23
X-raying Rachel Carson and Laura Hillenbrand
Sea Inside Us
One vicious stereotype about women writers is that they excel at writing about romance and relationships. My antidote to that propaganda is to point to the excellence of women writers themselves and to two women in particular—writing around fifty years apart—whose work shines in its coverage of subjects usually associated with men: science and sports.
MAGICAL CLARITY
In 1950 Rachel Carson wrote the book The Sea Around Us, a work so powerful that it won a National Book Award and was turned into a documentary film that won an Oscar. It is a thin text of 166 pages. Because of its brevity and scientific content, it was assigned to countless high school students in the 1950s and ’60s, not unlike Hiroshima, by John Hersey.
Carson was a remarkable stylist whose work deserves revisiting and whose exquisite prose lends itself to a full examination via X-ray reading. Check out this passage on the enduring legacy of the sea carried within the bodies of land animals:
When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea. Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal—each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water. This is our inheritance from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the one-celled to the many-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely the water of the sea.
I’ve reread that passage about half a dozen times just to swim around in it. That is often the first step for me as a reader. I find myself immersed in a passage that does something special to me or for me. At times it is the satisfaction of an aesthetic impulse, the appreciation of a beautiful-sounding collection of words. At other times it is an effect of powerful content, helping me see myself or the universe in a surprising new way. I am suddenly remembering an ancient rhetorical precept that the purpose of great literature is docere et delectare—to instruct and delight. And of course in the best cases (as with most of the passages we are studying in this book), a classic work of literature will deliver both instruction and delight.
With my X-ray specs on, I see that I am responding at first to the power of an intellectual insight offered in this passage. Carson’s title may be The Sea Around Us, but if this paragraph is any indication, it might be more accurately called The Sea Inside Us. After I first read this passage, I could never think of my body and the fluids inside of it the same way again.
But I am also beginning to see the strategies Carson calls upon to make this happen. Let me sort them out:
• Technical language instructs us but never dominates the common discourse. The tone is established in that first sentence of forty-seven common words, thirty-six of them of one syllable.
• The easy pace of ordinary language in the first sentence builds our muscles for the second sentence, which contains two simple scientific lists: one of categories of animals, the other of minerals.
• With that knowledge under our belts, we are armed for the third sentence, which contains the most technical bit of science, requiring us to understand the progression of animals from one-celled to many-celled and the development of their circulatory systems from seawater.
• Not one of these three sentences is short, but together they are so organized, logical in their progression, and coherent that they make powerful sense.
LANGUAGE AND LOGIC
Let’s look at another passage from Carson that is so clear it’s almost translucent, once again a product of her language and logic:
Nowhere in all the sea does life exist in such bewildering abundance as in the surface waters. From the deck of a vessel you may look down, hour after hour, on the shimmering discs of jellyfish, their gently pulsating bells dotting the surface as far as you can see. Or one day you may notice early in the morning that you are passing through a sea that has taken on a brick-red color from billions upon billions of microscopic creatures, each of which contains an orange pigment granule. At noon you are still moving through red seas, and when darkness falls the waters shine with an eerie glow from the phosphorescent fires of yet more billions and trillions of these same creatures.
If it is the author’s purpose to make us see, it would be hard to imagine a passage that accomplishes this with greater clarity than Carson’s. In the previous text, her goal was to make us see in the intellectual sense—that is, to understand. “I once was blind, but now I see” has both an optical and cognitive implication.
Carson’s passage has some “efferent” content in it, to be sure—knowledge readers can carry away. We learn that the sea is full of things we can see on its surface, and we learn some of their names. We learn about shapes in the sea and colors and lights. But the language is different in this passage, more mysterious and poetic, more to be read aloud in the company of others. Here we get “shimmering discs” and “pulsating bells.” We get “brick-red color,” a surprising one for the sea, along with “orange pigment granule.” We get the contrast of the falling darkness and the shining of the sea. We get “eerie glow” and, best of all, the alliterative “phosphorescent fires,” four syllables modifying one. The repetition of the word billions, followed by trillions, creates a kind of planetarium effect.
ALTITUDE AND DEPTH
Such epiphanic work deserves a great ending, and Carson delivers:
In its broader meaning, that other concept of the ancients remains. For the sea lies all about us. The commerce of all lands must cross it. The very winds that move over the lands have been cradled on its broad expanse and seek ever to return to it. The continents themselves dissolve and pass to the sea, in grain after grain of eroded land. So the rains that rose from it return again in rivers. In its mysterious past it encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives in the end, after, it may be, many transmutations, the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea—to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.
There is a true majesty in this prose, created by the accumulation of phrases such as “commerce of all lands,” “mysterious past,” “ever-flowing stream of time,” and especially the final prayerlike evocation of the alpha and the omega, “the beginning and the end.” Hiding in the middle is my favorite sentence in this paragraph: “So the rains that rose from it return again in rivers.” There are eleven words in that sentence, and all the key words begin with the letter r, yet it took me several readings to notice the alliteration. In linguistics the letter r is called a liquid consonant. Carson’s ear would have told her that “rains… rose… return… rivers”—the repetition of those r’s—would make the passage flow. Given the content of the paragraph, what better vehicle of expression than repetition of a liquid letter?
