'Certain rhythms, certain cores of sentences, come to you like dreams'
Nicholas Dames' masterclass on prose style Part II; a candidate for the best-written first book of the century; and the best from this year's John Leonard Prize shortlist
In today’s issue
— Part II of Nicholas Dames’ discussion of prose style (you can read Part I here). We chose Dames’ The Chapter as the best-written book on the shortlist for this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (you can read the opening pages here). The NBCC winners are announced tomorrow.
— Our pick of the best-written book from the shortlist for this year’s NBCC John Leonard Prize for a first book in any category.
— Our pick of the best-written book among the previous winners of the John Leonard Prize. This is part of our project to identify the best-written books of the century to date.
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Nicholas Dames on Prose Style Part II
Books not picked for Auraist tend to lack appealing rhythms, and musicality more generally. Can musicality be taught? Do you have to work on this in your own sentences or does it come naturally?
About the teaching of musicality in writing I feel like a character in Tolstoy: I fervently believe it can be taught and despair about its impossibility, and the collision of these sentiments can make me miserable! At some level my interest in writing has always been a variety of medium-envy: I would’ve loved to have had musical talent and am hopelessly jealous of musicians. I did learn the piano when I was young, and I love its tones, its percussive expressiveness, really the entire literature of the piano, all the more so as I get older. But as a pianist I was a failure. I simply couldn’t release myself into the music, I strained at the technical ability that might free me to do so, or I could only achieve some modest technical ability which somehow made my playing even more rigid and apprehensive. Some of this might have been not working hard enough, but I still think much of it was a basic inaptness: rather than inhabiting the instrument, I battled with it. That I don’t feel that discomfort with language, how much of an accident, or a pure contingency of some kind, is this?
That said, if I’m committed to anything on this subject, it’s that the surest route to learning “musicality”— comfort in and flexibility with the instrument of prose— is reading, widely and constantly and from demanding texts. Take the Suzuki method of music instruction, which was itself adapted from the model of language acquisition; if one turns that method around again and applies it back to language, I think we’re onto something: to develop an ear requires constant, and ideally early, immersion in the range of expressive possibilities of a medium, before one learns formal rules or techniques. Increasingly, in my teaching, I think of myself as an instructor in reading, believing that there is in the end a payoff in the widened expressive range of the writing students do.
And like a Suzuki instructor in some sense, I’m also a believer in the pedagogical uses of imitation— by which I mean parody. Why not ask students to parody a style, which is a way of getting inside of it, learning how it works? I do so often. The model for me here is Proust, of course a stylist of the highest individuality and idiosyncracy, but also a highly skilled parodist of others: Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, etc. The two qualities, a deeply particular voice and a skill at mimicry, are not opposed but related.
Do you read your work out loud, and if so, how important is this to your style?
Only infrequently. Reading aloud is a good way to make sure the sentence works functionally, that it makes the sense one wants it to make. But it can be hampering as well. I tend to prefer a less oral texture to my writing, to create instead the kinds of sentences one can’t use in situations of oral delivery like lectures or conference papers. Complicated subordinations, for instance; the use of punctuation devices (like the semi-colon, again) that are more adapted to a visual-cognitive medium like reading rather than anything that sounds like speech. I think this was one reason I’ve been so drawn to topics like chapters. The chapter, as I argue in my book, is among other things a solicitation of the eye rather than of the voice. It has always had a visual aspect to it, it aerates the page. I do tend to think of prose visually as much as aurally.
How close have you come to headbutting your keyboard in frustration at the miniscule nature of the prose issues you were working on, and what were those issues?
A first draft is, or should feel like (necessary illusion!) freedom. Every subsequent act of editing is like therapy: it means encountering the things one does without realizing it, the symptoms of one’s particular kind of derangement. Naturally those symptoms reside in very small, recurrent reflexes in sentences. I think the frustration of editing is only partly a result of their smallness; it’s more a result of how uncomfortable it is seeing those little characteristic flaws growing like weeds everywhere, so fecund, so hard to uproot. It’s also the difficulty of telling the weed from the flower. (Naturally one knows that they’re all, finally, plants; but some will throttle the garden, some will harmonize with it.) I was in agonies at how much evasive language I had to uproot from my various drafts— all those “sort of” and “kind of” locutions that are the symptoms of uncertainty or failed nerve. I had to think hard about my fondness for triads and how many are too many, what the tipping point is where a trait becomes a compulsion. Like many others— we need a support community— I tend to have a heavy hand with em-dashes, and I often have to reduce their number by some amount, to make sure that variation doesn’t harden into monotony.
None of these are necessarily, or categorically, errors. Repetition turns them into errors— that is, unconsciousness repetition. The pain of revision is the pain of encountering one’s own unconsciousness, which means one’s own unconscious. Worse yet, it’s a dull pain: becoming tired of yourself and your inevitable tics, boring yourself with your standard repertoire of moves. Noticing these things, let alone pruning them, is hard unpleasant work most of the time, but also, weirdly, exhilaratingly therapeutic, because (so much more so than in life) they’re correctable.
Is this headbutting business why so few writers obsessively polish their writing?
Perhaps, but I have a pet theory that the real source of the problem is technological. I’m just old enough to remember writing before it became a matter of screens and their instant responsiveness, what it was like to commit to a sentence’s logic and structure, on paper, before its conclusion. I can recall watching the typeball of the IBM Selectric spin across a page as one typed, or, later, watching the small LCD display on a Canon electric typewriter record a single line before it printed that line on the page. When I migrated to a word processor in my twenties, the possibilities of editing-as-one-writes seemed, and in fact were, infinite; and the effect was, in surprising ways, disabling. I felt a loss of fluidity or confidence in the act of writing, because the retouching or revising was co-incident with composing. And then one had the illusion of not needing further revision because revision had already occurred, in the moment. What I mean here is that I don’t think few writers obsessively polish their writing— we all do, but we all do in the act of composing. That cursor is always there, inviting us to back up, dip in and readjust, delete and reword. What a disincentive to edit later! The immediacy of editing on a screen compresses what should ideally be the duration of the editing process, the need to let things settle so that one can actually see what needs to be chipped away or readjusted.
‘how we read now’ hasn’t settled into anything like a recognizable pattern.
Do you see published prose adapting to the writing people read online, much of it written in the characterless bloggy style established twenty years ago? Has published prose adapted to the reduced attention spans that apparently result from heavy internet use?
I think there’s a good deal of confusion. I’m thinking of critics here rather than writers of imaginative prose. The technologies by which we read are now so distinct that it’s hard to say what we— critics, nonfiction writers— are writing for, or how we are supposed to take contemporary attention-spans into account. Are we being read on a phone screen? A laptop? A printed page of some kind? Very often we won’t or can’t know in advance, and yet the properties of each of these devices are widely distinct. A 250-word paragraph on a page is one thing; on a phone it becomes oddly unreadable. How can one assimilate the fact one will be read on a phone screen? And of course it’s not just devices, but venues— the proliferation of so many modes of circulation, on a spectrum from casual to formal, that mean there’s no consensus mode, less so than ever before. Barbed social media wit, confessional-casual blogging, punchy born-online concision, earnest longform magazine pieces… I can’t entirely make sense of the total ecosystem, because ‘how we read now’ hasn’t settled into anything like a recognizable pattern.
The best working critics now don’t seem to me to make any concessions to the conditions of online reading, even as they’ll often be read in that format. To name just a very few: writers like Tobi Haslett, Jane Hu, Frank Guan, Tara Menon, Emily Ogden, Christine Smallwood—a small sample of a whole generation of very fine working critics and critic-scholars— don’t seem to compromise with the medium in which they appear. How they pull this off, I can’t be sure.
And lastly, do you have any stylistic tips that Auraist readers might not have heard before?
Sentences take shape in the oddest ways, and not always when one is sitting in front of the screen. I find that sentences or fragments of sentences— little formulations, capsule turns of phrase— come to me while walking, even or especially when my mind is preoccupied with something else. Not all of those fragments are useful, but some are remarkably, bizarrely clarifying and make their way whole into the draft. What is a better use of a small notebook, or the Notes app, than allowing you to record these bits as they happen, to play with them, to test them out? Ambulatory prose-making: it’s high on my list of ways writing takes shape. Certain rhythms, certain cores of sentences, come to you like dreams, in passing moments when your body’s movement allows you to be receptive to them. This is at once one of my more quasi-mystical beliefs and also one of my more practical habits.
— Nicholas Dames is the Theodore Kahan Professor of Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches nineteenth-century fiction, the history and theory of the novel, the history of reading, and the aesthetics of prose fiction from the eighteenth century to the present. He is the author of Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 (2001), and The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (2007). He has written on contemporary fiction, novel reading, and the humanities for The Atlantic, n+1, The Nation, New Left Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and Public Books, at which he is co-Editor in Chief.
Imagine that was you trapped within your own body as a ten-dimensional demon used it to make the most excruciating artistic effort of the last 300,000 years and then slapped your name on it. Imagine how that must feel, the disbelief to begin with, followed by the realisation that this isn’t a dream or hallucination, it’s definitely happening on the filmsets and then every week on televisions across the world. Feel the frustration and embarrassment as you watch the demon juxtapose the series’ vanity for the ages with references to the ego-deflation of Eastern practice and the world’s other spiritual systems, then present the resulting shambles as a guide to better living—all with your name attached. You have to watch people who used to admire you frown and gawp at your series with similar disbelief, then comprehend that they’ve waited decades for this, this turkey to beat all turkeys, passed off as a spiritual toolbox.
And this nightmare is happening to you, once known as the nicest hermit in Hollywood. And because the Demon Inside You controls your body you can’t howl out your mortification and despair, or even just hang your head and sob, or throw yourself off an L.A. high-rise.
Coming soon: The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco
This year’s shortlist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for a first book in any category
Black Pastoral by Ariana Benson (University of Georgia Press)
A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography by Emilie Boone (Duke University Press)
The Love of Singular Men by Victor Heringer, translated by James Young (New Directions)
Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: a Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman (Penguin Press)
When Crack Was King by Donovan X. Ramsey (One World)
Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs by Martin J. Siegel (Cornell University Press)
The best-written of these is
1
In the beginning, our planet was hot, sickly yellow and stank of stale beer. The ground was black with boiling, clinging mud.
The outer suburbs of Rio de Janeiro were the first things to come into this world, even before the volcanoes and the sperm whales, before Portugal invaded, before President Getúlio Vargas ordered the construction of social housing. Queím, where I was born and grew up, is one of those suburbs. Tucked between Engenho Novo and Andaraí, it was made from that primordial sludge, which coagulated into various shapes: stray dogs, flies and steep hills, a train station, almond trees and shacks and houses, neighbourhood bars and arsenals of war, haberdasheries and jogo do bicho lottery stands and an enormous swathe of land reserved for the cemetery. But it was all still empty: there were no people.
They didn’t take long. The streets collected so much dust that man had no choice but to come into being to sweep them. And in the late afternoons, to sit on the porch and moan about poverty, bad-mouth others and gaze out at the pavements stained by the sun, the buses coming back from work coating the world with dirt again.
2
I read in one of my schoolbooks that, near the hottest parts of the earth, there existed a race of people that despised the sun. The men hurled insults in its direction five times a day and prayed joyfully when night fell. At the first glimpse of its rays, the women covered their heads and eyes with plain muslin, just as they did when they buried their dead, and only uncovered themselves at dusk. Because of the sun, these people were black, and their continent was called Africa.
Though I’m so white I’m almost green, I’m a child of this people. I’ve hated the sun since I was a kid, but all my life it’s been licking me like a puppy. I’ve learnt to tolerate its presence, occasionally even believed I loved it, but it’s no good: I hate the sun. I mutter obscenities at it five times a day.
In the school holidays of 1976, I was thirteen. The summer hadn’t properly started and my skin was already peeling for the third time. My arms and shoulders, inflamed with tiny blisters, soon shed strips of dead tissue. My nose had a new layer of charred skin. I couldn’t brush my hair because of my toasted scalp, nor sleep because of my back. It was almost noon already.
We’d been in the pool since morning. Joana, my younger sister, dived, floated and giggled, wearing only her bikini bottoms, despite her already swollen nipples. I couldn’t swim, so I had to sit on the edge of the pool, with my feet in the water and my thighs on the hot granite, watching the sun slowly nibble away at the patches of shade. Sitting on the first-floor balcony, Maria Aína kept an eye on us while Paulina, the maid, took care of lunch, and the dust.
By my childish calculations, Maria Aína must have been around 279 years old. She lived in the neighbourhood and looked after us whenever Mum asked. (I don’t know if she got paid.) She was born right here in Queím, died here and lived here, in a shack that had been around since the days when the neighbourhood was a farm. She’d never been outside Rio – the furthest she’d ever travelled was Jurema, where the spirits of the Indians dwell.
She gave long whistles as she breathed, like an old animal, and had witnessed the birth of every living person, including my dad. Thin, the daughter of slaves, she spoke the tongue of her great-great-grandparents when she didn’t want to be understood. When she looked at green fruit it would ripen. She’d make pumpkin compote on the Day of Saints Cosmas and Damian, and bring it to us still warm. I’ve never forgotten the taste, or how the crunchy shell would break to reveal the gritty, pulpy cream. We were the first to eat it, after the spirits: she’d leave a bowlful in the woods for them. The pumpkin would shrivel up and vanish. That’s how spirits eat.
Maria Aína liked me because I’d been born with the umbilical cord wrapped round my neck, just like her. ‘Anyone born that way will always be on the edge of trouble, ossí Camilo,’ she told me, years later, only days before she died.
"Upon finishing it you want to immediately meet the young man who wrote it, shake him vigorously by the hand and congratulate him on the beginning of a brilliant career. But Victor Heringer is gone. He left this beautiful book behind." --Zadie Smith
THE BEST-WRITTEN BOOKS OF THE CENTURY TO DATE
The NBCC John Leonard Prize previous winners:
2013 Anthony Marra A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
2014 Phil Klay Redeployment
2015 Kirstin Valdez Quade Night at the Fiestas
2016 Yaa Gyasi Homegoing
2017 Carmen Maria Machado Her Body and Other Parties
2018 Tommy Orange There There
2019 Sarah M. Broom The Yellow House
2020 Raven Leilani Luster
2021 Anthony Veasna So Afterparties
2022 Morgan Talty Night of the Living Rez
The best-written of these is
Prologue
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.
—BERTOLT BRECHT
Indian Head
There was an Indian head, the head of an Indian, the drawing of the head of a headdressed, long-haired Indian depicted, drawn by an unknown artist in 1939, broadcast until the late 1970s to American TVs everywhere after all the shows ran out. It’s called the Indian Head test pattern. If you left the TV on, you’d hear a tone at 440 hertz—the tone used to tune instruments—and you’d see that Indian, surrounded by circles that looked like sights through riflescopes. There was what looked like a bull’s-eye in the middle of the screen, with numbers like coordinates. The Indian’s head was just above the bull’s-eye, like all you’d need to do was nod up in agreement to set the sights on the target. This was just a test.
—
In 1621, colonists invited Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoags, to a feast after a recent land deal. Massasoit came with ninety of his men. That meal is why we still eat a meal together in November. Celebrate it as a nation. But that one wasn’t a thanksgiving meal. It was a land-deal meal. Two years later there was another, similar meal meant to symbolize eternal friendship. Two hundred Indians dropped dead that night from an unknown poison.
By the time Massasoit’s son Metacomet became chief, there were no Indian-Pilgrim meals being eaten together. Metacomet, also known as King Philip, was forced to sign a peace treaty to give up all Indian guns. Three of his men were hanged. His brother Wamsutta was, let’s say, very likely poisoned after being summoned and seized by the Plymouth court. All of which lead to the first official Indian war. The first war with Indians. King Philip’s War. Three years later the war was over and Metacomet was on the run. He was caught by Benjamin Church, the captain of the very first American Rangers, and an Indian by the name of John Alderman. Metacomet was beheaded and dismembered. Quartered. They tied his four body sections to nearby trees for the birds to pluck. Alderman was given Metacomet’s hand, which he kept in a jar of rum and for years took around with him—charged people to see it. Metacomet’s head was sold to Plymouth Colony for thirty shillings—the going rate for an Indian head at the time. The head was put on a spike, carried through the streets of Plymouth, then displayed at Plymouth Fort for the next twenty-five years.
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST - PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD WINNER - A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR - CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE WINNER - NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER - ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION NOMINEE
One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Dallas Morning News, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe