Contributing to the difficulty of classifying, comparing, or even talking about prose style is that writing itself is so different. No other creative endeavor comes in such a multiplicity of guises: writing can be art, craft, protocol, or something even less than that. That is to say, Vladimir Nabokov used the same materials as the author of the latest Coors Light advertising campaign. My next-door neighbor and I also use them when we talk about the weather, suggesting another singularity: We (all of us) use words in two amazingly different ways. Speaking takes place in real time and is an improvisational performance; writing permits, encourages and to some extent requires reflection and revision. It is an artifact.
Everybody who writes is engaged in the remarkable enterprise of making consciousness manifest—catching the slipperiest of substance, a thought, and nailing it to a page. It is amazing, when you think about it, that people should even try to do such a thing; that they would occasionally succeed, nearly miraculous. And, indeed, there is something spiritual about the act of writing. When it’s done in a slovenly manner or in bad faith, it seems somehow sacrilegious. When it’s done well we should stand back and regard it with a kind of reverence.
Writing is also alone in the level of mediation it requires its consumers to make. Hold this book with your arms extended and stare at the page until your eyes almost glaze over. The page becomes a hieroglyphic, an abstract pattern of characters combined into units of varying shape and size, not unpleasant to look at but meaningless, the way a blackboard covered with differential equations would be to an English major walking into a classroom. A film, a play, a painting, or a piece of music can wash over you and at least make you wet, so to speak, but you can’t receive a piece of writing passively; it requires work, an act of translation called reading.
Work: the notion implies that the reader has a hand in creating the meaning of the text, and thus that the end product is open to interpretation. And so it is with texts. Reader A will get the irony in a line of dialogue or an author’s comment; reader B will take the statements literally. A description of a sun-baked desert will make A start to sweat and leave B cold. Readers often report that too much physical description of characters in novels bothers them; they prefer to imagine these people themselves. Sometimes writers feel that way too. John le Carré, author of a trilogy of novels about the spy George Smiley, ended the series after Alec Guinness played Smiley, magnificently, on television; le Carré said he could no longer write about the character without seeing Guinness moving about and saying the lines. Music and images, being less subject to subjectivity, are more stable and dependable manipulators, which is why propagandists and the creators of advertising use them whenever possible.
Yet oddly enough, writing is also unique in presenting at least the prospect of transparency, of seeming to be a means of communicating ideas and information and only ideas and information, with no authorial intrusion. That is one of the things that makes talking about writing style so hard. It’s understood that in all texts (except maybe poems), sometimes, the content is the most important thing; readers will focus on it to the exclusion of all other concerns. As a result, if you have something to say that somebody wants to hear, you can have a horrendous style, or a style that is all over the map, and still be a successful writer. There is no shortage of writers in this category, because many readers are nearly or completely deaf to style and focus all their attention on trawling the text for meaning. Some readers even like bad styles, in the comforting warm-bath feel of their clichés, woodenness, or purple prose.
Style can ebb and flow in this way because all writers use the identical building blocks. Any two English speakers who sit down at the computer and write the word tree are using precisely the same symbols to communicate precisely the same thing, with no suggestion of any personal interpretation or fingerprint. That will not be the case if two people say the word; the speaking voice, or idiolect, of every human being in the history of the world is unique and, theoretically, identifiable. It will not be the case two people paint or draw or even photograph the same tree.* And, leaving trees aside for the moment, it will not be the same if they are asked to execute a particular pirouette, play the F-sharp above middle C on a trumpet, or mime being trapped in an elevator. Their style will betray them.
