SENTENCES
Toby Litt, 17th May 2011
Let’s start, and stick pretty close to, the reading I asked you to do – Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory; the opening chapters. Why did I choose this?
No, let’s evade that for a moment – Why did I choose to talk about Sentences today? Last year, my lecture was on Sensibility – a subject that seems much vaguer. But it was one I decided hadn’t been covered by the rest of the course. I tried to ask and answer the questions, ‘What do we read writers for? What makes us love this writer rather than this other one?’ Their sensibility – that’s what’s important – their particular way of appearing, through language; their stance, within language.
I think that if you asked any of the other tutors, they would agree that the way the most promising writers on the course most clearly reveal themselves is through their obvious command of the sentence. These writers have what you might call a take on what sentences are and can do. They have a force behind what they write – a force that is the developing expression of their particular sensibility. And this, very often, can be revealed through reading just a single sentence of their work.
Conversely, the writers who are struggling elsewhere struggle most conspicuously in the sentence. Their rewriting of a story or chapter will result in something choppy, unsettled. They haven’t yet developed their sensibility; their sentences are still going in this direction, in that – falling under one influence after another.
As we I hope I’ll demonstrate, choppy, unsettled writing isn’t bad in and of itself. But the clearer you can be in your own take on sentences, the better your writing will become. (I could do something similar about paragraphs, too – but that would seem slightly more affected. Paragraphs are avoidable; sentences aren’t.)
Why did I choose The Power and the Glory? Well, because I’ve often referred to it in class, when talking about how writing on the micro level – punctuation – has to fit with that of the macro level – the story or novel as a whole. But it has been a while since I went back and closely examined it, line by line.
So, if the students who’ve heard this last term will forgive me, I’ll go over a little of what I usually say.
I had a lot of trouble getting into Graham Greene, to begin with. I was living in Prague where there was an English section to the National Library. It was quite out of date – had lots of books, for example, by Antony Powell – and so their holdings of Graham Green were almost complete. This is how it went: I would read the first page of one of his novels, be drastically unimpressed, return the copy to the library, hear again a few months later that he was worth reading, go to the library, etc.
Some of Greene’s opening are, I’d say, drastically unimpressive. This, for example, is the start of A Burnt-Out Case:
The cabin-passenger wrote in his diary a parody of Descartes: ‘I feel discomfort therefore I am alive,’ then sat with pen in hand with no more to record.
I’m not talking about whether this is an enticing opening to a novel; I think ‘I feel discomfort therefore I am alive’ is about as rubbish a parody of Descartes as one could make – it suggests, to me, that this book has been written by someone uninteresting.
A Burnt-Out Case subsequently became one of my most-reread Greene novels, and although I am sure it isn’t as good as The Power and the Glory I found it more useful for what I was writing.
The first things of Greene’s that I managed to finish, and enjoy, werehis autobiographies – A Sort of Life (1971) and Ways of Escape (1980). I liked them because they emphasized very much the role of boredom in his life – how it was partly boredom that caused him to become a writer.
I feel that very strongly, too. I began writing because, on a few particular afternoons, it was the least boring option. Greene grew up in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. I grew up in Ampthill, Bedfordshire, north of and adjacent to Hertfordshire. They are very similar no-particular-identity, got-to-get-out-of-here places; growing up there isn’t like growing up in North London or Sheffield or on the Isle of Iona. According to the AA Route Planner (classic) there are 27.7 miles of road in between Berkhamsted and Ampthill – most of it the M1 motorway.
Ways of Escape, as I remember it, contains some descriptions of the writing of The Power and the Glory. At some point, I returned to that particular opening page.
I had a conservative view of prose – I thought it should be well-written, just that. I loved symmetry in sentences, balance. There were certain things I believed. For example, with Kurt Vonnegut, I hated semi-colons. Vonnegut said:
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
(Vonnegut is so wrong here. Transvestitve hermaphrodites – quite frankly, the more of those anyone can get in their prose the better, really. And how is it possible a transvestite hermaphrodite could represent absolutely nothing? They seem to be overrepresenting, over determining, any number of things. Contradictions all the way from bottom to top, Kurt, I’m afraid. But at least it got a few laugh and scared a few nervous college kids into feeling even worse about their phoney-making educations.)
