The Sound on the Page: Great Writers Talk about Style and Voice in Writing Read online

  Ben Yagoda

  The Sound on the Page

  Great Writers Talk About Style and Voice in Writing

  Dedicated to Russell Baker…

  for inspiration

  Contents

  Introduction: The Argument

  Part I

  Style from the Outside: Theory

  Chapter I The History of an Idea

  Interlude —Quotes on Style

  Chapter II Writing, Speech, and the Middle Style

  Interlude —“Looking for a Click in My Head”: Music and Style

  Chapter III A Field Guide to Styles

  Interlude —Engendering Style

  Chapter IV “Style Is the Man Himself”: Style and Personality

  Part II

  Style from the Inside: Practice

  Chapter V Finding a Voice, Finding a Style

  Interlude —Progress in Works

  Chapter VI What Writers Talk About When They Talk About Style

  Interlude —Blindfold Test

  Chapter VII Consistency and Change

  Chapter VIII Style According to Form

  Chapter IX By Way of Advice

  Appendix

  Interviewees

  Acknowledgments

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Ben Yagoda

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  The Argument

  This book began with a single and simple observation: it is frequently the case that writers entertain, move and inspire us less by what they say than by how they say it. What they say is information and ideas and (in the case of fiction) story and characters. How they say it is style.

  For the first of many times, I present as an example Ernest Hemingway. What is Hemingway’s content? He has some fishing and war stories that are pretty good, if a little short in the action department, and some ideas about honorable and dishonorable behavior that would puzzle many contemporary readers. His characters, especially in the novels and most especially in the later novels, tend to be tiresome. But his style! Take a look at the first paragraph of one of his first stories, “The Three Day Blow”:

  The rain stopped as Nick turned into the road that went up through the orchard. The fruit had been picked and the fall wind blew through the bare trees. Nick stopped and picked up a Wagner apple from beside the road, shiny in the brown grass from the rain. He put the apple in the pocket of his Mackinaw coat.

  The first striking thing about this passage is the action it describes appears to be in no way dramatic, significant, or interesting. The second is that it could only have been written by Hemingway. (I was going to add, “or by one of his imitators,” but his imitators, with all their talk about how “the fishing was good,” miss the subtlety and mangle the tone of the original.) Even if by some chance you have not read his work, you will, if you are at all an attentive reader, be struck by the unified, consistent, and ultimately hypnotic sound and feel of it. We note the plain words and short sentences, of course—so pronounced that the comma in the third sentence feels like a consoling arm around our shoulder and the three-syllable Mackinaw at the end a gift outright—but also the way these technical features create a mood. The reluctance to commit to a complex sentence, a Latinate word, an adverb, or even a pronoun (repeating Nick and the apple instead of substituting he or it), the urge to describe the world precisely, even at the risk of using eight ungainly prepositional phrases in one paragraph: the more familiar one is with this writer, the most one understands that his stylistic choices express a state of mind, a philosophy of perception, and a morality that we now communicate with one word—Hemingway.

  Consider, next, the most popular novelist in the English language—Charles Dickens. His characters are types, not people. With some honorable exceptions like Great Expectations and David Copperfield, his plots are unwieldy and ultimately uninvolving. He exposed alarming social conditions, but these have, for the most part, been taken care of. His comic set pieces, no doubt side-splitting in their day, are coming up on 150 years old and read like it; his sentimentality handed Oscar Wilde his best moment in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. (“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”) So why could you roam the Contemporary Fiction shelves at Barnes & Noble for a year and still not find a writer as stirring and alive? Benjamin Disraeli suggested the answer when he observed, “It is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work.” Here is how Dickens opens Bleak House:

  London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

  It is a muddy day, all right—that much is clear. But that’s not the point. The point is that Dickens, or, rather, the narrator of Bleak House, knows it is a muddy day. He knows it so completely and profoundly, and is so eager to tell us about it, that he can’t contain himself, much less take the time to place into complete sentences all the images and similes and words that are nearly overwhelming him. Reading this paragraph the traditional way is too fast—it may not be possible to catch all the facets of this teller’s personality. Flaubert used to submit his sentences to what he called la guelade—the shouting test. He would go out to an avenue of lime trees near his house and proclaim what he’d written at the top of his lungs, the better to see if the prose conformed to the ideal that was in his head. Try that with Dickens’s words. Or, maybe better yet, type them out (as I just did), the better to fall under the spell of this mordant, funny, metaphor-mad, and itchily omniscient voice.

