How to Write a Sentence (7 page)

The insight is theological, although Stein probably doesn’t intend it that way. In a world created and presided over by an omnipresent God who fills all the available spaces, the distinctions between things, persons, and events are illusory, a function of a partial, divided, and dividing consciousness. The seventeenth-century English poet George Herbert says it succinctly: “We say amiss / This or that is, / Thy word is all if we could spell” (“The Flower”). If we would only stop spelling, stop laboring to put discrete significances together in an effort to combine them into a larger whole, we could see, theologians tell us, that the larger whole we seek is already everywhere and that our very efforts to apprehend it themselves signify it. But this would mean giving up or letting go of consecutive thought, of the impulse to predication and sentence making. And how in the world (a phrase meant literally) could we do that? It is impossible. Nevertheless, that impossibility is pretty much Stein’s project. I was groping, she says, “toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again and then everything being alike then everything very simply everything was naturally simply different and so I as a contemporary was creating everything being alike was creating everything naturally being naturally simply different, everything being alike” (“Composition as Explanation”). In this sentence likeness and difference, the basic constituents of a discourse that anatomizes and ranks, change places, go in opposite directions, come together again, are in the end made one. By insisting on the alikeness in value of every word, Stein also insists on the difference or uniqueness of every word. “I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word” (“A Transatlantic Interview”). The result is sentences that circle around again and again to words that simultaneously stand alone and take their place in the ongoingness that is at once proclaimed—“writing should go on”—and enacted.

The very word “sentence” means a finished thought, a verdict, a judgment, a piece of wisdom—all of which meanings Stein’s prose refuses in a brilliant effort to make language perform (these are her words) “like a cinema picture made up of succession and each moment having its own emphasis that is its own difference, and so there was the moving and the existence of each moment as it was in me” (“Portraits and Repetition”). She wanted, she says, “the pleasure of concentrating on the final simplicity of excessive complication.” If the complication of a sentence was less than excessive, the prose would stop on a single point and not be ongoing. She wanted to defeat subordination. “A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it” (
Lectures in America
). The difficulty of negotiating such a sentence has as its reward both the knowledge composition will obscure—the knowledge of words and things before they are subordinated to some “central idea”—and the knowledge of that in you which desires the wrapped-up closure a Stein sentence will not deliver. The trick, Stein explains, is to have “done something that was not leading to anything.”

Now, doing something that is not leading to anything would seem to be a description of the kinds of sentences I was saying at the beginning you shouldn’t write because they degenerate into lists and fragments. If a sentence is a structure of logical relationships—the mantra I urged on you only a short while ago—what exactly is a sequence of words that, like Stein’s, pushes logic and coherent, consecutive thought away? At its furthest reaches the additive style may achieve a degree of looseness, of associative nonconnectedness that is radically antithetical to sentence making, at least as I have wanted you to understand it. I raise the issue, but I will put off taking it up until we have a few more examples on the table.

Stein was an acknowledged influence on another master of the coordinating style, Ernest Hemingway. But Hemingway’s views on writing were less philosophical than hers and stemmed mainly from his early career as a journalist. Hence his famous pieces of advice to writers: use short sentences, write clearly, use simple Anglo-Saxon words, don’t overwrite, avoid adjectives (a lesson he learned from Ezra Pound), and leave yourself out of it. The result was a style that has been described as realistic, hardboiled, spare, unadorned, minimalist, and lapidary. The last two words are particularly apt: a lapidary style is polished and cut to the point of transparency. It doesn’t seem to be doing much. It does not demand that attention be paid to it. It aspires to a self-effacement that allows the object to shine through as a master stonecutter allows the beauty of the stone to shine through by paring away layers of it. Hemingway’s sentences, unlike Stein’s, do not “force themselves upon you.” There is no “excessive complication.” There is no complication at all, just (or so is the claim) the thing itself, limpidly presented.

Here, for example, is the second sentence of
A Farewell to Arms
(1929):

In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.

The sentence divides in half, with the pebbles and boulders occupying one half and the water occupying the other half. No relationship between the two halves is explicitly asserted. They are just laid down next to each other, linked by an “and” that does minimal work. The clause “dry and white in the sun” is technically adjectival, but “dry” and “white” come across more as qualities (dryness and whiteness) than as modifiers. The water in the second half is a surrogate for the style’s (unvoiced) claim to be making no claim for itself at all. Like the water, the style is “clear” and “swiftly moving”; it does not stop or take a turn or qualify something it has presented. In short, this “simple” sentence is an allegory—one of the most complex of literary forms—of its own unfolding.

Sentences like this one are employed by Hemingway as a contrast to the anguish, despair, and pointlessness often experienced by his characters. In
To Have and Have Not
(1937), Marie Morgan thinks about what life will be like now that her husband, Harry, has been killed. We overhear her inner monologue, written in a style that is almost a parody of Stein’s; its repetitions, rather than circling around each other and straining toward a final complicating simplicity, are just . . . well, repetitions.

I guess you find out everything in this goddamned life. I guess you do all right. I guess I’m probably finding out right now. You just go dead inside and everything is easy. You just get dead like most people are most of the time. I guess that’s how it is all right. I guess that’s just about what happens to you. Well, I’ve got a good start. I’ve got a good start if that’s what you have to do. I guess that’s what you have to do all right. I guess that’s it. I guess that’s what it comes to. All right. I got a good start then. I’m way ahead of everybody now.

This doesn’t quite work, but you know what Hemingway had in mind: he wanted to convey a consciousness in the process of distilling a little bit of stoic hope out of a huge sea of troubles. He succeeds in the next sentence by leaving human consciousness behind and moving to the only real realm of security and stability, a landscape purged of human losses and perturbations:

Outside it was a lovely, cool, subtropical winter day and the palm branches were sawing in the light north wind.

“Outside” is very precise; it means not inside, not inside the mind of Marie or anyone else. “[L]ovely” and “cool” are attributes of natural phenomena that know nothing of the effect they have on mortal agents. One is reminded both of the pastoral tradition in which Nature is often presented as indifferent to man’s woes and of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “glazed with rain water / beside the white chickens,” and declared to be more important than any human perspective. Even when, in the novel’s last sentence, the landscape contains objects that must be man-powered, those objects have achieved the “thingness” and serenity of palm branches:

A large white yacht was coming into the harbor and seven miles out on the horizon you could see a tanker, small and neat in profile against the blue sea, hugging the reef as she made to the westward to keep from wasting fuel against the stream.

Three objects—the yacht, the tanker, and the sea—fill a palette of white and blue. The yacht and the tanker are not related to each other except as objects within the sentence’s pictorial frame. One is coming in to the observer, the other moving away at a westward angle; both seem self-propelled. In another sentence, “hugging” and “she” might be humanizing touches; here they function as painterly details: the small and neat boat stays close to the shore; it doesn’t make love to it; the feminine pronoun is merely precise, a feature of a language that, like French, but less formally, classes things by gender categories. It’s sexuality without the sex, a peaceful realm of nonaffect available to Hemingway’s characters only in death. Even the tension between the vessel and the currents of the sea is muted and stilled as the tanker moves in a way calculated to lessen it. In the same way, the tendency of language to move to a point of judgment and discrimination is also stilled by a syntax that refuses to develop or subordinate, and is held together by a slight connective (“and”) and a present participle (“hugging”) that is the declaration and vehicle of ongoingness.

Sterne, Salinger, Stein, Hemingway—the additive, non-subordinating style is obviously versatile; it can be the vehicle of comedy, social satire, philosophical reflection, realism, and something approaching photography. In any of its guises it displays the advantages of being able to stop on a dime, arrest action, freeze the frame, stay still at the same time the reader moves linearly—all effects achieved in spectacular fashion in a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
(1927). Mrs. Ramsey has just rebuked her daughters for mocking “the little atheist” Tansley. We see them react in a moment that expands and remains in focus despite the passing of considerable reading time:

She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters, Prue, Nancy, Rose—could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers: in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at table beneath their mother’s eyes, honour her strange severity, her extreme courtesy, like a queen’s raising from the mud a beggar’s dirty foot and washing it, when she thus admonished them so severely about that wretched atheist who had chased them to—or, speaking accurately, been invited to stay with them in—the Isles of Skye.

The word “behold” is a command: behold this woman! In the sentence, our surrogate beholders are the three daughters who gaze upward at their mother as if at a portrait and think thoughts in silence. From its beginning to “a life different from hers,” the sentence proceeds in the subordinating, hypotactic mode: “looking up from their place” is the present action the three young woman perform, but the present is immediately framed by the “after” clause—“after she had spoken so severely”—which provides a past and causal perspective on what they are doing. But then, “in Paris, perhaps” the prose breaks free. Who says “perhaps”? Is it a qualification from the outside, made by an omniscient narrator, or does the word belong to the three sisters, who perhaps have not yet settled on their preferred dream? And who is it that wants not to be “always taking care of some man or other”? Surely the daughters have not yet taken on that burden; does this wish belong to their mother, who is now playing in the fields of her daughters’ consciousnesses? Are the “infidel ideas” the sisters “sport” with theirs or hers? Is it for her or for themselves that they imagine “a life different” from the one their mother leads? The latter is the more likely; the austere majesty of Mrs. Ramsey leads them to question the world of ceremony and courtesy they associate with her; and yet—the sentence does not progress, but keeps adding to the perspectives and vistas that open up in its leisurely spaces—the severity from which they imagine themselves freed has its own attractions, its own beauty, which is summed up in the person of their mother, to whom they, and the sentence, return, re-conceiving her as a queen admonishing her subjects. At the same moment the subordinating style, with its clear temporal demarcations (“who had chased them—or, speaking accurately, been invited to stay with them”), also returns, putting events and persons in their proper place.

What makes the Woolf sentence able to shift direction and emphases without seeming discontinuous or disjointed are those “slight ligatures” that mark the coordinating style: “and,” “for,” “though,” “when.” These interact with a succession of present participles—“looking,” “taking,” “raising,” “speaking”—verbal forms indicating ongoing actions, no one of which is completed and all of which combine in almost a symphonic fashion to paint a densely layered moving, kaleidoscopic, sometimes frame-frozen picture.

Earlier I remarked that sentence makers are selectors; possibilities must be foreclosed so that clear and demarcated relationships can come into sharp view. But it is just such a discipline that the additive writer refuses, cultivating a looseness that allows meaning and worlds to enter and leave freely. Like Stein, Woolf explicitly theorizes her method. Words, she says in “Craftsmanship” (1937), do not “express one simple statement but a thousand possibilities.” Those possibilities are locked in as long as words are asked only to be useful; but liberate them from usefulness, and marvelous things happen. She illustrates by riffing on the words written on a sign in a railway carriage: “Do not lean out of the window”: