Heavy sentences
by Joseph Epstein
A fter thirty years of teaching a university
course in something called advanced prose
style, my accumulated wisdom on the subject, inspissated into a single thought, is that
writing cannot be taught, though it can be
learned—and that, friends, is the sound
of one hand clapping. A. J. Liebling offers
a complementary view, more concise and
stripped of paradox, which runs: “The only
way to write is well, and how you do it is
your own damn business.”
Learning to write sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime.
The only way I know to do it is to read a vast
deal of the best writing available, prose and
poetry, with keen attention, and find a way
to make use of this reading in one’s own writing. The first step is to become a slow reader.
No good writer is a fast reader, at least not of
work with the standing of literature. Writers
perforce read differently from everyone else.
Most people ask three questions of what they
read: (1) What is being said? (2) Does it interest me? (3) Is it well constructed? Writers
also ask these questions, but two others along
with them: (4) How did the author achieve
the effects he has? And (5) What can I steal,
properly camouflaged of course, from the
best of what I am reading for my own writing? This can slow things down a good bit.
All sorts of people write books that promise shortcuts to writing well, most not particularly helpful, if only because shortcuts are
not finally available. Over the years, I have
consulted many of these books, on rare occa4
The New Criterion June 2011
sions taking away a helpful hint or two, but
not much more. The most famous is Strunk
and White’s Elements of Style, which is devoted to teaching the composition of prose clear,
crisp, and clean of excess verbiage or tricky
syntax, served up in what is called the active
voice. Nothing wrong with clean, crisp, and
clean prose, or with the active voice, but The
Elements of Style is limited in its usefulness, if
only because there are more ways of writing
well than the ideal advocated by its authors.
On the Strunk and White standard, for example, I suspect my opening sentence would
have to be heavily edited, if not deleted.
The best book on the art of writing that I
know is F. L. Lucas’s Style (1955). Lucas was
a Cambridge don, a Greek scholar, and an
excellent literary essayist, especially good
on eighteenth-century writers, who wrote
a once-famous book called The Decline and
Fall of the Romantic Ideal. Style is filled with
fine things, but the most useful to me in my
own writing has been Lucas’s assertion that
one does best always to attempt to use strong
words to begin and end sentences. Straightaway this means eliminating the words “It”
and “There” to begin sentences and dropping also the pompous “Indeed.” This advice
also reinstates and gives new life to the old
schoolmarmish rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition, for a prepositon is
almost never a strong word.
F. L. Lucas wrote the best book on prose
composition for the not-so-simple reason
that, in the modern era, he was the smartest,
Heavy sentences by Joseph Epstein
most cultivated man to turn his energies to
the task. He understood the element of magic entailed in great writing—and understood,
too, that “faulty greatness in a writer stands
above narrower perfections.” He also knew
that in literature style can be a great preservative, and “how amazing it remains that . . .
perfection of style can still do much to immortalize writers of the second magnitude
like Horace and Virgil, Pope and Racine,
and Flaubert himself.” Pause a moment to
consider the wide reading required to have
written that last sentence.
Style, according to F. L. Lucas, “is simply
the effective use of language, especially in
prose, whether to make statements or rouse
emotions.” That it is, but it is also of course
much more. Even though there have been
national (English, French, German) and historical (baroque, rococo, plain) styles, style
itself is not finally about ornamentation or
its absence. In its subtlest sense style is a way
of looking at the world, and an unusual or
sophisticated way of doing so is not generally acquired early in life. This why good writers rarely arrive with the precocity of visual
artists or musical composers or performers.
Time is required to attain a point of view of
sufficient depth to result in true style.
In a chapter boldly titled “The Foundation of Style—Character,” Lucas writes that
“the beginning of style is character.” I write
“boldly,” for what, one might at first think,
has character to do with composition. “The
fundamental thing,” Lucas explains, “is not
technique, useful though that may be; if a
writer’s personality repels, it will not avail
to eschew split infinitives, to master the difference between ‘that’ and ‘which,’ to have
Fowler’s Modern English Usage by heart.
Soul is more than syntax.”
Lucas didn’t hold that good character will
make an ungifted person write better, rather
that without good character superior writing
is impossible. And, in fact, most of the best
prose writers in English have been men and
women of exceedingly good character: Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, Jane Austen,
William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, George El-
iot, Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope,
Henry James, Max Beerbohm, George Orwell, T. S. Eliot, Willa Cather. Even those
excellent writers with less than good character—compose your own list here—seem to
have been able to have faked good character,
at least while at their desks.
F. L. Lucas fought and was wounded in
World War I, opposed the British policy of
appeasement, was properly skeptical of the
Soviet Union, and, along with H. W. Fowler, had acquired the most interesting point
of view of those who have attempted books
on the art of writing well. A paragraph from
Lucas’ first chapter, “The Value of Style,”
will suffice to render his point of view, with
its fine sense of perspective and proportion,
plain:
It is unlikely that many of us will be famous,
or even remembered. But not less important
than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a
literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the
world from running backward; who guard and
maintain the ancient values, even if they do not
conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph
it is to pass on what they inherited from their
fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their
sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can
hand on the torch, and not let it down; content
to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who
know us and to be forgotten when they in their
turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is
not governed wholly by its “stars.”
First day of class I used to tell students that
I could not teach them to be observant, to
love language, to acquire a sense of drama,
to be critical of their own work, or almost
anything else of significance that comprises
the dear little demanding art of putting
proper words in their proper places. I didn’t
bring it up, lest I discourage them completely, but I certainly could not help them to
gain either character or an interesting point
of view. All I could do, really, was point out
their mistakes, and, as someone who had
read much more than they, show them several possibilities about deploying words into
The New Criterion June 2011
5
Heavy sentences by Joseph Epstein
sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, of
which they might have been not have been
aware. Hence the Zenish koan with which I
began: writing cannot be taught, but it can
be learned.
In How to Write a Sentence and How to Read
One, Stanley Fish, in his jauntily confident
manner, promises much more.1 Fish’s central
key to good writing, his Open Sesame, is to
master forms of sentences, which can be imitated and later used with one’s own content
when one comes to write one’s own compositions. Form, form, form, he implores, it is
everything. “You shall tie yourself to forms,” he
writes, “and forms will set you free.”
By forms Stanley Fish means the syntactical models found in the sentences of good
writers, or sometimes even in grabber lines
from movies, or even interviews with movie
stars: “If you want to see the girl next door,”
he recounts Joan Crawford saying, “go next
door.” He serves up John Updike’s sentence
about Ted Williams’s last home run in Fenway Park—“It was in the books while it was
still in the sky”—as a form that can be made
use of in one’s own writing by wringing
changes on the original. “It was in my stomach while it was still on the shelf” is Fish’s
example of such a change.
Fish’s first bit of instruction is that one
practice wringing changes on these forms,
over and over again, as a beginning music
student might practice scales. “It may sound
paradoxical,” he writes, “but verbal fluency
is the product of hours spent writing about
nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.” He
adds: “For the purposes of becoming a facile
(in the positive sense) writer of sentences,
the sentences you practice with should have
as little meaning as possible.” Is this true?
Taking the Updike sentence for my model,
allow me to kitchen-test the method: “My
toches was still in Chicago while my mind
was in Biarritz”; “My mind was still in Vegas
while my toches was in the Bodleian.” I fear
1 How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, by
Stanley Fish; Harper, 165 pages, $19.99.
6
The New Criterion June 2011
it doesn’t do much for me, but perhaps I am
too far gone for such warming-up exercises.
The larger point for Fish is that one learns
to write
not by learning the rules [of grammar, syntax, and the rest], but by learning the limited
number of relationships your words, phrases,
and clauses can enter into, and becoming alert
to those times when the relationships are not
established or are unclear: when a phrase just
dangles in space, when a connective has nothing to connect to, when a prepositional phrase
is in search of a verb to complement, when a
pronoun cannot be paired with a noun.
That ungainly Fishian sentence is of course
itself built on reciting a few rules, but let
that pass. The first thing that one might argue with in Stanley Fish’s method is that the
number of relationships that words, phrases,
and clauses can enter into is not limited, but
nearly inexhaustible. In art, anyone writing
a book on how to write ought to remember
there are no rules except the rule that there
are no rules. One does come upon a sentence
with a fresh form from time to time, and
makes a note to abscond with it, but learning the forms of sentences alone will not take
one very far. The argument of How to Write
a Sentence is that it will take you all the way:
“Hence the formula [of this book]: sentence
craft equals sentence comprehension equals
sentence appreciation.”