  The style of Bleak House is not exactly the same as that of Our Mutual Friend or Great Expectations, and indeed, looking in fiction for an author’s idiosyncratic and identifiable style, sometimes called voice for reasons that are explored later in this book, can be a tricky maneuver. A novel has to include plot and characters and dialogue, making the writer a ventriloquist, periodically compelled to pick up a dummy and throw his voice without moving his lips. (A first-person novel or story is all disguise, an extended monologue by a made-up someone.) Theme and setting will vary from book to book, perhaps leading the novelist to adopt a different style each time out. An essayist or critic, on the other hand, is figuratively talking to us from the beginning of a piece of writing to the end, and so his or her voice should in theory be more consistently evident. Put the theory to the test in this opening to an essay:

  Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The water I will dr
ink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also think about exactly where that water is: I particularly like to imagine it as it cascades down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate Owens water after its airless passage through the mountain pipes and siphons. As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale. I know the data on water projects I will never see. I know the difficulty Kaiser had closing the last two sluiceway gates on the Guri Dam in Venezuela. I keep watch on evaporation behind the Aswan in Egypt. I can put myself to sleep imagining the water dropping a thousand feet into the turbines at Churchill Falls in Labrador. If the Churchill Falls Project fails to materialize, I fall back on waterworks closer at hand—the tailrace at Hoover on the Colorado, the surge tank in the Tehachapi Mountains that receives California Aqueduct water pumped higher than water has ever been pumped before—and finally I replay a morning when I was seventeen years old and caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River near Sacramento. I remember that at the moment it happened I was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers. I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through which the river had been temporarily diverted. I recall being deliriously happy.

  That’s right, Joan Didion (from a 1977 essay, “Holy Water,” collected in The White Album). The California references are a giveaway, but Didion readers would be able to spot this one even if all the place names were whited out. The telltale signs: no contractions (a stylistic formality that’s a striking contrast to the way the narrator invites us to share her experiences and mental landscape). The repetition of I recall in the final two sentences. No commas in passages like “As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is.” The very words As it happens and other formal and subtly distancing phrases. The long sentences such as the one begun by As it happens, constructed with a precision that borders on the compulsive and thus hints that language is a construction erected to protect a vulnerable self against many unnamed assailants. In particular, the list “aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains”: the terms of art are such a fortification, and meanwhile the use of and ’s rather than commas to link them subtly raises the emotional volume and stakes. In Didion, style generates its own meaning, so that the words I can put myself to sleep, innocuous in any other writer’s work, here calls forth intimations of insomnia and the dark night of the soul.

  And what of Dave Barry? My reading suggests that this humorist has four principal themes: airline food is bad, it’s hard to live with an adolescent, males and females are essentially different, and the United States sure is a weird country. When I interviewed Barry in his office at the Miami Herald, he did not claim that these or any of the other points he makes are profound. Referring to Robert Benchley, he said:

  If there was anybody whose style I patterned myself after, it’s him. He’s silly. I love silly humor. There are a lot of people who cannot deal with silly humor. They say you have to be making some coherent, meaningful point for it to be of worth. I don’t believe that.*

  In humor more than any other form of writing other than poetry (and in Barry more than most humor), style trumps content. Here is the opening of one of his pieces relating to theme three:

  It began as a fun nautical outing, 10 of us in a motorboat off the coast of Miami. The weather was sunny and we saw no signs of danger, other than the risk of sliding overboard because every exposed surface on the boat was covered with a layer of snack-related grease. We had enough cholesterol on board to put the entire U.S. Olympic team into cardiac arrest. That is because all 10 of us were guys.

