Read How to Write a Sentence Online
Authors: Stanley Fish
How to Write a Sentence (9 page)
Music playing softly in the background, the smell of steaks sizzling on the grill, waiters being attentive to our every wish, oh how I remember it, no one calling or e-mailing, only the two of us drinking in each other’s eyes, she could almost taste it, loving.
The exercise is quite different from the one asking you to turn a three-word sentence into a hundred-word monster, but the principle is the same: have command of the repertoire of formal components and then build something out of it, and then do it again and again, until you can do it on demand. And as you work hard to acquire the skill, always keep beside you sentences produced by those who are virtuosi in the art.
Of course those who are virtuosi in the art aren’t just doing finger exercises, practicing scales until they can play them with eyes closed. They’ve already done that as a preliminary to writing in the service of an intention, and that intention will be substantive, a matter of content—the intention to praise or blame or reveal or complicate or exhort or rejoice or ponder or meditate or lament or anatomize or deconstruct (pardon the word) or “justify the ways of God to Man.” While formal devices are limited in number, contents are not; a book surveying or anatomizing them would go on forever (as, for example, Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
, written over many decades, threatens to). So I’m arbitrarily going to choose one kind of content to serve as a bridge between the largely formal part of this book, the how-to-write part, and the more relaxed part, the how-to-read-and-appreciate part.
I choose satire, the art in which “human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision or wit.” That is a dictionary definition, and there are more sophisticated ones available in the literature, but it will do. It places satire somewhere between direct brutal invective and mild sarcasm. Satire is less direct than the former and more cutting than the latter. It doesn’t quite come out and say what it is saying, and what it is saying is often devastating. It is a mode of writing characterized by great control of tone over the length of sentences, paragraphs, and sometimes entire volumes. Satire is obviously a content category—its content is cynicism, dyspepsia, disgust, anger—but there’s a lot of formal skill in writing satire, so our training in forms will continue.
Masters of satire and satiric wit write sentences that deliver their sting in stages; just when the reader thinks he knows what point has been made and at whose expense, the thing opens up to claim its victim or victims more intensely. Here is an example from J. L. Austin’s
How to Do Things with Words
(1962). Austin is cautioning readers not to be impatient with the slow unfolding of his argument:
And we must at all costs avoid over-simplification, which one might be tempted to call the occupational disease of philosophers if it were not their occupation.
The sentence begins with a simple statement of an imperative: avoid oversimplification. The style is serious, even sober, flat. Things get more complicated in the sentence’s second stage; the key is the relative clause “which one might be tempted.” Suddenly the stakes are higher. Before we know what the temptation is, we know that “one” should not yield to it, and we want not to be that one. When the temptation is named—to call oversimplification the disease of philosophers—we can relax, because the spotlight has been taken away from us and turned on philosophers, who must take care not to oversimplify, a fault to which they are apparently susceptible. But then we are drawn back in by the third stage, which snaps out at both readers and philosophers. Yielding to the temptation, we learn, would be wrong not because to do so would be unkind to philosophers, but because it would not be unkind enough. The phrase “occupational disease” implies a distinction between the activity of philosophizing and a hazard that sometime accompanies it; but the word “occupation” removes the distinction; oversimplifying is what philosophers do, which means that the philosopher who is now warning us against oversimplifying is probably oversimplifying at this very moment. No one escapes the sentence unscathed.
Is there a formula here? Yes. You begin with a mild, even anodyne, statement: “It’s important not to be late”; and then you add something that heightens the mood and sharpens the tone—“which is a black mark on the records of employees”—before the threat is made more explicit: “and even more so on the records of ex-employers.” Not as snappy and whiplike as Austin’s sentence, but in the ballpark.
The task of imitation would be harder, but certainly not impossible, if its object were this sentence from Oscar Wilde’s
The Critic as Artist
(1891). A speaker named Ernest is explaining why he dislikes memoirs:
They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering, which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feel perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.
