Building Great Sentences (16 page)

Four Basic Suspensive Patterns

Here's the first pattern: An inverted cumulative works periodically, forestalling the base clause by a number of modifying levels, keeping the distinctive cumulative rhythm, but putting it to suspensive effect. (Forestalling the base clause by a number of modifying levels, keeping the distinctive cumulative rhythm, but putting it to suspensive effect, an inverted cumulative works periodically.) For example: “His eyes weary from the road, his clothes tattered and dusty, his beard long and unkempt, looking as if not only insects but small animals might be nesting within its scraggly strands, Robert Coover's Wayfarer, the enigmatic protagonist of one of the mini-narratives in ‘Seven Exemplary Fictions,' is hardly a character designed to attract our sympathy.”

Second pattern: Completion of the base clause can also be delayed, interposing modifying or qualifying material between the subject and the verb of the sentence, a splitting tactic that runs the risk of losing or alienating the reader—easily the least controlled or focused pattern of the periodic form. This strategy, splitting the subject from the verb by interposing everything but the kitchen sink between them, bears more than passing resemblance to Mark Twain's description of the way the German language works—or doesn't work. As Twain put it in one of his speeches:

A verb has a hard enough time of it in this world when it is all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.

That's pretty much what this kind of suspensive strategy calls for—shoveling in anything and everything between the subject and the verb. Consider this example: “The old mayor, after waving to the assembled reporters (a small crowd of harried, cynical-looking men and one stunningly calm-looking young woman), after whispering something in the ear of his sickly-grinning administrative assistant, and after flashing a hollow version of his famed triumphant smile—a smile clearly patterned after that of Franklin Roosevelt's—and his equally well-known circle-the-wagons wave of his index finger, strode into the courtroom to play out the final act of his personal tragedy.” In
A Room of One's Own
, Virginia Woolf turns this process on its head by inverting the subject and verb of the following sentence but still keeping the verb apart from the subject by interposing all manner of exquisitely precise delaying information:

And thus by degrees was lit, half-way down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle, and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational discourse.

Third pattern: Initial qualifying constructions lead to more complicated periodic structures, presenting information that becomes complete only when joined with or reassessed in light of information in the base clause, a process signaled by an opening word such as
although
,
even
, or
if
. There are a number of conditional constructions that lead to suspensive sentences. The most obvious of these conditional sentence openers is
if
. Here is
Texas Monthly
writer Joe Nick Patoski's conditional suspensive: “If you're at Big Bend Ranch State Park, you look for David Alloway, quick.” It turns out that Alloway is the survival skills ranger, and Big Bend is a place where survival skills are more than an academic concern. And that final “quick” should also remind us of the suspensive phenomenon where the final word of the sentence receives extra emphasis either from a colon or from a totally unexpected final turn that serves to put in a new light what has come before.

And here is an impressive use of conditionals that add emphasis to a feminist critique written by one of Carl Klaus's students:

If I mow the lawn every Saturday, edge it to perfection and celebrate my victory over nature with a beer, if I stay on the pot for twenty minutes reading
Sports Illustrated
and return to the world bellowing a warning to stay clear of that end of the house, if I cuss and smoke and embarrass my friends with dirty jokes then laugh uproariously, if I play baseball in the park and spit out the car window two or three times on my way home, without hitting my own car, I still won't be treated as an equal.

Starting a sentence with
since
or
because
also creates some degree of suspense. Here's another wonderful example from Virginia Woolf in
To the Lighthouse
:

Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss.

Although
and
when
, if used to indicate the satisfaction of a condition, also create suspensive sentences. And then we have another set of conditionals that are preceded by elaborations on the word
even
:
even when
,
even why
,
even if
: “Even if I sort my mail into efficient piles, based on the importance of the letter and the degree of urgency in deadlines for response, even if I tell myself to open mail at once and then put it in piles, even if I keep my mail in ever-larger plastic bins, I simply cannot keep from losing bills, never opening invitations, and generally proving myself hopelessly inept in what should be one of life's less demanding responsibilities.”

There are any number of left-branching sentences that open with qualifying phrases or just plain prepositional phrases that will produce significant degrees of suspense, as we might remember is the case with the lyrics to “My Darling Clementine,” which begins “In a cavern, in a canyon, excavating for a mine.” Michael Chabon's first sentence in
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
offers a somewhat more literary example: “In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier's creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini.”

