This book began with a single and simple observation: it is frequently the case that writers entertain, move and inspire us less by what they say than by how they say it. What they say is information and ideas and (in the case of fiction) story and characters. How they say it is style.
For the first of many times, I present as an example Ernest Hemingway. What is Hemingway’s content? He has some fishing and war stories that are pretty good, if a little short in the action department, and some ideas about honorable and dishonorable behavior that would puzzle many contemporary readers. His characters, especially in the novels and most especially in the later novels, tend to be tiresome. But his style! Take a look at the first paragraph of one of his first stories, “The Three Day Blow”:
The rain stopped as Nick turned into the road that went up through the orchard. The fruit had been picked and the fall wind blew through the bare trees. Nick stopped and picked up a Wagner apple from beside the road, shiny in the brown grass from the rain. He put the apple in the pocket of his Mackinaw coat.
The first striking thing about this passage is the action it describes appears to be in no way dramatic, significant, or interesting. The second is that it could only have been written by Hemingway. (I was going to add, “or by one of his imitators,” but his imitators, with all their talk about how “the fishing was good,” miss the subtlety and mangle the tone of the original.) Even if by some chance you have not read his work, you will, if you are at all an attentive reader, be struck by the unified, consistent, and ultimately hypnotic sound and feel of it. We note the plain words and short sentences, of course—so pronounced that the comma in the third sentence feels like a consoling arm around our shoulder and the three-syllable Mackinaw at the end a gift outright—but also the way these technical features create a mood. The reluctance to commit to a complex sentence, a Latinate word, an adverb, or even a pronoun (repeating Nick and the apple instead of substituting he or it), the urge to describe the world precisely, even at the risk of using eight ungainly prepositional phrases in one paragraph: the more familiar one is with this writer, the most one understands that his stylistic choices express a state of mind, a philosophy of perception, and a morality that we now communicate with one word—Hemingway.
Consider, next, the most popular novelist in the English language—Charles Dickens. His characters are types, not people. With some honorable exceptions like Great Expectations and David Copperfield, his plots are unwieldy and ultimately uninvolving. He exposed alarming social conditions, but these have, for the most part, been taken care of. His comic set pieces, no doubt side-splitting in their day, are coming up on 150 years old and read like it; his sentimentality handed Oscar Wilde his best moment in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. (“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”) So why could you roam the Contemporary Fiction shelves at Barnes & Noble for a year and still not find a writer as stirring and alive? Benjamin Disraeli suggested the answer when he observed, “It is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work.” Here is how Dickens opens Bleak House:
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
It is a muddy day, all right—that much is clear. But that’s not the point. The point is that Dickens, or, rather, the narrator of Bleak House, knows it is a muddy day. He knows it so completely and profoundly, and is so eager to tell us about it, that he can’t contain himself, much less take the time to place into complete sentences all the images and similes and words that are nearly overwhelming him. Reading this paragraph the traditional way is too fast—it may not be possible to catch all the facets of this teller’s personality. Flaubert used to submit his sentences to what he called la guelade—the shouting test. He would go out to an avenue of lime trees near his house and proclaim what he’d written at the top of his lungs, the better to see if the prose conformed to the ideal that was in his head. Try that with Dickens’s words. Or, maybe better yet, type them out (as I just did), the better to fall under the spell of this mordant, funny, metaphor-mad, and itchily omniscient voice.
The style of Bleak House is not exactly the same as that of Our Mutual Friend or Great Expectations, and indeed, looking in fiction for an author’s idiosyncratic and identifiable style, sometimes called voice for reasons that are explored later in this book, can be a tricky maneuver. A novel has to include plot and characters and dialogue, making the writer a ventriloquist, periodically compelled to pick up a dummy and throw his voice without moving his lips. (A first-person novel or story is all disguise, an extended monologue by a made-up someone.) Theme and setting will vary from book to book, perhaps leading the novelist to adopt a different style each time out. An essayist or critic, on the other hand, is figuratively talking to us from the beginning of a piece of writing to the end, and so his or her voice should in theory be more consistently evident. Put the theory to the test in this opening to an essay:
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also think about exactly where that water is: I particularly like to imagine it as it cascades down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate Owens water after its airless passage through the mountain pipes and siphons. As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale. I know the data on water projects I will never see. I know the difficulty Kaiser had closing the last two sluiceway gates on the Guri Dam in Venezuela. I keep watch on evaporation behind the Aswan in Egypt. I can put myself to sleep imagining the water dropping a thousand feet into the turbines at Churchill Falls in Labrador. If the Churchill Falls Project fails to materialize, I fall back on waterworks closer at hand—the tailrace at Hoover on the Colorado, the surge tank in the Tehachapi Mountains that receives California Aqueduct water pumped higher than water has ever been pumped before—and finally I replay a morning when I was seventeen years old and caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River near Sacramento. I remember that at the moment it happened I was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers. I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through which the river had been temporarily diverted. I recall being deliriously happy.
