The world ain't ready for your long sentences, buckaroo

On being old-fashioned

Some years ago, before I was married, and yet during that blessed period when the cause of my future conjugal felicity had impinged upon my perception, and the nuptial concept had begun to be entertained, I commenced myself upon the exploration of a certain novel, no less famous in its own day than in our own, written at the dawn of the prose novel in English. This novel was begun by the printer Samuel Richardson some three hundred years ago in an attempt to provide the rising bourgeois with printed matter, written in the style of the new French and Spanish novels, and taking as an inspiration the long novels of the 17th century, such as the historical romance, the Grand Cyrus, or the picaresque (in the style of the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes) entitled, with no small amount of humility, The English Rogue. This author, Samuel Richardson, himself charged with printing, procuring, and selling printed matter to the public, tired of relying on the spotty productions of the writers of his day, who were often educated at the colleges and inns and educated to somewhat higher tastes than that of the young ladies who provided the principle market for works of light entertainment, and he determined that through some initial outlay of effort he could produce a work that would more neatly fit the public's desires than any that had heretofore appeared.

This novel, which would be known to history under the moniker Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life. And Particularly Shewing, the Distresses that May Attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, In Relation to Marriage, runs to some 1300 pages in the current Penguin Classics version, and at roughly one million words in length, stands almost twice the length of War and Peace and two and a half times that of Anna Karenina.

It’s really fucking long. And really fucking repetitive. And people really fucking loved it.

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I've been reading an excellent book, perhaps the most excellent book on sentences that has yet been composed, and this book is, at its core, merely a primer on how to write long and involved sentences.

No reader of English literature can have failed to appreciate that sentences have decreased greatly in length since the days of our ancestors. The long sentence perhaps reached its apex in the 18th century, and the writings of Samuel Johnson, in particular, are afforested with long, blooming sentences that proceed in different measures, both stately and rapid, down numerous alleys and roads--wherever Johnson elects to take the reader, he will surely take them there at some length.¹

Sentences decreased in length in the 19th century, and they decreased again in the Edwardian and second-Elizabethan area. In America, the long sentence was always an affectation. If one reads the other novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne besides the Scarlet Letter, one sees that his style--so lush and Gothic--was far from being the norm even in the author's own writing, and was chosen for its purposefully archaic qualities.² Long sentences appear in the late Henry James and in Moby Dick, but in both cases are a conscious stylistic device rather than being the natural mode.

And yet if one is to study the history of the sentence in English one must go back all the way to the Anglo Saxon to discover sentences written in the clipped, simple style common to today's works of prose. The Anglo Saxon, perhaps due to the exigencies of writing by hand, tends to be much more clipped and repetitive in its sentence structure, as can be observed in the most famous work of Old English prose--the Anglo Saxon chronicle--whose power relies rather more on understatement, as in this famous line, than in any gross elaboration of meaning or extended juxtaposition of elements.³

I have always admired the long sentence, and yet I'm no practitioner of the form myself. Critics of my work would, I think, be rather more likely to say that I err in the opposite direction: my sentences tend to be clipped and simple, and both my line and my paragraph lengths tend not to make full use of the variation that they are allowed by even the sadly constrained taste of modern readers.

Reading through Virginia Tufte's book, I am reminded that a long sentence often requires the author and the reader to be content with a certain level of inexactness, a certain generality, a certain vagueness in terms of the concrete, physical reality of the statement, both in terms of its point of view and its spatiotemporality.

Take for instance the line, "The horse had three teeth."

Simple, easy, nothing to argue with. Also very boring.

If we were to say however that "The initial haleness of the horse proved due to liberal dosing of arsenic--so famously productive of a shiny coat and glossy surface; this malfeasance, which resulted three days later in the death of the horse, only hours after the hanging of the huckster-at-arms who had tried to pass it off as a healthy beast, was revealed only by the blackened and foul-smelling condition of its dentiture upon proper handling shortly before the sale was due to close."

The sentence is much longer, more wry, informative, but it also jumps around in time, and it contains more information than can legitimately be packed into that moment of handling a horse's teeth.

In truth, it is very hard to stay within the moment (to write "in scene" or "within the body") and to write a long sentence, because the pacing of a long sentence demands that we put groups of words next to each other, and each of these groups of words represents its own unique impression, which surely cannot all have been captured at the same moment. Moreover, a long sentence inevitably involves multiple doers, multiple percievers, and multiple actors, in a way that muddies up the question of who, precisely, is telling the story and whose story they are telling.

Thus, the close point of view and focus on visual detail are at war, in modern prose, with the need for sonic beauty and variety.

Our most-acclaimed modern writers (besides those, like Karen Russell or George Saunders, who operate primarily within a comic mode in which some greater looseness of point of view and spatiotemporality are allowable) tend to remedy these difficulties by padding out their sentences with sense details and with metaphorical language.

This allows you to tap into the sonic effect of longer sentences, but at the expense of a curiously-impoverished vision of life.

Take, for instance, this sentence, "Upon opening the mare's mouth, Stein was assailed by the rotting-egg stench of its lips. The horse shied at the cold touch of air, laying bare the hollow dells where its teeth ought to be, with their absences casting the glossy coat and lively demeanor into quite another light: Stein was appalled to be witnessing not the opening of another chapter in a long life, but the final indignity of a living corpse--to be doped up and dragged out into the cold by a gimlet-eyed huckster who hoped that its overheated heart and twitchy legs would allow him to milk a few extra dollars from her flesh before she dropped dead."

Here, if you've got a close enough point of view, you don’t have those spatiotemporal difficulties: every part of the sentence, no matter how diffuse from the central thought, are all cast as the reflections of Stein himself as he examines the horse. And yet, because he is embodied within the scene, as a PoV character, he must either speculate about things he can know nothing of (which, to an audience, can seen rather silly, as when he suddenly intuits that the horse has been doped with arsenic) or he must frequently break out of the narrative to engage in flights of poetic fantasy about what are, in themselves, rather prosaic images.

If you are going to write longer sentences from a closer point of view, you find yourself very limited in the sorts of protagonists you can write. Everyone ends up coming off rather affected and Shakespearian—full of brooding upon their own little slights and situations—and, ironically, because of this frequent retreat into rumination or observation, you lose the very immediacy that is so in vogue and that was one's original purpose in choosing this close point of view!

Faced with this absurd choice, my tendency is for simple, unadorned writing that reads, to most readers of high literature, as being simply bad and unimaginative.

Now, as a final aside, people periodically think, "Why are no books written in omniscient points of view anymore?" This is indeed one of the most frequently-asked questions by ambitious writers. For a period of perhaps a hundred years, all third-person novels were written in the omniscient point of view--stories were told by an all-knowing narrator who cannily controlled access to information, doling it out as they pleased, to spice up the story.

With the rise of the limited omniscient viewpoint, this element of purposiveness vanished: now we are meant to assume that we have a direct, unmediated access to their psyche, and if we do not, then the narrator is "unreliable". We have utterly forgotten that there is an entire category of narrator that is not lying or deluded, but is well-aware that he is telling us a story (i.e. someone like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby or Jake in The Sun Also Rises). An entire category of fiction (metafiction) has had to be invented simply to take back the narrative freeness that a Henry Fielding or Robinson Crusoe comfortably allowed to themselves.

So why can we not resurrect old techniques in order to create works that are, perhaps, less immediate but more perceptive and alive. And the simple, tedious answer is that you can, but the book won't sell.

Whenever I give that answer, people are like, "But is there any other reason why we can't do it?" And the answer is no, there is no stylistic or artistic reason why you can't write like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Willa Cather or Charles Dickens or Samuel Johnson.

Perhaps some think it would be ludicrous to write about modern life using the syntax of early-modern times--they might say that the pace of modern life and the character of our relationships can only be communicated using limited point of view, close narration, lots of sense detail and/or shorter scenes. I do think many editors, agents and critics believe that to be the case. If you give the something written in a more mannered style, they think it is "old-fashioned", by which they mean unsuited for the modern era.

But I believe fashion is indeed merely fashion, and that fashions are like names. If you named your kid Winifred twenty years ago, she'd sound like an old lady--nowadays the name is totally unremarkable. In twenty more years, Elmer and Bertha will also probably be acceptable names for kids. Was there ever anything inherently old about them? No. It was just fashion. And people came back around to Winifred for very particular reasons: most millennial names were on the shorter side (Laura, Jane, Sarah, etc). That used to seem informal and fun, but over time these names started to seem drab and unremarkable, so parents went looking and they found Roberta and Winifred. And yet before they could be re-used, the last generation of Robertas and Winifreds had to die off, so their old-lady connotation would be lost—twenty years ago you could’ve insisted up-and-down that Winifred was a beautiful name, and nobody would have believed you, because the old-lady association was too small.

Modern kid's names have objectively different sonic properties than those of our generation, but the connotations they carried (as old-lady names) far outweighed anyone's ability to hear the name itself. Similarly, whatever rhetorical or aesthetic effect one gets from a certain writing style will be far outweighed by the impression of age and mustiness it gives off to the hurried reader.

1. From The Life of Richard Savage: “It has been observed in all ages that the advantages of nature or of fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of happiness; and that those whom the splendour of their rank or the extent of their capacity have placed upon the summits of human life, have not often given any just occasion to envy in those who look up to them from a lower station: whether it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages; or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality been only more conspicuous than those of others, not more frequent, or more severe.”

2. Compare the turgid first sentence of The Scarlet Letter with the positively brisk and chatty first sentence of The Blithedale Romance (the latter being my favorite work of mid-19th century American literature): “A THRONG of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.” (Scarlet Letter) vs. “The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street.” (Blithedale Romance)

3. The most famous section of the Chronicle concerns the Anarchy (it’s in the entry for year 1137), and it’s written in a succession of short clauses and simple diction that is typical for the Chronicle: “To till the ground was to plough the sea: the earth bare no corn, for the land was all laid waste by such deeds; and they said openly, that Christ slept, and his saints.” (was sae me tilede the erthe ne bar nan corn. for the land was all fordon mid suilee daedes. the hi saeden openlice the Christ slep. the his halechen)—interestingly, you can see in the original that late Anglo-Saxon essentially used one punctuation mark, the interpunct (a floating period), to mark off all the syntactical units for which we use the comma, colon, semi-colon, dash, period, etc. The effect is that a late Anglo-Saxon ‘sentence’ inevitably seems shorter than its translation.