SLOW-MOTION RIDER
What Rachel Carson did for marine biology, Laura Hillenbrand accomplished for horse racing. As I describe at length in my book The Glamour of Grammar, whenever we concentrate on the rules of grammar and punctuation, we run the risk of veiling the creativity and flexibility available to authors who think of them as tools of meaning and effect.
Let’s take as an example a splendid passage from Hillenbrand’s bestselling book Seabiscuit, an instant classic, a stirring narrative history of one of America’s legendary racehorses. In this scene, Hillenbrand describes the mystical glory of Seabiscuit’s last great stretch run in the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap:
In the midst of all the whirling noise of that supreme moment, Pollard [the jockey] felt peaceful. Seabiscuit reached and pushed and Pollard folded and unfolded over his shoulders and they breathed together. A thought pressed into Pollard’s mind: We are alone.
Twelve straining Thoroughbreds; Howard and Smith in the grandstand; Agnes in the surging crowd; Woolf behind Pollard, on Heelfly; Marcella up on the water wagon with her eyes squeezed shut; the leaping, shouting reporters in the press box; Pollard’s family crowded around the radio in a neighbor’s house in Edmonton; tens of thousands of roaring spectators and millions of radio listeners painting this race in their imaginations: All this fell away. The world narrowed to a man and his horse, running.
Consider all the tools of language used—and not used—to create this startling, cinematic slow-motion effect. Not used, for example, are commas to break up what might look like a run-on sentence: “Seabiscuit reached and pushed and Pollard folded and unfolded over his shoulders and they breathed together.” You will find three independent clauses in that sentence without the hint of a comma. You could argue that the brevity of these clauses makes punctuation unnecessary, even intrusive. I would suggest a more literary effect—that the sentence describes a continuous flowing action of horse and jockey: first horse, then jockey, then both together. The action, if you will, is running on. And so is the sentence.
Then something startling happens, marked by the sentence in italics: “We are alone.” The author considers this thought so important, so dramatic, that she emphasizes it in three ways: she expresses it in the shortest possible sentence; she places it at the end of a paragraph, next to a bar of white space; and she takes advantage of the convention of setting a character’s thoughts in italic type.
What follows is an exercise in literary and cinematic time management, a slow-motion effect that expands the moment in the service of suspense. Each of the eight phrases leading to the final main clause (“all this fell away”) happens in an instant as the camera pans from the track to the grandstand to the stables to the press box to a house in Canada to an audience of millions around the world. Unlike the earlier sentence, this is not one continuous motion but simultaneous action, the literary equivalent of a cinematic montage. Here commas would not be strong enough to enclose the distinct actions. Periods would insult their spontaneity. The solution: that oft-maligned expression of Aristotle’s golden mean, the semicolon. Seven of them, to be exact.
The final, startling insight comes in the form of one triumphant sentence: “The world narrowed to a man and his horse, running.” The movement is from a big noun (world) to two particular nouns (man and horse) that resolve themselves in a single word, a present participle (running), which, standing at the end of the sentence, connotes perpetual motion… immortality.
As I was working on this chapter, a friend pointed me to a profile of Hillenbrand written by Wil S. Hylton for the New York Times Magazine. It contains an anecdote that offers one of the best examples of X-ray reading and its benefits I have ever seen. It is spoken by Daniel James Brown, author of the bestselling book about the 1936 U.S. Olympic rowing team, The Boys in the Boat. He describes what he learned from Hillenbrand and Seabiscuit:
When I first started The Boys in the Boat—I mean, the day after I decided to write the book—I had an old paperback copy of Seabiscuit, and we were going on a vacation.… So I threw it in my suitcase, and I spent the whole vacation dissecting it. I put notes on every page in the book, just studying all the writerly decisions she had made: why she started this scene this way and that scene that way, and the language choices in how she developed the setting.… One of the things I wrote down in the margins of the book was that I needed to do this or I needed to do that.… I went into the whole research project with a list of guidelines, which were drawn from this close study of Seabiscuit.
What powerful testimony. Brown may use the phrase “close study” to describe his learning process as a writer, but we would call it X-ray reading.
WRITING LESSONS
1. Ease your reader into anything complex. If the tough parts come too soon, the reader can become discouraged. If, on the other hand, you build the interest of the reader with, say, anecdotes or poetic language, the reader will have faith in you and follow you into the thicket.
2. Test paragraphs of explanation to make sure they are built upon some logic: chronology, geography, size, complexity. Use the paragraph as a building block of narrative, explanation, or argument. Paragraphs work best when they develop a single, startling, memorable idea, such as the notion that each of us carries the sea inside of us.
3. Ask yourself, how quickly do I want this passage to move? Think in cinematic terms when you need to figure out if you want to create full motion or if you would prefer slow motion. In general, the faster you want a sentence to go, the less punctuation you will use. Every mark of punctuation slows a passage down to some degree. Think of your period as a British “full stop” and your comma, perhaps, as a “half stop.” The semicolon is somewhere in between.
4. Use Daniel James Brown’s anecdote about Laura Hillenbrand as a map. Before you begin a big writing project, find a model that works for you. X-ray it, marking your thoughts in the margins. Underline the reporting and writing strategies that might benefit your work.