“I WANTED TO CAPTURE it all,” Faulkner said, “in one sentence, between one Cap and one period.” Such stylistic bravado, or perhaps hubris, may not always sit well with readers, who may ask in return, “Why can’t he just say it simply? Why can’t he be more like Hemingway?” What we discover is that if a novelist is any good, he has a reason for the sentences he writes, and in terms of being simple, even Hemingway didn’t write like Hemingway. One of the great joys of the novelist’s life is the construction of ambitious, outrageous, magnificent, impossibly coherent sentences. From Fielding to Dickens to Hardy to James to Proust to Fowles to Boyle, writers have been having fun with sentences, and readers have indulged them. Of course, not every writer attacks narrative with long, baroque sentences. On simplicity, more anon. But let us start with the basic premise: you can’t write a novel without sentences.
Those sentences, moreover, tell us what sort of writer and what sort of story we’re dealing with. Hard-boiled detective novels, those by Robert B. Parker, say, or Rex Stout, tell us a lot about the attitude and psyche of the narrator as well as about the pace of storytelling. Stout’s wisecracking, tough-talking narrator, Archie Goodwin, often sounds like he belongs in a different sort of mystery from his cultured, orchid-cultivating boss, Nero Wolfe. On the other hand, Archie is the one who goes out in the world, mixes with the high- and low-life, and gets beaten up and threatened, so it makes sense for him to be streetwise and tough. Here he is in the first Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance (1934).
Miss Barstow invited me to lunch.
I liked her better than ever. For ten minutes or so I waited for her in the hall which connected the sunroom with other apartments. When she joined me there she wasn’t sore, and I could see why: I hadn’t pulled Mrs. Barstow’s leg for any of that stuff, she had just handed it to me on a platter, and that wasn’t my fault. But how many people in Sarah Barstow’s place would have stopped to consider that? Not one in a thousand. They would have been sore anyhow, even if they had realized I didn’t deserve it and tried not to show it; but she just wasn’t sore.
Archie definitely has a style. He’s a 1930s wiseguy, sure of himself, slangy, down-to-earth, direct. The repetition of “sore”—three times for a word in its nonstandard usage—and phrases like “pulled Mrs. Barstow’s leg” and “all that stuff” sets a character type, a period of history, a tone, an attitude. This is a modern American can-do person talking. No nonsense about him, and no fooling him. His sentences here say, “I know people” and “I know myself.” He may not be the genius detective, but he’s a man to reckon with in his own right.
The contemporary American novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle calls himself a maximalist, largely based on the hyperinclusive, jazzy, careening-almost-but-not-quite-out-of-control sentences he favors. His sentences mirror his overall narrative approach, which is to know—and employ—everything, as in this beauty from Drop City (2003).
Reba tried to crack the whip, and of course Alfredo had his nose in everything, and the Krishna cat (Tom Krishna, everyone was calling him now) came out of his Krishna funk long enough to show some real skill with a hammer and saw, and the chicks, all of them, kept putting things in boxes like a disaster-relief crew—but still, it looked as if Drop City was going nowhere right up until the moment the county dicks came up the drive in their county dick cars with the little gumball machines whirring on top and the bulldozers swung in off the highway.
This sentence meanders and loops around like the marijuana smoke of its characters, from quasi-factual (“Reba tried to crack the whip”) to impressionistic (“came out of his Krishna funk”) to satirical (“little gumball machines whirring on top”) to the plain-speak finality of bulldozers swinging in off the highway—all of it soaked in the attitudes and perspectives (for they are several) of the stoners and dropouts and dreamers who populate the Drop City commune. Over and over again Boyle gives his readers sentences that mimic the larger narrative structure: druggy dreams and half-baked actions are crushed by the bulldozers of reality. No one can experience these sentences and be shocked by where the plot ultimately takes us.
That’s actually pretty standard with novels. As readers, we typically know by the end of page one what sort of stylist we’re dealing with. Especially when there’s only one sentence on page one. But the farther we go in a book, the more certain we become about style. Hemingway, since I’ve brought him up already, never disappoints. The sentences you see in the opening paragraph will still be there on any page of the novel. This is very near the end of A Farewell to Arms (1929); Frederic Henry’s baby son has died at birth, and will momentarily be followed by his mother.
Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.
This is so simple that we might at first take it as simpleminded. In lesser hands, it would be. Here, it’s the language of a man of action—soldier, lover, deserter, deviser of a separate peace—bringing his accumulated knowledge of the world to bear on a single moment. He knows two things: Catherine, his beloved, will die, and so will the rest of us, usually too soon. His creator knows something else: Frederic Henry is grieving. He won’t say it, won’t admit to giving in, won’t say, “It’s unfair that this war has claimed so many young lives, unfair that my lover and baby are being taken from me, that the love of my life has been forced to desert me, that God is a bully who despises human happiness.” He would never say that. But it’s in there. What he says is that death is like a pickoff play in baseball, where you’re thrown out if you lose focus and stray too far from the bag. That we’re given some rudimentary guidelines but never enough to figure life out before we’re ripped out of it. That random and cruel fates are visited upon the innocent. Aymo doesn’t earn his death; it merely comes. Even Rinaldi, who clearly has had a role in acquiring syphilis, doesn’t contract it; rather, it’s a passive thing that they “gave” to him. And who are they, anyway? It’s not the Italian army, not the Germans, not anyone he knows personally. It could be the Fates, but he doesn’t mention them. No, they can only be he, the entity at whom Frederic Henry is angry. But he doesn’t say that. He doesn’t even say he’s angry. Instead, his tone is quite measured, “You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.” A careless reader could easily miss what’s really at stake here. Anyone can read this passage and get the notion that no one gets out of life alive, but there’s a lot more than that going on. Henry, who has earlier walked away from the Italian military and the ill-conceived war, is now walking away from the possibility of a benevolent Creator. How do we know? He tells us in the only adverb in the passage: Aymo is killed “gratuitously.” A God who kills gratuitously is no God for him. He’ll go it alone from here on out.
That’s what you can do with really short, simple, declarative sentences. If you’re Hemingway. It’s terribly difficult, though, which is why there’s so much bad imitation Hemingway out there, including a fair bit of later Hemingway. To write in this style and have it mean something beyond the Dick-and-Jane level, you have to be in complete command of tone, you have to understand the implications of everything you do and do not say, and you have to know, as he does, what lies in that huge mass of iceberg below the surface. It’s a kind of magic. Think it’s simple? Try it sometime.
Sentence magic has always been at the heart of the novel. Opening my copy of Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy (1760–1767) at something like random (the break in the spine may invalidate randomness) to a two-page spread in Volume III, Chapter XX (my copy of the 1967 Ian Watt text for Houghton Mifflin follows the first edition, and others will show different volume and chapter enumeration), I find one sentence under ten words: “I enter now directly upon the point,” itself a joke, since Tristram almost never enters directly upon any point. And the other sentences on that spread? Try this one, just a couple earlier.
I hate set dissertations—and above all things in the world, ’tis one of the silliest things in one of them, to darken your hypothesis by placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line, betwixt your own and your reader’s conception—when in all likelihood, if you had looked about, you might have seen something standing, or hanging up, which would have cleared the point at once—‘for what hindrance, hurt, or harm doth the laudable desire of knowledge bring to any man, if even from a sot, a pot, a fool, a stool, a winter-mittain, a truckle for a pully, the lid of a goldsmith’s crucible, an oil bottle, an old slipper, or a cane chair?’—I am this moment sitting upon one.
Now that’s more like it. Sterne is playing one of his favorite games, the sentential organic-form game. The novel is a series of digressions, or perhaps a gigantic digression, for it’s not clear that, whatever the ostensible purpose of Tristram’s narrative, he ever achieves it. He can’t even get himself born for several hundred pages, a serious blemish in an “autobiography.” The plot of the story is nearly nonexistent, the telling largely backwards or sideways in time, and the resolution a punch line. Sterne’s real business is sending up the barely established conventions of this new form, the novel. He is first among novelists to recognize and parody narrative practices, and one of his chief forms of parody is to delay or even deny entirely the fulfillment of readers’ expectations. So the sentence interruption acts as a localized form of the interruptions in the larger narrative. Both are goofy, frustrating, intrusive, often irrelevant, and very, very funny.
