Style - Long Sentences

 I have read several books on writing. However, I think only two have stuck in my mind. The first was Somerset Maugham's The Summing Up when I was a teenager, and during my first of law school when we were assigned E.B. White and William Strunk’s The Elements of Style. I want to say I read George Orwell's “Politics and the English Language” but I cannot trust my recollection on that point at this time. 

Legal writing wants clarity above all - which elevates the lessons of White and Strunk and Orwell. Back then I wrote rather ornate sentences, but I read much of Winston Churchill and William Faulkner. I found Ernest Hemingway and Dashiell Hammett aids in achieving the short sentences preferred by legal writing.

What I got from Maugham was an idea of rhythm. He wrote somewhere how he liked the rhythm created by semicolons. Against that was the advice of Kurt Vonnegut to get rid of semicolons.

KH criticized my prose as too telegraphic. He had a point. But where I learned how to stretch a sentence was in prison (why I did not notice it much, much earlier with Faulkner and James Joyce, I have no idea that puts my intelligence in a good light) when I read Jose Saramago's The Double - I recall a 45-page sentence. Then I read two of Marcel Proust's novels, and Maugham's talk of rhythm came back to me like a blow upside the head.

Truthfully, I find my prose plodding, like Theodore Dreiser. But I am trying to do better. Libre Office has a grammar checker that always hangs up on my too long sentences. Sometimes, I have chosen to break them down - my criterion is whether it is confusing as written. Other times, maybe even most of the time, I let them be. I liken them to guitar solos, breaking out of the steady beat. It seems to me there are times when the brain does not experience everything in 4/4 time, that too much is happening at one time, and to capture that then I need to forego telegraphic sentences.

But what do I know? i have had only one story published.

Over at LitHub, Ed Simon wrote an essay extolling long sentences, Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence which I think should be read in full. Mr. Simon bolsters his arguments with several examples, which reinforces my opinion about it needing to be read. It is also the latest in a run of articles and essays I have read knocking on White and Strunk. Another reason for reading the full essay, as I have lost my blind loyalty to "Elements of Style." I will tease with this paragraph:

Within the long sentence then there are certain things which can be accomplished that are impossible with its shorter partner; admittedly, there is a difficulty in reading a long sentence sometimes—all of those twists and turns, the convoluted syntax and piling on of word and imagery, comma and semicolon, clause, clause, and clause—but in the wrestling with such prose there is the possibility of the reader as much as the writer working towards a conclusion, in finding the meaning within the sentence itself; for, it must be said, there is an ethical difference between the sentence which is easy to read and the one which demands your attention, which in fact forces you to pay attention lest you get lost; this difference shouldn’t necessarily be understood as a claim that the long sentence is innately morally superior, but in demanding that a reader really grapple with a line we catapult a volley against the gods of this world (or the algorithms of the internet, the same thing) who valorize the short and bullet pointed above all else; in elevating the occasional joys of the long sentence, there is a an acknowledgement that sometimes the short sentence is the easy one, the small one, the insignificant one, but it should not be said that the long sentence demands the capitulation of the short, for what makes writing enjoyable to read is often the contrast between the gargantuan and the miniscule, just as music is built upon notes and rests; perhaps what’s self-indulgent in the long sentence (and certainly it can be that) can also be passed along to the reader, so that such expansive prose is better understood as a gift, or better yet as a secret; then, of course, there are the things which only the long-sentence can convey, that sense of motion, of movement across a landscape, or of the interior mind making its own wafts and wavers; finally, if there is any radicalism in the long sentence it’s this—the embrace of artifice, ornament, decoration, and excess, is resistance against base utility and the razor-sharp scalpels of those obsessed with bottom-lines, whether executives or editors—it is to give oneself over to the immaculate daringness of superfluous beauty. That’s all.

But is beauty ever superfluous?

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