Even in writing the possibility of transparency recedes—and the inevitability of style arrives—as words get combined into phrases, sentences, and paragraphs. And so I might write “The boy sits next to the tree” and think I was being concise, clear, and completely unobtrusive—that is, transparent. But consider all the other ways I could express this piece of data. I might name the boy and/or describe him in any of thousands of ways. I might name the tree and/or describe it in any of thousands of ways. I might specify how far away from the tree he is or how long he has been sitting there and how much longer he expects to do so. I might throw in an alliterative adverb (“silently”) or a prop (“sits in a chair”) or a simile (“Like a pint-sized Buddha, the boy…”) or an introductory clause (“As hundreds starved to death in Sudan…”). I could change the verb to the past tense or the future or a gerund (“The boy is sitting…”—a small shift but a significant one) or make the sentence a rhetorical question. I could go for irony. (“The boy didn’t sit next to the tree. Not much.”) With a tip of the hat to Jay McInerney, I could dust off the second person and write, “You sit next to the tree.” Short as the sentence is, I could still break it in two: “The boy sits. The tree is next to him.” Or I could go the other way and throw in some Tom Wolfe pyrotechnics: “Hold on! Wait a minute!!! The boy…he’s sitting—no, it can’t be right—it is—he’s sitting next to the tree!!!!!”
With the possible exception of the last one, all of these changes are grammatically correct, and, although some of them adjust the meaning of the original sentence, all are consistent with it. But each one radically alters the feel, the attitude, the cadence—the style—of the prose. Every time we write a word, a phrase, a sentence, we have to choose from what seems like an infinite number of acceptable candidates. Then, just as significantly, we choose how to link the sentences together into paragraphs. Together, these decisions constitute a style.
But here’s where it gets tricky. Some of those decisions are conscious. (Consider the first sentence of this paragraph. I had the sense that this discussion was creeping toward intellectualization or excessive abstractness. So I wanted to make the sentence short and conversational: hence the But opener, the contraction here’s, the colloquial gets tricky instead of a highfalutin combination like becomes problematical. After trying out numerous possibilities, I settled on what you see in front of you, despite my misgivings about the vague antecedent for the word it.) But many more of them are unconscious. (Getting back to that first sentence, what I wanted was a transition to the idea that writers make stylistic decisions without being aware they are doing so. Me being who I am as a person and writer, the vast majority of potential ways of expressing that thought would not even occur to me. [Here’s an example, generated after an effort that felt like trying to dress myself using only my left hand: “However, the unconscious also holds sway in this process.” For some reason, I almost never use personification or the word however. Go figure.] Of the limited number of possibilities that did enter my brain—some of them clichés I share with my generational, cultural, and class cohort, others lame formulations that only I would come up with—I tried them out on my inner ear. I put the ones that seemed the least bad on the computer screen and, one by one, rejected them: some because I could identify a problem or lack, but more because of a vague and inchoate sense that it wasn’t sufficiently “readable” or “well-phrased” or that it didn’t “flow” or “scan” or that it just wasn’t “right.” But here’s where it gets tricky was the least of many evils.)
And indeed, unwitting execution of a half-acknowledged inner scheme is an essential component of style. We don’t generally like it when we perceive that an artist of any kind spends too much time thinking and fussing about these things, and we designate the result as precious or arch or self-indulgent. Yet writers who lack an inner ear, the Dostoyevskys, Theodore Dreisers, Doris Lessings, and their lesser counterparts, who seem to dump the contents of their brain onto the page, producing work that (as Truman Capote observed of some Beat writers) “isn’t writing at all—it’s typing,” eventually wear on us, as compelling or fresh as their ideas may sometimes be. Style depends on the blend of instinct (discussed in Part I of this book) and intent (discussed in Part II).
For now, let’s move on to another paradox. On the one hand, the innumerable conscious and unconscious decisions made in the act of composition would seem to be like the millions of water molecules in a snowflake. They would seem, that is, ultimately to come together to describe a unique style—what Billy Collins calls “a printout of idiolect”—for every person who puts pen to page. On the other hand, the notion of transparency persists, strongly: writing style not as unique snowflake but as sturdy multipurpose template, never wearing out even as it’s shared by hundreds of thousands of practitioners. Strunk and White et al. are not delusional or simple when they maintain that we can and should write in a self-effacing way; if they were, such vast populations would not have bought their books. I have mentioned the names of a lot of authors who are read for their styles, but the fact is that usually when we pick up newspapers or magazines and sometimes books, we don’t care about or even notice the name on the byline or the title page. We are after content—information or story—and we really don’t want the writer to get in the way. We want transparency.