But, back in Prague, I agreed. What semicolons and colons do is make one part of a sentence lesser than another part. I thought sentences should be smoothly unbreakdownable. If they only contain a very few commas, sentences are more likely to have a feeling of polished integrity.
Also, I despised any repetition of words from sentence to sentence – the kind of thing that’s used to represent the laziness of speech. We’ll come back to this later with regard to David Foster Wallace.
Here’s an example of repetition I came across this morning – Ernest Hemingway writing in A Moveable Feast:
After Miró had painted The Farm and after James Joyce had written Ulysses they had a right to expect people to trust the further things they did even when the people did not understand them and they have both kept on working very hard.
If you have painted The Farm or if you have written Ulysses, and then keep on working very hard afterwards, you do not need an Alice B. Toklas.
This kind of thing used to drive me mad. I felt patronized, although Hemingway was doing it in the name of simplification – and of emphasizing a rhythm that’s within meaning, and of avoiding the falsity (in his opinion) of elegant variation.
Elegant variation, as I’m sure you know, is the deliberate avoidance of repeating, say, a noun in one sentence after another. One of the elements of Hemingway’s style that got imitated very often afterwards was his inelegant repetition. Because it is slightly infuriating to have the same word coming back and back, it’s a good way of building tension within a section of text.
Hemingway learnt this principally from Gertrude Stein, who is one of the world’s most deliberately infuriating writers. She has infuriated herself out of the canon – academics know she’s there, know she’s great, but don’t want to read The Making of Americans end to end.
Here’s just a little bit of Stein’s ‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso’:
If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.
Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.
This is more interesting writing than Hemingway, more infuriating, more extreme. Hemingway took it and did a pop version – then became Pop Hemingway.
Just these two things, hating sentences that aren’t all the one level and hating sentences that contain repetition – these decisions would lead quite a long way towards one particular style of writing. They imply a prose that keeps its distance from speech and from the way its subjects would clumsily express themselves. Again, I’ll come back to this.
For now, we’re ready for the opening page of The Power and the Glory:
This isn’t beautiful prose. It’s ugly. The rhythm is choppy; the style unsettled. There are two obtrusive colons in the first paragraph alone.
Let’s examine that opening sentence:
MR TENCH went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust.
It seems badly constructed in any number of ways. If you wanted a more elegant version, one that avoided the comma, you could have:
MR TENCH went out into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust to look for his ether cylinder.
But this seems to emphasize how clunky those two descriptive phrases are – ‘the blazing Mexican sun’ and ‘the bleaching dust’.
Perhaps they could be integrated into the sentence if they weren’t there, just hanging around at the sentence’s end, being descriptive. How about this? –
Out into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust came Mr Tench, looking for his ether cylinder.
They are still both a bit painful – ‘blazing Mexican sun’ because it seems to come straight out of pulp fiction, i.e.,
The tall handsome peon and the black-hatted gringo stood back to back beneath the blazing Mexican sun – ten steps, turn and fire, that’s what they’d agreed – last man standing.
‘Mexican sun’ is, it seems to me, a very cheap and cheerful way of conveying within the course of the first sentence that Mr Tench is in Mexico. By inserting Mexican between blazing and sun, it makes the cliché seem slightly less obvious. But it also raises some logical problems. Is this the blazing Mexican sun as opposed to another Mexican sun – the non-blazing Mexican sun? the gentle Mexican sun? No. So, the Mexican sun is logically always blazing when it’s shining at all. In which case, why not defer the information that this is Mexico, and just say the sun? Then, when we learn Mr Tench is in Mexico we’ll realize the sun must have been blazing.
The other phrase, by contrast, seems to be overliterary – ‘the bleaching dust’ – no, it’s not bleaching, not unless it gets into the weave of the cloth and makes it lighter in colour. It has a bleaching effect, with regard to the light and the way a fabric would look if it had become dusty. But this is always supposing that the observer was at a particular distance – too close, and they would be able to see that the fabric hadn’t been bleached but had merely become dusty. Given that Mr Tench, as he walks across the dusty ground, is likely to become bleached from the legs up; and given that any observer in the area is likely to have encountered the dust, and observed its properties; it is unlikely that anyone seeing Mr Tench with the bottoms of his trousers looking lighter in colour than the area around the thighs, would assume that he had deliberately bleached them, rather than that he had (as everyone walking on that surface does) got a bit dusty.
And so ‘bleaching’ seems to be a kind of stopgap word – a second draft word – something you’d put in there until you’ve thought of something better, more accurate.
Back again to the sentence. What’s say we do it as two sentences, for the sake of elegance:
MR TENCH went out to look for his ether cylinder. The sun blazed on the white dust beneath his feet.
That’s how a writer trying to avoid a weakly constructed sentence would do it. But Greene chose something else –
MR TENCH went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust.
It’s clear that Greene, former cinema critic for Night and Day magazine, and writer of numerous screenplays, is writing cinematically here. The comma marks a cut from interior shot, looking at Mr Tench’s back going through the door, to exterior shot of the plaza.
This would read:
INT. MR TENCH’S OFFICE. MEXICO. DAY.
A preoccupied expression on his face, Mr Tench turns and walks out of the door.
EXT. TINY PLAZA. DAY.
The sun blazes down on pale, dusty ground. As Mr Tench walks, he kicks up the dust.
Let’s move on to the next sentence:
A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet.
Here the most noticeable thing is that Greene is using an extremely literary device, the transferred epithet. It is the vultures which are shabby, not their indifference.
Here’s another example of a transferred epithet from the opening lines of T.S.Eliot’s the Waste Land:
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
The material in Greene’s sentence after the colon is emphatic (there for emphasis of what’s come before) –
A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet.
If the vultures are indifferent it is because Mr Tench is of no interest to them; what is of interest to vultures? – mainly what they can eat. Therefore the vultures aren’t interested in Mr Tench because they can’t eat him because he isn’t carrion. This is on the point of being overemphatic. You could say the first half of the sentence is Show, the second half Tell.
However, there’s something going on here. The first sentence puts us inside Mr Tench’s head: in the screenplay, we would only know he is going out to look for his ether cylinder if he said, ‘Now, where’s that bloody ether cylinder?’ or something like that. So, if the second sentence is attributed to Mr Tench’s consciousness, it becomes a little more interesting. He’s thinking, ‘I’m not carrion, not yet.’
A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr Tench’s heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering finger-nails and tossed it feebly towards them.
This sentence has two subjects, the ‘faint feeling of rebellion’ and ‘he’, Mr Tench. We lurch from one to another, via the comma. It would be more pedantic, but logically clearer, if the sentence were to read:
A feeling of rebellion towards the vultures stirred Mr Tench to wrench up a piece of the road and toss it in their direction.
But by now it should be apparent that Greene is up to something by writing in this way. As I continued to read, those years ago in Prague, I realised that Green was writing about Mexico in a deliberately dilapidated prose – because the Mexico he is describing is a delapidated country; he is also, in Mr Tench, describing a man who is falling apart. Therefore the senteces, when put under any kind of scrutiny, start to fall apart. Does this make them bad sentences? Again, I’d like to defer that question.
In avoiding writing ‘correctly’, Greene is doing something that many writers – particularly modern and post-modern writers – have done. (Not that it wasn’t a resource open to, say, Emily Bronte.)
There are other reasons for not wanting to write symmetrically, neatly, with conventional elegance.
In his Paris Review Interview (Winter 1966), Saul Bellow took the question directly:
My first two books are well made. I wrote the first quickly but took great pains with it. I labored with the second and tried to make it letter-perfect. In writing The Victim I accepted a Flaubertian standard. Not a bad standard, to be sure, but one which, in the end, I found repressive—repressive because of the circumstances of my life and because of my upbringing in Chicago as the son of immigrants. I could not, with such an instrument as I developed in the first two books, express a variety of things I knew intimately. Those books, though useful, did not give me a form in which I felt comfortable. A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously in a form that frees his mind, his energies. Why should he hobble himself with formalities? With a borrowed sensibility? With the desire to be “correct”? Why should I force myself to write like an Englishman or a contributor to The New Yorker? I soon saw that it was simply not in me to be a mandarin. I should add that for a young man in my position there were social inhibitions, too. I had good reason to fear that I would be put down as a foreigner, an interloper. It was made clear to me when I studied literature in the university that as a Jew and the son of Russian Jews I would probably never have the right feeling for Anglo-Saxon traditions, for English words. I realized even in college that the people who told me this were not necessarily disinterested friends. But they had an effect on me, nevertheless. This was something from which I had to free myself. I fought free because I had to.