Style: Nutriment, not Condiment

We’d meet in his Greenwich Village apartment, a creaky duplex across the street from the Jefferson Market. During prohibition it had been a speakeasy; the Judas window was still there. An oval recess in the ceiling commemorated the existence of a small stage. We’d sit side by side at his long dining room table walled in by books. Except where a set of tall drafty windows (whose sills his wife, Nancy, had adorned with cobalt bottles) faced Sixth Avenue every inch of the place, from its warped floorboards to its stamped tin ceiling, groaned with books.

Armed with his Mont Blanc fountain pen, my mentor slashed through my sentences, slathering them with ink, making me read first my version and then his, to see that his was superior. For eighteen months we did this, until I bridled at my mentor’s “improvements.” By then it didn’t matter; I’d learned what he had to teach me: Never allow a dead, sawdusty, or droopy sentence, a sentence not worth reading twice.

In those eighteen months, thanks to Donald Newlove,⁴² I became the next best thing to a poet: I became a stylist.

95}HAUGHTY HOBOS
& HAIRY CASSOULETS

Style is nutriment, not condiment: not the ketchup, mustard, or gravy of good writing, but, as much as subject, the meat and potatoes. Structure, substance, style … except for purposes of discussion, none of these elements can truly be separated from the others. When you can see the cracks, you need to worry.

For example, reading a story about a hobo, told in first person (or even close third), I stop short on encountering words like “complacency,” “obliterating,” and “mandatory.” Unless the hobo is a Rhodes scholar with an inflated vocabulary, the choice of language needs to be examined—especially if the same narrator also uses words like “ain’t,” “golly,” and “shucks.”

Half of a good style is consistency; the other half is modesty.

Cleverness for its own sake kills.

Take the following sentence from a story submitted recently to Alimentum, a journal of creative writing relating to food: “There are hardly any, though possibly a few, hairs in my cassoulet. I don’t notice. I take them to be feathers from the duck.” At first the sentence seems to make sense. But on closer examination there are at least three contradictions here. Are there hairs in the cassoulet, or not? Are they noticed, or not? Or does the narrator see duck hairs? At the altar of cuteness the author sacrificed meaning and precision. I confess I didn’t finish reading.

Even Nabokov, who could do almost anything with words, knew that to justify the verbal and intellectual pyrotechnics of Lolita he had to make Humbert Humbert, his narrator/protagonist, a hypercultivated, highly articulate man, and so he did. This gave him carte blanche to do as he pleased with the English language,⁴³ provided he did it well—and he does, very.

As for Melville’s Ishmael, you might think there is no excuse for a tramp seaman’s lancing us with Biblical prose. But Melville’s masterpiece is consistently incredible and excessive. Melville doesn’t just break all the rules, he breaks them constantly, flagrantly, in great bursts of rhetorical brio.

Saul Bellow is equally daring with diction in this passage from Herzog, where the title character watches his lover apply her makeup:

First she spread a layer of cream on her cheeks, rubbing it into the straight nose, her childish chin and soft throat. It was gray, pearly bluish stuff. That was the base. She fanned it with a towel. Over this she laid the makeup. She worked it in with cotton swabs, under the hairline, about the eyes, up the cheeks and on the throat. Despite the soft rings of feminine flesh, there was already something discernibly dictatorial about that extended throat. She would not let Herzog caress her face downward—it was bad for the muscles. Seated, watching, on the edge of the luxurious tub, he put on his pants, tucked in his shirt. She took no notice of him; she was trying in some way to be rid of him as her daytime life began.

Though Bellow does it so casually and confidently that we may not even notice at first, the above paragraph holds no fewer than a half dozen shifts in diction. The first sentence is neutral, its tone neither formal nor informal. But “bluish stuff ” drops us firmly in colloquial territory. Then we get three more neutral or plainspoken sentences, each short, creating a staccato effect, as of a recipe or grammar school primer: See Spot run. In the next sentence, via multiple subordinate clauses, Bellow ratchets his voice higher, but only slightly. But with sentence seven he vaults fully into formal diction, starting with the word “despite” and arriving at the summit of pomposity with “discernibly dictatorial.” From that haughty zenith Bellow has nowhere to go but down, and down he drops, to “bad for the muscles,” another colloquialism. From there, the passage reverts to its plainspoken style—as if, having tolerated Herzog’s highbrow presence for as long as possible, his now fully made-up mistress has worked him and his bombastic vocabulary out of her system.

Proof that, with fiction, you can do almost anything, provided you do it with purpose, conviction, and confidence.