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

305 Pages·2005·1.38 MB·English

by  Ben Yagoda

B E N Y A G O D A
The
S
ound
on the
P
�age

�
Great Writers Talk about
Style and Voice in Writing
Dedicated to Russell Baker . . .
for inspiration
CONTENTS
Introduction : The Argument v
PART I
STYLE FROM THE OUTSIDE: THEORY
Chapter I The History of an Idea 3
Interlude
—Quotes on Style 22
Chapter II Writing, Speech, and the Middle Style 26
Interlude
—“Looking for a Click in My Head”:
Music and Style 43
Chapter III A Field Guide to Styles 46
Interlude
—Engendering Style 72
Chapter IV “Style Is the Man Himself ”:
Style and Personality 77
PART II
STYLE FROM THE INSIDE: PRACTICE
Chapter V Finding a Voice, Finding a Style 105
Interlude
—Progress in Works 124
iv Contents
Chapter VI What Writers Talk About
When They Talk About Style 130
Interlude
—Blindfold Test 150
Chapter VII Consistency and Change 156
Chapter VIII Style According to Form 166
Chapter IX By Way of Advice 224
Appendix 243
Interviewees 243
Credits and Permissions 251
Acknowledgments 253
Index 255
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Ben Yagoda
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
The Argument
T
his book began with a single and simple observation: it is fre-
quently the case that writers entertain, move and inspire us less
by what they say than by how they say it. What they say is infor-
mation 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 Heming-
way. 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
vi Introduction
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 orig-
inal.) 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 ulti-
mately hypnotic sound and feel of it. We note the plain words and short
sentences, of course—so pronounced that the comma in the third sen-
tence 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 honor-
able exceptions like Great Expectations and David Copperfield, his plots are
unwieldy and ultimately uninvolving. He exposed alarming social condi-
tions, 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:
Introduction vii
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 per-
sonality. Flaubert used to submit his sentences to what he called la gue-
lade—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 ventrilo-
quist, periodically compelled to pick up a dummy and throw his voice
viii Introduction
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 Col-
orado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The
water I will drink 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 cas-
cades down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate Owens water after its air-
less passage through the mountain pipes and siphons. As it happens my
own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant medi-
tation 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 imag-
ining 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 Col-
orado, the surge tank in the Tehachapi Mountains that receives Califor-
nia 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 Nim-
bus 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.