That’s right, Joan Didion (from a 1977 essay, “Holy Water,” collected in The White Album). The California references are a giveaway, but Didion readers would be able to spot this one even if all the place names were whited out. The telltale signs: no contractions (a stylistic formality that’s a striking contrast to the way the narrator invites us to share her experiences and mental landscape). The repetition of I recall in the final two sentences. No commas in passages like “As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is.” The very words As it happens and other formal and subtly distancing phrases. The long sentences such as the one begun by As it happens, constructed with a precision that borders on the compulsive and thus hints that language is a construction erected to protect a vulnerable self against many unnamed assailants. In particular, the list “aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains”: the terms of art are such a fortification, and meanwhile the use of and ’s rather than commas to link them subtly raises the emotional volume and stakes. In Didion, style generates its own meaning, so that the words I can put myself to sleep, innocuous in any other writer’s work, here calls forth intimations of insomnia and the dark night of the soul.
And what of Dave Barry? My reading suggests that this humorist has four principal themes: airline food is bad, it’s hard to live with an adolescent, males and females are essentially different, and the United States sure is a weird country. When I interviewed Barry in his office at the Miami Herald, he did not claim that these or any of the other points he makes are profound. Referring to Robert Benchley, he said:
If there was anybody whose style I patterned myself after, it’s him. He’s silly. I love silly humor. There are a lot of people who cannot deal with silly humor. They say you have to be making some coherent, meaningful point for it to be of worth. I don’t believe that.*
In humor more than any other form of writing other than poetry (and in Barry more than most humor), style trumps content. Here is the opening of one of his pieces relating to theme three:
It began as a fun nautical outing, 10 of us in a motorboat off the coast of Miami. The weather was sunny and we saw no signs of danger, other than the risk of sliding overboard because every exposed surface on the boat was covered with a layer of snack-related grease. We had enough cholesterol on board to put the entire U.S. Olympic team into cardiac arrest. That is because all 10 of us were guys.
I hate to engage in gender stereotyping, but when women plan the menu for a recreational outing, they usually come up with a nutritionally balanced menu featuring all the major food groups, including the Sliced Carrots Group, the Pieces of Fruit Cut into Cubes Group, the Utensils Group, and the Plate Group. Whereas guys tend to focus on the Carbonated Malt Beverages Group and the Fatal Snacks Group. On this particular trip, our food supply consisted of about 14 bags of potato chips and one fast-food fried-chicken Giant Economy Tub o’ Fat. Nobody brought, for example, napkins, the theory being that you could just wipe your hands on your stomach. This is what guys on all-guy boats are doing while women are thinking about their relationships.
If you put the passage under the microscope, you can fairly easily enumerate Barry’s trademark stylistic techniques. He likes to sedate you with a conventional sentence or two, then sucker-punch you with something like snack-related grease. That phrase also shows his skill for plucking pieces of bureaucratese or other forms of cliché or dead language out of the linguistic ether, teeing them up, and knocking them 300 yards or so: gender stereotyping, recreational outing, nutritionally balanced. He hyperbolizes with a surgeon’s precision. There are subtle things, too, like the repetition of the word guys, which after being said or read a certain number of times becomes inexplicably funny, and the way he sticks a redundant particular in the third-to-last sentence and an unnecessary for example in the next one for no reason other than to enforce a pause. But readers are devoted to Barry, and to other estimable humor writers, such as Fran Lebowitz, Calvin Trillin, Roy Blount Jr., Nora Ephron, David Sedaris, and Sandra Tsing Loh, not merely because they are efficient laugh-delivery machines. Barry is no Hemingway, no Dickens—I guess not even a Didion—but his style, like theirs, is distinctive, suggestive, and the best manifestation of his particular genius. In the above passage, Barry aficionados will focus in on the middle of the second paragraph—the “food groups” bit. They will note (more likely subliminally than consciously) the capitalization, the word choice (carrots instead of vegetables, fruit instead of, say, cantelope), the pacing—the way that the women’s list has four items and the guys’, only two, and how in each list, the items get shorter and funnier, leading up finally to the formulation that only Dave Barry would have or could have devised—the Fatal Snacks Group.
So my observation became a premise: style matters. On further review, it accumulated two corollaries. The first is that for writers of the first rank (and many of the rest of us as well) style is unique and irrefutably identifiable, like a fingerprint, or like the sound of close friends’ voices, even if they’re only saying, “Hi, it’s me” on the telephone. Samuel Coleridge, in a letter to his friend William Wordsworth, describing reading some lines from Wordsworth’s poem “There Was a Boy” for the first time, wrote: “That ‘Uncertain heaven received/Into the bosom of the steady lake,’ I should have recognized any where; and had I met these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out ‘Wordsworth!’” In the same way, on reading the above passages for the first time, readers familiar with the respective authors’ work would instantly scream out Hemingway, Dickens, Didion, and Barry!
