How to Write a Sentence (13 page)

This is, again, a sentence about itself or, to be more precise, about its inability to characterize its addressee, “My God.” Its basic syntactical structure is simple: “Thou art . . .” The problem is to fill in the dots. The first part of the sentence tells us that there is no problem at all, for the object to be known and described is “direct,” “literal,” and “plain,” words implying that little in the way of interpretation is required. Not only does this God mean what he says, but what he says can be “understood literally,” that is, with no reaching after a meaning that is perfectly present. But God’s literalism—the instantaneous conveyance of his intentions—is a feature of eternity where those to whom he speaks dwell within him; he is always, in a sense, speaking to himself; there is no distance to be bridged; no translation, in the root sense of being carried across space, is necessary. Mortal men and women, in contrast, live at a distance from one another—that’s why they have to write sentences—and at an even greater distance from a realm to which they have no access. Their perspective is limited by time and space, and because the discursive structures they employ reflect that limitation, the literalism they can achieve—the literalism of the here and now—is spectacularly inadequate to the literalism Donne celebrates as God’s. That is why his sentence does not end with the proclamation of God’s “plain sense”; the real question is how do we get even a glimpse of that plainness when the instruments (of cognition, understanding, human language, sentences) at our disposal are actually obstructions, are in the way?

The answer is to refuse the confines of the medium and deploy it as a springboard to truths it cannot express; use mortal language while bending, stretching, and even breaking it at the same time. That is what Donne does after the turn in his sentence “but thou art also . . .” But before he continues, he parenthetically warns away the “profane misinterpreter,” who might mistake his intention (a danger that increases as earthly literalism is left behind). A profane misinterpreter is a secular interpreter, an interpreter who because he is not spiritual is literal in the wrong way. Donne knows that no mere imprecation can protect him from those who do not have within them that which moves him to write. He just has to clear the decks before he flies.

And fly he does as he at once characterizes and performs the language in which God speaks. It is a language that is always pointing away from itself to something that transcends it, something that is, literally, out of this world. It is figurative, that is, always departing from ordinary meaning. It is metaphorical, that is, rubbing two literalisms together so as to produce something never imagined before. And once its flight pattern is established, the language soars higher, moving not only into allegories (double-sided discourse) but “curtained,” obscured allegories; not only into figures, but heights of figures, figures of figures; not only into hyperboles, but third-heaven hyperboles, hyperboles that reside where God lives, where what is said is “unspeakable” (2 Corinthians 12:4) because it does not have to be spoken. Just before its end, the sentence descends to earth and to the literalism it strives to leave behind—“the seed of the serpent that creeps”—before it rises again with the final completion of the “Thou art” pattern: “thou art the Dove that flies,” which means, impossibly, that Jesus is simultaneously the one baptized by John in the river Jordan and the Dove that descends from above (that is, from himself ) to confirm the baptism and his identity as God. Quite a trick, and while Donne’s sentence does not, could not, match it, it gets as close as we are likely ever to get in merely mortal prose.

The extraordinary power of language to communicate a reality its forms cannot present is not limited to instances of religious yearning. It is both the accomplishment and often the explicit subject of those who profess the religion of Art. Here are two sentences by worshipper Joseph Conrad.

The first is from the preface to
The Nigger of the “Narcissus”
(1897), which begins by declaring, “A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.” A few sentences later, Conrad elaborates:

And it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting, never discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surfaces of words, of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.

The first part of the sentence names the requirements—complete devotion, perfect blending, unremitting care—phrases that seem preliminary to a celebration of art’s ineffable power, but in fact turn out to be preliminary to a celebration of sentences, of their “shape and ring.” “Shape” suggests something firm and crisp, something self-contained; but (another surprise) the firmness is valued as a way to something decidedly not firm, to “plasticity,” an availability to being molded and remolded. The shape of an artfully made sentence, like a piece of sculpture, can be turned this way and that, revealing from each new perspective new meanings, new shades, new colors; and in that way it can become the vehicle of a “magic suggestiveness,” magic because nothing in the mere surface form—the form that might be grammatically parsed—hints of it.

As Conrad’s sentence proceeds, it moves into the very realm of the suggestiveness it invokes while refusing, as it must, to arrest it; it is glimpsed, here and in the sentences of other artists, only in an instant, and that instant is “evanescent”—that is, transitory, fleeting, capable of being intermittently experienced, but not of being captured and pinned down. The miracle, and the magic, is that such moments of evanescence can be produced by language that in its mundane uses sits inert on the page. The phrase “evanescent instant” is poised between “play” and its adverb “over,” which then deposits us on “the commonplace surfaces of words.” The evanescent instant has occurred in the space between the action and its usual commonplace result, has occurred, as it were, in the syntax; but it can be sustained for a microsecond only, and the sentence ends with an almost elegiac caressing of the threadbare material out of which the marvelous can sometimes be made: “old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage.” The barely submerged image is of a coin, a piece of currency, exchanged and made use of many times until it has almost been worn away and seems incapable of regaining a pristine value. Except in sentences like this one where there is no careless usage at all, and more than a hint of the evanescent instant that makes language, at least for a microsecond, magical.

