Worth Reading Twice:
Pedestrian vs. Poetic

“Words, he said, have a certain value in the literary tradition and a certain value in the market-place—a debased value.”

—JAMES JOYCE, Stephen Hero⁴⁶

“Unconscious action leads to style, conscious action to mannerism.”

—MAX J. FRIEDLANDER

98}HOW THE GAME IS PLAYED:
WHY SHAKESPEARE DRIBBLES

Style is substance. In good, durable writing, no dichotomy between the two exists. To last, writing must withstand numerous readings with little or no diminishment of pleasure. If the style is good enough, each fresh encounter between text and reader will bring greater pleasure than the last.

Without a great style there can be no great art. The subject of art is, in part, its style: how what is said (or painted or danced or photographed or filmed) has been said. There are invisible styles and styles that call attention to themselves; styles that go down like water and others that taste like whisky, wine, molasses, or motor oil.

The poet claims he doesn’t “capture” feelings. Rather he builds with words monuments to commemorate them. Fiction works similarly. Do we create experience? Do we “capture” it? No: We, too, build monuments of words, though our monuments commemorate characters and scenes. And if they are to last, our monuments must be made of something durable—a strong style.

Except for its style, the content of most works of fiction can be successfully conveyed by other means, by movies and television, media that have indeed stolen much of fiction’s fire. Who needs fiction, anyway? With such slick and dazzling media at our disposal, why bother with plain, old-fashioned words? Why work with a medium so challenging—for both writers and readers?

I’m reminded of an undergraduate’s complaint about Shakespeare: “Why does he make everything so hard? Why can’t he just say things straight?”

I asked the student if he ever played basketball. He did.

“Do you dribble?” I asked.

He squinted at me. Of course he dribbled. Everyone dribbles.

“Why? Why don’t you just walk down the court with the ball?”

“That’s not how the game is played.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Because—it’d be too easy. It wouldn’t be any fun.”

The rules to basketball are fairly straightforward; the rules of style aren’t. While there’s no arguing with someone else’s style, we can choose not to put up with it—just as you may choose not to put up with some of the advice that follows.

 

99}WORDS INTO MUSIC: WHAT WRITERS
CAN GIVE PEOPLE THAT MOVIES CAN’T

If books merely convey plots and characters, why, in the age of cinema, read a book? What can books give us that movies can’t?

In two words: beautiful writing.

Screenplays can be brilliant, but language isn’t their medium. The language of a story or novel is the point.

Here’s something movies can’t do:

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

So the beginning of this was a woman and she had come back from burying the dead. Not the dead of sick and ailing with friends at the pillow and the feet. She had come back from the sodden and the bloated; the sudden dead, their eyes flung wide open in judgment.

With these opening words of her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston strikes deep into the heart of what fiction does best: language. Prose poetry. This language doesn’t just reconstitute itself in the mind as images, plot, and characters; like music it imbues us with feelings.

But Hurston soon gets down to telling her story. This opening prose poem is merely appetizer.

Like many a great opener, this one tells us, from the start, that whatever else the forthcoming tale is about, it will be also be about the power and beauty of words.

100}INDELIBLE SENTENCES:
SIGNATURE STYLES

However we define style, who doesn’t want to be known for hers? What aspiring author doesn’t dream of producing prose so distinct readers can identify her from one or two indelible sentences?

Even among the most celebrated, very few writers achieve that standard. How many of the following quotes can you link to their authors?

1. “Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.”

2. “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

3. “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”

4. “With two thousand years of Christianity behind him ... a man can’t see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end.”

5. “In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it anymore.”

6. “We had to empty our pockets; they were after knives and matches and such objects of harm.”

7. “Sunday is always a bad day. A sort of gray purgatory that resembles a bus station with broken vending machines.”

8. “I don’t like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.”

9. “A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

10. “The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”⁴⁷

Unlike the so-called graffiti “artist” who sprays his indecipherable scrawl on the tenement wall, the first wish of those who wrote the sentences above wasn’t to call attention to their style, but to communicate clearly. Unconscious action leads to style, conscious action to mannerism.

The great character archetypes of literature—Emma Bovary and Leopold Bloom and Raskolnikov—resulted not from their authors’ desire to create archetypes, but from their desire to create authentic individuals. Similarly, great style tends to be a result, not a cause.

Style happens while we attend to other, more important matters.

 

101}ENGAGING THE
SYMPATHETIC IMAGINATION

When I say “communicate clearly,” I’m not being very clear.

Communicate what? Do I simply mean information: who, what, where, when? Newspapers give us this. But a work of literary art must create a fictional world; it engages not just the brain’s cognitive functions, but a higher organ: the sympathetic imagination.⁴⁸

And this is where style begins to assert itself.

Until the reader surrenders to his imagination, he will not enter the world of a story. If he does not, the blame falls not on the reader but squarely on the writer. Every stylistic glitch or blip, every unnecessary or jarring word, every misplaced punctuation mark, unintentional rhyme, or alliteration, every droning or backwards sentence—anything that draws the reader out of the story to strand him on a shallow sandbar of mere words—undermines the fictional experience.

This is why writers, good ones, study poetry. Not to compete with poets in their prose, but to learn from poets how to use language— not just efficiently, but perfectly.

102}A RESORT IN THE LAURENTIANS:
POETIC VS. PEDESTRIAN PROSE

When I speak of poetic prose, I don’t mean purple prose. Purple prose is bad poetry —overly rich; it’s corned beef hash with gravy.

Poetic prose is prose tempered by poetry, as in this passage from “Maedele” by Gabriella Goliger:

Staring at a stubborn spot of ice that resists the battering of the windshield wipers, Rachel sinks down into her seat and drifts. She constructs a fantasy, beginning with a premise and adding details, a dab of color here, another there, until the vision wraps her in its fuzzy warmth. The premise is that Mr. Blustein’s gone to Paris. A gallery there is exhibiting her work. Meanwhile Blustein waits for Rachel on the front steps of his apartment building. He paces with impatience, then catches sight of her youthful figure up the street. His eyes glow when he sees her, graceful, nonchalant, her hair streaming in the wind (it has lengthened and straightened itself by some miracle). He grabs her arm and guides her upstairs. No. He whistles for a cab, and they go to the Queen E. Hotel for a second breakfast. No. They drive to a resort in the Laurentians. That’s it, a resort in remote, snow-filled woods. He reaches for her hand across a dining room table and his eyes, brilliant with all that he knows and feels and has a hold on, those eyes burn toward her, reduce her to cinders.

I call this writing poetic not because it functions as poetry—it doesn’t. The author isn’t writing a poem; she’s telling a story. It’s poetic because it exploits poetic devices.

What are these devices? Precision (not just a “resort” but one “in the Laurentians”). Concision (that “stubborn spot of ice” says all we need to know about the weather conditions). Compression (from the resort in the snowy Laurentian woods the author cuts to the lovers holding hands across the dining room table, implying everything in between). These devices combine with musical attributes, with an ear for rhythm and cadence: “he paces with impatience”—the internal rhyme clearly intended.

Here, a lesser version of the same passage:

As Rachel drove her car in the blizzard she fantasized about Mr. Blustein. In one of her fantasies Mr. Blustein had gone to Paris to attend an opening at a gallery that was exhibiting Rachel’s paintings. In another fantasy she met him at his apartment building, where he stood waiting for her on the sidewalk in front of his door, seeing her approach, looking extremely gorgeous and sexy to him, with her long brown flowing hair blowing in the stiff breeze. In the same fantasy he took her by the arm and took her upstairs to make love to her, or maybe they went to have breakfast in a fancy hotel. As Rachel drove through the snowstorm more fantasies went through her mind, like one of Mr. Blustein taking her to a far away, remote resort, where, over a candlelit dinner, he would gaze lovingly into her eyes.

Pedestrian prose.

Writers’ workshops, even those belonging to the fanciest and most righteous MFA programs, say little about poetic prose, though it represents an ideal for fiction writers to aspire toward. Prose needn’t be “poetic” to have style. But fiction not worth reading twice—not just for the plot, but for the joy of encountering its well-chosen words in the same artful order—isn’t worth reading at all.

Poet Richard Hugo warns us: “Once language exists only to convey information it is dying.”

103}A QUAYSIDE IN THE RAIN:
THE JOURNEY FROM JOURNALESE

Pedestrian prose is sometimes called “journalese.”

Though they have things in common, journalese isn’t the same as journalism. Journalese is writing that gets all the information down in the right order, but in language that’s flaccid, flat, not worth repeat readings.

An author needs to create in her narrators not a dry reporter who gives us the facts, but a seductive storyteller whose voice is unique and memorable—or at least delivers some poetry or wit.

Here’s a passage raised, in three stages, from journalese to stylish prose.

STAGE 1:
It was raining. I was standing on the pier reading a notice about drowning victims. There were no other people or cats on the wharf. There were a few railway trucks parked under a row of cranes. All of the warehouses were closed. There were only a few dim lights burning on the Lotus, which didn’t look very inviting.

STAGE 2:
I stood in the rain on the quayside reading a large sheet of printed instructions for resuscitating the apparently drowned, which was the only information of any sort available to passersby. The wharf was deserted. The cranes huddled together in a row, a few railway trucks crouched between their legs; the warehouses were shut, locked, and abandoned even by the cats; the Lotus, lit with a few dim lights, looked as uninviting as a shut pub.

STAGE 3:
I stood in the quayside mizzle reading a broadside for resuscitating the freshly drowned, the only information available to a passerby like me. At that hour the wharf was unambiguously deserted, occupied only by six dinosaur-like rusty cranes, with railway trucks crouching at their feet. Even the local alley cats had deserted the warehouses in favor of more welcoming places. The SS Lotus, her massive black hull pierced by a spattering of feeble porthole lights, looked about as inviting as a shuttered pub.

The second of the three passages is from Richard Gordon’s 1953 novel Doctor at Sea. Into it he has injected some of his narrator’s wit, which takes the form of droll observations (“the only information of any sort available to passersby”), personifications (cranes “huddled,” trucks “crouched”) and character-inspired

simile (“uninviting as a shut pub” suggests the narrator’s non-aversion to a cozy nip now and then). The result isn’t poetic, but it’s not journalese.⁴⁹

In the third revision I’ve perhaps gone too far with my tweaking, removing dead wood (“apparently,” “together”), nixing all but one conjugation of that dead verb to be, and—since the book is about shipboard life—changing “abandoned” to “deserted” and “large sheet of printed instructions” to “broadside” (both new words have nautical connotations). “Shuttered” feels more solid to me than “shut.” As for “mizzle,” it means “a very fine rain” but sounds like “mizzen” as in “mizzen mast,” and so, for me anyway, it casts a maritime aura. Other of my “improvements” are by way of injecting personality. You may take issue with “unambiguously,” as I usually do with adverbs; it is there not just to color the adjective, but to tint the narrator’s psyche. You’d cut it? Fine, cut it.

As a stylist, you, too, won’t resist tinkering with other people’s prose. The better the prose, the more it invites tinkering.