Memoir writers get hit twice. First they are said to be fabricators; they don’t have any memories and they are just making them up. Or (and this is worse) they do have memories but what they remember is not worth reading about, is entirely without interest. And this, paradoxically, turns out to be their great value for the audience that is the sentence’s real object of criticism. As the sentence makes its turn, Wilde slows down the pace so that the reader is in position to receive its final two clauses. The syntactical logic requires only the “which is”; “however” and “no doubt” are there largely to allow a pause like the moment when a roller coaster is poised at the top of its arc. To be sure, they do some work; “however” signals, somewhat unnecessarily, that the sentence’s harsh judgment on memoir writing is going to be ameliorated if not reversed (in fact, it’s going to get harsher); “no doubt” tells us that we should be as certain as the speaker is about the observation he will make. This certainty of conviction is conveyed also by the word “true,” which nicely, and without fuss, dismisses the alternative explanations of the genre’s popularity; hundreds of cultural critics are thus dispatched with a casual verbal flick. Then comes the “as” clause, which reports, apparently without emotion, the damning fact about the English public, of which Wilde’s readers are presumably members. The phrase “perfectly at its ease” is perfectly deadly. On a literal level it means merely that the English public reads without undue anxiety; but this apparently neutral account of the public’s posture is at the same time an indictment of its shallowness. Anything satisfies it, especially if what it reads makes no demands on an intelligence its mediocrity does not possess. What an economy of venom and disdain! (There is more economy, equal venom, but less subtlety in a sentence from Wilde’s essay “The Decay of Lying” [1889] that makes a similar point: “Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.”)
The trick in writing sentences like these is to open with a deadpan observation that gives no clue to the nasty turn the performance will soon take. You don’t have to be an Austin or a Wilde to do it. Here is a quite nice specimen from Lee Server’s biography of Ava Gardner,
Ava Gardner: “Love Is Nothing”
(2006). Server is relating the courtship (if that is the word) of the earth goddess from North Carolina by Artie Shaw, the much-married and fiercely intellectual Jewish clarinet player (their coupling was an earlier version of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe). The basis of the relationship was that he talked and she listened:
One evening, in the middle of a discussion of the mathematics of Chopin or nuclear fusion or something, he had looked at her and abruptly told her that she was in all ways the most perfect woman he had ever met and further that he would marry her in a minute if he hadn’t already done that too many times, which in its perfectly Shavian way contained at the same time a boast (“Artie Shaw took it for granted that everyone was panting to marry Artie Shaw”), a put-down (he didn’t think enough of her to marry her), and a great compliment (he spoke as a connoisseur of perfect women).
The sentence goes off its initially quiet rails with the phrase “or something,” which is at once a tribute to the breadth of Shaw’s knowledge—there were a million other things he could have discoursed on—and a hit at his compulsion to display it. “[A]bruptly” tells its own story: Shaw doesn’t bother with any preliminaries; the shift from seminar mode to compliment (kind of ) mode is instantaneous. Chopin’s perfection and Gardner’s share the same category: glories Artie Shaw is able to appreciate. He also manages, as Server observes, to turn a confession (I’ve been married too many times) into a self-advertisement. Had the sentence stopped with “times,” it would have been quite a piece of work, but Server gives it a second act by turning the spotlight on himself and his analytical abilities. He explicates his own reporting of a moment of which he alone seems to be the source (was he there?) and, in a series of parenthetical interruptions that slow things down so that we can watch him, he explicates his own explication, lest the reader be without his authoritative direction for even a moment. Artie Shaw has nothing on him.
Server’s sentence, like Austin’s and Wilde’s, foregrounds the mechanics by which it launches its multidirected missiles; we are given time to see and appreciate what’s happening. But a supreme sentence in the mode, written by Jonathan Swift (the English are particularly good at this), affords no such easy handles. It is, if you will pardon a very bad pun, all too swift:
Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.
This famous sentence from the ninth section of
A Tale of a Tub
(1704) follows Swift’s observation that “in most corporeal beings, which have fallen under my cognizance, the
Outside
hath been infinitely preferable to the
In
.” Our sentence is offered as proof of this pronouncement. The power of the sentence comes from the disparity between its surface tone—calm, detached—and the horror beneath it. The sentence is itself an emblem of the lesson it teaches. “Last week I saw a woman” is perfectly conversational. We’ve all seen a woman, haven’t we? That is the question the sentence proceeds to answer, first with the bombshell word “flayed,” which would seem to disturb, if not destroy, the flat-footedness of “Last week I saw.” But the disturbance is not registered by the speaker, who strolls right past it to express an incredulity he assumes the reader will share. By saying “
you
will hardly believe,” the speaker puts his arm around the reader’s shoulder and claims him as someone who sees things as he does. What they are both said to see and hardly believe is a woman whose “person” has been altered by having had her skin removed. The effect of this deadpan, clinical response to a surgical dissection depends on the ambiguity of “person,” which can refer either to someone’s outside (he hid it on his person) or to someone’s interior qualities (what kind of person is she?). For the speaker, there is no disjunction between the two; the person
is
his or her surface, and if this is so, the removing of one surface should reveal another equally pleasing, and then another, until there remain no layers to peel off. He is surprised, and expects us to be too, when the removal of the surface—of the appearances of things—reveals something disagreeable beneath. The moral of the incident for him is the one he began with. Stay on the surface, don’t look into things too closely, be content with “the Superficies,” and you will be rewarded with “the sublime and refined point of felicity, called the
Possession
of being well deceived
; the serene peaceful state of being a fool among knaves.” This is the state into which we are invited by the sentence, and the measure of our resistance—the extent to which we recoil from the speaker’s awful equanimity and refuse to become fools or knaves—is the measure of Swift’s satiric success.
The form Swift deploys is fairly simple. Put together two mildly affirmed assertions, the second of which reacts to the first in a way that is absurdly inadequate: “This morning I awoke after twenty minutes of sleep and it is amazing how tired I was.” “Last night I ate six whole pizzas and you would hardly believe how sick I was.” “Yesterday I saw a man electrocuted and it really was surprising how quiet he became.” Why are these imitations so lame, aside from the fact that I, not Swift, wrote them? It is because nothing is at stake; their subject matter is trivial; there is nothing behind them; they are little more than a trick. Swift’s sentence is certainly a trick, but it is dead serious; and behind it is a constellation of concerns about the Church, sectarian disputes, politics, education, literature, the ancients and the moderns, and much more. I know I said at the beginning of this book that it is not the thought that counts; but of course it is, ultimately. The forms on which I have placed so much ( justifiable) emphasis are there for a reason they do not themselves point to; they are there for the elaboration, illumination, and powerful expression of content.
This is obviously true of first sentences. If I say to you, “Go write a first sentence,” you will say, “A first sentence of what?” The category of first sentence makes sense only if it is looking forward to the development of thematic concerns it perhaps only dimly foreshadows. First sentences know all about the sentences that will follow them and are in a sense last sentences (a separate category we shall get to soon). First sentences have what I call “an angle of lean”; they lean forward, inclining in the direction of the elaborations they anticipate. First sentences thus
have content in prospect
, and because they do, “first sentence” is at once a formal category and a category of substance; its members cannot stand alone, and we cannot read them, as we have read some of the sentences we have encountered, as self-contained, formal artifacts. Even the simplest first sentence is on its toes, beckoning us to the next sentence and the next and the next, promising us insights, complications, crises, and, sometimes, resolutions. There can be no formula for writing a first sentence, for the promise it holds out is unique to the imagined world it introduces, and of imagined worlds there is no end. From here on in there will be no more exercises in imitation. How can you imitate a sentence’s opening out to all that lies before it?
Here is a quiet yet pregnant first sentence by Agatha Christie, the grande dame of mystery writers, known to her peers as the Queen of Crime:
In the afternoons it was the custom of Miss Jane Marple to unfold her second newspaper.
(
Nemesis
, 1971)
The sentence seems simple; but in fact it communicates a surprising amount of information (and more) in its brief space. Even before we meet Christie’s detective-heroine, Miss Marple, we know a great deal about her. She has a routine, she follows it, and it occurs daily. Indeed, it is more than a routine. It is a custom, a word that suggests tradition, duration, and an obligatory practice tied to social and class norms. (These suggestions are enhanced by the slow progress of her full title, “Miss Jane Marple.”) Moreover, one senses that “custom” is not for her a thing easily trifled with. Her customs, we intuit, are methodically, even ritualistically observed. We know this from the word “unfold”; unfolding is so much more formal than opening; merely opening a newspaper, in any which way, would seem indecorous and overhasty to her. As she unfolds it, she can take its contents in the order in which they are given, from the important news of the front page to the (to her) equally important news of the obituary page. The word that sets the seal on this mini-portrait is “second.” The word is casually delivered, but because it comes late and constitutes a small surprise—it tells us that this is part two of her custom, something we hadn’t been expecting—it calls attention to itself and to its message: Miss Marple is not content with one source of information; she has to know everything. And she will know everything. You wouldn’t want to be someone who has something to hide.
Elmore Leonard’s
Gold Coast
(1980) opens not with something hidden, but with something revealed:
One day Karen DeCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca.
Karen is a detective too, but we can’t imagine her searching the
London Times
for information and clues; if she has “put a few observations together,” it is probably by looking in pants pockets or checking the mileage of a car. The sentence that introduces Karen to us is distinguished by its speed. We aren’t told what the “few observations” are or how she added them up; the “realization” comes quickly, in rapid bursts of information with no break between them (the acceleration of pace is furthered by the absence of a “that” between “realized” and “her”): husband, infidelity, woman. But not just any woman: “a real estate woman from Boca.” A real estate woman is a southern Florida type often portrayed as blond, brittle, driven by avarice, a dime a dozen (this is of course a literary caricature, not a literal description). For Karen, the fact that such a woman is her husband’s paramour is both infuriating and comforting; this is nothing serious and something she can take care of.
Both Christie’s and Leonard’s first sentences illustrate what I mean by the “angle of lean.” Their sentences lean forward and point to future, if presently inchoate, vistas; they draw readers in and equip them with quite specific expectations. We know that Jane Marple will find something in her second newspaper of the day and that, whatever it is, she will follow through on it. And we know that Karen DeCilia will soon do something about what she has discovered. (What she does is figure out where her husband and the real estate woman are meeting; she then goes there and rams his Cadillac with the twin Cadillac he had bought her; a short time later, he buys two new ones; he knows the price of things.)
Our expectations are less specific after reading the first sentence of Philip Roth’s
Goodbye, Columbus
(1959), but nevertheless they are strong:
The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses.
The economy of this is marvelous. “The first time I saw” is a narrative cliché; it is often followed by something romantic, like “The first time I saw her my breath was taken away” or “The first time I saw her I couldn’t stop staring.” (Working against expectations is something skilled writers often do; it gives them two for one, the assertion they deliver and the one a reader may have been anticipating.) But before Neil (or the reader) knows it, Brenda has taken the sentence over and has also taken the “first time” away from the speaker, who is just someone who can perform an immediate, and minor, service. Despite having the form of a request, “she asked me” does not suggest the possibility of refusal. The fact that she has never seen him before—this is her “first time” too—doesn’t matter; he’s a boy of a certain age and the assumption, confirmed in the event, is that he will do anything she desires, without either question or demurrer. That is all we know, but it is enough. The relationship between the two has been set—he aspires; she lets him, as long as it pleases her—and the story can now unfold in its tragicomic arc toward the narrator’s inevitable disappointment. It’s all there in the first sentence.
Leonard Michaels was a contemporary of Roth’s (both were born in 1933), and was often compared to him as a chronicler of Jewish anxieties. Michaels’s first sentences explode off the page. Here is the opening of his short story “Honeymoon” (2000):
One summer, at a honeymoon resort in the Catskill mountains, I saw a young woman named Sheila Kahn fall in love with her waiter.
The setup is leisurely, each detail of it setting the stage for the punch line. “One summer,” in short nothing special; “ . . . at a honeymoon resort in the Catskill mountains”; yes, there are, or used to be, plenty of those; “I saw a young woman,” a honeymooner we assume, and a Jewish one by her name. Again, all to be expected. And then the cliff the sentence steps off: “fall in love with her waiter.” That is, the speaker saw her do something wholly at odds with her situation—she had been married, we discover, “a few hours earlier in the city”—saw her perform an act of social indecorum; teenage girls, not just-married women, are supposed to fall in love with waiters in the Catskills. How did it happen? What happened next? Who is the speaker and what is his relation to the event? How does it turn out? The sentence propels us into the story, where we find out all this and more.
Another of Michaels’s first sentences breathes menace:
Twenty were jammed together on the stoop, tiers of heads made one central head, and the wings rested along the banisters, a raggedy monster of boys studying her approach.
(“The Deal,” 1969)
The sentence works by giving and withholding information at the same time. Twenty what? By not telling us at first, Michaels has us waiting for a picture to be filled in, and it is, slowly. “[O]n the stoop” locates the twenty in space but still doesn’t tell us what they are. That (small) mystery is solved by the phrase “tiers of heads,” which is more than a little macabre, a suggestion of gargoyles and griffins reinforced when we are told that the apparently disembodied heads formed one giant head. It takes a second to realize that the wings resting along the banisters are arms, but wings remains the image in our minds and completes the portrait of some kind of monster, which is then precisely named: “a raggedy monster of boys.” The last piece—“studying her approach”—comes quickly. What lingers is the participle “studying,” an action so much more threatening than “watching” or “observing.” Studying means calculating as a preliminary to action, and we can only guess (with some anxiety) what that action is going to be. (It turns out to be more complicated and terrifying than anything we imagine.)
In Michaels’s world, danger and threat are everywhere, and they materialize with swift force in the first sentence of “Isaac” (1969):
Talmudic scholar, master of Cabala, Isaac felt vulnerable to a thousand misfortunes in New York, slipped on an icy street, lay on his back, and wouldn’t reach for his hat.
