Life Sentences (43 page)
Authors: William H Gass
The sentence without its commonplaces:
To be brief, Bloom, realizing they should not stay longer, was the first to rise, and having prudently and discreetly signaled to their host that he would pay the bill, quietly left his last four pennies, a sum—most reasonable—he knew was due, having earlier seen the price of their coffee and confection clearly printed on the menu.
Bloom was the first to get up so that he might also be the first to motion (to the host) that the amount due was forthcoming.
The theme of the sentence is manners: Bloom rises so he and his companion will not have sat too long over their coffees and cake, and signals discreetly (
unobtrusively
is used twice) that he will pay the four pence due according to the menu. The sum, and the measure of his generosity, is a pittance.
The sentence is itself an odyssey, for Bloom and Dedalus are going home. They stop (by my count) at twenty-two commonplaces on their way. Other passages might also be considered for the list,
such as “when others were not looking.” Commonplaces are the goose down of good manners. They are remarks empty of content, hence never offensive; they conceal hypocrisy in an acceptable way, because, since they have no meaning in themselves anymore they cannot be deceptive. That is, we know what they mean (“how are you?”), but they do not mean what they say (I really don’t want to know how you are). Yet they soothe and are expected. We have long forgotten that “to foot the bill,” for instance, is to pay the sum at the bottom of it, though it could mean to kick a bird in the face. Bloom, we should hope, is already well above his feet when he rises to them. The principal advantage of the commonplace is that it is supremely self-effacing. It so lacks originality that it has no source. The person who utters a commonplace—to cut a long explanation short—has shifted into neutral.
The concluding cliché is not exactly as advertised. “Once in a way” mangles the trite, but hasn’t triteness itself, except for Wetherup, who apparently says it often, as might be expected, because he was a onetime clerk in the Collector of Rates Office with John Joyce. “It’s well worth twice the money once in a way,” he’d invariably say. We well remember. On every visit. So, the skids greased, the pair slip off toward home, “[s]eeing that the ruse worked and the coast was clear,” despite the fact that Stephen is still four sheets to the wind. When Stephen wonders why they place chairs upside down on tables in the café every night, Bloom makes no mention of the Shakers who had hangers on the wall for their ladder backs to cling to, but does say, “To sweep the floor in the morning.” Routines of speech and behavior, good custom and propriety continue to control every action as Bloom skips nimbly to his companion’s right, “a habit of his, by the by, the right side being, in classical idiom, his tender Achilles.”
My culminating sentence, one that most clearly demonstrates what I’ve been trying to suggest, is appropriately from Henry James.
Henry James. From
Italian Hours
(1909). Spindle Diagram
To dwell in a city which, much as you grumble at it, is after all very fairly a modern city, with crowds, and shops and theaters and cafés and balls and receptions and dinner parties and all the modern confusion of social pleasures and pains; to have at your door the good and evil of it all; and yet to be able in half an hour to gallop away and leave it a hundred miles, a hundred years, behind, and to look at the tufted broom blowing on a lonely tower-top in the still blue air, and the pale pink asphodels trembling none the less for the stillness, and the shaggy-legged shepherds leaning on their sticks in motionless brotherhood with the heaps of ruin, and the scrambling goats and staggering little lads treading out wild desert smells from the top of hollow-sounding mounds; and then, to come back through one of the great gates and a couple of hours later find yourself in the “world,” dressed, introduced, entertained, inquiring, talking about “Middlemarch” to a young English lady or listening to Neapolitan songs from a gentleman in a very low-cut shirt—all this is to lead in a manner a double life and to gather from the hurrying hours more impressions than a mind of modest capacity quite knows how to dispose of.
James manages this quite complex sentence with the ease of a waterslide. It takes its trip in a travel book; what could be more appropriate? In front of us is what I call a spindle diagram, designed to reveal the axes around which the phrases and the clauses turn, usually a modest preposition or obliging conjunction, and therefore generally a part of speech. In this case, it is both the infinitive and the
and:
nine of the former and seventeen of the latter.
To
, as versatile as it is, can stand at either side of a verb as comfortably as a sentry: “to go to the dogs,” “to declare to your beloved your love,” “to see to it,” “to remodel to suit,” and “I am about to dance to the music to the movie
To Have and to Hold
.” James’s city divides itself, like a sonata, into a departure point—Rome, “to dwell in”—the countryside nearby, “to gallop away” to, and a destination—Rome again, “to come back” for. Each of these sections is followed by a bit of temporally characterized reflection. “To have at your door the good and evil of it all, and yet to be able in half an hour to gallop away …” “and then to come back through one of the great gates and a couple of hours later find yourself in the world …” “all this is to lead in a manner a double life and to gather from the hurrying hours …” What? impressions, of course, what else?
