What I have been arguing is that no truly transparent or anonymous style can exist: the many choices the act of writing requires will sooner or later betray a stance, an attitude, a tone. But middle styles, in following an established code and meeting established expectations, especially in the way they mix the spoken and the written, give the illusion of transparency. An author who is fluent in a middle style allows us to believe that he or she is merely delivering information, without prejudice.
But this is a book about something else, writers who are or want to be visible. What distinguishes their prose from that of the middle stylists? A lot of things, as this chapter tries to explain. Start with bad writers: the indifferent, inconsistent, the dull, the utterly conventional, the tone deaf, and the grammatically, verbally, and orthographically incompetent. Their prose is certainly noticeable, filled as it is with clichés of all kinds, mistakes of all kinds, rhythmless sentences and paragraphs, repetition in sentence structure, and unintended word repetition. It has a sound, but it is the sound of fingernails on the blackboard, or, at best, a droning monotone. To the extent that there is any hope for this contingent, it is to achieve (with the help of Strunk and White or other aids) enough competence to go incognito.
At the other extreme are the stylists who for one reason or other feel compelled to trouble the waters, to shout their name, and who are conspicuous even to untutored readers. Instead of transparency, their find themselves strangely and strongly drawn to opacity. As Richard Lanham says, they do not want their prose to be looked through; they consciously or unconsciously want it to be looked at. So let’s look at a few of them:
Upon the rocks hereabout some told me they had seen inscriptions. At six on the morrow, ascending from that belt of low sandstone hills, we marched anew upon the plain of shallow sliding sand. The sun rising I saw the first greenness of plants, since the brow of Akaba. We pass a gravel of fine quartz pebbles; these are from the wasted sand-rock. Fair was the Arabian heaven above us, the sunny air was soon sultry. We mounted an hour or two in another cross-train of sand-rocks and iron-stone: at four afternoon we came to our tents, pitched by a barren thicket of palms grown wild; and in that sandy bottom is much growth of desert bushes, signs that the ground water of the Hisma lies not far under. Here wandered already the browsing troops of those nomads’ castles which followed with the caravan.
—Charles Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, 1888
Every one then is an individual being. Every one then is like many others always living, there are many ways of thinking of every one, this is now a description of all of them. There must now be a whole history of each one of them. There must then now be a description of all repeating. Now I will tell all the meaning to me in repeating, the loving there is in me for repeating.
—Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, 1925
Like two lilies in a pond, romantically part of it but infinitely remote, surrounded, supported, floating in it if you will, but projected by being different on to another plane, though there was so much water you could not see these flowers or were liable to miss them, stood Miss Crevy and her young man, apparently serene, envied for their obviously easy circumstances and Angela coveted for her looks by all those water beetles if you like, by those people standing round.
—Henry Green, Party Going, 1938
When all goes silent, and comes to an end, it will be because the words have been said, those it behoved to say, no need to know which, they’ll be there somewhere, in the heap, in the torrent, not necessarily the last, they have to be ratified by the proper authority, that takes time, he’s far from here, that brings him the verbatim report of the proceedings, once in a way, he knows the words that count, it’s he who chose them, in the meantime the voice continues, while the messenger goes toward the master, and while the master examines the verdict, the words continue, the wrong words, until the order arrives, to stop everything or to continue everything, no, superfluous, everything will continue automatically, until the order arrives, to stop everything.
—Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, 1954
In each case the style is way, way outside normal expectations. It’s out there far enough to suggest that the authors are slightly or more than slightly unhinged. Thus one wonders if Charles Doughty, in addition to his clear wish for conspicuous composition, Arabic overtones, and biblical portent, has an undiagnosed learning disability that prevented him from absorbing consistency of tenses, punctuation rules, noun-verb sentence order, and the other conventions of standard English. Thus Gertude Stein seems to need to act out in words a regression to infancy. Thus it makes sense that Henry Green (who acknowledged a debt to Doughty) should have been severely hard of hearing, so far does his prose wander from the normal cadences of speech. (There was slightly more to it than that. Frank Kermode says, “Henry Green was very rich, drunk, odd, and deaf, which contributed to his style.”) And thus Samuel Beckett would appear to have been beset by a kind of despair or at least desperation that compelled him to continue, the little phrases advancing like spiders, and only reluctantly accept the brief respite of a full stop.
Big-foot stylists such as these don’t have a particularly enviable lot. For one thing, although critics pay them a lot of attention, they’re unpopular with publishers and readers, who seem to prefer good stories in clean prose. Hence the fame achieved by B. R. Myers’s 2001 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, “A Reader’s Manifesto,” which, according to the magazine, generated more comment than any other article in its history, most of it approving. (An expanded version was published as a book in 2002.) Myers pointed his accusatory finger at “the cult of the sentence,” perpetrated by critics out of touch with the reading public, which encourages contemporary novelists—Myers focused on Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, David Guterson, Paul Auster, and Cormac McCarthy—to fixate on style at the expense of matter. In the “literate past,” he argued, plot and character rightfully dominated: “We have to read a great book more than once to realize how consistently good the prose is, because the first time around, and often even the second, we’re too involved in the story to notice.” This is an idiotic statement. Losing oneself in a story is, certainly, a consummation devoutly to be wished, but you can’t credibly deny that the experience of literature or art of any kind is enhanced by an awareness and appreciation of formal achievement, even on the level of a sentence. (Myers’s blurb for Bleak House: “Great read! A real-page turner. I couldn’t put it down.”)
But despite his limited conception of literature and his tendency toward hyperbole and the setting up of straw men, Myers did get in a few legitimate shots. Some esteemed novelists, prodded on by critic-enablers, are indeed guilty of sloppiness, preciousness, and/or self-indulgence. More important, the essay recognized (albeit thickly) an essential tension between personal style, on the one hand, and plot and exposition, on the other. The stronger or more idiosyncratic a writer’s style is, the more trouble he or she is going to have with these undeniably important functions of the printed word. Let’s say you were writing a biography and wanted to explain in a few paragraphs the family background of your subject’s spouse. Or, in a novel, you had character X and character Y on opposite sides of the party and just wanted to get them to the middle of the room, where they would recognize each other from a barroom encounter three years ago. Style would just get in the way. Style invokes the extraordinary, and so much of life is ordinary. As a result even strong stylists, short of the Gertude Stein–Charles Doughty level, usually develop pretty efficient strategies for going undercover when the text calls for it.
A certain egotism is a healthy and necessary component of all styles. In styles-that-shout-their-name, this can get out of control. In his book The Art of Fiction, John Gardner put together one of the most sustained and cogent briefs against what he called “mannered writing,” which he defined as prose “that continually distracts us from the fictional dream by stylistic tics that we cannot help associating, as we read, with the author’s wish to intrude himself, prove himself different from other authors…. The mannered writer feels more strongly about his own personality and ideas—his ego, which he therefore keeps before us by means of style—than he feels about any of his characters—in effect, all the rest of humanity.”
Excessive idiosyncrasy makes things tough over the long haul as well. Writers defined by their styles all eventually have to come to terms with the same question: In the course of a career, how do you avoid repeating yourself? In different ways, such diverse writers as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Joyce all fell victim to this syndrome.
For all those reasons, let’s return, permanently, to styles that are noticeable but not excessively so, and to the question posed at the beginning of the chapter: What makes them distinctive? A middle style is a series of compromises or negotiations that leads a reader not to notice it. To the extent that a writer is drawn to a certain manner of expression and either repeats it to the point where it becomes noticeable or is unwilling or unable to balance it out with its counterparts, then he or she will have a distinctive style. As Robert Alter puts it, “Style is, among other things, the deviation from a norm, or at least from statistically preponderant usage.”
An important character has been lurking and sometimes popping up in this chapter, most recently three sentences ago. Anybody can notice the difference between Gertrude Stein and Charles Doughty, but a more conventional style depends on the sensitivity (and sometimes the kindness) of readers. Just as a speaking voice is meaningless or solipsistic unless it is heard, so a style will not exist without someone on the other end to register the way it is different from the norm. And the nature of the transaction will sharply change according to whom that someone is. The more sophisticated readers are, and the more intimate they are with the writer—if they speak the same language, inhabit the same temporal moment and cultural milieu, and, best of all, if they have read and paid attention to his or her work—the more readily they will apprehend the style.
And for that reason, all readers will respond to a given piece of writing in different ways. To the extent that they are familiar with the writer, the genre, or the period, their ears will be developed and they will note its particular stylistic qualities. To the extent that they’re on unfamiliar ground, they will be deaf to differences and will focus on the content; style will become an issue only if it’s incompetent or unclear. For example, for a casual reader of the newspaper, just about everything, except maybe a favorite sports columnist, movie critic, or op-ed writer, sounds alike. On the other hand, a graduate student in English literature would instantly pick up on the special sounds of major novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Ideal readers are hard to come by, so let’s posit a feasible figure—a Pretty Good Reader (PGR), intelligent, attentive, and reasonably familiar with the writer, the genre, or both. For the sake of pronoun simplicity—and because my examples will tend to be writers of whom I am a PGR—let’s make him male. He will not be so dull and inexperienced that everything he reads sounds alike, but not so well read and sharp that he could, for example, spot the style of every New York Times arts critic in a blindfold test. So how does a PGR note a stylist? Most commonly, by the manner in which that writer negotiates the discrepancy between the written and the spoken. As Jonathan Raban puts it, “On the whole, modern style has tended to be a conflation of the high and the low. Most writers who are interesting at all veer spectacularly between, as it were, the rolling period and the deflating ‘fuck you.’” David Thomson says:
I love the literary style. I was certainly brought up on nineteenth-century English novels, and can go back with enormous pleasure. But I love the idea of a more modern interruption of it too. Nabokov’s Pale Fire starts with this very learned disquisition, and then the narrator interrupts himself by saying something about the damned amusement park outside his window. It’s an intrusion from a completely different world. I like that device and I use it in different forms. It’s a very natural and energetic thing, and it can be wonderfully stimulating. I love the dialogue in Howard Hawks films because people are always interrupting each other. That’s very lifelike. In my experience the best way to tell if two people are in love is if they interrupt each other a lot.
And Andrei Codrescu:
The one principle I have, among a total lack of principles otherwise, is “high and low.” In fact, the motto for Exquisite Corpse, the journal I publish, is “Aim high, hit low.” I love nothing better than the mix of high and low language. I love the sentence that starts to feed on its own grandeur, and then you bring it low with a piece of slang or street talk. I also find that this comes in handy teaching, because very often a teacher’s voice will put students to sleep. You go on and on about theory or other, and then you jolt them by saying, “And then, that’s all the motherfucker said.”
The veering, as Raban calls it, between two very different modes can be used to most immediate effect in humor. There has never been a more spectacular veerer than S. J. Perelman, who verbally pushed the sublime and ridiculous about as far as they would go—patrolling the über-literary heavens, then making swan dives to the vulgate, viz., to wit:
If you were born anywhere near the turn of the century and had access at any time during the winter of 1914–15 to thirty-five cents in cash, the chances are that after a legitimate deduction for nonpareils you blew the balance on a movie called A Fool There Was. What gave the picture significance, assuming it had any, was neither its story, which was paltry, nor its acting, which was aboriginal, but a pyrogenic half-pint by the name of Theda Bara, who immortalized the vamp just as Little Egypt, at the World’s Fair in 1893, had the hoochie-coochie.