For the second corollary, shift the analogy from fingerprints, which identify us but have no bearing on any other aspect of ourselves, to handwriting, which not only identifies us but, we are told, reveals our essence. George Buffon famously encapsulated the idea in 1753: Le style c’est l’homme même (“Style is the man himself”). Style in the deepest sense is not a set of techniques, devices, and habits of expression that just happen to be associated with a particular person, but a presentation or representation of something essential about him or her—something that we, as readers, want to know from that writer and that cannot be disguised, no matter how much the writer may try. “Our style betrays us,” Robert Burton observed in The Anatomy of Melancholy. Our style advertises the extent to which we are (or are not) self-absorbed, generous, solicitous, obsessive, conventional, funny, dull, stuffy, surprising, impatient, boring, slovenly, intelligent, or insecure. In his memoir, Experience, Martin Amis recounts a long-standing debate he had with his father, Kingsley Amis, about the merits of Vladimir Nabokov. When Martin read aloud a Nabokov passage he particularly admired, Kingsley said, “That’s just flimflam, diversionary stuff to make you think he cares. That’s just style.” Martin: “Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It’s not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence. To Kingsley, though, sustained euphony automatically became euphuism: always.”* Young English novelist Zadie Smith recently observed, “Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to [David] Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist’s literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy—it’s always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.” This can work for ill as well as good. Wilde, in another Bartlett’s moment, once remarked that the chief argument against Christianity was the style of St. Paul.
That the how is more important and revealing than the what goes without saying when it comes to many other creative endeavors. Think of Michael Jordan and Jerry West each making a twenty-foot jump shot, of Charlie Parker and Ben Webster each playing a chorus of “All the Things You Are,” of Julia Child and Paul Prudhomme each fixing a duck à l’orange, of Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson each designing a twenty-story office tower on the same corner of the same city, or of Pieter Brueghel and Vincent van Gogh each painting the same farmhouse. Everyone understands that the content is constant, frequently ordinary, and sometimes banal; that the (wide) variation, the arena for expression and excellence, the fun, the art—it’s all in the individual style.
Encouraged by my premise and corollaries, I began haunting bookstores and libraries. I emerged with a paradox: as important as personal style is in writing, it is strangely overlooked in books that purport to be about style in writing. Exhibit 1 is an 84-page volume called The Elements of Style. I didn’t even need to go to the library to read it; like millions of other Americans, I own a copy. It grew out of a self-published pamphlet that William Strunk, a professor of English at Cornell in the early decades of the twentieth century, handed out to his students, one of whom was E.B. White. In 1959, White updated the manuscript and added an introduction and a new chapter. It has been in print ever since. At the moment, it’s number 48 on the Amazon.com best seller list of the roughly two million titles the online bookstore offers for sale, just ahead of Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul and just behind Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook.
One odd thing about Strunk and White (as everybody calls the The Elements) is the way it uses style in different, sometimes seemingly contradictory, senses. At the outset we are in the world of The Chicago Manual of Style, The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual, and the sixth and final definition in the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary: “a convention with respect to spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and typographic arrangement and display followed in writing or printing.” Thus the first sentence of chapter I in Strunk and White is “Form the possessive of nouns by adding ’s.” Subsequent rules or customs include “Place a comma before a conjunction introducing an independent clause” and “A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.”
Later on, the conception of style broadens a bit, to mean something like elegance or, more broadly, propriety and effectiveness in written communication. “Use the active voice,” the reader is advised, and, “Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.” In the chapter White wrote himself, he offers a list of guidelines, including, “Place yourself in the background,” “Do not affect a breezy manner,” and “Do not inject opinion.” (All that placing calls to mind someone dropping little people and houses into a model-railroad layout.) “The approach to style,” White concludes, “is by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, sincerity.”
This meaning for the word style doesn’t exactly correspond with any of the dictionary definitions. The one that comes closest is: “a mode of fashion, as in dress, esp. good or approved fashion; elegance; smartness.” Strunk and White aren’t talking about clothing, but that good or approved hits home. They purport to be talking about “style,” but they are really advocating a particular style. They define this almost completely in negative terms, as an absence of faults—an elimination of all grammatical mistakes and solecisms, of breeziness, opinions, clichés, jargon, mixed metaphors, passive-voice constructions, wordiness, and so on. The implicit and sometimes explicit goal is a transparent prose, where the writing exists solely to serve the meaning, and no trace of the author—no mannerisms, no voice, no individual style—should remain. They think of writers the way baseball’s conventional wisdom thinks of umpires: you notice only the bad ones. One measure of this doctrine’s weirdness is that its absolute inapplicability to E.B. White’s own prose style, which, although outwardly plain, simple, orderly, and sincere, is also idiosyncratic, opinionated, and unmistakable.*
Simplicity, clarity and invisibility are, in any case, the gospel in almost all post–Strunk and White writing manuals, whether or not they invoke the word style. Richard Marius, in A Writer’s Companion, advises, “Don’t show off; avoid drawing unnecessary attention to yourself…. When we blatantly insert ourselves into our story, we are like thoughtless people who invite friends to a movie and then spend so much time talking that they can’t enjoy the show.” (An odd metaphor—it forgets that when we write we are the movie.) In Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Joseph Williams states, “The only reliable rule, I think, is ‘Less is more.’” Edward Corbett and Robert Connors in Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (fourth edition, 1998): “The prime quality of prose style is clarity.” William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, Jacques Barzun’s Simple & Direct, Peter Richardson’s Style: A Pragmatic Approach: each time, it’s the same minimalist and impersonal doctrine.
But this is a chimera based on a fallacy. Perhaps transparency is possible, or at least a useful metaphor, when one is composing an instruction manual. Dowel A is 10 inches long, no more, no less. It should be inserted in hole B, and nowhere else. This is the information that must be conveyed, and any intimations of personality by the writer would be misplaced and counterproductive. But in communicating ideas, opinions, impressions—indeed, in any attempt to describe or imagine the wide world—content does not exist separate from the words in which it is expressed. Each one depends on the other. When you remove the wrapping of the language, you see that the box is empty.
When I arranged to interview Yale literary critic Harold Bloom, I told him beforehand that my intention was to write a book that looked at style from a perspective different from the one found in The Elements of Style. When he met me in the living room of his New Haven house, he said:
I put that book away from me with some loathing twenty years ago, but I looked at it earlier today, and I just burst out laughing. If I were asked to sum up its teachings, they would be: put yourself in the background, avoid all figurative language if possible, and don’t be opinionated. The first half, the rules of grammar and so forth, is perfectly sensible, but you could not write two pages in which you try to say anything that matters to you and obey what is going on in the second half of that little manual. It outlaws everything that I care for in writing, in literature, in the act of writing. It tries to pretend it’s against the overly baroque, but what it’s against is what I would say is imagination itself.
Bloom gestured to the bound galleys of his soon-to-be-published book Genius, sitting on a table next to him. “There isn’t a single paragraph of that eight-hundred-page monster that could pass muster in Strunk and White. Never does its author keep himself in the background, never does he avoid his own opinions, and he goes from one figuration to the another.”
Bloom went on:
It is a shirtsleeve doctrine of writing. It’s based upon a kind of false social contract, a mock civility, combined with that wretched thing, a mock humility. Why the appeal? I’m afraid it’s a social dialectic. If you can get yourself to write like that and admire writing like that, then you must be a gentleman or gentlewoman, rather than a parvenu. I had a creepy feeling as I browsed in it. Those qualities which the latter half is rejecting, and which are my essence as a human being, a writer and a teacher—those are exactly the qualities that Yale would not tolerate in me. That tells me what this is. The genteel tradition—or the Gentile tradition—is what Strunk and White comes down to.
One doesn’t need to accept Bloom’s entire critique to agree that there are limitations to the Strunk and White dogma. They come down to this: by pursuing transparency, you miss out on a whole lot of other things. Joseph Williams, author of Style, demonstrates this in his scrutiny of the following passage from George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language”:
The keynote of a pretentious style is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds….
Williams endorses the sense 100 percent but correctly notes that Orwell’s practice flouts his preaching: the passage is loaded with noun constructions and impersonal syntax. So Williams offers a new and improved version:
Those who write pretentiously eliminate simple verbs. Instead of using one word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, they turn a verb into a noun or adjective and then tack it on to a general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, from, play, render. Whenever possible, they use the passive voice instead of the active and noun constructions instead of gerunds….
One must have an ear of tin to read both versions and not realize that Williams has wrecked the passage. Yes, the revised version is logically consistent where the original is not: Orwell talks about “the elimination of simple verbs” without saying who is doing the eliminating, and writes “a verb becomes a phrase” as if verbs do this kind of thing on their own, and criticizes the passive voice in the passive voice! Yet the Orwell version is stronger for three reasons. First, the subject Williams has created for the first sentence and thence for the paragraph (“those who write pretentiously”) is vague and indeterminate; we squander a bit of our mental energy wondering who these miscreants are and are slightly disappointed when we realize they are straw men and women. Second, the passage actually suffers from the elimination of the passive voice, which admittedly has its flaws (most egregiously, evasions of responsibility along the lines of “mistakes were made”) but is sometimes spot-on. Orwell’s impersonal approach has a cosmic accuracy, in that the kind of writing he is talking about does seem to have a mind of its own; it spreads without human agency. Third, Orwell’s version sounds like Orwell—and why would anyone ever want to flatten out one of the most distinctive voices of the twentieth century?