  I hate to engage in gender stereotyping, but when women plan the menu for a recreational outing, they usually come up with a nutritionally balanced menu featuring all the major food groups, including the Sliced Carrots Group, the Pieces of Fruit Cut into Cubes Group, the Utensils Group, and the Plate Group. Whereas guys tend to focus on the Carbonated Malt Beverages Group and the Fatal Snacks Group. On this particular trip, our food supply consisted of about 14 bags of potato chips and one fast-food fried-chicken Giant Economy Tub o’ Fat. Nobody brought, for example, napkins, the theory being that you could just wipe your hands on your stomach. This is what guys on all-guy boats are doing while women are thinking about their relationships.

  If you put the passage under the microscope, you can fairly easily enumerate Barry’s trademark stylistic techniques. He likes to sedate you with a conventional sentence or two, then sucker-punch you with something like snack-related grease. That phrase also shows his skill for plucking pieces of bureaucratese or other forms of cliché or dead language out of the linguistic ether, teeing them up, and knocking them 300 yards or so: gender stereotyping, recreational outing, nutritionally balanced. He hyperbolizes with a surgeon’s precision. There are subtle things, too, like the repetition of the word guys, which after being said or read a certain number of times becomes inexplicably funny, and the way he sticks a redundant particular in the third-to-last sentence and an unnecessary for example in the next one for no reason other than to enforce a pause. But readers are devoted to Barry, and to other estimable humor writers, such as Fran Lebowitz, Calvin Trillin, Roy Blount Jr., Nora Ephron, David Sedaris, and Sandra Tsing Loh, not merely because they are efficient laugh-delivery machines. Barry is no Hemingway, no Dickens—I guess not even a Didion—but his style, like theirs, is distinctive, suggestive, and the best manifestation of his particular genius. In the above passage, Barry aficionados will focus in on the middle of the second paragraph—the “food groups” bit. They will note (more likely subliminally than consciously) the capitalization, the word choice (carrots instead of vegetables, fruit instead of, say, cantelope), the pacing—the way that the women’s list has four items and the guys’, only two, and how in each list, the items get shorter and funnier, leading up finally to the formulation that only Dave Barry would have or could have devised—the Fatal Snacks Group.

  So my observation became a premise: style matters. On further review, it accumulated two corollaries. The first is that for writers of the first rank (and many of the rest of us as well) style is unique and irrefutably identifiable, like a fingerprint, or like the sound of close friends’ voices, even if they’re only saying, “Hi, it’s me” on the telephone. Samuel Coleridge, in a letter to his friend William Wordsworth, describing reading some lines from Wordsworth’s poem “There Was a Boy” for the first time, wrote: “That ‘Uncertain heaven received/Into the bosom of the steady lake,’ I should have recognized any where; and had I met these lines running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out ‘Wordsworth!’” In the same way, on reading the above passages for the first time, readers familiar with the respective authors’ work would instantly scream out Hemingway, Dickens, Didion, and Barry!

  For the second corollary, shift the analogy from fingerprints, which identify us but have no bearing on any other aspect of ourselves, to handwriting, which not only identifies us but, we are told, reveals our essence. George Buffon famously encapsulated the idea in 1753: Le style c’est l’homme même (“Style is the man himself”). Style in the deepest sense is not a set of techniques, devices, and habits of expression that just happen to be associated with a particular person, but a presentation or representation of something essential about him or her—something that we, as readers, want to know from that writer and that cannot be disguised, no matter how much the writer may try. “Our style betrays us,” Robert Burton observed in The Anatomy of Melancholy. Our style advertises the extent to which we are (or are not) self-absorbed, generous, solicitous, obsessive, conventional, fu
nny, dull, stuffy, surprising, impatient, boring, slovenly, intelligent, or insecure. In his memoir, Experience, Martin Amis recounts a long-standing debate he had with his father, Kingsley Amis, about the merits of Vladimir Nabokov. When Martin read aloud a Nabokov passage he particularly admired, Kingsley said, “That’s just flimflam, diversionary stuff to make you think he cares. That’s just style.” Martin: “Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It’s not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence. To Kingsley, though, sustained euphony automatically became euphuism: always.”* Young English novelist Zadie Smith recently observed, “Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to [David] Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist’s literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy—it’s always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.” This can work for ill as well as good. Wilde, in another Bartlett’s moment, once remarked that the chief argument against Christianity was the style of St. Paul.