Thomas Mann’s bizarre but mythic short story The Transposed Heads retells an Indian legend treating the intricately riddling questions of identity: who am I, who are you, who are we together? A young couple and a friend are on their way home (in more ways than one), and passing a temple in the countryside, one of them, “obeying an impulse of his heart,” wishes to stop and pay honor to the goddess whose shrine they have by chance (if chance there is) come upon. He makes his way alone to the temple while the others wait for him at the road:

It was a shrine no more important than the little mother-house by the secluded bathing-place on the river Goldfly; but its columns and ornamentation had been carved with infinite piety and care. The entrance seemed to crouch beneath the wild mountain itself, supported by columns flanked by snarling leopards.

Columns carved with infinite piety and care. Slow work, no doubt, for what else is there to rush off to when your heart is devoted to your love? Something more than intensity is being suggested by the adjective infinite, something to do with the source of that builder’s preoccupation in a place both near and far.

Mann’s story depicts the traditional world where artists, like those who built this Indian shrine, looked within to find the design and purpose of what they had to do. The British scholar Brian Keeble wrote a work entitled Every Man an Artist: Readings in the Traditional Philosophy of Art (2005), explaining this ancient devotion, and he also edited an anthology of essays on the same topic by the English sculptor and printmaker Eric Gill, entitled A Holy Tradition of Working: An Anthology of the Writings of Eric Gill (1983). The scholar Erich Heller wrote insightfully on both Thomas Mann (Thomas Mann: The Ironic German, 1958) and the artistic life (The Artist’s Journey into the Interior, 1965). We would be the poorer without any one of these writers to remind us that there are other ways to conceive of who we are in the world.

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It can help us in our writing if we remember just how crazy a thing it is we’re trying to do. Imagine putting a word to every last thing we perceive, and then putting all those perceptions together into a self-reflecting kaleidoscope for someone else to look through. We witnessed something, and now it’s in our mind. We saw something happen in the world, we had a thought, we felt an emotion, and now we want to (and sometimes we have to) share it. To share is what the word communicate originally meant, and to do that we have to be adept in a medium, an art, with which to carry it from our own awareness to another’s. To do this, the art of writing comprises the three elements of word, phrase, and clause, and these have to be placed just so if we are to succeed in having one idea reflect off another.

But it’s the vision of what we must say that determines the artful form with which we communicate it. And finding that form is where the winds start to blow, because a vision, an idea, comes clear only slowly, like a light seen far in the distances as we approach it. And if we settle too early on a way to say what we see, our work does not succeed as it otherwise could. Our reader is left with a haze, rather than with our clear sight; but when we take courage to realize that, we go back to our studio, which is our draft, to clear the mist a bit more. Often that next revision need be little more than a change in punctuation. Pointing a sentence, as punctuating used to be called, is a subtle technique in the art of writing, and understanding how a miniscule, black mark in a line can open or close whole worlds will serve us immensely well in clearing the reader’s vision.

Consider, for example, the commas in this sentence: The aircraft, having finally come to a stop, its nose gear had broken on landing. There is little doubt that in the minds of both writer and reader, the raw ideas of an aircraft landing and nose gear collapsing have arisen, but the sentence the writer drafted has hastily confused two thoughts which should otherwise calmly present themselves confidently to the reader, whole and complete. Commas cut; that is their office. But whether an element should or should not be separated from others in a sentence depends on the logic of what we’re saying, and logic always has to do with the relations of things we have named—all those nouns we put to our perceptions. So one way to test the logic, or illogic, of a sentence is to see whether every noun in it is associated accurately with some element of the syntax.