A while back, I said it was odd that Strunk and White and other writing pundits adopted a constricted meaning of style. Actually, they have had at least four sound reasons for doing so. The first is tactical, the second practical, the third generic, and the fourth philosophical.
Number 1 is a matter of triage. To put it bluntly, our citizens have for some time been poor writers. When they are moved or required to put words to paper, their prose is likely to be (choose one or more): muddy, sloppy, pretentious, meandering, obfuscatory, jargon-and cliché-laden, and filled with errors of spelling, grammar, and diction. In addressing students or prospective writers, it would be loony to give such maladies a pass and concentrate on the finer points of style or voice.
But consider: there are books for golfers whose main goal is to hit the ball, and others for the more advanced players who are trying to get a little more backspin on their sand shots. Why isn’t it the same in writing? This leads me to the second reason: individual style really is hard to talk about, much more so than sand shots, and is even harder to teach. One can see the difficulty in White’s chapter of The Elements of Style. There (unlike many of his epigones) he does make appreciative gestures toward “style in its broader meaning: style in the sense of what is distinguished and distinguishing.” But having said that, he immediately backs away from the abyss. “Here we leave solid ground,” he observes, and goes on:
Who can confidently say what ignited a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes slightly rearranged are impotent? These are high mysteries, and this chapter is a mystery story, thinly disguised. There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly, no key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rule by which the young writer may steer his course. He will often find himself steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.
This manuever, of acknowledging the existence of individual style, then shielding the eyes before the bright light of its overwhelming mystery (White does it with rhetorical questions), is not an uncommon one. Indeed, it is understandable. There is something mysterious about style; it is hard to pin down. One does sometimes have the romantic sense that a distinctive writing style is genetic and immutable, precisely like fingerprints. So why write about it? Books about fingerprints do exist but are always about how to identify or interpret them, never how to make yours better.
Another option for dealing with individual style, besides White’s bowing to the ineffable, is a “you know it when you see it” pragmatism, exemplified in William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, which has been through so many editions since its original publication in 1985 that its subtitle has become The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. In one of the handful of paragraphs he allots to the subject, Zinsser tells us that the “fundamental rule is: be yourself.” This is plausible and encouraging, but it demands definition, exemplification, explication, maybe even peroration. Zinsser gives us just three sentences: “No rule, however, is harder to follow. It requires the writer to do two things which by his metabolism are impossible. He must relax and he must have confidence.” It’s the same advice a Little League coach might give to an 11-year-old about to face a curve ball for the first time, and just as helpful.
The third reason for the paucity of books on individual style is that in writing, it is always challenging and sometimes nearly impossible to separate what writers are saying from how they say it—that is, to separate content from style. Writers are messengers, and we tend to kill them or love them or merely make use of them more for what they have to tell us than for the way they express it. And when content is emphasized, a style that doesn’t get in the way of it—a transparent style—will be sought after and valued. (Contrast the art of painting, where content is immaterial and style is paramount. That is, if your style is original or artful enough, your work can hang in the Museum of Modern Art whether it depicts a sunset, a vase of flowers, or a geometrical pattern.)
I called the fourth reason “philosophical.” Another word for it might be proprietary. We all would probably grant that the prose of Dickens or Dave Barry is unmistakable. But would it be wise—or sane—to suggest that as a goal for the average English Composition student or aspiring romance novelist? The idea that every written passage should make a reader scream out the author’s name summons up the prospect of a cacophonous Tower of Babel. In his 1924 book English Prose Style, Herbert Read contended, “A personal style in the sense in which we have defined it is a very rare achievement…. For one erratic genius of this kind, there are a hundred who adopt a code. It is a more possible and a more politic faith.” Walter Raleigh, in his 1897 treatise, Style, set even longer odds and attributed them to the forces of conformity, cliché and linguistic inflation: “‘The style is the man’; but the social and rhetorical influences adulterate and debase it, until not one man in a thousand achieves his birthright, or claims his second self…. We talk to our fellows in the phrases we learn from them, which come to mean less and less as they grow worn with use. Then we exaggerate and distort, heaping epithet upon epithet in the endeavor to get little warmth out of the smoldering pile.”
Whatever the actual chances of achieving your stylistic birthright, more pressing questions present themselves. Who gets to be one of those erratic geniuses who are entitled to a style, and who is better off sticking to what Read calls “a code,” or what Strunk and White and Williams call style? And who decides which writers belong in which camp? Difficult questions indeed, and the temptations to leave them alone is certainly understandable.
My bookstore wanderings revealed to me a group of commentators who are not just willing but eager to take a stab at them. If White, Williams, and Zinsser are on the faculty of a button-down school of writing instruction, these authors belong to an alternative academy, dressed, as it were, in Hawaiian shirts, drawstring hemp pants, and sandals. They believe that everyone should have a style. Except they prefer the word voice and usually put it in the titles of their books: Developing a Written Voice; The Intuitive Writer: Listening to Your Own Voice; Writing and Personality: Finding Your Voice, Your Style, Your Way; Let the Crazy Child Write: Finding Your Creative Writing Voice; and (my favorite) Writing the Mind Alive: The Proprioceptive Method for Finding Your Authentic Voice. The general tack can be seen in a passage from another of the many volumes in this genre, Natalie Goldberg’s Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life: “Style in writing…means becoming more and more present, settling deeper inside the layers of ourselves and then speaking, knowing what we write echoes all of us; all of who we are is backing our writing…. We are each a concert reverberating with our whole lives and reflecting and amplifying the world around us.”
If “turning in his grave” weren’t already a cliché, one would have to invent it to imagine E. B. White’s reaction to those two sentences. Yet when you get past the muddy syntax and mixed metaphors and confusing or downright meaningless formulations (when she writes “all of us,” does she mean all of us, or all of the particular person who is putting the words on paper?), everything Goldberg says is more or less true. The same, as far as I was able to bring myself to read them, with the other voice manuals. What limits them, even more than the mushy way in which they are written, is their therapeutic approach. The object, from page one till the end, is self-expression, self-fulfilment…I almost wrote self-abuse. The goal of setting down words that could or should be of interest to a reader never comes up. But consider: the traditional purpose of writing is communication, equally true in an e-mail message and a published book. If it leaves the person on the other end bored, bothered, or bewildered (or if it permanently remains locked up in a diary), it is of limited use.
Premise, corollaries, paradox, and finally a proposal. The Strunk and White posse privileges readers (sorry for the neologistic vogue-verb, E. B.), viewing them as delicate invalids, likely to scurry off to their bed-chambers when faced with any sentence diverting in the slightest from the plain style. At the other extreme, the Goldberg group coddles the writer the way a overindulgent parent would a sensitive child: Are you sure you’ve shared everything that’s on your mind or in your heart? But there didn’t seem to be a book that held two different but hardly contradictory ideas about style in its head: writers express themselves through it, and readers draw pleasure and sustenance from it. A book that although not a how-to manual gave both aspiring and experienced writers a solid toehold as they negotiated the steep, winding, and sometimes perilous path of identifying and developing their own style.
That is the book I decided to write.
The decision did not change the fact that style is so darned difficult to talk about. I will be more precise. Addressing style philosophically, historically, lexicographically, and analytically didn’t present a problem. My preliminary investigations told me this was a rich subject. They formed the basis for what became Part I of this book, which, in the process of defining style, looks at how conceptions of it have changed through the centuries. This material shed a lot of light on recent developments. It turns out, for example, that the (virtual) debate between Natalie Goldberg and E. B. White is merely the latest installment in a battle that has been repeatedly replayed since Gorgias and Plato started it 2,500 years ago. The battle is between style as personal expression (Gorgias, Goldberg) and style as vehicle for content and a moral litmus test (Plato, White), and it seems to flare up every hundred years or so.
But approaching the subject practically—looking at the process by which a contemporary writer acquires and nurtures his or her own style—proved to be harder. As White says, this makes you feel as if you are leaving solid ground. I had inklings and my own experience and the testimony of those writers who had addressed the question in essays, books, or interviews. But all that seemed an inadequate safeguard against ending up in the diaphanous realm of psychobabble. An obvious tactic was to identify some writers with a strong style, seek them out, and ask them questions. And that is what I did.
I looked these people up on the Internet or in the phone book; e-mailed them, faxed them, wrote them, or phoned them; at home or care of their publisher or their English department or the publication they wrote for. Some still haven’t responded, but most of them did, and of these, most agreed to take some time out of their lives to talk with a stranger about style. The positive response was striking because writers, as a rule, are solitary and shy and much more comfortable putting words on paper than producing spoken ones on demand.* What explains it? A cynic would cite the power of flattery. A realist would observe that it is often much easier to say yes than no. Both true, but I think a third reason is more important: writers are fascinated and mystified by style. They realize, consciously or not, that it is essential and fragile. Kenneth Tynan once despaired to his diary, “One reason I cannot write nowadays is that I no longer have a stance, an attitude, what Eliot called in a letter to Lytton Strachey ‘the core of it—the tone.’ I used to have a sign by my desk: ‘Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy.’ But I am no longer any of these things, except melancholy.” Virginia Woolf, moving in the other direction, noted in her diary, “There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without phrase.”
The writers I contacted had kept company with that elation and that dejection. A couple of those who declined gave me to understand that they were afraid that if they talked about style, it would ruin some kind of necessary magic. Some who accepted said something to the effect that, perhaps by being forced to talk about style, they would learn something about it. Novelist Elizabeth McCracken, in accepting, said she was obsessed with style and voice and wanted to try out her “pet theories” on me. When we met in her apartment atop Johnny D’s nightclub in Somerville, Massachusetts, she expressed one of them this way:
A writer’s voice lives in his or her bad habits. That’s the heart of a voice. The trick is to make them charming bad habits. You have to leave some of them alone—basically, leave enough in, so that, if you’re Grace Paley, readers know it’s Grace Paley.