More measured print humorists over the past three-quarters of a century, from Robert Benchley through Stephen Leacock, James Thurber and P. G. Wodehouse, and up to Dave Barry, have distinguished themselves by the particular way they pull off idiomatic discord, describing something common or ridiculous in a fancy or literary way. Barry, in a move that endears him to adolescents of all ages, will periodically punctuate the mock-formal exposition with a word like booger. Calvin Trillin’s trademark is describing everyday things with elaborate similes. (From his book American Fried: “People outside of Louisiana, in fact, often scoff when they hear of people eating crawfish—the way an old farmer in Pennsylvania might scoff at a New York antique dealer who paid fourteen hundred dollars for a quilt that must be at least a hundred years old and doesn’t even look very warm.”) Damon Runyan contributed a neat twist, by having his gangster and lowlife characters speak in a fractured, contraction-less version of Victorian prose. (In his story “Dancing Dan’s Christmas,” the title character says: “I know where a stocking is hung up. It is hung up at Miss Muriel O’Neill’s flat over here in West Forty-Ninth Street. This stocking is hung up by nobody but a party by the name of Gammer O’Neill, who is Miss Muriel O’Neill’s grandmama. Gammer O’Neill is going on ninety-odd, and Miss Muriel O’Neill told me that she cannot hold out much longer, what with one thing and another, including being a little childish in spots.”)
As Raban suggests, no writer today would be able to thrive without some degree of cross-pollination. However, notable stylists usually end up spending more time on one side or the other—end up adhering to, in Cyril Connolly’s terminology, the Mandarin or the colloquial style. Vladimir Nabokov wrote and John Updike writes famously literary prose, with a preponderance of long, complex sentences and, on every line, a word or a phrase that will cloud up the windowpane and remind the Pretty Good Reader he is in fact reading. Hunter Thompson, Nicholson Baker, movie critics Anthony Lane and A. O. Scott, Michael Chabon, and Trillin, in their very different ways, are contemporary upholders of the periodic sentence—long, complicated, perfectly crafted affairs that contain multitudes of subclauses and stop on a dime.
The use of metaphor and other figures of speech is a fairly dependable indicator of a writing-based style. Like water flowing downhill, talking finds its way to the easiest path—literalism and words and expressions in the current lexicon. But expressing something metaphorically (other than in a cliché) or, more strikingly, in a classical rhetorical figure such as zeugma or homoioptoton, is an act of labor.* A metaphor is also (again, unless it is a cliché) likely to be a personal or individual representation. Every common word in the English language has been used millions of times to express roughly the same meaning, but when you fashion a fresh metaphor, you are making a connection for the first time. Aristotle wrote in The Poetics, “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.”
James Wolcott’s criticism is suffused with inventive metaphors, sometimes extended and sometimes as small as one word (see murmurs, below). He has a particular knack for translating ideas into visual scenarios, where his notions are played out like the action in an animated cartoon. Despite his disapproval of words such as indefatigable and lamentable, his style is anything but transparently conversational. He uses few contractions and a lot of complex sentence structure and, though he rarely writes in the first-person singular, we are always aware of his presence—if only a sense of his having gone to the trouble to make the writing so entertaining. Here, reviewing Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, he uses figuration, humor, repetition, and inventive diction to skewer a writer who shows how metaphor can go terribly, terribly wrong:
Incapable of poison-dart wit or flat assertion, Faludi employs hypnotic repetition as her chief power of persuasion, massaging the reader into trance-like submission. Whether the reader is nodding in agreement or just plain nodding off seems lost on her. As she murmurs the same phrases over and over and as her metaphors become fruitful and multiply (“Lured from my intended course, I sometimes lost sight of the bright beacons and media buoys marking the shoals where men and women clashed, and also lost sight of that secure shore…”; “its surge had washed all the men of the American Century into a swirling ocean of…”; “its Tsunami forces had swamped…,” “If ever there was an enemy behind this cultural sea change…”; “Navigating the ornamental realm…”), every chapter becomes longer than it needs to be, and every chapter seems longer than the one before, creating the illusion of a book feeding on itself and engulfing unsuspecting visitors.
Wolcott says:
You can’t try to craft metaphors—you have to let them pop out naturally. I’ll just be walking along and think, “That’s the way to say it, that’s the image.” In the Faludi review, I just had the image of her gripping the steering wheel. I think it came from a Susan Sarandon movie I saw once, where there was a shot of her gritting her teeth and gripping the wheel. In this, it’s a sort of Warner Brothers cartoon image, a way of undermining the solemnity or seriousness of the subject. Metaphors are one of the things I got from Mailer. In American Dream, almost every sentence has this incredible metaphor. And Philip Larkin and poetry in general. In poetry you get things across through metaphors, rather than flat statement. When you make your point through the visual image, and the reader can see it in his mind, it’s much more convincing than if you simply lay it down as an opinion. It comes naturally to me, though maybe it seems unusual, because people don’t see anymore, even through we’re supposedly in a visual age.
For Jamaica Kincaid (a native of Antigua), the literary character of her writing relates not to metaphors or other figures of speech but to a non-or anticonversational quality. As she explains, this is so powerful a force for her that it has, in effect, taken over her speech:
When people meet me, they say, “Oh, you speak the way you write.” It is not the other way around. I am always writing in my head. Everything I do, I’m thinking of writing. I may have grown up in an oral tradition, but that had no influence on me at all. For me, the oral part of writing comes from having things read out to me at an early age; for me, voice is more about hearing than about just speaking. I am unable to interest myself in plot, because I love to hear. When I create sentences, I am hearing them in my head. Trying to make them beautiful takes over everything.
Speech-based styles tend to be generic (tough-guy newspaper columnists, slick magazine writers, Web bloggers) rather than individual, unless they go whole-hog and position themselves completely in the world of demotic talk, as in the plays of David Mamet and the novels of George Higgins. This kind of writing can be idiomatically discomfiting, like a symphony orchestra playing Rolling Stones songs. We wonder: If this author wants to talk to us, why is he doing it in print? A rich American tradition eliminates the problem through a premise that someone actually is talking to us: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, many of the short stories of Ring Lardner, Hemingway’s “My Old Man,” Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.,” John Updike’s “A&P,” The Adventures of Augie March, Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, Portnoy’s Complaint, and hundreds of other works. Even when the narrator is supposedly writing the story (as in Catcher) rather than telling it to an unseen auditor, the style is still usually infused with the slang, cadences, and all-around attitude of talk.
In third-person fiction, such disparate writers as Stanley Elkin, Toni Morrison, and Junot Díaz make artful use of the rhythms and vocabulary of particular groups of speakers. David Foster Wallace is a hectoring guest at a dinner party, grabbing your coattails and unloading his pet theories. David Halberstam and Gay Talese are at the same party, old army buddies of the host who clear their throats a lot and have lengthy, perhaps too lengthy, stories to tell. Tom Wolfe emulates a special kind of speech in his journalism and essays, a kind of sideshow barker’s spiel. (The trademark italics, ellipses and exclamation points are his Step-right-up!)
The spoken–written interchange is different in publications with fairly rigid “literary” house style, such as the New York Times, where rock critics have to refer to “Mr. Dylan” and “Mr. Jagger”; there, critics, columnists, and feature writers can distinguish themselves merely by including some colloquial phrasing now and again. It’s like trying out fancy English on your shots while hitting a tennis ball against a backboard. Jon Pareles, who has written “Mr. Dylan” hundred of times, says he tries to “hover between the spoken and the literary.” That created problems with copyeditors at the Times, when he started as a pop music critic in the 1980s. “Back in the day, it was Vincent Canby and me,” he says, referring to the late Times film critic. “We would put in contractions, and the copyeditors would take them out. That would completely flatten the sound of the writing. The New York Times for a while was speaking Klingon.”
The spoken–written scale is extremely useful but hardly all-inclusive. A related continuum applies to many if not most of the distinctive American writers since the 1920s. On one end is a terseness, or a strategic plainness, that has many of the characteristics of speech but doesn’t really emulate it. The captain of this team would be Hemingway, of course, with Gertrude Stein as éminence grise; their squad would include John O’Hara, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, John Hersey, Irwin Shaw, Raymond Carver, Pete Hamill, Joan Didion, Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane, Tobias Wolff, and a big compliment of bench players. Terseness is not merely a matter of writing short sentences. Dick and Jane primers are not terse. Rather, this effect is achieved when we sense that the author is leaving a lot out, almost daring us to make inferences and connections. Critic L. A. Sherman wrote that a collection of short sentences achieves terseness “according to the leap of omission of thought between. It is the length of the leap rather than the shortness of the period that makes an author seem laconic.” Hemingway’s whole approach to writing, as he often said, was to leave out essential facts and feelings, so that the words that remained filled in for them, charged with a special kind of energy. On the level of the writing itself, following Stein’s lead, he aggressively omitted adjectives, metaphors, commas, and connecting words and phrases. In Hemingway you almost never find subordinate clauses or transitional words and phrases such as moreover, consequently, and in fact. Instead, there is a period and a new sentence, or else a single noncommittal connecting word: and, just as in the King James Version of the Bible.*
As everyone knows, Hemingway’s style was and continues to be enormously influential. Some writers merely copied the sound and the effects. Others adapted it, and their particular spin on the style had to do with what was being omitted. Kurt Vonnegut writes and Richard Brautigan wrote in short sentences, short paragraphs, and short sections and chapters that actually affected, at times, a Dick and Jane kind of sound—omitting, as it were, grown-up words and thought processes. The result is a sometimes nifty faux-naïf irony. And so it goes.
Vonnegut, incidentally, has given an interesting chronicle of the development of his style:
I went to a high school that put out a daily newspaper and, because I was writing for my peers and not for teachers, it was very important to me that they understand what I was saying. So the simplicity, and that’s not a bad word for it, of my writing was caused by the fact that my audience was composed of sophomores, juniors and seniors. In addition, the idea of an uncomplicated style was very much in the air back then—clarity, shorter sentences, strong verbs, a de-emphasis of adverbs and adjectives, that sort of thing. Because I believed in the merits of this type of prose, I was quite “teachable” and so I worked hard to achieve as pure a style as I could. When I got to Cornell my experiences on a daily paper—and daily high school papers were unheard of back then—enabled me to become a big shot on Cornell’s Daily Sun. I suppose it was this consistent involvement with newspaper audiences that fashioned my style…. The theory was that large, sprawling paragraphs tended to discourage readers and make the paper appear ugly. Their strategy was primarily visual—that is, short paragraphs, often one-sentence paragraphs. It seemed to work very well, seemed to serve both me and the readers, so I stayed with it when I decided to make a living as a fiction writer.
The fact that Vonnegut doesn’t mention Hemingway’s name doesn’t mean that the earlier writer wasn’t an influence, only that his influence was so great as to go without saying.
Hammett and many detective writers and newspaper folk appear to have a specific stylistic motive for terseness: they leave out transitions, semicolons, four-syllable words, and other sissified aspects of language to show they are tough. From Elmore Leonard’s Pagan Babies: “He pushed the button next to D. Dewey and waited in the light over the doorway to hear her voice on the intercom or for the door to buzz open. She would know who he was. He pushed the button again and waited and then stepped back on the sidewalk to look up at the windows.” (Like Toni Morrison, Leonard has a particular dislike for adverbs. “I would never use a word like quietly,” he says. “There’s a pause with the ly that stops everything. I’ll say, ‘He used a quiet voice.’”) Even in the three sentences above, one can see that though Leonard took classes at the School of Hemingway, he managed to avoid some of its traps. He says, “I studied Hemingway till I realized he didn’t have a sense of humor. Then I found Richard Bissell, and W. C. Heinz”—writers a generation older than Leonard who had followed Hemingway’s ideas about paring down the language but balked at his portentousness.