And that’s the point, or at least one point, of style: it should have something to do with the story that’s being told. That something may relate to the content or the chosen form or the attitude (or needs) of the narrator, but there should be some sort of relation between the larger narrative design and the design of sentences. Too often, as any creative writing teacher can attest, apprentice writers can’t make those connections. Students are saddled with a style that is theirs either by default or by adoption because they’re in thrall to some great writer.
I say this as a recovering Lawrentian. As an undergraduate, I read more D. H. Lawrence than is good for anyone. At least I have an excuse: his fiction was my thesis subject. Still, the stylistic effects were pernicious, or at least occasionally obnoxious. All that repetition, all that thumping a point to death. The shrillness, the stridency. Oh well, part of being a student is trying on different masks, even badly fitting or poorly made ones. But here’s the real crime in my stylistic slavishness: neither my essays nor my fiction had any need of the Lawrence touch. I couldn’t have written Women in Like, much less Love, and without Lawrence’s genius, one is best off leaving his style alone. In his creative writing text, Three Genres, Stephen Minot employs the term “mock-Faulkner” for a certain kind of overwrought short story that attempts to pack all the action of a Faulkner novel—two murders, incest, rape, a kidnapping, three fires, and several outrageous racist incidents—into twenty-five hundred words, broken into maybe five sentences. Those stories would be comic masterpieces if the writers had any self-awareness of what they were doing, but they never do. These days it may be Jack Kerouac (a hardy perennial) or Toni Morrison or Alice Walker being inadvertently mocked, but the most likely inspiration for bad apprentice prose has never changed since about 1927.
Why does Hemingway bring out the worst in so many writers? And we’re not talking just students here. Browse the mystery section of the local book emporium, and what’s the dominant style? Sure, it’s watered down, puffed up, denatured, ineptly managed, loose in the stays, but you recognize it. There’s that tight-lipped, clipped diction, subject-verb-(maybe)object, seven- to ten-word sentence, over and over again. Noun and verb and and. Very few adjectives and fewer adverbs. A vocabulary the size of a Dr. Seuss primer. Maybe one out of ten is worth the bother of reading. Maybe. So what’s the problem? I think it’s that Hemingway looks easy: hey, I could write those sentences. And it’s true. I (or you) could write those sentences. They just wouldn’t mean much. Hemingway’s sentences typically say very little. Their meaning, however, speaks volumes. Contradiction, you say? Very well, then, contradictory it is. His meaning isn’t in the words, but in the silence around them. To accomplish this requires two things most of us don’t have enough of: linguistic sensitivity and great discipline. He is absolutely scrupulous about what word he uses in any context and about how many. He pares his language down to the starkest minimum, leaving out everything that doesn’t scream to be left in. Most of us can’t do that. We don’t have enough self-control.
So, long sentences, short sentences, simple, complex, mixed. They come in all forms. Which forms are right? The ones that work. The Law of Novelistic Style: There are no rules for sentence length and structure except those dictated by the novel in which they’re used. And they generally do. We’re happiest when we can make those connections between style and story.
I may have given the wrong impression of writers’ involvement with style, since this discussion would seem to suggest that every novelist is a consummate stylist, or is at least consumed with style. Yet I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of novelists have written their sentences under the rubric, just get on with it. Certainly the vast majority of novels display a merely serviceable, if that, prose. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. We think of Henry James, and rightly, as one of the great innovators of fiction at both the macro and micro levels. But another of his great contemporaries, William Dean Howells, hardly ever wows anyone with the magic of his sentences. This if from The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), again, pulled more or less at random.
The next day the head book-keeper, who lunched at the long counter of the same restaurant with Corey, began to talk with him about Lapham. Walker had not apparently got his place by seniority; though with his forehead, bald far up toward the crown, and his round smooth face, one might have taken him for a plump elder, if he had not looked equally like a robust infant. The thick drabbish yellow mustache was what arrested decision in either direction, and the prompt vigor of all his movements was that of a young man of thirty, which was really Walker’s age.