Great stuff, but I wasn’t naïve enough to expect pet theories from everybody. Indeed, I had a carefully thought-out plan designed to draw my subjects out. I’d choose a representative passage from the writer’s work, make photocopies, and bring them to the meeting. Then we would go through it line by line, and the writer would tell me how he or she got it to “sound” like him or her.
It was a stupid plan. I found that out in the third interview, with Jonathan Raban, an author of essays, travel books, and sometimes non-classifiable nonfiction who is my idea of a terrific all-around writer. This was actually one of the more trying interviews I have ever conducted. We met in a restaurant overlooking Puget Sound in Seattle, where Raban has lived for 10 years or so. He arrived first and (intentionally or not) situated himself so that I would be looking directly at both the sound and the sun, which, on the West Coast, turns out to set over the water. The air in the restaurant seemed to be composed of equal parts smoke, most of it emanating from Raban’s cigarette, and remarkably loud jazz music, which I feared would foul my tape recording. Over and above all that, Raban was antagonistic, or at least aggressively Socratic, in the manner of the classrooms of his native England. What, he demanded, did I mean by style? I found myself blabbing out inarticulate inanities and realizing, for the hundredth time in my stay on this planet, that I would much rather ask questions than answer them.
Either the inanities somehow passed muster or Raban took pity on me: before too long he was telling me with considerable insight and animation what he meant by style. But then trouble struck again. I was (truthfully) telling him how glad I was to have him represented in the book, because his style was so compelling and immediately identifiable, and he was looking bemused. It turned out that the “immediately identifiable” part bothered him. In his view, all of his books had different styles. He said:
I’ve been haunted the past few days by a phrase which is new to me but is probably part of the cliché jargon of psychotherapy, a discipline for which I usually have no time at all.
(I interrupt Raban to aver that he really talks this way. He continued:)
But there have been a couple of articles in the Observer lately about boarding schools, pro and con. I have a distinct interest in the subject, having gone to an English boarding school of the most hideous kind and suffered at times and got ruined for life one way or another. One of the articles referred to a book called The Making of Them, by a psychotherapist who says that the effect of boarding school on kids who don’t fit in, kids like me, is that they develop “strategic survival personalities.” In other words, the usual product of boarding schools has an outward self-confidence, an assurance, a mask or persona that is constructed to deal with the world and stop the other kids from doing their worst.*
When I heard that, I realized it was true of my personality, and that it applied to writing as well. Every one of my books requires a “strategic personality” before I can write it at all. Obviously, there is a connection between the language of Hunting Mister Heartbreak, the language of Bad Land, the language of Passage to Juneau, the language of Old Glory. But they don’t begin to be writable until I’ve found the strategic personality for the experience of the book. The one for Arabia is the Englishman abroad, the old mask. In Britain the book was always called Arabia Through the Looking Glass, and the persona at the center of it was essentially Alice, who is a terrifically important figure in English writing—someone full of innocence while knowing what is right and what is wrong, and being prim and easily surprised but at the same time having a very clear and English sense of where you stand. Traveling Englishmen abroad tend to see the rest of the world as consisting largely of mad queens and talking rabbits and the rest.
Now the strategic personality of Hunting Mister Heartbreak, which is about trying out identity in the United States, is this hopeful, would-be sunny fictional immigrant who wants to try out life in New York. The book became writable once I found the voice for him. And the style changes in the course of the book. I set up myself or a version of myself in seven different American landscapes, and the language distinctly changes through these seven chapters, so you see it as a progression from the hopeful innocence of the would-be immigrant at the beginning to the know-it-all bum who orders his own tomb in Key West at the end.
I had a great deal of difficulty beginning Bad Land, finding the voice in which to write it. I looked at the first page earlier today because I knew we were going to have this conversation, and I saw exactly how I managed to kick it off. In the previous books of mine that had been set in the United States, the emphasis was on my Englishness, on being a foreigner to it. In the voice of the person narrating Bad Land, the Englishness has gone. The important thing is that, like the people the book is about, he is urban, his experience is of the city, and he’s out in this rural area. There was the voice, there was the strategic personality. That allowed the language to happen, that enabled the story of the book to take place.
Everybody knows the strategic personality of Gore Vidal, the essayist—the tone, the verbal pirouettes. I met Vidal in private once, and I have to say his personality in conversation is rather different from his personality on the page. I mean, he did not speak as he writes. So strategic personality seems to be a necessary acquisition of any stylist, not necessarily related to his social personality. Only when he slips inside this persona, this mask, does the language-making machine in him begin to function. There are a whole lot of other times—and I know this from my own periods of block at the typewriter—that I can think of tons of things to say, but they are not within the rhetoric of the book, so they won’t fit.