At the other end of the line is Faulkner, whose style is certainly not colloquial but has overtones of oratory and the pulpit. From The Hamlet:
After a time, Mrs. Armistad raised her head and looked up the road where it went on, mild with spring dust, past Mrs. Littlejohn’s, beginning to rise, on past the not-yet-bloomed (that would be in June) locust grove across the way, on past the schoolhouse, the weathered roof of which, rising beyond an orchard of peach and pear trees, resembles a hive swarmed about by a cloud of pink-and-white bees, ascending, mounting toward the crest of the hill where the church stood among its sparse gleam of the marble headstones in the sombre cedar grove where during the long afternoons of summer the constant mourning doves called back and forth.
You get the impression of Faulkner starting out on the sentence as if on a journey, with no idea how it will end but with a determination to follow it to its ineluctable conclusion, classical proportions and the capacity of the human lungs be damned. In classical rhetoric, running sentences are rambling affairs that pursue one thought and then another. (They are opposed to the periodic sentence as practiced by Samuel Johnson and Henry James, which is laboriously shaped in order to most elegantly express an idea, with a kind of single-word punch line at the end.) Faulkner’s running style borrows from Joyce’s stream of consciousness in imitating or at least intimating the process of human thought. For Faulkner, everything is a link—a synonym, a simile, a sense memory—and he puts no limits on himself in pursuing these connections.
In interviews over the years, Faulkner gave varying, sometimes contradictory, explanations for his style. In 1957, he said, “Any writer who has a lot to say, hasn’t got time to bother with style,” and, on his sentence structure, “It comes from the constant sense one has that he only has a short time before he is going to die.” Five years later he said:
I think that any artist, musician, writer, painter would like to take all of the experience which he has seen, observed, felt, and reduce that to one single color or tone or word, which is impossible…. And the obscurity, the prolixity which you find in writers is simply that desire to put all that experience into one word. Then he has got to add another word, another word becomes a sentence, but he’s still trying to get it into one unstoppable whole—paragraph or page—before he finds a place to put a full stop.
Faulkner’s style is intoxicating, in the way it invites one to luxuriate in the language and all its possibilities, but it’s not surprising that his followers are outnumbered by Hemingway’s. A maximal style is harder to carry off than a minimal one; and it can make you look a lot sillier.
A few stylists have borrowed a bit from each presiding genius. Because of its verbal inventiveness and its recipe of conviction-minus-pretension, there is no style more entertaining than that of Raymond Chandler, who spoke through his narrator-detective Philip Marlowe. It alternates between just-the-facts-ma’am terseness (mostly used for exposition) and highly rhetorical figuration, usually deployed when Marlowe is emotionally invested in the subject at hand, as in this great riff from The Long Goodbye (1953), which suggests Chandler as an inspiration for the clever second-person present-tense style of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City:
There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition are as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial.
Rick Bragg, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, alternates, to excellent effect, among a trio of voices derived from Hemingway, Faulkner, and journalistic convention. He set one article in a New Orleans cemetery and began it this way:
In a graveyard where rows of crosses lean left and right, where one-inch-thin headstones bow to the earth or tilt toward the sky and misspelled missives to the dead are inked onto rotted plywood markers, Cleveland Cobb spent a long time making sure he got the flowers just right.
Mr. Cobb, 75, first pounded the dirt of the family plot as smooth as he could with the flat of his shovel, then, with his hands, scooped a hollow place just big enough to root a small clutch of white flowers.
“My mother,” he said, in explanation. “Mary. I like to see her grave looking good. Nothing else I can do for her.”
Bragg violates the Hemingway code right away, with oratorical cadences, with personification, with alliteration, with general Faulknerian purple. But the mention of Cleveland Cobb toward the end of the first sentence seems to pull the writing taught and ward off any verbal overreaching. From that point on, there are no adverbs, only plain adjectives like hollow and big, and only two words longer than two syllables ( family and explanation).
Then there is Cormac McCarthy. From Cities of the Plain (1992): “He worked long into the nights and he’d come in and unsaddle the horse and brush it in the partial darkness of the barn bay and walk across the kitchen and get his supper out of the warmer and sit and eat alone at the table by the shaded light of the lamp and listen to the faultless chronicling of the ancient clockworks in the hallways and the ancient silence of the desert in the darkness about.”
It’s pure Hemingway until the word faultless. Everything after that is Faulkner—the personification of the clockworks (and is there a difference between clockworks and clocks?), the repetition of the rather gratuitous ancient, and the curious word about, which in this sense is archaic or otherwise nonstandard. The complete absence of punctuation within the sentence is McCarthy’s own shot at being even more conspicuous than his two forebears.*
What I have been discussing are personal stylistic imperatives, an attitude made manifest in language, and noticeable in everything a particular writer produces. But in other cases style works on a microlevel. That is, a writer’s calling card will be a particular verbal habit, the way Michael Jordan will go to his fallaway jumpshot or John Coltrane to the modal scale. Sometimes this usage or device will be indicative of the writer’s approach to writing or the world; sometimes it will just be a usage or device. And, naturally, you have to be a PGR of the writer to notice it.
A nonstandard gerund at the end of sentences is an Elmore Leonard trademark. (“Today he watched from the wicker chair, the green shirt on the stick figure walking toward the road in the rain, still in the yard when Terry called to him.”) If in no other way, you could tell apart the criticism of John Leonard and Martin Amis because the former characteristically layers on lists and allusions, usually without much explanation, and the latter has a similar fondness for quotation. (Amis explains: “You proceed by quotation. Quotation is the reviewer’s only hard evidence. Without it, in any case, criticism is a shop-queue monologue.”)
