Life Sentences (44 page)

Thus I learned that grammar was concerned with only one sort
of structure that a sentence had to have to earn a period. Its aim was always clarity of communication. Nothing should leak out of, or fall idly into, the perfect sentence. It must not forget its way and wander in the wilderness. Later, after the steam engine’s invention, we might say “lose its train of thought.” In 1783, when Hugh Blair composed his lecture “Structure of Sentences,” he listed their desirable properties as “1. Clearness and Precision. 2. Unity. 3. Strength. 4. Harmony.” Yet we do not always share those goals when we speak or write, for we often desire to be devious, to mislead, conceal, confuse, or confound our audience; perhaps to persuade them to vote as we wish or to purchase our faulty vacuum cleaner or grant us a reputation for profundity. Much later, I came to believe that Hegel must have thought reality was a sentence, because everything that occurred in the world turned out to be a predicate of the absolute, and disappeared into it the way the steps to the front door did, or the standing man would if he left the stoop, having been invited in to wait at the end of the sentence, when he’d get to put, under someone else’s care, the book of cut-rate erudition he had so long borne beneath his arm, weariness from previous refusals showing in his face, a weariness not unlike the weariness this sentence gives its listeners, and will its readers, too.

Hegel, of course, would not be the first to look at the world through the methods of its depiction. The Pythagoreans may have been originals at that. Aristotle’s categories serve him as the grammar of being, and prove amazingly useful for an error of such magnitude. A sentence, the philosopher says, is a form of speech that has a beginning and an end within itself, and is of a length that can be readily grasped—two conditions that resemble those required of a tragedy: beginning, middle, end, and the unities of time and place that are imposed upon the action. Of course, to utter a rule is half on the way to breaking it. For instance, Laurence Sterne, who loved to cause metaphysical alarm in his readers, damaged the rule for time with this rip in the fabric of reality: “A cow broke in tomorrow morning to my Uncle Toby’s fortifications.” And E. E. Cummings,
to continue along this line, begins a poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town / with up so floating many bells down.” Grammarians are not taught to cope with this sort of thing. How do you diagram the “cowtown” that manages to live in the shadow of “how town,” or set down the up so floating many bells? You don’t, I’m sure Miss Duck (for that was her name) would say. The incorrect does not deserve the honor of a design.

Philosophers can often be classified in terms of their favorite parts of speech: there are those who believe that nouns designate the only reliable aspects of being; others, of a contrary view, who see those nouns as simply unkempt nests of qualities; and all are familiar with the Heraclitean people who embrace verbs as if you could make love to water while entirely on land. I have personally always preferred prepositions, particularly
of
, and especially, among its many meanings, those of possession and being possessed, of belonging and exclusion.

In that classroom I also encountered what was apparently a mind like mine: one that had to picture relations in some symbolic space if it hoped to understand them. Later, Venn diagrams would provide visible evidence for the soundness of the syllogism. The syllogism required a rewriting of any sentences offered to it so that they would fit neatly into a system that would facilitate the diagramming of its premises by means of overlapping hoops. Like a ticket machine, this logic did not accept sentences until they had been pressed flat, formed into propositions, and fed carefully through the appropriate slot. “David is the slayer of Goliath.” According to some readers, of which I am one, this formula—S is P, with its quantifier and simplified copula—encouraged the concepts of Substance and Accident and gave them considerable legitimacy. The syllogism itself, apart from the fact that anything it could handle had to be uninteresting, encouraged a conflation of premises and their valid conclusion with the actions of causes and effects, supposing that between them there had to be a necessary connection simply because the propositions that expressed causality were that firmly linked.

Wittgenstein has even said that the structure of a true proposition mirrors the structure of its fact, but this is true only in fiction, where there are no other facts than those created by the prose, and no other relations either.

At a social function, the name tags may be folded at your plate or they may be pinned to your dress at the door. If properly posted Sir Gregory will remain the MP for Gladhampshire wherever he stands and as his name tag identifies him; otherwise that must be Lady Disgrace seated at the left hand of the host, as her place mark says, since that is where a person of such rank and compliant reputation is always to be found. The English sentence creates a predelineated space, like a table set for lunch, while a Latin one is satisfied that everybody knows their station and their duties wherever they may be positioned. In an English sentence, as Blair remarks, “the words or members most nearly related, should be placed in the Sentence, as near to each other as possible.” Placing relations in such proximity with one another is not wise social advice.

When word ordering is insufficient for the organizing task at hand, one can fold the sentence back upon itself as line breaks do in verse, or by creating interior rhymes, and symmetrical structures bring it to heel; but now closeness must be redefined in terms of each word’s placement anywhere on the page or its resemblance to others when read and heard in the head.

The favored name, in Blair’s time, for the effect of a word on its neighbor was
qualify
, whereas today it is
modify
. The adverb, by its presence, does something to the meaning of a verb that the verb, by itself, is incapable of doing. The general assumption has been that though these qualifiers are subordinate to their objects, and must be considered to be fastened to them in some life-giving way (weariness cannot exist on its own), it is their presence alone that effects the change. That is to say, if the salesman is standing wearily at your front door, weariness will be like a car’s paint job, and do its work on the poor fellow’s posture without suffering, itself, any modification. This is, I think, a major mistake. If, out of all the kinds of standing,
the adverb is pointing only to the weary ones,
standing
, in its turn, is picking out only those elements of posture that are appropriate, and certainly not all the ones the sentence—“ ‘Wanna buy a book, ma’am,’ the salesman said wearily”—is selecting; or, even more obviously, “The geese lit upon the pond, where they floated wearily about like lilies made of feathers.”