Isaac’s credentials are given in modifying phrases of honor (“Talmudic scholar, master of Cabala”) before he is named, as if to shore him up against disaster. It is not enough. The sentence’s form cannot keep back the vulnerability it immediately names. Vulnerability is not a discrete state, but an ongoing one; it travels with Isaac and asserts its power over him when he least expects it. That is why he does not fall but slips, loses his footing in a manner at once accidental and unpreventable; what can you do? His slipping does not have stages; as fast as the slight pause after a comma, he is on his back; and that’s just what he expects, and because he expects it, he does nothing, not even reach for his hat, for that is going to be lost somehow, isn’t it? The word “wouldn’t” indicates his refusal to entertain any hope of a reprieve, however slight, from the rain of misfortune he immediately accepts. A man who believes that a bad fate can be avoided or at least ameliorated would have reached, but not Isaac. He knows.
As we can see from the examples surveyed so far, first sentences are marked by compression; they do a lot of work in a short time. (“Call me Ishmael,”
Moby-Dick
; “It was love at first sight,”
Catch-22
). Sometimes, as in the first sentences by Christie, Leonard, Roth, and Michaels, they perform their function of looking forward and pulling readers in by hinting at plot and character, both of which then await development. These sentences are narrative in mode; they begin to tell a story, and we want to hear the rest of it. In other first sentences the job of setting things up is done not by narrative, but by mood, metaphor, and imagery. Here is the first sentence of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
(1850):
A throng of bearded men, in sad colored garments, and grey steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
There is an event here (or at least one anticipated) and human actors, but the work of the sentence is done by colors and textures arranged in a series of descriptive clauses leading to a passive action—“was assembled.” The men are seen simply as beards—their faces are obscured—and as beards dressed in somber, that is, “sad” hues (“sad” also has its connotations of doleful, melancholy, desolate). These beards also wear gray pointed hats, hats that point away from the faces we do not see. There are women too, who for a moment promise to soften the scene and give it color; but they are described as hooded; we don’t see their faces either. What we do see is a dark, heavy (“timbered”) door that has the attributes of a weapon: “studded with iron spikes.” In a scene crowded with human figures, the door is the most aggressive actor. Rather than being a portal through which one might walk, this door opens outward in a posture of threat. Its spikes are aimed at us. No one, we might think, would want to live here, and we would be right.
In Hawthorne’s sentence, human actors are present, but agency is given over to somber colors and to a door. In the first sentence of D. H. Lawrence’s “Tickets, Please” (1919), agency is given to a piece of machinery. Nevertheless, the sense of narrative is strong. How is this managed?
There is in the Midlands a single-line tramway system which boldly leaves the country town and plunges off into the black, industrial countryside, up hill and down dale, through the long ugly villages of workmen’s houses, over canals and railways, past churches perched high and nobly over the smoke and shadows, through stark, grimy cold little market-places, tilting away in a rush past cinemas and shops down to the hollow where the collieries are, then up again, past a little rural church, under the ash trees, on in a rush to the terminus, the last little ugly place of industry, the cold little town that shivers on the edge of the wild, gloomy country beyond.
Here there are no human actors at all (they are presumably in the ugly villages, small houses, and picturesque churches); there’s just the tramcar, which has a personality of its own. At first that personality is vigorous and adventurous; the tram moves “boldly” and it “plunges.” At this stage in the sentence, the word “black”—“black, industrial countryside”—seems merely descriptive, but as the tram proceeds on its way the mood begins to darken with the first appearance of the word “ugly.” The next two clauses—“over canals and railroads, past churches perched high and nobly”—seem to deliver a more benign landscape, until we learn that what the churches perch over are smoke and shadows; no sunlit fields here, and the “nobility” attributed to the churches seems more like a lofty distance from the meager lives of the parishioners. As both the tram and the sentence accelerate, so does the number of somber, even depressing, words: “stark,” “grimy,” “cold,” “ugly” “cold” again, “shivers,” “gloomy.” It is a feature of the sentence that words and objects that appear early on reappear in its second half. So we hear twice about “town” and “country” and things that are “cold” and “little,” and twice we encounter a church that suggests (but only momentarily) a lighter and brighter vision of things; but the tram leaves the second church behind in a rush. What it rushes to we don’t know—it is “beyond”—but we do know that it is ugly, wild, and gloomy. And the story, when it unfolds, bears this out.