then finish it: “only the two of us drinking in each other’s eyes”; finally the word that names and extends the moment: “loving.” Now play with it a little by inserting a meta-comment after “wish”: “oh how I remember it”; and stick in a quick shift in tense and narrative mode: “she could almost taste it”; and, behold, you have something that is at least gesturing in the direction of Ford territory: