Nonsense Verse

Catching up

A review.

A related blog post.

An unrelated blog post.

Cheers.

Virtuosity

In the two weeks I was in Europe I carried around one book: Rabbit Angstrom, the Everyman's Library edition of John Updike's great tetralogy. I'm currently in the middle of the third novel, and I'm trying to get through it as quickly as I can, before the fall school semester starts. But I had to interrupt my reading to share just one passage. There are many instances of virtuosity to be found throughout these books — which has made reading quickly even harder going, since so often I find myself wanting to go back and read again — but this may be the first sentence I read where I had to put the book down, step away from it, throw up my hands and just marvel: How did he do that?

First, back up a tad: sentence. Now look below — this indented bit looks awfully long, does it not? In fact, it's more than 200 words long, long enough to require numerous breaths, and mental pauses, to absorb all that's happening and how it links up so seamlessly with what has come before, not only within this single sentence but within the past 843 pages. I'm not often a fan of never-ending sentences; so few authors can pull them off gracefully, and even when they do, the reader is often left wondering, All right, that was lovely, but — was it necessary? Here, though, at this major turning point in the characters' lives, it works. Updike wraps us in the moment and reminds us of the inside jokes and the many years of joy and pain and bitterness, and shows us the beauty and tragedy of the passage of time, just as his overwhelmed protagonist must have experienced it. (For those who haven’t read the Rabbit books, a little primer: Harry, aka Rabbit, is our antihero; Nellie is Nelson, his son, whom we first met when he was a toddler; and Mim, Harry's sister, we've also watched age through Rabbit's eyes, from 19-year-old ingénue to — well, you'll get the picture. Read it slowly:

And outside, when it is done, the ring given, the vows taken in the shaky young voices under the towering Easter-colored window of Christ's space shot and the Lord's Prayer mumbled through and the pale couple turned from the requisite kiss (poor Nellie, couldn't he be just another inch taller?) to face as now legally and mystically one the little throng of their blood, their tribe, outside in the sickly afternoon, clouds having come with the breeze that flows toward evening, the ridiculous tears dried in long stains on Harry's face, then Mim comes into his arms again, a sisterly embrace, all sorts of family grief since the days he held her little hand implied, the future has come upon them darkly, his sole seed married, marriage that daily doom which she may never know; lean and crinkly in his arms she is getting to be a spinster, even a hooker can be a spinster, think of all she's had to swallow all these years, his baby sister, crying in imitation of his own tears, out here where the air quickly dries them, and the after-church smiles of the others flicker about them like butterflies born to live a day.

Literary coincidences

I'm reading "Tender Is the Night," which is dedicated to Gerald and Sara, as in Gerald and Sara Murphy, the wealthy American expatriates who in the 1920s held court in the French Riviera and created a haven for artists including Picasso, Hemingway and, yes, Fitzgerald. ("Many Fetes," the dedication also says, and oh, the fetes they must have had.) Last week I was carrying this book while visiting friends a couple of floors below me, and one of my friends, noticing it, said she happened to be reading a biography of the Murphys.

A few days later I got my Vanity Fair in the mail, and what should one of the articles be but a profile of Sara and Gerald Murphy.

Then this week a friend who wanted to meet for martinis did a little digging on the Internet and decided we should rendezvous at a bar on 26th Street called Gstaad — as in Gstaad, winter playland of les tres riches, and onetime destination of the likes of, oh, the Fitzgeralds. But that's not all: The same day I was to meet my friend, I happened to be reading Part 2, Chapter 13 of "Tender Is the Night," which begins:

With his cap, Dick slapped the snow from his dark blue ski-suit before going inside. The great hall, its floor pockmarked by two decades of hobnails, was cleared for the tea dance, and four-score young Americans, domiciled in schools near Gstaad, bounced about to the frolic of "Don't Bring Lulu," or exploded violently with the first percussions of the Charleston."