Some well established sentences forms
are, in fact, better neglected. Those sentences that begin with the word “Although,”
or those sentences requiring a “however”
somewhere in their middle, are almost always dead on arrival. If a form is imitable,
it is probably stale, and hence best avoided.
Superior writers do not seek out old forms.
They create forms of their own devising.
Fish’s notion that “without form, content
cannot emerge” is not very helpful either,
and, except in the most blatant way, untrue.
Content obviously needs to be given form,
but in my experience it dictates form rather
more than the other way round. Form too
well fixed, in fact, is ripe for comic response.
Heavy sentences by Joseph Epstein
“The world is everything that is the case,”
wrote Wittgenstein, “So stop your blubbering and wash your face,” added, several years
later, the poet Donald Hall.
If one is to write a solid book on how
to write, one ought on every page to demonstrate one’s own mastery of the skill.
H. W. Fowler, the author of Modern English
Usage, a writer with great powers of formulation, dressed out in witty peremptoriness,
was easily able to do so. Here he is on the
delicate matter of the split infinitive: “The
English-speaking world is divided into (1)
those who neither know nor care what a split
infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but
care very much; (3) those who know and
condemn; (4) those who know and approve;
and (5) those who know and distinguish.”
Ernest Gowers, who revised Modern English Usage and wrote an excellent book called
Plain Words intended to eliminate the pompo-verbosity of bureaucrats, commanded a
fine common-sense style suitable to his message. Writing early in the history of the feminist incursions on language: Gowers noted:
“chairperson and other new words ending
in person have yet to win general approval.
Meanwhile, it is safer for official writers to
be cautiously conservative, and to take evasive action where possible.”
Stanley Fish is not a writer of this caliber.
He is a fluent, sometimes a lively (for an academic), but finally an undistinguished writer. A self-advertised sophist, he is most at
home in polemic. Sentence by sentence, this
would-be connoisseur of sentences is insufficiently scrupulous. He often roams deep into
cliché country. “You can talk the talk,” he
writes, “but you can’t walk the walk.” Earlier
he writes that “the very thought of putting
pen to paper, an anachronism I find hard to
let go of, is enough to bring on an anxiety
attack.” An anachronism isn’t the same as a
cliché, and pen to paper, as clichés go, is blue
ribbon, and let go of it, gladly, Fish should
have done. His diction, or word choice, is
commonplace: those worn-out vogue words
“focus,” “meaningful,” and “bottom line,”
come to him all too readily. “But, far from
being transparent and incisive,” he writes,
“these declarations come wrapped in a fog;
they seem to skate on their own surface and
simply don’t go deep enough.” Take three
metaphors, mix gently, sprinkle lightly with
abstraction, and serve awkwardly. These infelicities are from Fish’s first twenty pages.
Many more, to stay with my salad metaphor,
are peppered throughout the book.
U
nless one is considering aphorisms or
maxims, the study of the sentence, by itself,
has its severe limits. After one has charted
simple, complex, and compound sentences,
mentioned sentences dominated by subordinate clauses and sentences that are additive,
or add one clause after another on their tail
end, there isn’t all that much useful to say, except that one sentence is ill- and another wellmade, one tone deaf and another sonorous.
Fish ignores the crucial fact that sentences
owe their form and their language to their
place in that larger entity, the paragraph.
One cannot know the form one sentence is
to take until having taken into cognizance
the sentence, or sentences, that precede it.
As the principle of poetry is—or once was—
uniformity of meter, so the reigning principle of prose is variety, which means avoiding
uniformity of syntax, rhythm, repetition of
words, sameness of syntax. A sentence, every
sentence, is a tile in a briefer or lengthier mosaic known as a paragraph. No sentence, like
no man, as the poet said, is an island.