In our example, the noun aircraft appears as the sentence opens, and that suggests to every reader of modern English prose that, more likely than not, it will be standing as the subject of a verb to appear shortly. That, however, does not happen here. No sooner do we read aircraft than we come to a cutting comma, defeating our expectation that a verb will immediately next appear. Whereupon comes the problem with that comma and the difficulty it causes the reader. We must understand the comma after aircraft together with the comma after stop; the two work as a pair to isolate the participial phrase between them. When we continue reading, we come to the phrase its nose gear, which we soon see is the subject of the verb and the rest of the predicate had broken on landing. And there we find ourselves at the period, with the noun aircraft hovering at the start, unassociated with anything else.

There is no intractable problem here—if we recognize there is a problem. The drama of the moment the writer recalled has likely overpowered what we might call the presentational logic of the sentence. As is not always the case in life, the world of expository prose must identify things and put each in its proper relation to some other thing in the scene to avoid what the author Bryan Garner calls (in his indispensable writing guide Garner’s Modern American Usage) “disruptions of thought.” That first comma has separated the noun aircraft from its participle having finally come, and so we can see that the fix is immediate and sure: make it the subject of verb and nose gear the object: The aircraft, having finally come to a stop, had broken its nose gear on landing. Or another possibility might be to convert the original participial phrase into a subordinate clause of its own, changing a simple sentence into a complex one: The nose gear had broken on landing when the aircraft had finally come to a stop. And then we can better the logic of that revision by inverting the order of the two clauses: When the aircraft had finally come to a stop, the nose gear had broken on landing. And better: When the aircraft had finally come to a stop, the nose gear had broken apart on landing. And even better: When the aircraft had finally come to a stop, the nose gear had collapsed on landing. Revision is generative.

Our sentences, we’ve said, are like a self-reflecting kaleidoscope we assemble for someone else to watch the coordination of ideas we hold in our mind, but the simile points up a philosophical peril we should be careful to avoid. The classical position has it that both prose and poetry intend to communicate objective reality, not the subjective manufacturing of mental vagaries. Ideas are as objective as the ground we stand on; both are real, and both are therefore something to get right and to be precise about. The language we write (it’s not strictly quite right to say the language we create, for that would suggest that we are the cause of ideas) can only approximate objective truth, so subtle is the relationship between our minds and the world. But there are degrees of approximation, and we try, as careful writers and readers and thinkers, to approach the truth as closely as we rightly can through the particular art we devote ourselves to.

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Here is the first of Writing Smartly’s new Thursday posts, very short selections from significant writers and thinkers to help keep keen perceptions and masterful language before us.

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This most beautiful passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Winter Dreams” defeats logic at its own game, for the noun surfeit means not only excess, but satiety, repletion, utter completion. So how can it be, as Fitzgerald describes this tender moment, that surfeit would demand more surfeit? Such a thing is possible only in the impossible world of love:

Then he saw—she communicated her excitement to him, lavishly, deeply, with kisses that were not a promise but a fulfillment. They aroused in him not hunger demanding renewal but surfeit that would demand more surfeit…kisses that were like charity, creating want by holding back nothing at all.

You can find this story, along with many other fine tales (don’t miss William Carlos Williams’s “The Use of Force”), in Short Story Masterpieces, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine, 1982. The editors have important things to say about reading short stories, among them this: “The really fine story is by a writer who has some characteristic slant on the world, some characteristic reading of human values.” And if you are working on your own short story, John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, 1983, makes an excellent companion for the task—whatever one’s age.

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The root of our word studious means zealous. To study something originally means to attend to it seriously, earnestly, devotedly in the belief that what we are trying to understand can open a vision otherwise closed off to us by a merely casual acquaintance with the subject. In its original connotation, whatever we study will and can and must be put to use, because we can only be passionate about something we believe is important, if not even indispensable, to the way we live the life we are living, which includes not only action, but awareness.

This understanding of intellectual work is far upstream from what is called intellectualism, thinking and analyzing and conceptualizing for the sake of thinking and analyzing and conceptualizing—exercising the mind for the pleasure in feeling that click when we understand, when the pieces of a puzzle or the squares of a crossword all finally fit together. That is all a subtle (and unbecoming) kind of acquisitiveness. Studying, though, differs from intellectualizing in that something is at stake when we’re really studying. We feel we have to understand, because we’re looking not only for pleasure and possessions, but livable meaning as well.

It is important to make this distinction because the study of the language arts is often assailed with just this criticism, that grammatical and logical and rhetorical analysis, along with all of their special terminology, is a game some so inclined like to play, and that we can all get along just fine, thank you, with our natural responses to what we read and write. There is much to respect in this position, and there should be no question that our ingenuous response is primary; it is difficult work to set aside our presuppositions and give ourselves over trustfully to an author and a world contrived in words, and we should take pride when we accomplish it. But there are two good reasons for both the so-inclined and not-so-included to study the technicalities of language and literature: the securing of control and the deepening of appreciation.

To illustrate this, let’s look at a sentence at the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Winter Dreams.” After many episodes of infatuation and dejection, perhaps and no, yes and never, the protagonist Dexter has succumbed to understanding that his love for the extravagantly beautiful, contestably playful Judy is not to be realized. The first four sentences open the paragraph, but it’s that fifth sentence that holds a lesson for us:

For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

Our ear will no doubt alert us right away to something unusual: the sun was gone down, instead of had gone down. A small change of one word and the kind of observation which those who do not see the value of reading closely will censure for its minuteness. But that tiny grammatical difference essentializes the imaginative world Fitzgerald wants us to see here, the baren, inactive inner world Dexter is despairingly living out as the story of a youthful dream concludes. We expected had gone down because the sun appears to us to move across the sky, and when we wish to depict motion in the past—a past here before the time tears were streaming down the character’s face—we employ some form of had to help build the past present tense. That standard tense is meant to show that something securely happened.

But that is exactly what Fitzgerald does not want to convey. In fact, nothing happened. The once luscious hope did not mature, and so Fitzgerald uses was, a form of the verb be, to denote a past state, a situation or circumstance or atmosphere in which the sun, the illuminator of all that is life, was present no longer to Dexter. And by including the adverb down, Fitzgerald is playing off the standard active construction of the past perfect tense. It will stumble us if we are reading too quickly: we’ll trip over his unexpected phrasing. But when we rub the dust from our eyes and look again more closely to see things from the angle Fitzgerald opened for us with an intelligent linguistic twist, we understand what we first had missed. And coming then to the last paragraph of the story, he will repeat a similarly constructed verb three times: but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. He means with such language to reflect again that abstract, joyless gray beauty of steel.

If we, as readers and writers both, are not familiar with these technicalities—the notions of tense and the ways the craft of the language can subtly suggest the difference of state over action—we can certainly still enjoy the story, but we preclude ourselves from a fuller appreciation, meaning a deeper insight, into the ideas which assembled themselves in a certain way in a particular writer’s mindful preoccupation. And too, without this, after all, reasonably manageable grammatical knowledge, we risk our own intelligent ideas taking on a life of their own and assuming a place in our sentences only when a well-worn phrase or trite expression seems good enough to express them. What knowledge of the craft of writing we can accrue by close examination of language, both our own and others’, will yield a proper control, the control of excess and imprecision, and this can be, ironically, the path back to our own spontaneity—just what we might have lost but can find again after a little zealous study of the craft of writing.

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New Thursday Postings

Later this week, Writing Smartly will begin a weekly Thursday post of a sentence or short passage from significant writers to keep good models of language and thought, like this one of Fitzgerald’s, present before us. At this late (let us hope not too late) date in human history, we have collectively accrued sentences and stories, poems and insights from every time and direction of human culture, a veritable embarrassment of riches from which we may find both pleasure and guidance. The aim of this new weekly post will be to preserve and promote a regard to the structure and style of language and the insight its intelligent study can provide—preservation through the reading and promotion through the recommendation of other authors to discover, examine, and read. Please look for the first installment this coming Thursday.