The English novelist Anthony Powell had an abiding predilection for the rhetorical device of litotes, a form of understatement in which one describes something by saying what it is not. The linguistic habit defined the voice of Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator of Powell’s 12-part novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, and, indeed, of Powell himself. Even for Powell, the five separate uses of litotes in this paragraph from At Lady Molly’s is unusual and, together with the two uses of the passive voice, the style reaches a rare level of bemused diffidence:
Although never exactly handsome, Mrs. Conyers was not without a look of sad distinction. In public she deferred to her husband, but she was known to possess a will of her own, displayed in that foxy, almost rodent-like cast of feature, which, resembling her sister’s in its keenness, was not disagreeable. It was said that she had entirely reorganised the General’s life after he had left the army; and much for the better. When I went across the room to speak with her, she raised her eyebrows slightly to indicate, if not precise disapproval, at least a secret signal that she felt herself not altogether at home.*
Continuing to move along the macro–micro scale, individual words can be reliable stylistic markers. (The nineteenth-century French critic Sainte-Beuve observed, “Each writer has his favorite word which recurs in his style and inadvertently betrays some secret wish or weakness of the user.”) Pauline Kael was partial to slang expressions of obscure provenance; only in one of her pieces would you find a film described as “a crumbum farce.” Another trademark (presumptuous to some) was using a character she called “you” to be the mouthpiece for her own reactions to a movie. (About John Carpenter’s horror film Halloween she wrote, “Carpenter keeps you tense in an undifferentiated way—nervous and irritated rather than pleasurably excited—and you reach the point of wanting someone to be killed so the film’s rhythms will change.” To which the appropriate response would have to be, “Who, me?”) Russell Baker is a naturally modest stylist; he refers to himself as well as his ostensible subject, Joseph Mitchell, when he writes, “He was trained in the hard discipline of an old-fashioned journalism whose code demanded self-effacement of the writer.” Yet Baker reveals himself despite himself, and one way is his use of antique terms and expressions, as in this line from a review of a Joe DiMaggio biography: “It is eloquent testimony to the cheapness of baseball owners that the finest players of the DiMaggio era can now earn more as geezers peddling gimcracks than they did when they were golden lads bringing glory to the game.” The phrase “geezers peddling gimcracks” is especially fine. Unlike Elmore Leonard and Toni Morrison, English provocateur Christopher Hitchens has a thing for adverbs, perhaps an example of his championing of unpopular causes. Adverbs are rightfully scorned because of all the people who use weaselly modifiers like rather/pretty and somewhat/a little to avoid coming out and saying what they mean, or empty intensifiers such as really, incredibly, and profoundly to do their work for them. Hitchens is more precise. In an essay about anti-Semitism he writes, “Even as a wretchedly heretic and bastard member of the tribe [he did not discover his mother was Jewish until he was an adult], I perhaps conceitedly think that there may be something about Jews’ being inherently and intuitively smart.” Wretchedly, perhaps, conceitedly, inherently, intuitively: maybe there’s one too many, but the basic idea is sound. Each word palpably nudges an adjective or noun until it falls into its proper place with a satisfying click. Collectively the modifiers define a stance and a style.
Neurologist and medical writer Oliver Sacks’s estimable middle style reveals him as intelligent and sympathetic, in an unextraordinary way. (I am not speaking of Sacks’s insights and achievement, only his style.) But even in his “transparent” prose, if you are familiar enough with it, there are markers. Here is a paragraph describing his conversation with a woman who had suddenly lost the ability to mentally process letters and numbers:
I wondered how she could read the time, since she was wearing a wristwatch. She could not read the numbers, she said, but could judge the position of the hands. I then showed her, mischievously, a strange clock I have, in which the numbers are replaced by the symbols of elements (H, He, Li, Be, etc.). She did not perceive anything the matter with this, as for her the chemical abbreviations were no more or less unintelligible than numerals would have been.
There are several notable things about the paragraph. The first is the very subtle way Sacks scruffs up the prose, counters the PGR’s expectations, and keeps him on his toes. In sentence 1, the word wondered gives us a jolt because we initially read it to indicate a mental process, not an action; the expected phrasing would be “I asked her how…” Indeed, both the first two sentences would conventionally be rendered in dialogue form, with quotation marks. Paraphrasing slightly distances us. The parenthesis and the word etc. in the third sentence are literary; but the matter instead of wrong in the fourth sentence is pleasingly colloquial. Having said all that, I’m not familiar enough with Sacks’s work to know if these stylistic maneuvers are characteristic. But I have read enough to hear the one word in the paragraph that shouts his name. The word is mischievously. It makes me say to myself, Yes, his stylistic self-presentation is exactly such that he would act mischievously and call himself mischievous. That he puts the word by itself, in an unnatural place (one would expect it to be the first word in the sentence or to come after then), clinches the case.
Remember Richard Lanham’s epithet about the middle style: expected. As the PGR reads along, he is always coming upon standard words, words that, like 10-year-old quarters, are no longer shiny and do not require or inspire a reaction. A first-rate literary stylist—an Updike, a Martin Amis, a Nicholson Baker, a Jonathan Raban, a Cynthia Ozick, a Clive James—will continually present us with words that we do not expect, that have not been in everyone’s hands and are consequently sometimes unfamiliar, that are precise and correct for the circumstances, and that brand the sentence as the author’s work. The first sentence of the second paragraph in Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections reads, “Three in the afternoon was a time of danger in these gerontocratic suburbs of St. Jude.” Gerontocratic: a truly unusual word, with only 580 hits at www.google.com, but we understand its meaning (“pertaining to a society ruled by an elderly elite”), and that the word is Franzen-like. On page 368 of Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which mixes real events and characters with fictional ones in telling the story of some creators of comic books in mid-century America, is this sentence: “The sudden small efflorescence of art, minor but genuine, in the tawdry product line of what was then the fifth-or sixth-largest comic book company in America has usually been attributed to the potent spell of Citizen Kane acting on the renascent aspirations of Joe Kavalier.”