Here is a paragraph from that brilliant prose
mosaicist Evelyn Waugh from his biography
Ronald Knox, in which I can descry seven artless—which is to say perfectly artistic—sentences and no clear forms whatsoever:
Ronald had no desire to grow up. Adolescence,
for him, was not a process of liberation or of
adventure. Manhood threatened him with tedious duties and grave decisions. His mind had
flourished and matured while his heart was still
a child’s. He grew up slowly. Each stage of his
growth imposed a burden; each enlargement
of spirit, the loss of something fond. Perhaps
some instinctive foreboding of the heaviness
of the coming years years tinctured his love of
Eton and sharpened his longing to delay.
The New Criterion June 2011
7
Heavy sentences by Joseph Epstein
The only sentences that stand alone—that is,
that are not utterly dependent on what has
come before them—are the first and, to a
lesser extent, the last sentences in a composition. Fish defines the missions of first and last
sentences thus: “First sentences . . . are promissory notes,” prefiguring what is to follow.
Last sentences “can sum up, refuse to sum up,
change the subject, leave you satisfied, leave
you wanting more, put everything into perspective, or explode perspectives.” I should
put it differently. Excellent first sentences
are about seduction, seducing the reader, at
a minimum, to read the second sentence. Fish
chose to ignore the best first sentence in literature, which is Tolstoy’s in Anna Karenina:
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way.” Often first
sentences aren’t composed as first sentences at
all, and rare, I should say, is the writer who
has never had the experience of discovering
that his initial first sentence was a misfit and
that his composition starts better by opening
with the sentence beginning his second or
third or fourth paragraph.
As for last sentences, along with that of
A Tale of Two Cities (“It is a far, far better
thing that I do than I have ever done before;
it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than
I have ever known”) of which Stanley Fish
doesn’t approve, the best in my opinion is
that which ends on Madame Bovary: “Monsieur Homais received the legion of honor,”
which signals a victory for all that its author
wants his readers to despise. The task of a
fine last sentence is to set the plane down
safely, without any bumps, and the satisfying sense of a trip completed.
Stanley Fish refers to himself as a “sentence nut” and at one point refers to “the
wonderful world of sentences,” reminding
me of nothing so much as of the Erpi Classroom films of my boyhood, which contained
lines like “Wonderful world of fungus,” with
the public-school camera generally grinding
to a slow breakdown on the word fungus. In
his chapter “What Is A Good Sentence?” he
neglects to tell us what, precisely, it is, perhaps because there is no convincing solitary
answer. He teaches, as the old proverb has
8
The New Criterion June 2011
it, by example—the example of a few score
sentences scattered through his book.
W
hat these ostensibly exemplary sentences
prove is that, in the realm of sentences, tastes
differ. Fish exults over sentences by Leonard
Michaels, D. H. Lawrence, Virgina Woolf,
and Ralph Waldo Emerson that I find without power or charm. He cites an abstruse
sentence from Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger
of the “Narcissus” on the composition of sentences when much better, and more efficient,
sentences were available to him in the preface
to that same story: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written
word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it
is, before all, to make you see,” followed by
the clincher close, “That—and no more, and
it is everything.”
Fish quotes a few sentences by Gertrude
Stein—he ends his book on her writing about
the seduction of diagramming sentences—and
is under the impression that she was a great
writer. (He also quotes from that most useless,
for the real writer, of essays, Edgar Allan Poe’s
“The Philosophy of Composition.”) What
Gertrude Stein attempted was to make prose
do what the great avant-garde art of her day—
that of painting—did, by writing in the continuous present and using boring repetitions as
if filling in a canvas. She failed in her attempt,
and a good thing, too, for English prose.
Perhaps the reason for the rather poor
choices of so many of Fish’s sentences is that
they allow him, in obeisance to his subtitle,
which promises how also to read a sentence,
to do rather elaborate riffs—explications du
texte, in the old New Criticism phrase—on
these sentences. While many of these heavybreathing exercises allow Professor Fish to
work himself up into a fine pedagogical lather, their chief effect on this reader is to remind
him that it is good no longer to be a student.
I seem to have written more than three
thousand words without a single kind one
for How to Write a Sentence and How to Read
One. To remedy this, at least partially, let
it be noted that, at 165 pages, index and acknowledgments and biographical note on
the author included, it is a short book.
Copyright of New Criterion is the property of Foundation for Cultural Reviews, Inc. and its content may not be
copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.