Life Sentences (47 page)

Why not admit that the sentence is a suitcase packed with all of these, for James is obedient as a servant to the rules of grammar, and yet has his own manner or style of address? His sentences are made of words whose spelling is prescribed, and of letters whose shapes not only endeavor to be recognized, but hope to look lovely. These words are in English, a form of mostly Frenchified Germanic
speech. His periods embody grammatical, musical, and rhetorical structures. They are continuously aware of the rank given words and their objects and actions in the social world: James would never write
stink
but rather refer to something possibly odiferous; he would not say
shat
in any company. Any of his sentences are immediately recognizable as such, and belong to rubrics innumerable; moreover, the various phrases, lengthy clauses, lists, and repetitions they contain are given the order, correlation, and symmetry that any high style requires. That is to say, they are formed to a fare-thee-well.

Primarily, a form consists of terms in a significant relation: a relation of communal belonging that gives rise to a quality or condition—a meaning, an emotional effect—that could not be realized otherwise. We can, as we read, feel it occurring, but how does it happen? I suspect there is no single cause or simple explanation. Yet it is a quality felt by any responsive reader and it constitutes the verbal consciousness that has been built by many different sorts of relations, and by the interconnections these systems have with one another—some dominate, others subordinate—but all in tune, as the strings of a guitar or violin must be; so that any word or phrase or clause that finds itself in such company would have chosen to be there. Like love, it is a free and freedom enhancing enslavement.

Perhaps this is metaphorical thinking at its worst, but it describes how writing feels when every word is fully active in the networks of its world. By
active
I do not mean “in use.” By
active
I mean sensitive and alert to every possibility, even though many will, in this or that context, have to go unrealized. It means that avenues are open to be explored even when—this time—they are only viewed. A spare and simple-seeming style can be fully aware of what else might have served where it is serving, and a convoluted and apparently complex manner may be obtuse to every possibility but the flourish. If it is Mr. Micawber knocking at our door, we shall hear such posturing, but we shall be amused by it, because it is not the author but his character who is thusly revealing himself.

We are familiar with texts that bear like a banner some trope that
modifies or distinguishes them. Richardson’s
Clarissa Harlowe
pretends it is made of letters; Swift and Defoe both say their famous travelers kept a journal; Dickens insists that he has written David Copperfield’s autobiography; Nabokov that the characters in his novel,
The Defense
, are pieces that move about on a chessboard, while Cortázar claims that his
Hopscotch
is the game itself.
Finnegans Wake
is a dream. John Barth’s
Perseid
is inscribed on a column. Calvino’s
Invisible Cities
follows a Dantesque path to hell that performs like a dance step a logarithmic spiral. One of my own novels is called
The Tunnel
, and has been dug to resemble one; a few others are mazes, or portraits, or pastorals, or symphonic movements, or fake confessions. Many of Beckett’s paragraphs, even pages, resemble contrapuntal pieces, and poems are sometimes shaped to look like altars or angels’ wings or leaves, or driving rain for Apollinaire, or pipes or lutes. Sentences cannot be quite so explicit, though I have depicted one of Mark Twain’s diatribes against another river pilot (“He was a middle-aged long, slim, bony horse-faced ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling fault-finding mote-magnifying tyrant”) as a towboat pulling behind its noun a long row of barges bearing acidulous and pejorative adjectives.

A sentence can sometimes give its reader such a strong sense of its overall character that it provokes a flight of fancy, a metaphorical description: it’s like a journey of discovery; it’s like a coil of rope, a triumphal column; it’s like a hallway or a chapel; it’s like a spiral stair. To me, for instance, Sir Thomas Browne’s triplet—“Grave stones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks”—with its relentlessly stressed syllables (seven strong to one weak in the first row, seven to two in the second course, and six to one in the last) resembles a wall. I can even locate spots (the weak stresses) where its stones have crumbled. Families come to pieces the way the word does.

Henry James builds a stairway with
old
as a riser in a sentence from
The Golden Bowl
, punning in addition on the word
decent
while depicting the decline of the West’s several ages, and by deftly returning
our attention to the sentence’s beginnings—one step forward, one-half back—with a marvelous row of
O
s, thereby obtaining a spiral effect: “Of decent old gold, old silver, old bronze, of old chased and jeweled artistry were the objects that, successively produced, had ended by numerously dotting the counter.…” Nor dare I omit James Joyce’s use of the same sound in his magnificent conclusion to
Finnegans Wake
, as the waters of the River Liffey finally make their return to the sea, and Joyce, too, completes his cycle of life.

Finally, here is an example of how Stanley Elkin gives his subject matter a form admirably suited to it by imitating the actions of an elevator, and beginning at the parking garage level, B2.

This is our floor. Time to get off at encyclopedias, brushes, and shabby suits.

Earlier versions of these essays have appeared, often with different titles than they have here, as well as significantly altered texts, in the following venues: “The Literary Miracle,” delivered as an acceptance speech for the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, Iowa City, October 25, 2007, and published in the
Iowa Review
, Spring 2008; “Slices of Life in a Library,” delivered as an acceptance speech for the St. Louis University Library Literary Award, 2007, and published in
St. Louis Magazine
, December 2007; “The First Fourth Following 9/11,” in
The American Spirit
(New York: Life Books, 2002); “A Wreath for the Grave of Gertrude Stein,” a presentation at the 92nd Street Y, published in
PEN America
, issue 4, 2004; “Reading Proust,” a presentation at the 92nd Street Y, published in
PEN America
, issue 2, 2001; “Nietzsche: In Illness and in Health,”
Harper’s Magazine
, August 2005; “Half a Man, Half a Metaphor,”
Harper’s Magazine
, August 2006; “Unsteady as She Goes: Malcolm Lowry’s Cinema Inferno,”
Harper’s Magazine
, January 2008; “Henry James’s Curriculum Vitae,”
Harper’s Magazine
, August 2008; “Introduction” to
Nickel Mountain
(New York: New Directions, 2007); “Katherine Anne Porter’s First Fiction,”
Harper’s Magazine
, January 2009; “Kinds of Killing,”
Harper’s Magazine
, August 2009; “Norway’s Nobel Nazi,”
Harper’s Magazine
, March 2010. “Form,”
“Mimesis,” and “Metaphor” were the Biggs Lectures in the Classics, given in 2004 at Washington University, St. Louis. “Mimesis” was published in
Conjunctions
46, 2006. “Lust” was published in
Wicked Pleasures
, edited by Robert Solomon (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). “The Esthetic Structure of the Sentence,” was the Dotterer Philosophy Lecture at Penn State and was published in
The Review of Contemporary Fiction
, fall 2008. “Narrative Sentences” was presented at Michigan State University in April 2002 and was published in
The Yale Review
, Winter 2011.