Two years later, in
Heart of Darkness
, Conrad’s aesthetic reappears as a description of Marlowe’s tale-telling:

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut, but Marlowe was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

The sentence’s independent clause is as directly simple as the yarns it reports; its meaning, like the meaning seamen deliver, is easily extracted. But when Marlowe’s atypicality becomes the sentence’s subject, meaning become elusive and is ever receding. First we learn that in Marlowe’s yarns, meaning, rather than being a kernel wrapped inside the prose, is on the outside. But what does it mean for meaning to be on the outside? The successive clauses that labor to tell us only deepen the question. Look at the “it” in “enveloping the tale which brought it out.” “It” is the meaning that is brought out by a tale enveloped—everywhere surrounded and enwrapped—by, guess what, the meaning; the meaning is its own membrane. But that’s not quite it, because it is too visually specific; hence the qualification “only as a glow brings out a haze.” A glow is a light produced by something else; it is a second-order phenomenon. A haze, an opaque vapor, is the effect of a glow; it is even more insubstantial, a third-order phenomenon. But that’s not quite it either. It—the meaning, the glow, the haze—should be understood not as itself but like something (“in the likeness”), like a misty halo, a cloudy luminescence, a light that is dim and barely seen; you can’t be sure you see it, because its illumination (a word that names what the sentence withholds) is spectral, ghostly, and a form of moonshine, that is, of talk that is either visionary or foolish. Which is it? The sentence doesn’t tell us, and we leave it not quite knowing of what kind of moonshine it itself is made or what meaning really is.

Conrad was (for a time) a friend and collaborator of Ford Madox Ford’s. Ford admired Conrad’s writing and, in his 1911 essay “The Critical Attitude,” paired him with Henry James. The two were united, he said, by “an extreme literary conscientiousness”; that is, both cared only for their art. The compliment could be extended to Ford himself, who wrote in the preface to the 1927 edition of
The Good Soldier
(a novel nearly every sentence of which merits a place in this book), “I have always been mad about writing—about the way writing should be done.” The madness, in several senses, is shared by the novel’s narrator, John Dowell, who pauses frequently to reflect on the act of writing. In fact the construction of the story is his obsession, as we can tell from the famous first sentence:

This is the saddest story I have ever heard.

The irony is that Dowell is incapable of understanding the story he tells, incapable of plumbing its true sadness, because there is nothing inside him, no human investment in relation to which the things he experiences can be made sense of.
That
is the saddest story, the story of what he can neither see nor feel. He says of himself, “No one is interested in me, for I have no interests” (a marvelous sentence in itself ). He is fixated on the act of composition because he thinks if he puts things down correctly the meaning he hasn’t got a clue about will emerge. In his eyes, the problem he faces is merely a technical one:

I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down—whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself.

The question, which he cannot really even approach, is what kind of “thing” this is. To him the story—of multiple betrayals, destructive passions, casual cruelties, monstrous sentimentalities—is simply a problem in composition; the “better” he seeks is the better order. (He is Faulkner’s Benjy, but under the misapprehension that he has a functioning brain.) The alternatives he considers—telling the story in an immediate present “from the beginning” or filtering it through the words of others and through the lens of time—are textbook alternatives from primers on how to construct a narrative. What “reaches” him are verbal and painterly memories of which he can make no final sense. And he knows it, knows that even after all is revealed, he remains uncomprehending, but he cannot even comprehend his incomprehension:

But the inconvenient—well, hang it all, I will say it—the damnable nuisance of the whole thing is, that with all the taking for granted, you never really get an inch deeper than the things I have catalogued.

This sentence is an example of Ford’s ability fully to present a character and allow us to see through him at the same time. “Inconvenient” is a word that marks Dowell’s deepest emotional level. When he announces that he will discard the politeness of the circumlocution and say something more raw and real, all he can come up with is “damnable nuisance,” a class-bound epithet even more conventional and empty than “inconvenient.” And what is the nuisance? Well, no matter how much he recalls and catalogues, he can never get beneath the surface. For him, never getting beneath the surface is the equivalent of not being able to get into a room or having to wait until a door is opened. It’s just a nuisance, not the occasion for a deep insight of the kind Conrad’s Kurtz has when he cries, “the horror, the horror.” Ford’s Dowell is as incapable of saying anything like that as he is of feeling more than annoyed or inconvenienced.

Still, the cataloguing of life’s details even by an unseeing person can generate great sentences that reveal much the cataloguer cannot see.

Whole castles have vanished from my memory, whole cities that I have never visited again, but that white room, festooned with papier-mâché fruits and flowers; the tall windows; the many tables; the black screen round the door with three golden cranes flying upward on each panel; the palm tree in the centre of the room; the swish of the waiter’s feet; the cold expensive elegance; the mien of the diners as they came in every evening—their air of earnestness as if they must go through a meal prescribed by the Kur authorities and their air of sobriety as if they must seek not by any means to enjoy their meals—those things I shall not easily forget.

The room comes alive in its deadness; its whiteness functions as a blank screen, which is then filled in by a succession of precisely realized details (it’s like painting by numbers), details that are resolutely inanimate even when human beings are brought in. Not fruits and flowers, but papier-mâché fruits and flowers; cranes that are golden against a background of black lacquer; waiters’ feet, which are as much objects as the tables (one doesn’t actually look at waiters, does one?); the appearance (“mien”) of the diners, who are nothing but appearance and who “go through” their prescribed forms without ever allowing them to spill over into emotions (like pleasure) they do not have. And the narrator? The clauses piled up and chock full of precise observations create a pressure for, and an expectation of, a response to the inertly busy canvas they fill out. But the response we get—“those things I shall not easily forget”—is underwhelming, anticlimactic, even bathetic. He won’t forget these things, but what does he think of them? Does he think anything of them at all?