To make sense of the paradox, I retrieve Cicero’s idea of the middle style. This particular rhetorical road, you will recall, lies between the ornateness and perorations of the grand or vigorous style (used for persuasion) and the simple words and conversational manner of the plain or low style (used for proof and instruction). Cicero designated the middle style as a vehicle for pleasure and defined it by what it is not—not showy, not highly figurative, not stiff, not excessively simple or terse. By its own name and others, it has had considerable and continuing appeal through the years. Aristotle and Swift and Thoreau were talking about the middle style, and so was William Hazlitt in his essay “On Familiar Style,” published in 1821: “To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes…. You must steer a middle course.” The twentieth-century reformers, up to and beyond Strunk and White, were and are advocating and teaching their version of the middle style. Richard Lanham, who as far as I know is the first critic to apply this classical idea to current writing, wrote in his book Analyzing Prose, “The middle style is the style you do not notice, the style that does not show, ideal transparency…. The ‘middleness’ of the middle style will lie…in the expectedness of the style.”
The phrase bears repeating: the expectedness of the style. There are many kinds of middle styles, each one having evolved to suit a particular purpose and audience and each one speaking to that audience in a predictable idiom. For example, if you pick up a slick magazine, such as Vanity Fair or Premiere, and read a profile of a movie star, you will expect the writer to employ the first person and the present tense and an ironic, highly conversational voice with a lot of current catchphrases. In the 1960s, when Tom Wolfe and others began to write this way, it was a stylistic innovation; now it is a convention or code.* An accepted middle style exists for any form of writing you can think of: news stories in the New York Times, scholarly articles in the sciences or humanities, historical narratives, Web logs, legal decisions, romance or suspense novels, CD reviews in Rolling Stone, medical case studies.
Learning a middle style, any middle style, isn’t easy. When you start out, you will have in your head diction and cadences from the other styles you have sampled or that are in the cultural ether, many of them barbarous, plus (possibly) some personal formulations of your own. A student handed in to a colleague of mine a newspaper feature story that began as follows (I have changed the name of the subject):
The fierce atmosphere of a construction worker seems unimaginable to the naked eye. However, a day in the life of John Hamilton sheds more light on such a career. The day begins at 5 a.m. as Mr. Hamilton packs a lunch and heads to the construction sight.
Here’s the problem: the student has no familiarity or competency with the written word, so she trowels on a soupy mixture of words, phrases, and syntactical ploys that seem vaguely lively and stylish but are actually nonsensical. (How can a worker have an atmosphere? How can an eye, even a naked one, imagine?) Peering through them, we vaguely sense what she means to write, which in more experienced hands might be something like, “Are you now or have you ever been a construction worker? If not, you have no clue what life on this particular job is like. Trust me on this one: I recently spent a day with John Hamilton.” (The student’s third sentence is fine newspaper-feature-story middle style, once you change sight to site. I put all the blame for that mistake on a pernicious invention called Spell Check.) This student was lucky enough to have a teacher willing and able to flush the “good writing” from her system. Other people get the help of an editor or maybe even a book, spend a lot of time reading aloud to themselves and ripping up their first and second drafts, and eventually pick up the skills needed to deliver the content they have to or want to communicate.
Strunk and White is a manual instructing readers in the middle style for what might be called public or occasional prose: the kind of thing Joseph Addison did in his contributions to the Spectator, Hazlitt and Orwell in their essays, White in his “Notes and Comment” editorials for the New Yorker, and college students in their freshman English courses (hence the appeal of Strunk and White to that crowd). As Hazlitt recognized, the style has a deep and indestructible connection to the spoken word. He was neither the first nor the last to observe this, as the following quotes attest:
Writing, when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation.
—Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Many writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.
—Thornton Wilder
Good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.
—Somerset Maugham
Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination.
