But We Can Begin with But

Where it originated I don’t know, but the belief exists and seems to persist that a good writer does not begin a sentence with the word but. This is not true, as many traditional guides to English style affirm. It is true, certainly, that some occasions are better than others to begin a sentence in that way, but there is no grammatical ground for saying it is an objective mistake, something comparable to writing I goes to the store. That, of course, we can’t do.

Jean Stafford was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, and in her short story “A Country Love Story,” she composes an instructive example of exactly when a sentence can and should begin with the conjunction but. As the story opens, the current owner is showing May and Daniel around a property they are interested in purchasing. When their attention is caught by a weathered and unsightly antique sleigh in the yard, the owner brushes off the offending object by telling them, “Paint that up a bit with something cheery and it will really add no end to your yard.” The agent-owner’s attempt to paint things in a better light did not have its intended effect on the couple: “simultaneous shudders coursed them,” Stafford writes. “They had planned to remove the sleigh before they did anything else.” The next paragraph then begins with this long sentence:

But partly because there were more important things to be done, and partly because they did not know where to put it (a sleigh could not, in the usual sense of the words, be thrown away), and partly because it seemed defiantly a part of the yard, as entitled to be there permanently as the trees, they did nothing about it.

Conjunctions join words and phrases, and when they’re really humming, they join clauses too by telling the logical relationship that holds good between the thought each clause asserts. Accordingly, all of the conjunctions fall into one or more groups, one of which is called the adversative. To advert means to turn toward (it’s the origin of our word advertisement, which is, it seems, the ubiquitous attempt to turn our attention toward something to buy), and so an adversative conjunction intends to turn the reader’s mind toward a thought which is in contrary or even direct opposition to an earlier thought. Other such adversative conjunctions are however, nevertheless, still, and many more besides.

The logical opposition of this passage, which the initial adversative but signals, is not complicated. As prospective buyers, May and Daniel “had planned to remove the sleigh before they did anything else,” but as owners now, “they did nothing about it.” The first half of that opposition had been expressed in the last sentence of the previous paragraph. This long sentence beginning with but is now laying down the other half of the opposition, and so that we don’t miss that logical structure, the writer has explicitly announced it to us with the adversative conjunction. She had before her other choices: employing another conjunction of the same category (however, nonetheless, still, yet), or no conjunction at all (a rhetorical technique call parataxis), which would have left it to the reader to play a logical game without directions.

So the only objection one could make to Stafford’s beginning the sentence with but (and I, for one, would not make it) would have to be asserted on rhetorical, not grammatical, grounds. In addition to classifying conjunctions according to their logical performance, they are also grouped according to their diction, which is to say, just where on the spectrum from casual to formal speech one usually uses them. This attribute is a much more subtle one to discern than the objectively grammatical, and it depends really on listening and reading closely with ears and eyes on the context. A rough (very rough) rule is that monosyllables are more casual than polysyllables, and that is frequently the case between the adversatives but and however. Indeed, too often we will begin a sentence with however in a context that really can’t absorb the energy of that stronger conjunction, and those sentences would improve mightily and swiftly either by simply replacing however with but, or by retaining the however, but placing it further into the clause to dilute its potency. If Stafford had done the latter (called a postpositive construction), her sentence would then have begun something like this: Partly because there were, however, more important things to be done…. With this change in diction, the narrator would have stepped a few paces back from the reader, and from that greater notional distance would have assumed a degree of formality Stafford apparently did not want in her narrator’s voice.

All this is regularly going on in the choice and placement of words, and we owe it both to the writer and to ourselves to attend to such subtleties that go with the art of writing. We’re left, otherwise, with a poorer palette of elements to read the colors of life a writer has worked so hard to portray—and we so hard to find and enjoy.

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Another Short Course Coming in February

Stafford’s story, along with two by H. L. Davis and Elizabeth Parsons we have looked at in recent weeks, will be another of the five we will be reading and discussing in an upcoming new offering of Writing Smartly’s four-week online short course called Reading Closely to Write. As in the past, we will examine each week the grammatical structure and stylistic design of sentences from one or two short stories written by celebrated authors. Each story averages about fifteen pages, and our effort will be to see more deeply into the meaning and implication of the author’s written composition.

The exact dates and time of the course will be set in early January, but if you have questions in the meantime (or if you would like to express your intention to enroll), please email me directly at ultimo@writingsmartly.com.

I hope you can join us for a winter of close reading as we await the welcome of spring.

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