So, you ask, what’s wrong with that? Not a thing in the world. It does its job, which is to carry narrative forward, without tripping over itself or otherwise impeding the business at hand. In other words, it is serviceable, which is ever Howells’s goal for prose. If it doesn’t sing, that’s because he doesn’t intend it to. Remember, too, that Howells was no slouch: intimate of Mark Twain and Henry James, biographer of Lincoln, U.S. consul to Venice, editor for a decade of The Atlantic Monthly, best-selling novelist and all around literary lion. If serviceable is what he wants from his prose, and if, moreover, it’s what he gets, who’s to squawk?
Or take his near-contemporary Arnold Bennett. Bennett writes of his native England rather than the America of Howells, but the approach is similar.
And then, on this last day of the year, the second year of her shame and of her heart’s widowhood, Mr. Scales had reappeared. She had gone casually into the shop and found him talking to her mother and Mr. Povey. He had come back to the provincial round and to her. She shook his hand and fled, because she could not have stayed. None had noticed her agitation, for she had held her body as in a vice. She knew the reason neither of his absence nor of his return. She knew nothing.
Again, nothing defective here, just solid, workmanlike prose. Bennett was a businessman of literature, writing reviews, essays, fiction that would sell, anything that kept the till active. He lived from, rather than for, his art, which made him a natural whipping boy for the modernist hotshots. He’s the model for the character in Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” who tells the young man to give up poetry because there’s no money in it. And Virginia Woolf excoriates him in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” for, well, chiefly for belonging to the immediately prior generation. Even while indicting him, however, for his shortcomings, she admits that he is highly competent (indeed, his competence is part of the indictment—how dare he be a good craftsman?). What she dislikes in him, as in H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy, is that his work lacks the aspiration to rise to the level of art. He’s a materialist (her word), satisfied with craft. I share her impatience with Bennett’s fiction, but I’ve always suspected that the fault lay in me rather than in him. What we might say is that, on the stylistic level, he seeks the adequate. He wants sentences that will carry his meaning and otherwise stay out of the way. Rarely will readers stop in midchapter to admire a brilliant sentence that has called attention to itself. Bennett doesn’t want sentences calling attention to themselves, and that’s fine.
In fact, it’s better than fine. Bennett and Howells write prose that is right for their fiction. Sentences that arrest readers’ attention disrupt the narrative flow in ways that run counter to the interest of these novelists. For both of them, the instructions they would give their prose would be, as I suggested earlier, just get on with it. Do the business. Don’t be showy or ostentatious.
Precisely what a lot of readers want.
I recently had a conversation with a colleague about Julian Barnes and how terrific his sentences can be. Real showstoppers. We both like that in him, but I had to point out that I often find that students disagree. They tend on the whole to prefer a transparent style, one they can forget about as they can forget about the glass pane in a modern window. It’s much easier to get student readers to like Willa Cather than William Faulkner, and that’s largely due to the difficulties of the Faulknerian sentence.
Come to think of it, if I make a list of my novelistic pantheon, two of the things that unite a lot of them would be that they all are, or at least can be, wonderful writers at the sentence level and that most of them can be a tough sell in the classroom: Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway, Hardy, Lawrence Durrell, John Fowles, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Pynchon, Barnes, the Swifts Jonathan and Graham, T. C. Boyle, Flann O’Brien, Henry Green, Louise Erdrich. Edna O’Brien is one of the great stylists in English, yet I often get the sense from readers that they like her in spite of her prose rather than because of it. It may be in part an American mistrust of showiness or a post-Hemingway slant toward simplicity or merely a wish for the easily digestible—a high style requires a bit of chewing. But a really good style—whether it’s Hemingway’s or O’Brien’s, Pynchon’s or Durrell’s—is a pleasure in itself. At least for some of us.
This business of high style also points toward what matters for the novelist. It suggests the novel isn’t entirely about the story being told, or that the story, the stuff that happens, is being enhanced by the manner of the telling, that some elements will matter more than others because of how the thing is told. Hardy’s sentences are one of several factors that limit the kinds of stories he can tell, but oh, what he can do with the ones he does tell. Style—sentences, their length and structure and arrangement, paragraphs, word choice, word order, the lot—isn’t mere makeup, covering and coloring the narrative. Rather, it is a decisive element in that narrative, governing or reflecting what can be told and how, the rate of revelation, the attitude of the novelist toward his world, the relationship of writer to reader. Sentences can welcome us or rebuff us, but they always make a statement.
Now, that Faulknerian monstrosity. It comes from Go Down, Moses, and runs for a zillion pages in my edition. Arising in the middle of the story “The Bear,” it attempts to capture, if not the world, the whole sordid history of the slave-owning South. The section begins simply enough, with an uncapitalized initial letter in what would be a sentence, and then launches into another sentence that runs approximately forever.
then he was twenty-one. He could say it, himself and his cousin juxtaposed not against the wilderness but against the tamed land that was to have been his heritage, the land which old Carothers McCaslin his grandfather had bought with white man’s money from the wild men whose grandfathers without guns hunted it, and tamed and ordered or believed he had tamed and ordered it for the reason that the human beings he held in bondage and in the power of life and death had removed the forest from it and in their sweat scratched the surface of it to a depth of perhaps fourteen inches in order to grow something out of it which had not been there before and which could be translated back into the money he who believed he had bought it had had to pay to get it and hold it and a reasonable profit too . . .
Whew! And that’s just the start. It goes on for pages and pages and pages. It even has paragraph breaks, and dialogue, and the occasional full-stop, although those periods are part of a character’s statement rather than of the narrative. For me, this is one of the great performances in all of fiction. The only problem is, I don’t know where it ends. Or begins, really. The section begins and ends without a capital or period, so we might see the entire thing as a single utterance, a kind of freak sentence, an interior monologue going on forever but taking the form of one statement. Or do those periods within the passage actually constitute some sort of sentence changeover? I just can’t tell.
Of course, first-time readers generally have a different question.
Why?
Isaac McCaslin has been reading his grandfather’s farm ledgers regarding all aspects of plantation business—including the buying, selling, and misusing of human beings. He’s from Mississippi, so the concept of slavery itself isn’t shocking to him. What is shocking is that he finds that his grandfather, old Carothers McCaslin, has fathered a child with one of his slaves, Eunice, and then later fathered another child—with that first child, Tomasina. Eunice, the mother/grandmother, has subsequently drowned herself six months before the child, Terrel or Tomey’s Turl, is born, to which Ike’s father’s (Theophilus) only comment is to record the death as another loss of property. His more “humane” brother, Amodeus (Uncle Buddy) circles over the fact of that death, ultimately wondering whoever heard of a slave “drownding him self?” All of this is what Ike finds shocking: the compounded horrors of not only using slave women against their will for sexual pleasure but of practicing incest into the bargain, the callousness of the grandfather’s response, the depths of despair that led to Eunice’s suicide, the death in childbed of Tomasina, the routine, unthinking inhumanity of his father and uncle, both of whom were sufficiently progressive to have freed their own slaves before the Civil War, the inevitable intertwining of races into a single, enormously dysfunctional family. In other words, everything Faulkner wants us to understand as the terrible, logical outcome of owning other human beings. Which is to say, everything about the history of the South. And he wants to do it all at once, to capture Ike’s moment of epiphany.
See? You can’t even write about the book without having sentences lead into a morass. And for Faulkner to tell it, it’s a sixty-page-long sentence fragment. When “The Bear” is published as a stand-alone story, section four is nearly always omitted, and for good reason. We need the context of its novel to make sense of it. The writer may have claimed to want to capture the whole world between a capital letter and a period, but section four has no cap at the beginning and no period at the end. Nor it is entirely clear that any of the periods or question marks—and they are few—in the section actually break the flow of this torrent of words.
So whether it’s three words by Hemingway or thirty-five pages by Faulkner, a sentence—or fragment—can tell us a lot more than it says. Which do I prefer? Neither. Both. The one that does the job. But here’s the thing. That job is inextricably linked to its pieces. The novel will dictate what sort of sentences it requires; the sentences will determine the sort of novel that can be written. Hemingway’s books embody a cultural amnesia, or maybe a desire for short-term memory loss. Who would want to remember the terrible events of this century, this war? Faulkner’s articulate a war between nostalgia and revulsion, a wish for a stable past containing horrors that he cannot avoid confronting. His aim is to include, to draw from everywhere, Hemingway’s to exclude, to keep at arm’s length. No surprise, then, which one would write complicated prose, which one simple. Their sentences are nothing alike, except for one thing: they’re perfect.