—Robert Frost
The writers interviewed for this book agree:
BILLY COLLINS: You can drive a wedge in all poetry. On one side are poems that sound like people talking, on the other are ones that look like people writing. My preference is the former. I’m always listening for someone to talk to me.
DAVE BARRY: When I started with all this, I remember thinking that I wanted to sound like me. Except with the pauses and long moments of silence when I have absolutely nothing to say. I always try to sound, as much as possible, like a regular person talking to the reader and as little as possible like a professional newspaper columnist. Some of the stylistic things I’ve always done are meant to create the sense of me talking. I’ll write, “Now, I know what you’re saying,” as though I can hear or see them. I use italics a lot. I use capital letters a lot. It lets you know I am raising my voice.
MARGARET DRABBLE: I always hear everything I write as if it were spoken, and for that reason I find it quite difficult to listen to the people reading my work, because they misemphasize, or they haven’t got the rhythm right.
ANNA QUINDLEN: I’m convinced that if there is such a thing as reincarnation and I run into the person who was Jane Austen in a past life, I will recognize her instantly by her syntax, delivery, and turn of phrase.
CAMILLE PAGLIA: I think of writing as a performing art. I believe that there is at the center of every text a living, breathing human being. My writing voice is intimately connected to my speaking voice, and a lot of sounds went into it. I grew up in an immigrant Italian culture—the earliest language I heard was Italian. I was influenced by Whitman’s “barbaric yawp,” the Beats, Ginsberg’s chanting, hybrid adjectives and nouns, Dylan’s electric period—“How does it feel?”—long strings of invective and surreal imagery. I was always impressed by Jewish culture, that confrontational style of self-presentation. And I love slang and clichés—they’re like folk poetry.
JAMES WOLCOTT: I never use words in print that I wouldn’t use in conversation. There are all these words you see in print but in fact nobody ever says. Words like “hauntingly lyrical” or “indefatigable,” which is even hard to say. If somebody said that to you when you were talking, you’d be embarrassed, but critics write it all the time. Then there are hedge-words they use in negative review—“given such and such, it’s unfortunate…” Or “it’s lamentable…” Come on, you don’t think it’s lamentable, you’re enjoying it. And then they begin to believe that it’s okay to say these words. If you’ve ever been to a literary panel discussion, you’ll see people who actually do talk as pretentiously as they write. You think, “Oh my God, they’ve convinced themselves.”
Just yesterday, I read a short article in New York magazine making fun of the New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani for overusing the verb limn, which is basically a fancy synonym for describe and is more or less impossible to say. Thanks to the merciless LexisNexis database, the writer was able to quote nine examples, including five separate cases where, in Kakutani’s estimation, authors did or did not adequately limn their characters’ “inner lives.” That’s some limning.
Kakutani shouldn’t feel too bad. Samuel Johnson, acknowledged to be one of the greatest stylists in the history of English literature, has been nailed for this kind of thing for centuries. Hazlitt complained that Johnson “always translated his ideas into the highest and most imposing form of expression.” Fulke Greville, on coming upon a Johnsonian reference to “a gloomy, frigid, ungenial summer,” scribbled in the margin of the book, “why cant you say Cold like the rest of us?” Johnson’s elaborate writing style presents a stark contrast with his plain-spokenness in conversation, on continual display in James Boswell’s biography of the great man. And any time his prose took on a conversational spark, he was quick to stamp it out. At one point Boswell describes his subject writing the sentence (in reference to the author of the play The Rehearsal ) “It has not wit enough to keep it sweet.” Boswell: “This was easy:—he therefore caught himself and pronounced a more rounded sentence: ‘It has not vitality enough to keep it from putrefaction.’” Thomas Macaulay commented that Johnson wrote “in a learned language…in a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love, in a language in which nobody ever thinks…. As respected style, he spoke far better than he wrote.”*
Johnson’s Latinate diction, a critic’s going out on a limn, the wooden bureaucratic memos held up to scorn in composition texts, and contemporary academic prose (pilloried in various “bad writing” contests)…all give offense because they flout a undeniable truth: even though silent reading may have become standard a thousand years ago, the process of absorbing words on a page still has a deep connection to hearing them through the air. When we “get into” a book, the pleasant, enveloping feeling brings us back to the childhood state of being read to by our parents. Bad writing keeps clearing its throat to wake us from our reverie. Psychologists report that all of us, whether or not we move our lips when we read, subvocalize, or silently recite the text to ourselves. (One ingenious piece of evidence for this is a study showing we are more likely to recognize misspelled words that look similar and sound different [“borst” and “burst”] than ones that are homonyms [“hurd” and “heard”]. Another is the loss in comprehension suffered by speed readers, who read too fast to subvocalize.)