Dick Diver and company spend the entire chapter at Gstaad, and then it ends: "Good-by, Gstaad! Good-by, fresh faces, cold sweet flowers, flakes in the darkness. Good-by, Gstaad, good-by!"

This sort of thing happens a lot. Whatever book I'm reading, whether a contemporary memoir or a work of nonfiction or a classic novel, something in life will jump out to mirror something I've read on the page. It's not a matter of, for instance, reading about a hot-fudge sundae and then deciding, My god, I'd really like a hot-fudge sundae about now. It's more like I'll be sitting there already eating a hot-fudge sundae, reading Page 6 of my book, and then as I eat, and as I read, and as I flip to Page 12, the characters on Page 12 will decide that nothing would taste better at that very moment in their little world in the book than a goopy, gloopy hot-fudge sundae.

It's downright eerie. And it happens again and again. Does it often happen to you?

Geek attractant

In the course of my work I must check the precise titles of books and spellings of authors' names and dates of publication and other such minutiae, a detail-oriented activity that a lot of people might find mind-numbing but which I, queen geek, derive a certain satisfaction from. Perhaps you're thinking I'm the kind of gal who is easily amused. And I am -- by certain things. Like the fact that one of the reference sites I use these days, the Catalog of the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library, has a ridiculously apropos nickname: Catnyp.

So that's why I get such a buzz from a room lined by well-stocked shelves. Why any story I tell about a quick trip in search of a single title always ends with an "hours later…" Why that last time I went to a Barnes & Noble I ended up rolling on the floor and mewling and purring and chasing invisible mice and gnawing on my toes. They put drugs in the books! Yay.

Grammar, and the rhythm and the magic

In response to a query about that last post, I'm moved to expand: Embracing grammar does not mean an author must sacrifice rhythm or style. That's the point Francine Prose starts to make here: "Mastering the logic of grammar contributes, in a mysterious way that again evokes some process of osmosis, to the logic of thought."

Let's explore that.

My interpretation of what Prose is saying is that understanding the way sentences are structured will give writers more power, not less, when it comes time to play with that structure -- to, at their creative will, "break the rules," and break them well. The thing is, in writing, the rules are infinitely bendable. Writers can choose "wrong" words (from a pedant's viewpoint) but go on to employ them in such a way as to make them, in context, seem more "right" than the reader could ever have imagined. What doesn't work is the writing that takes the rules and abuses them to such an extent that a sentence becomes impossible to comprehend -- or just plain groan-inducing. (How many times have you read tortured prose where the writer was obviously trying to stretch a bit too hard? Take my word for it: Editors run into that sort of thing almost daily.) At that point, the breaking of the rules serves no one -- not even the author, for who wants to read a book made impenetrable in its gobbledygook?

In the very same chapter in which Prose makes the case for grammar, she also says it's "essential to find a style manual with a loose interpretation of the whole concept of style[*], lest you be advised against ever writing the sort of sentence fragment that animates the Philip Roth passage" (a mesmerizing excerpt from American Pastoral that she cited earlier). "Which is why, I believe, it's necessary to hold the concept of clarity as an even higher ideal than grammatical correctness, and why it's essential to read great sentences -- that is, the sentences of great sentence-writers -- along with your style book."

Let's linger on that word for a moment: CLARITY. In all the verbal pyrotechnics a writer may employ, it comes back to that. At the end, do we understand what we just read? After a 181-word sentence -- which is the length of a Virginia Woolf sentence Ms. Prose uses to make her point -- are we still breathing? Is the brain electrified, or is it confused? This is where Prose goes on, after her discussion of grammar, to write at length on the importance of rhythm, using the Woolf sentence and those of several other writers as examples. And she illustrates her point with a couple of lovely sentences of her own (again on Woolf):

Because as her sentence winds on, everything proceeds in an orderly progression from that participle "considering" and that introduction of "illness" as the noun that can subsequently be summoned up by the pronoun "it." Pausing to breathe at each comma, we find ourselves amid a series of dependent clauses that break over us like waves, clauses that increase in length, complexity, and intensity as the aspects of illness that we are invited to consider grow more elaborate and imaginative, whisking us from undiscovered countries to deserts to flowered lawns and down into the abyss from which we are lifted by the voice of the dentist whom we mistake for God welcoming us into heaven.