The city, described as you are about to leave it, receives eight qualifiers, and regains them again when you return, while the countryside receives but four; however, these four are more redolent with detail and make up in richness what they lack in numbers. Although the Rome which we rejoin after our hundred-mile gallop is Rome still, the city we left was given over entirely to public bustle—theaters, cafés, and balls—whereas the city we recover is more privately social—chamber music and conversation. What we see in the city is activity, but what we see in the country is still—shepherds, towers—though we and our carriage are perhaps ajounce and ajolt
on the road, except for small natural movements which do not disturb the scenic serenity—trembling asphodels, for instance.
For the country is reserved James’s most mouth-filling music: “the tufted broom blowing on a lonely tower-top in the still blue air,” or “the scrambling goats and staggering little kids treading out wild desert smells from the top of hollow-sounding mounds.” James is nonetheless a city man. The country is visited, but he is a happy grumbling part of the crowded streets and a participant in the hubbub of parties and receptions. He is not about to chase after a scrambling goat; nor is his sentence, though it ends very brashly with a preposition.
One could make many other observations about this sample of Henry James’s magazine prose, among them the fact that
Middlemarch
—here entwined—is a country book and the songs are citified, but the narrative shape of the sentence is not just a nice touch or final flourish; it inscribes the verbal journey that the meaning also makes; the two travel together in the same coach, although the words are up top driving the horses, while their referents are sitting in the stage with hankies held daintily to their noses against the persistent dust.
Decades ago, when I was in the grades, the teacher of composition would occasionally go to the blackboard and write there a sentence of some appropriately simple kind for her students to worry like cats with their prey—for example, “The man at the door was an encyclopedia salesman,” though, I suspect, my instructor chose a more succinctly spelled commodity. During the Great Depression such a neat but shabby-suited person would ring the bell oftener than anyone cared to remember. Then teacher would draw lines that tied various parts of her sentence together, “at the door” descending like a staircase from its noun. This moment made me happy. I was perhaps the only student in the class who relished diagramming; who could while away a happy hour picturing predicates docking at the ports of their subjects like ships. Levels one through six were called grammar schools then, attesting to the importance once placed upon the subject.
The idea of the sentence, I saw from these chalky demonstrations, was the disappearance of the words that comprised it into one compounded notion, namely whatever was designated by a large often smeared letter S on the board.
The
had scarcely slipped without any fuss into
man
when
at the door
folded up into the slightly fattened S on the slate as if swallowed by its shape. Meanwhile,
encyclopedia
was safely inside
salesman
and resting comfortably. The
sentence offered no guarantee that the union of
doorsman
and
salesman
would ever be relevant for any other stoop. Its allegation was quite indefinite about all else except this one past-tense declaration.
Yet its time frame did determine certain circumstances. Had the verb (here, one weak as water) been in the present, I could have easily imagined a comfortable use: “Mabel, I think the man at the door is an encyclopedia salesman.” But our sample sentence is not in an immediately functional mode, but rather in one of recollection and depiction. (Actually, even this is a pretension, because the sentence isn’t being used, but merely being mentioned.) Moreover, its meaning is not captured by any easy refiguring, such as, “An encyclopedia salesman was at the door,” because that blunt version fails to highlight the statement’s sense of recognition: “O lord, the man at the door …” et cetera. There is absolutely no point in saying, “The man at the door,” if you already know who he is. And if you know who he is, you probably won’t utter an entire sentence, just, “Uh-oh, an encyclopedia salesman,” in a warning whisper. Incidentally, is that warning a fragment or can we treat it as a sentence with copious elisions?
The teacher, to my mystification, did not give word order much attention, and she seemed to think that some sentences could be flipped like pancakes. She regarded with scornful indifference my claim that the news, “David slew Goliath,” was seriously not the same as, “Goliath was slain by David,” but that each registered joy or woe depending on whose side you were on. Grammarians were on the side of the parts of speech. Wherever it might find itself, an adverb was surely an adverb, the
-ly
a brand as on the flank of a steer, and in just that way her classifications went through the words of the alphabet,
aardvark
to
Zion
, declaring them to be articles or prepositions, nouns or verbs. If I wanted to insist on a difference between the two Davids-versus-Goliaths, beyond a simple change of voice, fine; but my opinion would not be a grammatical one. The syntax of the sentence—its form—was the issue, although no one said
syntax
back then.