Just as reading is like listening, the act of writing is, or should be, linked to speaking. The connection is especially evident among poets, descendants of Homer who are still expected to sing for their supper by reading their work aloud at festivals and poetry slams. In Charles Olson’s view, “The line comes from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes.” But writers of all kinds are always whispering to themselves as they compose. Eudora Welty reported, “The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me…. My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back on my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice.” Even for the least colloquial of authors, there is connection between writing and speech. William Allen White, who hung with Henry James, said that the novelist “talked, as he wrote, in long involved sentences with a little murmer-mum-mum-mum standing for parenthesis, and with these rhetorical hooks he seemed to be poking about in his mind, fumbling through the whole basket of his conversational vocabulary, to find the exact word, which he used in talking about most ordinary matters. He seemed to create with those parentheses.”
After all my years of teaching and being taught, I am convinced that there is only one specific, consistently reliable tip writers in training can be given: read your stuff aloud, if not literally, then with an inner voice attended to by the inner ear. It is the only sure way to spot the clinkers, the rum rhythms. The merit and effectiveness of the practice stems from this link between the written and the spoken word. In Modern English Usage, Fowler says that doing it can teach you to differentiate between
what reads well and what reads tamely, haltingly, jerkingly, lopsidedly, topheavily or otherwise badly; the first is the rhythmical, the other the rhythmless. By the time the reader aloud has discovered that in a really good writer every sentence is rhythmical, while bad writers perpetually offend or puzzle his ear—a discovery, it is true, not very quickly made—he is capable of passing judgment on each of his own sentences if he will be at the pains to read them, too, aloud (“My own voice pleased me, and still more the mind’s Internal echo of the imperfect sound”).*
But only the most extreme and specialized style would ever mimic actual speech, with its hesitations, verbal tics and mumbles, repetitions, pardoned grammatical mistakes, and frequent desperate resort to body language and facial expressions. The two idioms are essentially different. Even though they subvocalize, readers are perfectly capable of dealing with words that are pronounced differently than they appear, like Mr. and 10,052. (However, shrewd writers will sometimes spell them out in dialogue so we can “hear” it better.) We read words faster than we would be able to say them,† and as a result our mental “breath” has greater capacity than our physical one. Linguist Wallace Chafe handed a group of people a variety of texts whose “punctuation units” (the words between punctuation marks) were an average of 9.4 words long. When the subjects were asked to recite the texts, their “intonation units” (the words between pauses) averaged just 5.5 words. They ignored the punctuation.
It is not just a matter of the rhythm of sentences (also known as prosody)—some words and formulations are strictly in the domain of writing, others in that of speaking. On the one extreme are words like limn and lamentable; on the other, slang, colloquial, and nonstandard locutions like ain’t, gonna, and whack (both the adjective and the verb). In English, one often can choose between two words to express the same meaning: one that sounds fancy and is usually longer and of Latin origin (difficult, lengthy, possess, humorous, frequently, additionally, fortunate, individual, position, require, attempt, concerning/regarding, et cetera) and one that sounds plain and unpretentious, is usually shorter, and is of Anglo-Saxon origin (hard, long, have, funny, often, also/too, lucky, person, job, need, try, about, and so on). The first word is native to the world of writing, the second to the world of speech. Most writing books advise you to go for the simpler word whenever it can be used without losing or changing meaning. That’s good advice but not all-embracing. For one thing, sometimes the longer, more formal or more literary word will convey a nuance that’s simply beyond the grasp of any shorter substitute. For another, if you only use simple words, you risk sounding like a simpleton. Virtually any effective style will have some room for locutions of each type. In other words, James Wolcott is employing (or using) poetic license when he says he refuses to commit to print anything he wouldn’t say out loud. (I picked up the recent issue of Vanity Fair and found the following in the first three sentences of Wolcott’s column: notion, colleague, notorious, pedestrian, sensibly, rhetorical, regarding, docile, and christened. I have passed the time with Mr. Wolcott and can attest that formulations such as these are not the building blocks of his conversation.) Think about contractions—can’t, won’t, and so on. In speech, there is an expectation that anyone who’s not prissy or pretentious or is emphasizing a point will use them whenever possible. But just as a prose style with no contractions sounds stiff, a style filled with them sounds oddly and uncomfortably informal. As Voltaire complained back in 1745, “Somebody once upon a time said that we ought to write as we speak…. It has been urged so repeatedly upon our good writers to copy the tone of good company that the most serious authors have grown jocose, and in order to be good company for their readers, have come to say things that are decidedly bad mannered.”
As Hazlitt, Maugham, and all thoughtful practitioners of the middle style recognize, it requires an elevated or purified version of conversation. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who believes so strongly in straightforward writing and clarity that he does not put footnotes in his opinions, says his principal compositional principle is to write “not the way I speak, but how I would like to speak.” Philip Roth said in an interview, “Beginning with Goodbye, Columbus, I’ve been attracted to prose that has the turns, vibrations, intonations and cadences, the spontaneity and ease, of spoken language, at the same time that it is solidly grounded on the page, weighed with the irony, precision and ambiguity associated with a more traditional literary idiom.”
Of all the middle trails the middle style blazes, the most important is between the “written” and the “spoken.” On the one hand, the prose must have a certain conversational quality; you must be able to read it aloud. On the other, it must implicitly acknowledge that it is not speech. Literary critic Robert Alter defines literary style as “a manifestation of writing that elaborately embodies the essential discontinuities between writing and speaking.” In his book Ferocious Alphabets, Denis Donoghue goes Alter one better, describing style as “compensation for defects in the condition of writing, starting with the first defect, that it is writing and not speech.”
The middle style doesn’t merely alternate between the literary and the colloquial: it plays them off against each other, juxtaposing, for example, a Latinate word such as juxtaposing that almost no one would say out loud with a conversational phrase such as plays them off against each other, alternating the spoken doesn’t with the written will not, and following a long, complex sentence with a short one. Learning to carry it off is a little like learning to rollerskate. In the process, it’s hard to keep your balance. But once you’ve got the hang of it, you can glide indefinitely.
Kurt Vonnegut once observed, “The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo speech you heard when a child…. Lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as ornamental as a monkey wrench.”
This phenomenon Vonnegut describes presents a special challenge for writers who grew up in environments where the common forms of speech are especially far removed from literary usage. To the extent they use conventional “proper” English in their prose, they can be seen (by others and themselves) as inauthentic sellouts. To the extent they use the vernacular, they can be marginalized and, worse, not understood.
African-American writers have always been confronted with this dilemma. Traditionally and maybe inevitably, they have solved it by mastering two forms of discourse and strategically alternating between them. The back-and-forth is like the one I’ve been describing as a quality of all middle-style writing. But each time these writers make the shift (within a paragraph, a work, or over the course of a career), the change is packed with emotion and meaning.
That’s because it’s an issue in their lives as well as their work. Novelist Bebe Moore Campbell says:
I’m a civil rights black person. I lived enough time during segregation to have tasted it. My choirmaster, my teachers, everybody told me I had to be two times as good as a white person. For black people who enter the “white world,” that creates a need to be precise, to speak and write perfectly. (My daughter does not feel that burden. She listens to rappers.) At the same time, when I meet someone like that, or create a character, I assume there is a lot of black English in that person. It comes out at different times, usually when emotion is involved. Maxine, in my novel Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, can come right down to the level of whoever. She’s ambidextrous in terms of language.