Fourth pattern: An extended subject produces similar results, initially offering an infinitive or relative clause, bringing the sentence into focus only when it becomes clear that what at first may have looked like a complete sentence is actually no more than the subject of a much, much longer sentence—as I've done with a sentence from
The Great Gatsby
, designing my sentence to end on the same climactic word as did Fitzgerald's:

“Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of distortion” was Fitzgerald's way of suspending his message to the very end of his sentence, a tantalizing way of foregrounding a word that functions on two levels, reminding us first of Nick's ambivalence toward the world around him, then handing us on a rhetorical silver platter the one word that most accurately also characterizes Nick's own narration: distortion.

Next Steps

I bet you're tired by now of writing individual sentences. So here's a chance to write a number of suspensive sentences in a sequence much closer to what happens in a natural writing situation. Let's use suspensive syntax to contemplate one kind of delay we probably all know all too well. Try your hand at constructing a paragraph in which you contemplate or meditate upon the widespread human tendency to procrastinate. This paragraph should contain no fewer than five sentences, all of which are suspensive and all of which use different approaches to delaying the completion of the sentence, whether toward the end of creating a surprise or toward the end of emphasizing the end of the sentence.

Degrees of Suspensiveness, Significance of Surprise

S
uspensive sentences are the Hamlets of the writing world, and indeed, one of my favorite suspensive sentences comes from Hamlet himself: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” And under the sign of delaying tactics, one of my all-time favorite suspensive sentences was written by one of my students years ago and says, with marvelous economy: “I was, perhaps, stalling.” We've already seen several examples of grammatically cumulative sentences that exploit this delaying tactic to different ends. There was the “boy sitting down to eat” sentence which so delays the base clause by left-branching modifiers that it functions suspensively (“Rubbing his hands together, running his hungry eyes over the steaming food, anticipating the feast, savoring its aromas, stunned by his good fortune, realizing an opportunity like this might never come again, he sat down”) and there was the “corpse in the trunk” sentence, both sentences showing how grammatically cumulative (or loose) sentences can have exactly the same rhetorical or affective impact as periodic sentences. These sentences differ, however, in that the “boy sitting down to eat” sentence seems to delay the base clause only to emphasize a number of related propositions, while the “corpse in the trunk” sentence employs delaying strategies to heighten the surprise of its final revelation.

Syntactical suspense is always a matter of degree: “Having sharpened all of my pencils and lined them up together at least twice, having neatly placed beside my pencils a brand-new yellow legal pad, having visited the bathroom for the third time in the past twenty minutes, having reminded myself that I now compose exclusively on the computer and not with pencil on yellow legal pad, having checked my e-mail one final time just to be sure there wasn't a note waiting for me from the MacArthur Foundation, having cranked up my iTunes Basil Poledouris soundtrack from
Conan the Barbarian
as loud as it would go, having done a final few deep knee bends, having drained my fourth cup of coffee (probably the reason for that third bathroom visit), desperately hoping that this time the magic would work, I sat down at my computer, ready to write.” Carefully crafted delay can create emphasis or surprise. And the degree of emphasis can be controlled, depending on the writer's purpose. That “sitting down to write” sentence is a left-branching suspensive version of what could have been a right-branching cumulative sentence, or loose sentence, that would have opened with the base clause “I sat down at my computer” and followed it with all of those modifying phrases. And, of course, I could reposition that base clause “I sat down at my computer” or its extended version “I sat down at my computer, ready to write”
anywhere
in that sequence of modifying phrases, each new position of the base clause giving the sentence a slightly different degree of suspensiveness.

Degrees of Suspensiveness

Winston Weathers and Otis Winchester explore this idea of degrees of suspensiveness (of course, they insist on calling it “degrees of periodicity”) in their book
The Strategy of Style
, starting with the sentence “Red-tailed hawks hunt my meadow,” then expanding it to “On those sheet-metal days in February, red-tailed hawks hunt my meadow for rabbits and field mice.” Next they make it “somewhat more periodic”: “On those sheet-metal days in February when the rabbits and field mice creep out to feed, red-tailed hawks hunt my meadow.” And finally they make the sentence “almost wholly periodic”: “Hunting my meadow for rabbits and field mice on those sheet-metal days in February was a pair of red-tailed hawks.”

The point of their variations and of mine is simply to remind us that any sentence can be made more or less suspensive, and rather than think of the long-standing but essentially misleading dichotomy between loose and periodic sentences, it may reward the writer to think of suspensiveness as a continuum of delay along which sentences fall. In other words, instead of saying all sentences are either loose or periodic, it's actually more useful and more accurate to think of all sentences as making different demands on the reader's concentration and patience, some sentences delivering the goods of their messages as quickly as possible, others dragging out the process, finding any number of ways to delay the completion of the sentence. Suspensive syntax gives us the opportunity to turn a vice into a virtue, as delay in a sentence can be a very good thing.

Let's survey some of the resting points along the continuum of delay along which all suspensive sentences fall. One of my goals here is to free suspensive syntax from the long-standing assumption that periodic sentences, while marks of the writer's control and sophistication, are usually if not inevitably long and difficult to follow. Powerfully suspensive sentences do not have to be all that long or all that complicated, but they do need skillful handling and they generally are most effective when consciously planned.

Short suspensive sentences are all around us: “It's not just a job, it's an adventure.” “It's not just footwear, it's equipment.” “Read my lips: no new taxes.” “I was, perhaps, stalling.” “I came, I saw, I conquered.” “Where she comes from, it turns out, is Arkansas.” “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Or this, from Anthony Bourdain in
A Cook's Tour
, “Cambodia is a dream come true for international losers.”

Somewhat longer suspensive sentences are also bountiful. Here's a memorable statement of exasperation from TV critic Ken Tucker: “Excuse me while I wipe the tears of laughter from my eyes and put a small but powerful handgun to my temple.” And while we are on the subject of guns, notice the almost perverse turn taken by this sentence from William Kittredge in his book
Who Owns the West?
: “After half a mile in soft rain on the slick hay-field stubble, I would crouch behind the levee and listen to the gentle clatter of the water birds, and surprise them into flight—maybe a half-dozen mallard hens and three green-headed drakes lifting in silhouetted loveliness against the November twilight, hanging only yards from the end of my shotgun.”

Two somewhat opposite patterns frequently found in midlength suspensive sentences are the postcolonic drumbeat of a final word to which the sentence has been building and the completely unexpected appearance at the end of the sentence of a word or phrase no one could have predicted. A
New York Times
article about political consultant Mark Penn illustrates the first of these patterns: “He remained for the second Clinton term and through Mr. Clinton's impeachment trial, demonstrating, among other things, one of the virtues that the Clintons prized most: loyalty.” And the opposite pattern can be seen in a sentence from William C. Martin's essay on the inimitable Reverend Ike: “Reverend Ike has come a long way, honey.” That “honey” comes out of nowhere and completely recasts all that has come before it in the sentence, adding a touch of aggressive emphasis to the comment, suggesting a quite unexpected attitude toward the reader. Many of us raised in the South will quickly associate this rhetorical pattern with the insidious Southern practice of erasing or mitigating a very critical, if not ugly, comment with the trailing phrase, “Bless her [or his] soul”: “She dresses like a homeless person, bless her soul.” And we need to remember that the surprise at the end of a sentence that has been seemingly building to some dramatic conclusion may lie in its anticlimax, as we see in this sentence from Annie Dillard: “Late one night, while all this had been going on, and while the library was dark and locked as it had been all summer and I had accustomed myself to the eeriness of it, I left my carrel to cross the darkness and get a drink of water.”

Suspensive sentences lend themselves to cataloging as a means of delaying the completion of the sentence, and cataloging seems to lend itself to kicking off autobiographies, as we see in the celebrated first sentence of
The Education of Henry Adams
: “Under the shadow of Boston State House, turning its back on the house of John Hancock, the little passage called Hancock Avenue runs, or ran, from Beacon Street, skirting the State House grounds, to Mount Vernon Street, on the summit of Beacon Hill; and there, in the third house below Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born, and christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First Church after the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams.” By the time Adams gets around to announcing his own birth, he's located his home in an enviable and eminently historical section of Boston, touched several geographical bases with iconic names, and not only identified his religion but also revealed that his uncle was a Unitarian minister. Talk about your auspicious beginnings!