Many adverbs and some adjectives have private as well as public sides. Here, only the posture of the salesman has been described as weary, so the reader must first go to the qualities one associates with the corresponding behavior of the body, and only then, if the inference is deemed safe, to the appropriate state of feeling, since a person may feign weariness, or hide it if he wishes to make a sale.

To dwell at this point a moment longer like those geese who now are resting on the palest patch of water: if it is a part of the syntax of the sentence that any adjective in it modify or qualify a noun, how it does so will depend not only upon the nature of the noun but also on the connections that the adjective has made with other portions of the text, provided, of course, there are such companions. It has been suggested that our salesman was shabby-suited, and given the general circumstances we might reasonably suppose that neatness was nevertheless likely. The salesman is poor but he is trying to make a good impression. Still, we can’t be sure. If Mr. Micawber is the guy ringing the bell, we do know that he will be dressed as well as Mrs. Micawber can manage. So if this sentence were in
Copperfield
, the way the adjective modified its noun would be precisely determined: shabby but not as one who is homeless, rather as one who is poor but proud—even pompous. Sometimes the text will furnish details and particulars: “The frayed edges of his coat sleeves had been sewn shut so that the ravelings could no longer embarrass.” At other times it may indicate that
shabby
alone is quite enough. The reader must read carefully and obey. Such links, such severances, are everywhere inevitable in literary work and, I should say, are formal properties of the sentence with the consequence that the sentence cannot be surgically lifted from its context like a liver to be transplanted. I call
these possibilities
contextual tentacles
, because, though they reach out, they do not always grasp.

The placement of the man’s shabbiness is as important as the suit’s location—worn rather than still hung in a closet or flung over a chair. To say, “The suit was shabby,” is to grant
shabby
its full powers as an adjective and to place special emphasis on the suit’s condition (the
suit
goes to seek
shabby
); whereas if it is allowed to cozy up and be
shabby-suited
it will take on substantive, or nounlike, qualities. Then the sentence is on its way to omitting the suit—to say
shabby man
and be done with it. In addition, “The man at the door was a shabby encyclopedia salesman,” casts aspersions on the poor soul’s selling techniques, and
shabby
’s closeness to
encyclopedia
suggests a similarly low opinion of his merchandise. I shall stick with
shabby-suited
. Because it fits him.

Let our instructor in these matters be Samuel Beckett, who understands the general problem of word order and selection as well as anyone who cares. In his early novel
Watt
, Beckett reckons with the problem.

To dwell on this point still a moment longer like a guest who will not say “good night”: sentences must be understood to contain all
sorts of unused syntactical space. These are places that could be filled with more words, but, in any specific instance, aren’t. Instead of, “The man at the door was an encyclopedia salesman,” we could have written, “The weary shabby-suited man at the door was an Encyclopaedia Britannica salesman.” Between any adjective and its noun, more can nearly always be added. Sentences are like latticework, like fences, to be left open or prudently closed, their boards wide or narrow, pointy or level, the spaces between them, ditto. “The man was a salesman” is a short sentence that is as gappy as a badly buttoned blouse. An adjective that began its duties nearly in the arms of its noun can suddenly find itself removed almost to another room. Or if in a queue, a victim of violators. “The tall gaunt shabby-suited weary-looking man who suddenly appeared at my door after ringing its bell with a hand I identified as that of an old radioman because it sounded so like Morse, was, to my surprise, not an encyclopedia salesman, though I at first had taken him for that, but a Bible pusher whose stature and demeanor reminded me of my father, dead these many years, and a man of the book if there ever was one.” Don’t think we can’t make this a novel. Words in a sentence are like stars in the heavens: close together only if viewed from a distance of many light-years.

Occasionally we are misled into thinking that some of these spaces have been adequately closed up. For instance, what room is left between
at
and
the
in the phrase “at the front door”? Well, a lot if we cheat a little. “The man at [rest at] the front door …” Without changing the order of the words we can begin our redesign with, “The man at rest at the first step leading to the front door was, to my dismay, a dismay I conveyed to my wife in a whisper, not just an encyclopedia salesman, but the same guy I turned away yesterday when he was selling brooms.” Although the grammarian, as well as the logician, will find the original sentence and pull it out with pliers, to the ordinary reading eye that original unity will have disappeared. This is called
embedding
. There are two kinds. We simply place the sentence to be embedded, as it stands, in a larger whole,
usually with material added fore and aft; or we segment the sentence and make intrusions all along its length.

Embedding is related to framing. Frame tales are famous:
A Thousand and One Nights, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales
. At the level of the sentence it is called indirect address. “Seymour said that the man at the door was an encyclopedia salesman.” At all times, the authority for statements, assertions, beliefs, and opinions is crucial. Gossip, the very lifeblood of the novel of manners, can do its damage regardless of its reliability, but that reliability is essential if we are ever to know what Millie has actually done with her life, besides running away with that fact-flogging encyclopedia salesman. Henry James, who is fundamentally an epistemological novelist, is always concerned with who said what, why, and with what authority. He would certainly be interested to know that Miss Duck, who wrote our initial example on the board, was one of Millie’s aunts, an intimate of the family, who might very well know what her niece of only thirty-five had done, running away with a lowlife like that. What Seymour said made only half a frame; a full frame might go like this: “Seymour said that the man at the door was an encyclopedia salesman, but Joseph wasn’t so sure, because Seymour owed Britannica a bundle and saw their emissaries hiding in his drawers.”