Campbell periodically contributes commentaries to National Public Radio, and it is fascinating to hear her own cadences abruptly shift from standard to funky. She says:
I find myself using black English when I’m moved enough to tell people what I think. One of my pieces grew out of seeing that Ike Turner was appearing at a blues festival. He was on the comeback trail. Ike Turner, out here playing music. Am I supposed to buy that? I give him props because he is the architect of rhythm and blues, but I’m not buying that CD—he never apologized to my girl.
Toni Morrison said in an interview that when she was coming of age, she felt that African-American fiction, written by men like Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, was too literary, with all that the term implied:
I didn’t feel they were telling me something. I thought they were saying something about it or us that revealed something about us to you, to others, to white people, to men. Just in terms of the style, I missed something in the fiction that I felt in a real sense in the music and poetry of black artists. When I began writing I was writing as though there was nobody in the world but me and the characters, as though I was talking to them, or us, and it just had a different sound to it…. There is a mask that sometimes exists when black people talk to white people. Sometimes it seems to me that is spilled over into the fiction.
Morrison makes a conscious attempt to use a black literary style, which, she said, is a more complicated project than it might first appear:
Some of the writers think it’s dropping g’s. It’s not—it’s something else. It’s a putting together of all sorts of things. It’s cleaning up the language so the old words have new meanings. It has a spine that’s very biblical and meandering and aural—you really have to hear it. So that I never say, “She says softly.” If it’s not already soft, you know, I have to leave a lot of space around it so a reader can hear that it’s soft.
When I do a first draft, it’s usually very bad because my tendency is to write in the language of everyday speech, which is the language of business, the media, the language we use to get through the day. If you have friends you can speak to in your own language, you keep the vocabulary alive, the nuances, the complexity, the places where language had its original power, but in order to get there, I have to rewrite, discard, and remove the print-quality of language to put back the oral quality, where intonation, volume, gesture are all there.
John Edgar Wideman relates the proper-vernacular dichotomy to one opposing thinking and feeling:
One of the things I do as I’m composing is read stuff aloud to myself and look for a kind of music, the music that I remember from my primal language. I think everybody has a primal language. By primal language, I mean the language in which you learn feeling. For some people, like myself, we’re kind of bilingual. We speak a standard English, but we speak some other variety as well. It’s usually that other variety that is our primal language—not because it’s less sophisticated or less expressive but because that’s the language in which we learn to feel. And it’s as much nonverbal as it is verbal. In other words, a mother rocking you or the way a father walks away from you when you’re a child or the music that you hear when you’re a child or the sounds that somebody makes when they’re crying or laughing—all that’s part of the primal language. And that primal language is the one that as a writer, I’m always trying to get back to. That’s the one I’m trying to recover.
As a member of the generation that came after Campbell, Morrison, and Wideman, Touré doesn’t have to fight some of the battles they fought and won. Black English is accepted on the page; it’s there, a formidable instrument, for him to use as he sees fit. He says:
Black English has so much sound, double and triple meaning. It relates you to a community and a history. Black conversation is so stylized, it has so many tones. What I try to do is put the black way of talking on paper—not just record, but evoke, so I get the essence. It’s so easy to caricature. I sometimes knowingly caricature the subject, but the style, I never caricature.
Yet he knows that he is faced with certain decisions that a white writer would not have to make:
You cannot be writing for white people and black people. You’ve got to choose one audience first. I chose black people. Others are welcome, but they have to understand that they’re not the primary audience. There are absolutely certain words that resonate in the black community. “Promised Land”—that’s a dog whistle. You can whistle as much as you want, but whites won’t understand it in the same way.
Language becomes like the keys of the piano. Which key do you play at which time—the black note or the vanilla note? You have to balance it. You don’t want to lose anyone. If you hedge it, blacks could go, “Man, I thought he was for us.” You want to open it up. Nabokov teaches that you can do anything you want. You can tell a joke that requires you to understand French, Russian, and German. So you press ahead.