Leonard Woolf struck a very different tone in opening his autobiography, but, like Adams, he chose a highly suspensive sentence with which to begin his story: “Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over the fifty-seven years of my political work in England, knowing what I aimed at and the results, meditating on the history of Britain and the world since 1914, I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing.” And Christopher Hitchens singles out a wonderfully suspensive sentence by another famous writer to explain how he had chronicled his own life: “In his 1991
Memoirs
, Kingsley Amis stated roundly: ‘I have already written an account of myself in twenty or more volumes, most of them called novels.'”

One-Two Punches: Suspensive Combinations of Sentences

Suspensive sentences do indeed align themselves along a continuum that runs from the very unsurprising to the very surprising. It's also interesting to note that suspensive syntax sometimes requires more than a single sentence to create its effect. The critical discourse concerning periodic sentences notes that periodic style can be distributed across several sentences, as long as delay or suspense is the goal and the completion of the point of the period is suspended to the very end of the sequence of sentences it covers. We can see this in a two-sentence combination from Art Buchwald in an essay about acid indigestion. Buchwald writes: “America is an abundant land that seems to have more of everything than anybody else.” And he adds, “And if one were to ask what we have the most of, the answer would be acid indigestion.” In the same collection of essays on “great American things,” M. F. K. Fisher opens her essay on apple pie with a similar two-sentence one-two punch:

It is as meaningless to say that something is “as American as apple pie” as it is to assert proudly that a Swedish or Irish grandfather who emigrated to Minnesota was “a first American.” Both the pie and the parent sprang from other cultures, and neither got here before the Indian.

And the mother of all two-sentence suspensive combos must surely be the following pair of sentences by Ernest Hemingway in
Death in the Afternoon
. I'll spare you the almost-impossible-to-follow ramble Hemingway takes his reader on for 272 words detailing all the images and history a writer would have to master to begin to describe the Spanish town of Navarra. His almost unreadable list of things the writer would need to describe, repeatedly interrupted by histories of the town's inhabitants, turns out to be just a tease, boring us nearly to death describing a piece of writing we do not want to have described, much less want to have to read, before the punch of a six-word second sentence that says (to the reader's relieved delight): “But it's not in this book.”

Flavors and Uses of Suspensive Syntax

We can see that suspense comes in more shades than a certain ice cream chain has flavors, and we've seen that suspense created by syntactical delaying strategies can be put to many uses. Winston Weathers and Otis Winchester in their well-respected, rhetorically grounded writing text
The Strategy of Style
suggest three main reasons for employing suspensive syntax:

1. For varying your predominantly loose style and emphasizing your more important ideas

2. For putting the important ideas at the end of the sentence

3. For sustaining interest in a long sentence

Joan Didion touches all of these bases in her essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” with her suspensive account of a perplexing murder investigation:

They set out to find it in accountants' ledgers and double-indemnity clauses and motel registers, set out to determine what might move a woman who believed in all the promises of the middle class—a woman who had been chairman of the Heart Fund and who always knew a reasonable little dressmaker and who had come out of the bleak wild of prairie fundamentalism to find what she imagined to be the good life—what should drive such a woman to sit on a street called Bella Vista and look out her new picture window into the empty California sun and calculate how to burn her husband alive in a Volkswagen.

The crafting of coyly delayed sentences can fairly quickly reach a point of diminishing returns as it becomes clear that there's no redeeming reason for delay, as Professor Carl Klaus has playfully noted: “If you're a no-nonsense person, if you're a straightforward writer and you expect the same of others, if you don't have any patience with long-winded people—people, that is, who never come directly to the point, but instead waste your time in seemingly endless digressions, as if they were mentally incapable of putting first things first—then you will probably consider periodic sentences, such as the one you are reading right now, which looks like it may never come to an end, to be an exasperating waste of time.”

Starting a sentence with an infinitive as a subject will also always produce some degree of suspense, as Hamlet reminds us with his “To be or not to be, that is the question.” In a move of stylistic genius, Phil Spector took another well-known sentence starting with an infinitive subject—“To know him is to love him”—and tripled the subject, balancing it against a tripled verb, creating an even better-known line made famous in a song by the Teddy Bears. And two-sentence combinations can also work this way, as we can see in James Villas's use of a one-word sentence in place of the colon we have previously noted as an intensifying device at the end of the sentence: “To know about fried chicken you have to have been weaned and reared on it in the South. Period.”