^* Block quotations in Helvetica type, and every other quote attributed to authors listed in the Appendix, starting on p. 243, came from my interviews with those authors. Quotations attributed to anyone else came from previously published sources.

^* Euphuism: “An elegant Elizabethan literary style marked by excessive use of balance, antithesis, and alliteration and by frequent use of similes drawn from mythology and nature.” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary.

^* The dictionary offers other meanings for style, including “a distinctive quality, form, or type of something” and “the state of being popular.” Both can be and are applied to prose. Someone who goes heavy on the fancy words and figures of speech might be said to write with a lot of style. And a magazine writer who knows all the current catch phrases and can adopt the fashionable ironies and attitudes is definitely writing in style.

^* This fact was clearly relevant for some of those who graciously declined. One e-mailed me, “I am tired of hearing myself as an interviewee.”

^* The author of The Making of Them is Nick Duffell. He is also the founder of an organization called Boarding School Survivors.

^* The English equivalent was originally spelled stile and as early as 1300, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was used to mean “a written work or works.” The first use in the sense of a manner of writing, according to the OED, the Clerk’s Tale, where Chaucer says that Petrarch wrote the story “with heigh stile.” The spelling of the word changed to style in the early eighteenth century, apparently because of the mistaken belief that the word derived from the Greek stûlos, meaning “column.”

^* I can’t resist quoting Swift’s indignant riff on bad style, in which he includes two persistent faults, unnecessary adjectives and clichés: “It would be endless to run over the several defects of style among us; I shall therefore say nothing of the mean and paltry (which are usually attended by the fustian), much less of the slovenly or indecent. Two things I will just warn you about: the first is the frequency of flat, unnecessary epithets; and the other is the folly of using old, threadbare phrases, which will often make you go out of your way to find and apply them, are nauseous to rational hearers, and will seldom express your meaning as well as your own natural words.”

^* Flesch also devised an even loonier Human Interest Index. To get this, you have to count the “personal words” and “personal sentences” in a passage. Personal words are all pronouns referring to people, proper names, words that have a “masculine or feminine natural gender” (including iceman but, for reasons that escape me, not including teacher), and the words people and folks. Personal sentences are direct quotations; questions, statements or commands directly addressed to the reader (Flesch’s example: “Does this sound impossible?”); exclamations; and “grammatically incomplete sentences whose full meaning has to be inferred from the context,” such as, “Handsome, though.” To get the Human Interest Score, you multiply the number of Personal Words per 100 by 3.635, multiply the number of Personal Sentences per 100 sentences by .314 and add the results. Flesch died in 1986. Today he is remembered less for his work on writing style than for his 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read, which in addition to having one of the catchiest titles of all time, argued that the whole-language method of teaching reading was less effective than phonics.

^* Photography comes the closest, but even if the same camera set precisely the same way and at precisely the same distance is used to photograph a tree twice in a row, it will always be a different tree—two leaves will be gone, the light will be infinitesimally brighter, or the tree will merely be five minutes older and that much closer to death.

^* In a 1987 interview, Wolfe said, “Now, even though I made the historical present my trademark at the outset, I find that it’s self-parody for me to lean on it. This can happen. Your own inventions can become deflated currency. How can you start another magazine piece with ‘Madonna sits there fidgeting with a forelock that just won’t act right. She pouts, she pivots on her seat, she gives me a look through tiger-tongue lick-on eyelashes and says…?’ Somehow, you just can’t start a story that way anymore.” Maybe Wolfe can’t, but a nation of hacks can and does.

^* Posterity bears out Macaulay’s judgment. Of the 146 quotations from Johnson in the sixteenth edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 94, or 65 percent, are things that he said (as taken down by Boswell and others) rather than wrote.

^* The quotation in parenthesis is from Wordsworth’s The Prelude.

^†Unless the text is difficult, in which case we slow down to the speed of speech and subvocalize like crazy.

^* Zeugma: using a different sense of the same word in different grammatical constructions—for example, “He took his time and the good silver.” Homoioptoton: the repetition of end sounds—for example, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

^* Although Hemingway had many penetrating things to say about writing and the other arts, not many of them addressed the distinctiveness of his own style. One exception was this, from Death in the Afternoon: “In stating as fully as I could how things really were, it was often very difficult and I wrote awkwardly and the awkwardness is what they called my style. All mistakes and awkwardnesses are easy to see, and they called it style.”

^* The final of the Big Three early-twentieth-century American novelists, F. Scott Fitzgerald is a conversational middle-stylist (his best book, The Great Gatsby, is in the first person) and thus not nearly so distinctive as Hemingway or Faulkner. His biggest stylistic influence, I believe, was his essays of the 1930s, collected in The Crack-Up. One can hear direct echoes of their direct, mordant and unsparing tone in Joan Didion and dozens of other later essayists.

^* Another Powell habit evident here is the nonstandard semicolon, followed by less than a complete clause, after the word army.

^* Well, maybe two. Writing a profile of the late jazz musician Lester Bowie, I labored mightily on a description of his singular beard and finally emerged with “the lacustrine reflection of twin lake peaks.”

^† “The Rhetoric of the Series,” College Composition and Communication, XVII (December 1966), 217–221.