Comma. Participle. Clause. Pronoun. See how that works? What she's saying is that the building blocks are all still there, that they can be applied to the most dazzling and unconventional of sentences by Woolf, by Roth, by Joyce or by Hemingway. But they're employed in a way that makes sense, one that breathes with the help of -- wait for it! -- the happy little pieces all coming together harmoniously. In fact, speaking of harmony, here's another Prose analogy: "It's helpful to consider the parallels to music, the way that, at the end of a symphony, the tempo slows down and the chords become more sustained or dramatic, with overtones that reverberate and echo after the musicians have stopped playing."

Where that music becomes discordant, though, is in the misapplication of some of the building blocks. I'm going to play with Prose's own sentence here and rearrange the commas. Note how the random insertion or deletion of the commas impedes the breath, even changes the meaning, and turns this into something less than lyrical:

Pausing to breathe, at each comma we find ourselves amid a series of dependent clauses, that break over us like waves clauses that increase, in length, complexity and intensity as the aspects of illness, that we are invited to consider grow more elaborate and imaginative, whisking us from undiscovered countries to deserts to flowered lawns and down into the abyss from which we are lifted by the voice, of the dentist whom we mistake for God welcoming us into heaven.

Enh. Feel like you're hyperventilating? I sure do. The haphazard placement of the commas destroys the sentence's natural flow. The good news is that even without having all the comma rules memorized, talented writers can usually still get by, helped by their natural ear for the language. (And as the above example should illustrate, even people who aren't writers have enough of an ear to recognize when something is off. This is what I referred to in my earlier post.)

I've mentioned before how I often get e-mail from old friends or new acquaintances (even parents) asking me to please forgive them their sins of syntax, goofs of grammar, perversions of punctuation. What's truly amazing (even heartbreaking) to me is when they include these kinds of caveats up front, then go on to write an amazingly gorgeous letter. A letter in which, sure, they've bent or broken some rules, or used nonsense words, or made-up words (something I do all the time, by the way), and yet from a writerly standpoint, there is absolutely nothing wrong with what they've done. I'm frequently left dumbfounded by these apologies, but then I realize it all comes back to the root problem: These people are convinced they're abusing the writing because they feel unclear on the rules, insecure about their mastery of them; and if they're unclear on the rules, they think they must be breaking them, they must be committing embarrassing gaffes -- they're just not sure which ones.

This is again where grammar becomes a tool -- to if nothing else relieve these writers' paranoia. Some writers obviously have more of a natural gift for rhythm, for the layering of clauses, for the ingenious use of vocabulary. What's funny is that in exercising their gift, they're most likely already using most of the helping tools of grammar. They just don't realize it.

* To this, I'd add that it's helpful to have not just one style manual, a "loose" style manual, but rather a collection of manuals of style and usage to weigh the advice of various authorities and then make an informed decision of one's own. By studying the ideas of different experts, you pick a variety of tips and tricks, not just the ideology of one grammarian.

I vaaant to suuuck your subjuuunctive

One might say that in terms of readers (and writers), the world can be divided into two kinds of people: those who like (not to mention are capable of) reading grammar and usage books cover to cover, and those who don't. Most people, one can assume, fall into the latter category. If that were not the case, you'd see a lot more copies of Hodges' Harbrace Handbook and The Elements of Style being flipped through on the subway or at airport newsstands.

The obvious reasons for this are that (1) most people don't care enough about the finer points of usage to bother reading an entire book on the subject, and (2) many such books are so heavy and dry that any joy at finding wit within their pages, if it (the wit) exists at all, is soon quashed by the exhaustion that comes from just trying to slog through the damn things.

There are exceptions to the "too dense to stomach" rule. I didn't read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, for all the reasons stated in this New Yorker review*, which declared, "'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' is really a 'decline of print culture' book disguised as a style manual (poorly disguised)." And yet Eats appealed to a fairly large subset of the American book-reading population -- if we are to take the NYer's word, the segment who, like the author, Lynn Truss, fall into this camp: "They are like people who lose control when they hear a cell phone ring in a public place: they just need to vent. Truss is their Jeremiah. They don’t care where her commas are, because her heart is in the right place." There are enough of these people to have made Eats a best seller, even though, as the NYer points out, "Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor."

The hyperpopular Eats, then, ends up being a somewhat shoddy example of how to get people more interested in grammar (that is, in good grammar). But there are superior usage books, packaged in quite palatable form, on the market. Three I've long had on my reference shelf: Lapsing Into a Comma and The Elephants of Style, both by Bill Walsh, an esteemed former colleague; and Woe Is I, by Patricia O'Connor.

This past year I added another, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. And this one is unlike any usage book I've ever read.

Vampire was originally published in 1984 and revised in 1993, so obviously I'm late in discovering its syntactical delights. It's got the clear explanations and the droll humor of the others. But where it distinguishes itself is in its voice and presentation.

Vampire is a grammar book with a wickedly libidinous sensibility, populated with dark, lusty characters, Russian and Victorian, French and Transylvanian, all of whom you might expect to run into at a candlelit picnic in a graveyard adjacent to an enchanted forest, an affair presided over by Vincent Price and immortalized in ink by Edward Gorey. It holds the reader's attention not just in display (it abounds with antique etchings) but with censorious little asides that dare the reader to turn away:

"Singular pronouns take singular verbs. And what might these pronouns be? And must you go riffling off, losing your place here and forgetting what you're after and ending up in a field of cows?"

The sentences Gordon spins out and lines up to illustrate her points are lush and wicked. She describes linking verbs as "copulative," for instance -- and later, as "erotic":

And here they are, caught in the act of copulating in various positions:
I am willing and I'll be ready in a while.
She sounded eager, but he couldn't be sure.

Here she is demonstrating that not all -ly words are adverbs:

When dressed in his most uppity drag, the transvestite vampire appeared a stately damsel all tricked out for tea.

To demonstrate a pronoun in the possessive case, she offers:

They trampled on my nightie, those shortsighted mastodons.

And in explaining a confounding noun that's plural in form yet singular (or is it?) in meaning:

The shade of sadness we call the blues can take a singular or plural verb, since anyone who has them can't be bothered to look it up, or to be consistent about whether it is -- or they are -- in pieces or in a solid hopeless mass.
The blues is hard to lose.
The blues have tracked me down in this upbeat part of town.

Part of the dullness of reading grammar books is their mind-numbing repetition. Not so Gordon's, thanks to its refreshingly inventive explications. Gordon can illustrate a single concept using fifteen sentences in a row, but instead of putting the reader to sleep, they manage to bewitch, bother and bewilder (in a good way), until a person can't help but finally understand the role of, say, the subjunctive complement.

In the end, rather than taking us back to the tedium of childhood grammar school, Gordon immerses us in a world of nefariousness and whimsy -- all in the service of appositives and gerunds, past and future perfect tenses, splices and run-ons. And it's a world the reader will be loath (not loathe) to leave when the final page is turned.

*I'd recommend reading the entire New Yorker article, by the way. It begins as a review but evolves into a beautiful meditation on the mechanics versus the art of writing.

The line that made my day

Probably not as hilarious out of context, but still, I had to share...

"Howard was 57 years old. He had been married for thirty years to a difficult woman. Entering waiting orifices was about as much as he felt he could handle now, in the arena of personal relations." -- On Beauty