Entry 472 — Sentences
I’m now very self-conscious about my sentences. Joseph Epstein, one of the chief Philistines on my list of enemies of poetry, has an article of writing good sentences in the latest issue of The New Criterion, that mentions the value of having a strong word at the beginning and end of your sentences. Not “it” or “there.” I’ve never thought about that. Now, alas, I am. I’m always using “there” and “it” to start sentences. I end sentences with prepositions, as well. They’re weak, says Epstein. He’s never seen mine, though. Most sentences with “however” in the middle of them are “dead on arrival,” according to Epstein. That worried me. If midstream “however’s” are so over-used to bother a mediocrity like Epstein, I had bad problems, for I’ve always used them so much that for years I’ve tried to cut them down. I immediately read the firt few pages of my book on the Shakespeare authorship question to see how many “however’s” I’d committed. None. Whew. But I do know they are a weakness of mine. I think primarily on-one-hand-on-the-other terms. That makes avoidance of “however,” difficult.
I think a problem for me is too diligently trying to keep cliches out of my writing. Shakespeare probably used more cliches per word than any writer ever. Possibly what most counts is ratio of fresh to cliched language.
I’ve gone by intuitive feel mostly in my writing. On the look-out, however, for complex sentences that can be chopped up into two or three shorter sentences–because I tend not to think in short steps but long convoluted lopes. I also try to stay alert for spots I can break convention at. Interestingly.
Too much of the time I’m too concerned with saying everything I think needs to be said. Which it rarely does.
As Evidence of Epstein’s Philistinism is his chestnutting Tolstoy’s “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is alike in its own way” as “the best first sentence in literature.” Must be, if every mediocrity writing on style has said so for the past fifty years or whatever. Who knows, maybe Epstein was the first to say it. In any case, it’s crap. The sentence is a clever half-truth,” nothing more. True, it signals Philistine that he’s going to be reading about families so unlikely to have to go very far outside the little world he inhabits, but it also tends to warn certain others that it won’t be of much interest to them. I tend to think Raymond Chandler wrote some unbeatable first lines, but would never advance any of them as “the best first sentence in literature.” There are many terrific first sentences. (Oops, there’s a “there” at the beginning of a sentence!) “It began feebly for an undertaking of Final Importance,” is the first sentence in my Of Manywhere-at-Once. One defense of it for first-place is the way it flows from “it” (can you start weaklier than that?!), into something about as bannered as can be. (A fellow member of my local writers’ group found it and the rest my first page unexciting–because it was about a poet’s waking up with what he considered a great idea for a poem.)
The first sentence of Finnegans Wake is ridiculously superior in every which way to Tolstoy’s.
Epstein later favorably quotes Joseph Conrad’s “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see. That–and no more, and it is everything.” The sentiment is nice (but limited and, of course, not true) , the expression clumsy.
As a Philistine (and thus incapable of rising above moralism), he automatically applauds F. L. Lucas’s notion that “without good character superior writing is impossible.” But I agree with him about Gertrude Stein’s misguided attempt “to use boring repetitions as if filling in a canvas”–but he doesn’t commend her for her exploration. No Philistine could ever recognize failed explorations as superior to successful verifications of the value of previous explorations.
I’m with him against idiocies like “chairperson,” HOWEVER, and grateful he brought Lucas’s “faulty greatness in a writer stands above narrower perfections” to my attention.