All this was credible and tremendously interesting. But the paradox it suggested took a sledgehammer to the foundations of my research plan. Raban saw the style of his books as essentially different, with minor similarities, whereas I saw it as essentially the same, with minor differences. When we looked at a passage from Hunting Mister Heartbreak together, we both agreed it was a brilliant bit of prose, but beyond that our perspectives were at odds. He focused on how it fit into his “strategic personality” for the book; I focused on the Raban-like qualities: the paired and meticulously chosen adjectives, the veiled self-portrait, the understated sardonic humor.
Over the next few days, I tried to digest the implications of my four-hour dinner with Jonathan. What helped me eventually resolve the apparent contradiction was voice (so common a metaphor in discussions of style) and in particular one characteristic of literal speaking voice. Until the moment when we first hear it come out of a tape recorder, we don’t know what our speaking voice sounds like; even after that first experience, it retains the power to shock or surprise. To repeat a distinction Harold Bloom made in my interview with him, we hear ourselves hundreds of times a day; only a couple of times a year (if that many) do we overhear ourselves. Speaking voice is not premeditated: it emerges from the architecture of our vocal cords and our facial structure and from some other qualities within us. People do alter their voice—to “lose” an accent, perhaps, or to lower the pitch so as to sound more authoritative. But for most people, once the change is made, it’s made, and you don’t think about it anymore. Voice is not a perfect metaphor for writing style, which is why it’s just a metaphor. Writing is much more premeditated than speaking: we are allowed to mull over our words for an awfully long time before setting them down, and once they are down, on the page or screen, we can look at them, puzzle over them, revise them. (This is much less true of Internet chat, which is why some people say it’s not writing.) Yet even the most thoughtful writers can stare at a sentence for a whole day and not realize precisely how readers will “hear” it. A part of style is unintentional or even unconscious; as Robert Burton said, it betrays us. In the sentence you just read, it would have been equally correct for me to put down a semicolon or a period after the word unconscious. As I look at the sentence and read it to myself in my head, I realize in composing it I didn’t think about which punctuation mark to use but that they have a slightly different sound, and the semicolon, with its subtle but strong disinclination to allow a breath, sounds like “me.” It is a small, insignificant, but undeniable component of my voice.
I ended up interviewing more than 40 writers, and all, like Raban, were deaf to at least some of the sounds on their own pages. I quickly understood that even the most cooperative of them weren’t going to be able to cogently explain why they used their version of a semicolon, in the manner of a football coach analyzing his calling of a screen pass in a third-and-long situation. E. B. White termed individual style a “high mystery” and maintained that there was “no satisfactory explanation” of it. Though this book tries to refute that position, it does so in a way that borrows from White’s metaphor when he wrote, “the young writer…will often find himself steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.” Like a distant star, style, I found, is most clearly discernible when you don’t look straight at it but keep it at the periphery of your vision. In the interviews, this translated into talk about semicolons, influences, reading habits, feelings about number 2 pencils and the computer, and bedside reading. The underlying movement is a circling around the subject, until finally it is securely roped and tied to the ground.
The interviews inform Part II of the book. Chapters V and VI are about the conscious and unconscious ways writers approach style, and in it you will find the interviewees as voices in a physics-defying conversation. So Cynthia Ozick, Harold Bloom, and John Lukacs will grumble together about the word processor and its discontents. And so if the subject is “influences,” we may hear from Elmore Leonard on Richard Bissell, Susan Orlean on Ian Frazier, James Wolcott on Manny Farber, and Frank Kermode on William Empson. Chapter VIII takes a closeup look at particular genres—from opinion-writing to poetry—offering in-depth testimony from outstanding practitioners.
I said earlier that The Sound on the Page isn’t a how-to manual. It isn’t. On the other hand, every page has implications for writers who are interested in discovering and developing their own style. A hunch that hardened into a conviction as my investigation proceeded—and that was refuted by none of my interviewees—is that personal style is more democratic than it might first appear. To be sure, most of us neither can be nor want to be a Hemingway. But all of us have within us a quieter sort of stylistic distinctiveness. Anyone who is serious about writing in any form is engaged in a lifelong waltz with this capability. Especially at first, one’s steps are clumsy and all over the place. Even the most proficient and experienced writers often find that the style takes the lead, and they only follow. But if they are aware of what’s going on, they can achieve a sort of dance within the dance, which is one of writing’s greatest satisfactions. Chapter IX respectfully offers advice on the daunting task of identifying and bringing out one’s own style.
Between chapters, you will find brief Interludes, following up on tangential themes and ideas. There could have been more of them. When the subject is style, I have found, the links are infinite and the conversation never ends.