#8 Sentences and sensibility
The fact that one sentence comes after another, the fact that good sentences are rare, the fact that Jack Barker-Clark, George Saunders, Gordon Lish, and Lucy Ellman feature, the fact that…
I read a couple of good sentences recently, or what were good sentences in my opinion. The first was in a short story ‘Eucalyptus’ by Jack Barker-Clark which opens like this:
After the speeches came the eucalyptus. Triggered only by dried stems in high flutes, my uncle unravelled his long sermon on misguided eucalyptus planting up and down our British Isles. We sat and we waited. We breathed heavily into our collarbones. Did we know of the gardens with soils too acidic, the gardens with soils too alkaline, the beds that could not hope to hold their roots, the fragile shadow-world where fleshy rhizomes conquered cement and brick, strangling foundations and eviscerating houses? A bulldozer in slow motion, son – a bulldozer in slow motion.
(The London Magazine, Feb/March 2023)
I’d argue there are no good sentences here. I suppose “breathed heavily into our collarbones” is okay. In fact, if I was being Gordon Lish about it (see below) I may have stopped reading; but obviously something nudged me on, suggesting the sentences were good enough. Anyway, pretty soon the narrator sees his neighbour hit by a car, then we get this:
I was, in a small way, impressed with my ineptitude, my failure to accept the present horror. As it happened, there was more horror to come and all I had to do was await it. Though my neighbour had not been killed, and would remain alive, just about, for now, until cancer later claimed her, it was as though, to me, she had died then and there as I viewed her through the eucalyptus leaves, her body both twirling in space and pouring itself neatly down the drain.
Thoughts? The sentence I liked—and liked enough to underline in pen and write an essay about—is this:
As it happened, there was more horror to come and all I had to do was await it.
Why is this a good sentence? The real answer is ‘because it feels like one’ (i.e. it’s good because I think it’s good). But let’s analyse. I like the narrator’s lack of agency; things “happen” to him and “all [he has] to do” is literally nothing, which feels to me like an ironic, true reflection of life. This is reflected in the passive sentence structure too: in “there was more horror to come” what exactly is “there was” doing (it’s just, kind of, there)? I like the ironic tension between the subject of “horror” and the sentence’s casual tone (“as it happened”). I get a Mark Twain aphorism vibe, and minimalist hints of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. The sentence also pivots us from the present moment (reflecting on the car collision) into the future; so it’s short but expansive.
Another good sentence, this time in the land of non-fiction, is from a review by Frank Lawton on two books about Bob Dylan:
Where did Bob Dylan come from, and where did he go? The Philosophy of Modern Song is in part an answer to the former, while Greil Marcus’s Folk Music: A Biography of Dylan in Seven Songs is a partial answer to the latter.
Neither of these books is being straight with you. At least, not on first glance. The Philosophy of Modern Song is not, in fact, a book of philosophy, and neither are the songs it looks at particularly ‘modern’. Marcus’s Folk Music: A Biography is not, in fact, a biography of Bob Dylan, and doesn’t strictly confine itself to seven songs or ‘folk’ music (rather it is ‘folk’ in the American sense of ‘people’, the music of a nation’s life.)
(‘How Bob Dylan Plays’, The London Magazine, April/May 2023)
I’d suggest most of the sentences here are not good, but I like:
Neither of these books is being straight with you.
For me, this sentence is high-impact, totally direct and frictionless, and I know exactly what is meant. The other sentences read too clever: after “is in part an answer […] is a partial answer” I’m left trying to detangle the different meanings of “in part” and “partial”. And the repeated sentence structure “is not, in fact” I find grating, not cute.
Sense in the sentence
What do we make of all this? First (which really doesn’t need saying) is that what readers enjoy is individual to them. Second, writers might only write one good sentence in a piece of work, if they’re lucky; readers might only read one good sentence in a week, or month. Most sentences are fine, okay, alright, or bad. Third, we read sequentially, so our response to one sentence is influenced by what comes before and after it.
This last point—the fact that we can only read one word at a time, in their order, to make sense—is obvious, but it has not-so-obvious implications which are hugely freeing for writers. As George Saunders says in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain:
It proceeds, and charms us (or doesn’t), a line at a time. We have to keep being pulled into a story in order for it to do anything to us. […]
A story (any story, every story) makes its meaning at speed, a small structural pulse at a time. We read a bit of text and a set of expectations arises. […]
If a story drew us in, kept us reading, made us feel respected, how did it do that? […] What did we feel and where did we feel it? (All coherent intellectual work begins with a genuine reaction.)
I remember reading Saunders’ lit criticism a couple of years ago, and it shifted my perspective on what I was writing. I’d been writing long-form fiction where so much talk is on broad structure (inciting incidents, rising action, climax, etc) but it’s possible to approach novels like short stories, line-by-line. So, what are the workings of these “structural pulses”? What are they actually made of? Saunders again:
Manifestations of writerly charm, basically. Anything that inclines the reader to keep going. Bursts of honesty, wit, powerful language, humor [sic]; a pithy description of a thing in the world that makes us really see it.
What this means for writers is that—instead of worrying about structure, plot, or even scenes—all we need to do is respond to each sentence as we write and rewrite it. The only type of editing is line editing. I call this freeing because the sentence is a far easier unit to hold in your mind than a whole novel. The five-act structure, the inciting incident/climax, and all their pals want us to forget: any and all writing is made one sentence at a time. This approach is particularly helpful during editing and revising:
Our anxiety has made us crave a method, when what the situation demanded was some moment-to-moment responsiveness to what was actually happening (to the true energy of the conversation). […] What makes it more intense, direct, and honest? What drives it into the ditch? The exciting thing is that we’re not doomed to ask these questions abstractly; we get to ask them locally, by running our meter over the phrases, sentences, sections, etc., that make up our story.
(George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain)
It's interesting that Saunders uses the word “honest” a couple of times. Can one sentence really be more “honest” than another? Is a good sentence simply one which feels true to us? I’ve talked before about the vocal production of singers being “anchored in truth and on the body” and again I wonder if that’s what writers should aiming at. Saunders mentions “charm” more than once too. Is a good sentence made of an honest idea delivered with charm? Coming back to ‘Eucalyptus’, to me “After the speeches came the eucalyptus” is literary rather than honest, but “As it happened, there was more horror to come…” is honest and charming.
Sentence sensibilities
The infamous disciple of the sentence Gordon Lish was obsessed with editing at this level, particularly with cutting out, and even more particularly with identifying the right “attack sentence”: “an exorbitant opening sentence, a hook that hooks your reader to a line that could lead anywhere and everywhere.” (Irish Journal of American Studies)
According to Amy Hempel, this was a recurring technique in the editor’s seminars: “Lish looks over our work word for word . . . ‘Here’s your attack,’ he will say, skipping past a page and a half of throat clearing to the real beginning of the story.
(quoting Amy Hempel, ‘Captain Fiction’ in Vanity Fair, 1984)
As I mentioned previously on how to begin a novel, I’m wary of this philosophy on opening sentences, which feels to me like literary peacocking, a competition on who can “attack” strongest. I mean, really, does a reader want to be attacked by the text? My scepticism is probably shared by a lot of people, as Lish’s extreme outlook on the sentence has fallen out of popularity, just as his character has ended in the gutter. But we can learn from the idea that good sentences interact with each other, allowing writers to “curve back in your stories in every possible way: thematically, structurally, acoustically” (Lish in Numero Cinq).
Lish’s sentence-level sensibility has also become synonymous with a certain mid-century American literary style—the style of Carver, Ford, Hempel, etc variously called minimalism, dirty realism, the new realism, or “lower-middle-class modernism” (according to Mark McGurl).
But this is a red herring. Editing line-by-line in the way Saunders advocates can take you into experimental, postmodern, or any other territory, even beyond the confines of the sentence itself. It can take you to Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport in which (nearly) every phrase begins with the colloquial and slippery phrase “the fact that …” and in which these phrases run on for 1,000 pages without a full-stop. This anaphora does a lot of things: it raises epistemological questions of what constitutes a fact (is there such a thing as a subjective fact?) and it comments on the relentless stimuli fed to the modern human (as the songwriter Conor Oberst puts it: “the modern world is a sight to see / it’s a stimulant, it’s pornography”)… The repetition also happens to be exhausting for the reader. And this exhaustion, I think, is Ellman’s point—hers is a direct challenge to the idea of a sentence as a neat unit of sense, an argument that the foundations of realism (like the sentence) no longer reflect reality in a world of weapons of mass destruction, Roe v Wade, and Reese’s Pieces.
After all, when you’ve perfected the sentence to the point of exhaustion, the only way is beyond. Maybe those good sentences weren’t so good in the end.
*Postscript. I’d like to acknowledge that I’m aware that most of today’s references are from white male British/American authors. Also, the reason I’ve been reading The London Magazine is because someone bought me a subscription.