^* You may have noticed that I like footnotes and parentheses too. One reason is that both are devices for digression, a verbal action that mirrors my belief that the world is multifarious and knotty. But another is that I get a strange satisfaction from reminding people that they are reading, not listening. I imagine a Henry James assignment strikes fear into the hearts of the actors who read books on tape: it cannot be easy to master the pauses and pitch changes required to render a parenthesis in speech. Not even Laurence Olivier could “say” a footnote, and that, for me, is part of its charm. The first draft of this book had twice as many parentheses as this version. One key to style is to be yourself but not too much like yourself.

^* The most prominent example of a comma used strictly to help with subvocalization, and not with grammar or sense, is one that comes between a compound subject and a verb: “All the students who happen to arrive at school early, should report to the auditorium.” This comma was universally used in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth but is now considered incorrect.

^* “I read considerable in it now and then,” Huck goes on. “The statements was interesting, but tough.”

^* The first study mentioned was Francis, B., Robinson, J., and Read, B. An Analysis of Undergraduate Writing Styles in the Context of Gender and Achievement. Studies in Higher Education, 26 (2001), 313–326. The second was Scates, C. A Sociolinguistic Study of Male/Female Language in Freshman Composition. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern Mississippi, 1981. The third was Rubin, D. L., & Greene, K. Gender-Typical Style in Written Language. Research in the Teaching of English, 26 (1992), 7–40.

^* Velleity: A mere wish, unaccompanied by effort to obtain.

^* It is no coincidence that Edelstein’s critique sounds oddly Thomsonesque. In writing about a strong stylist, one often finds oneself mimicking his or her cadences and approach.

^* Barthelme’s novel Paradise begins: “After the women had gone Simon began dreaming with a new intensity. He dreamed that he was a slave on a leper island, required to clean the latrines and pile up dirty-white shell for the roads, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow, then rake the shell smooth and jump up and down on it till it was packed solid. The lepers did not allow him to wear shoes, only white athletic socks, and he had a difficult time finding a pair that matched. The head leper, a man who seemed to be named Al, embraced him repeatedly and tried repeatedly to spit in his mouth.” Strunk and White would give the passage an A, with a gold star for not splitting an infinitive in the last sentence. Barthelme’s shipshape prose partly explains his longtime presence in the New Yorker, traditionally the most formally conservative of magazines.

^* In a noun style, the writer turns the key words in a sentence (no matter what their natural part of speech) into nouns, through frequent use of the passive voice and prepositional phrases, and employs few verbs other than to be. Lanham quotes an example from a scholarly book: “To regard the same evolutionary pattern as part of the process of secularisation is to shift to a perspective which is significantly but not qualitatively different.” That’s four nouns, four prepositions and two uses of to be in one relatively short sentence. Lanham also points out the unintentional alliteration of p and s sounds and says that if we attend to them, “the prose becomes almost unreadable.”

^* I quote from it (in part because I am proud to be able to read it without glasses): “You can’t know how much it pains me to even have that word, the one beginning with i and ending with y, in this book. It is not a word I like to see, anywhere, much less type onto my own pages. It is without a doubt the most over-used and under-understood word we currently have. I have that i-word here only to make clear what was clear to, by my estimations, about 99.9% of original hard-cover readers of this book: that there is almost no irony, whatsoever, within its covers.”

^* A paragraph from Díaz’s book, Drown, shows that he succeeded in achieving the truth effect he wanted: “Days we spent in the mall or out in the parking lot playing stickball, but nights were what we waited for. The heat in the apartment was like something heavy that had come inside to die. Families arranged on their porches, the glow from the TVs washing blue against the brick. From my family apartment you could smell the pear trees that had been planted years ago, four to a court, probably to save us all from asphyxiation. Nothing moved fast, even the daylight was slow to fade, but as soon as night settled Beto and I headed down to the community center and sprang the fence into the pool. We were never alone, every kid with legs was there. We lunged from the boards and swam out of the deep end, wrestling and farting around. At around midnight abuelas, with their night hair swirled around spiky rollers, shouted at us from their apartment windows. ¡Sinvergüenzas! Go home!”

^* About a year after our interview, Lukacs told me he had given away his computer.

^* Martindale makes it clear that his theory only applies to the high arts, not to the popular arts, where sameness is famously valued. One of the limitations of the theory is the fact that it is difficult if not impossible to make such an absolute distinction. That is, almost all artists worth caring about seek some mixture of aesthetic achievement and popular recognition.

^* Helson, R., Jones, C., & Kwan, V. S. Y. (2002). “Personality Change Over 40 Years of Adulthood: Hierarchical Linear Modeling Analysis of Two Longitudinal Studies.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 752–766. Applying the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), the authors found the most marked increases in self-control and good impression and decreases in flexibility, social presence, empathy and self-acceptance. Independence increased until the subjects were in their fifties, when it began to decrease, while responsibility followed the opposite pattern, decreasing until middle age, after which it started back up again.

^* The testimony is from my interview (or, in the case of Clive James, e-mail correspondence) with that writer, rendered into monologue form.

^* The first sentence in the book, as completed, reads, “John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth.”