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What are we after when we want to write a well-crafted paragraph? Cynically we might answer, just to get it done!, but when we have something we really want to say to the world, we inevitably care about how well we say it: we want to be taken seriously and we don’t want to be misunderstood.

But what does well-written mean, and how do we know when we’ve achieved it? We might profitably look for help in answering those questions by turning to the traditional standards of art and art criticism, which appeal to the way the natural world takes shape. A British teacher and designer, N. I. Cannon, wrote in 1948 a manual entitled Pattern and Design, and there she enumerated thirteen such principles, among them unity, contrast, and symmetry.

To see what this might mean in the art of writing a paragraph, let’s look at a passage from Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition (Oxford, 1949). Highet was a classical scholar, but also a teacher and public lecturer, and so he was aware of the shapes and patterns his sentences had to take in order to meet his objective of clear, persuasive, untechnical language. Here he is speaking of how English first began to take shape:

The story of English prose literature during the Dark Ages is also the story of the much-interrupted upward struggle of civilization in the British islands. Poetry nearly always looks backwards, in form or matter or both, to an earlier age. Prose is more contemporary, reflecting the needs and problems and powers of its time. Therefore English prose literature in this period was primarily educational. Its intention was to civilize the British, to keep them civilized, and to encourage them in the struggle against the constantly recurring attacks of barbarism. To do this it used two chief instruments. One was the Bible and Christian doctrine. The other was classical culture. There was nothing frivolous, no fiction or fancy, about English prose in this era. It was resolutely religious, or historical, or philosophical.

The principle of unity is first and all-important in any artistic production. Unity means oneness—the absence of confusion, not the absence of difference—and in a paragraph, that means that every sentence must arise as an organic part of a main stem, or trunk, or central idea which the paragraph wants to address. This central idea is called the topic or thesis, and in Highet’s paragraph, the first sentence tells us that he will be saying something about English prose in the Dark Ages (both these ideas mentioned in the subject of this topic sentence) and the difficult development (he names it an upward struggle) of civilization in the British islands (mentioned in the predicate). Those ideas constitute a contract he has now signed with the reader, and we can test whether he has achieved the principle of unity by asking whether each of the subsequent nine sentences grows as a limb or branch or twig (each derivative of the last) from that main trunk.

The subject of the second sentence is poetry, and we might conclude too quickly that Highet has already introduced a new idea and thereby violated the principle of unity. But unity encompasses opposition, or contrast, another of the principles Cannon identifies, and saying something about what prose does not do—that it does not look to the past, like poetry, but to the present—stabilizes the structure Highet is raising in the way one branch of a tree will grow opposite another to balance the ascending height. The subject of the third sentence returns to the central idea of prose, the fourth expands that idea into its result (therefore educational), and the fifth ramifies the idea of developing prose into its purpose (to civilize).

With the sixth sentence, we move from these branches to the limbs, the means whereby this civilizing purpose of English prose was accomplished. The author says that two instruments got the job done: he names the Bible and Christian doctrine as one in sentence seven, and classical culture as the other in sentence eight. These three sentences together illustrate the principle of symmetry, which Cannon defines as “the equal balance of weight, shape or form about a central axis.” This axis is laid down with the claim in sentence six that we must look to a pair of instruments, and then on both sides of that axis, in sentences seven and eight, Highet states the two means, each in a simple sentence whose predicate names the instrument. That equal syntactical weight hangs level from the fulcrum of sentence six (also a grammatically simple sentence), and the resulting structure makes it easy and pleasing to follow the author’s claim.

The remaining sentences we could call the outer twigs of the paragraph’s thesis, a flourish to explain that the historical work of developing English prose was taken seriously, even religiously so. Without saying it directly, Highet is intimating at the conclusion of his paragraph that the study and practice of English are worth the time and effort, preserving and advancing the work of civilization, or what is more classically called the humane tradition. Indeed.

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