Chabon says:
As a kid I used to read the dictionary for fun in the bathroom. I’m still fascinated by synonyms, antonyms, etymology. So I have a big vocabulary at my disposal. When I’m writing, I’m also listening. I’ll hear a rhythm; a pattern will beat in my mind that will encapsulate what I’m trying to say. Then the words will pop in. When I was writing that sentence, I heard it in looping swags of words. Dit-da-dit-da. Efflorescence and renascent dropped in because I knew them. Then I go over the sentence and ask myself, are the words accurate for the meaning I’m intending, and would that narrator know them? If the answer is clearly no, I’ll take them out.
A word doesn’t have to be unusual to be distinguishing. Think of the writer as a saxophonist in a band that’s providing the music for a bar mitzvah party. In other words, Charlie Parker need not apply. Audience members will take note of a neophyte or just plain rhythmless player who doesn’t have the skill to play the expected note at the expected time, the way they can’t avoid being aware of a writer who doesn’t know the meanings of words, who doesn’t even notice the clanging of repetition, or who sends out a steady stream of clichés. They will not notice a saxophonist who has mastered his instrument sufficiently to hit the proper note in the proper rhythm (the middle stylist). But some musicians will stand out and make things a little bit interesting by playing slightly in front of or behind the beat, or by “bending” a note to make it ever so slightly discordant. That’s what writers can do with words. In the Oliver Sacks paragraph quoted above, take a look at the unusual, precise, and unexpected word judge; it distinguishes the sentence. In the next sentence, the transparent adjective would have been unusual, but Sacks uses strange, which has a faint and pleasing scent of science fiction and adventure stories.
The routes by which writers find their mots justes are various.
I often find myself desperately looking for a word. Sometimes I close my eyes tight and find myself clawing the air. Sometimes I find it with that kind of physical pressure. Sometimes I don’t, and then I do what every writer does, which is take out the thesaurus. Sometimes the word is there, and sometimes what helps is the experience of a tour through words. I do love the thesaurus. It is such a work of genius. I’m seduced by adjectives. It can be a flaw, and one has to be very careful.
—Cynthia Ozick
In rewriting, what I put in are adjectives—they speak to the senses, to drama, to emotion. I use Roget’s and the dictionary, and what I am looking for is not only the right word, but the surprising word—maybe for something in the rhythm that is a bit abnormal for English prose. I’m very conscious of drawing on certain French or Italian things.
—Camille Paglia
I have this philosophy—I like plain words, like tall and guy. I like rehabilitating words that have been so overused they they don’t get used anymore.
—Susan Orlean
I could fill up the rest of this book with examples of words that are redolent of their author but will content myself with one,* which involves two more of the writers named above. I still remember reading the New York Times Book Review one morning in 1991 and jumping to attention when I read Amis describing Updike’s Odd Jobs (919 pages long) as “his fourth cuboid volume of higher journalism.”
If you pay close enough attention, style peers out from all sorts of doorways. Consider the series: a list of nouns or adjectives. Winston Weathers devoted an ingenious essay† to demonstrating that by forming series of various lengths, writers present greatly different tones of voice. A series of two parts will suggest “certainty, confidence, didacticism and dogmatism”; one of three parts “the normal, the reasonable, the believable and the logical” (also, in our terminology, transparency); and one of four or more parts “the human, emotional, diffuse and inexplicable.” Thomas Hobbes uses all three types in a famous sentence from Leviathan: “No arts, no letters, no society [3]; and which is worst of all, continued fear and danger [2] of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short [5].” Weathers points out that the use of conjunctions—and or or—can vary the style even more. Normally, there’s one before the last item in the series. By omitting it, a writer can give a sense of integration, inevitability, and/or speed: “I came, I saw, I conquered.” And inserting a conjunction between all elements can suggest portent or, as in Hemingway, an increase in rhetorical volume, conveying agitation on the narrator’s part.
Getting about as micro as it’s possible to get, certain writers are identifiable by their use of punctuation and other typographical features. Poet W.S. Merwin and James Joyce (at times), who eschew punctuation, are obvious and radical examples. But you can also spot Henry James for the ‘inverted commas’ he uses to put a special stress on a term, Emily Dickinson for her dashes and nothing but dashes, and John Irving for his italics, exclamation points, and semicolons. George Eliot was a semicolon virtuoso as well, recognizing it as a piece of punctuation that allows a gradual landing from a thought and takeoff to another one, rather than the abrupt and sometimes bumpy full stop of a period. (Donald Barthelme, by contrast, once said, “Why do I avoid, as much as possible, using the semicolon? Let me be plain: the semicolon is ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly. I pinch them out of my prose. The great German writer Arno Schmidt, punctuation-drunk, averages eleven to a page.”) J. D. Salinger is probably the king of italics—his specialty being italicizing just one syllable of a word. For Pauline Kael, parentheses served as a kind of wise-guy Greek chorus to the main line of exposition. (Her protégés Elvis Mitchell and James Wolcott carry on the tradition.) Nicholson Baker started a vogue for footnotes in his novels The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. He liked the idea, he says, of “sometimes just to glance on something, but to then have these observations that would flow from that one moment in time, without having to explode the paragraph and make it five pages long.”*
The use of quotation marks to indicate spoken dialogue came into being at the same time as the novel itself, the eighteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth, it was a purely subliminal signal; readers did not notice them, merely understood by their presence that the words within were meant to be “heard” as dialogue. (Even so, the double marks [“”] customary in the United States definitely have a different feel than the single marks [‘ ’] used in Britain: they are a little ungainly, a little literal, a little American.) Perhaps because he wished to disrupt the equilibrium, perhaps because he wanted his writing to be less transparent, or perhaps just because it felt right, Joyce left out the quotation marks in his novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and his short-story collection, Dubliners, using a dash to indicate a line of dialogue. He repeated the technique in Ulysses. Since then, writers including William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, E. L. Doctorow, Cormac McCarthy, William Vollman, Margaret Atwood, and Junot Díaz have (consistently or sporadically) opted out of quotation marks and made that decision part of their respective styles. By doing so they don’t alter meaning; we still understand that a certain character has said the words on the page. But the sound and the feel of the prose are different; it’s a move away from the fiction of transparency and toward the acknowledgment of artifice.
Punctuation itself began roughly the same time as silent reading became dominant, in the late middle ages; when a text was read aloud, the pauses and emphases suggested themselves, but silent readers needed guidance for their subvocalization. Generally speaking, commas are the best punctuational style gauge because a good deal of the time, even within the rules of standard English, they are optional. That is, it’s a question of style, not correctness, whether to put a comma between independent clauses (“I was there, but he wasn’t”), after introductory or transitional clauses or phrases (“the next day, we went home”), or around borderline nonrestrictive modifiers (“when he graduated, in 1954, he went to work as an insurance adjuster” or “my best friend, Bobby”).*
When commas are put in more than we are used to, we hear the result as overcultivated or prissy or painfully slow. Consider the so-called serial comma. If we uttered a phrase like “ready, willing and able,” we wouldn’t pause after “ready.” So the comma is there to aid not subvocalization but comprehension: “ready willing and able” is initially confusing, the kind of thing you might see in a deliberately opaque avant garde style or in a Joycean stream of consciousness. But a comma after willing—the serial comma—isn’t necessary for us to follow the sense. It slows our reading down and sounds pedantic.
Not surprisingly, the house style of the New Yorker magazine mandates the serial comma. This is the publication where, as E. B. White once said, “commas…fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.” The serial comma was taken on the counsel of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which was founding editor Harold Ross’s Bible. More commas came as a result of Ross’s mania for accuracy, matched and indeed intensified by his successor, William Shawn. In the New Yorker’s heyday from the end of World War II to the 1980s, each bit of meaning was punctuationally divided, so that nothing could possibly be ambiguous and no bit of a sentence contaminated by any other. This led to formulations that couldn’t be imagined in any medium other than the New Yorker. From a 1948 article: “When I read, the other day, in the suburban news section of a Boston newspaper, of the death of Mrs. Abigail Richardson Sawyer (as I shall call her), I was, for the moment, incredulous, for I had always thought of her as one of nature’s indestructibles.” That’s seven commas when only two are necessary (after her and incredulous).
English writers tend to use fewer discretionary commas than do Americans, with their weakness for literalness and their ambiguity complex. Evelyn Waugh writes in A Handful of Dust: “Mrs. Beaver [the proprietress of an antique shop] was able to descend to the basement where two dispirited girls were packing lampshades. It was cold down there in spite of a little oil stove and the walls were always damp. The girls were becoming quite deft, she noticed with pleasure, particularly the shorter one who was handling the crates like a man.” Waugh could (and according to most style guides should) have put commas after basement, stove, and one. But if he had it wouldn’t be Waugh. By contrast, P. G. Wodehouse uses almost all optional commas, possibly because he was born two decades earlier than Waugh (in 1881) and came of age in a calmer, more leisurely time. Also, the commas helped Wodehouse poke fun at his dim, prim and proper upper-class narrators, notably Bertie Wooster. From The Inimitable Jeeves: “In fact, the only event of any importance on the horizon, as far as I could ascertain, was the annual village school treat. One simply filled in the time by loafing about the grounds, playing a bit of tennis, and avoiding young Bingo as far as was humanly possible.”
When Americans omit commas, it’s often to conjure up untutored narrators who would presumably be flummoxed by their classroom mustiness and tricky protocol. (They often put in superfluous quotation marks for the same reason.) Huck Finn memorably writes that one of the books he came upon in the Grangerford house was “Pilgrim’s Progress, about a man that left his family it didn’t say why.”* The opening lines of Ring Lardner’s “A Caddy’s Diary”: “I am 16 of age and am a caddy at the Pleasant View Golf Club but only temporary as I expect to soon land a job some wheres as asst pro as my game is good enough now to be a pro but to young looking. My pal Joe Bean also says I have not got enough swell head to make a good pro but suppose that will come in time, Joe is a wise cracker.” (The comma Joe does use is called a comma splice, in that it improperly splices together two clauses or sentences. Beckett and Michael Herr, in his Vietnam book Dispatches, are masters of the comma splice.) Peter Carey is not an American but an Australian, which is the next best thing. When he finished a draft of his novel True History of the Kelly Gang—in the form of a document written by the nineteenth-century outlaw Ned Kelly to his daughter—he used a function of his word processor to search for and remove every single comma. The opening sentence of the published book reads: “I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.”
Gertrude Stein disdained commas, and Hemingway certainly got the idea. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein wrote (referring to herself in the third person), “[Stephen] Haweis had been fascinated with what he had read in the manuscript of The Making of Americans. He did however plead for commas. Gertrude Stein said commas were unnecessary, the sense should be intrinsic and not have to be explained by commas and otherwise commas were only a sign that one should pause and take breath but one should know of oneself when one wanted to pause and take breath. However, as she liked Haweis very much and he had given her a delightful painting for a fan, she gave him two commas. It must however be added that on rereading the manuscript she took the two commas out.”