Sorry, reader — I couldn’t resist doing that with the title, even though it probably looks so forbidding that it’ll have discouraged many people from even venturing this far. But it’s true, and I will respectfully argue with anyone who tries to insist otherwise.
(I’m also aware there’s no full stop in the title, which means it may technically not even be a sentence, but that’s just my little stylistic thing with blog post titles. Ordinarily, a full stop is very important to sentences — mine, yours and everyone else’s.)
If writing long sentences is the crime that readability analysis (including on this site) makes it out to be, then many of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century writers who have had a big influence on me are serial offenders. Edgar Allan Poe, M R James, Henry James, H P Lovecraft — all guilty as charged. Georges Perec has a wonderful way with the long sentence, too, but then again, I think French writers have that in their blood. Marcel Proust, Honoré de Balzac, all guilty as charged.
Joe Moran, whose thoughts on sentences (of any length) are always unfailingly interesting and thought-provoking, has much to say about this subject, including in his piece for Literary Hub (12th December 2018), entitled In praise of the long and complicated sentence.
“A long sentence should exult in its own expansiveness, lovingly extending its line of thought while being always clearly moving to its close. It should create anticipation, not confusion, as it goes along,” he tells us. I certainly wouldn’t disagree with that.
I think, as a reader, it’s quite difficult to be sure if a short sentence is good or not, but it feels much easier to tell if a long sentence is working well, or if it isn’t. A long sentence, however well-intended, betrays its writer much more readily than a short one. We find ourselves instinctively drawn to their unfortunate word choices, vocabulary repetitions, this punctuation mark when maybe that one would have been better. The confusion that Moran highlights can sink in before your eye has even moved down to the second line of print.
Later in the article, Moran talks about how “A long sentence can seem thrillingly out of breath, deliciously tantalizing, so long as we feel the writer is still in charge. It is like listening to a great singer as he holds his breath and prolongs a phrase.” He singles Frank Sinatra out as being a master of this — whereupon I can’t really comment, as I’m not really a Sinatra fan. But when he also mentions Karen Carpenter a few paragraphs on, I’m totally there:
“The emotional power of Carpenter’s singing comes not so much from her vocal tone, gorgeous as that is, but from the fact that she, like Sinatra, sings in sentences. Singing for as long as she does on one breath, in complete sentences over twisting melodies, is an amazing feat—not just of lung capacity but of tricking her throat into thinking that she is not about to swallow.
By the end of a Carpenters song you feel wrung out, as if someone has emptied their heart in front of you. All that has happened is that you have been sucker-punched by the dexterity of a technical virtuoso, effortlessly unspooling a long sentence. Easy listening is hard singing—and easy reading is hard writing.”
The question of breath in relation to writing makes me think about theatre writing, which certainly is written in order to be spoken aloud, and where breathing can make or break the delivery. Tennessee Williams was one for leaning into the cumulative power of a long sentence: Catharine Holly gets stacks of them in the final stretches of Suddenly, Last Summer when she is dizzily recalling the death of her cousin Sebastian at the hands of a mob of street urchins, and then, of course, there’s Maggie’s showstopper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof which Nicholas Wright and Richard Eyre remind us about in Changing Stages:
“Williams was ferociously hard-headed about the meaning of language and the music of it. Ignore the punctuation, you change the rhythm, the sound and the sense. A sentence like this — ‘We drank together that night all night in the bar of the Blackstone and when cold day was comin’ up over the Lake an’ we were comin’ out drunk to take a dizzy look at it, I said, “SKIPPER! STOP LOVIN’ MY HUSBAND OR TELL HIM HE’S GOT TO LET YOU ADMIT IT TO HIM!” – one way or another!” — has to be played on a single breath at least up to the comma. Williams needs actors with formidable skills and big lungs.”
Literary writing is not, by and large, written to be read out loud, or at least, prose generally isn’t. (Poetry is its own particular thing, which I have no instinctive feeling for and which I generally don’t enjoy listening to. Don’t judge me too harshly for that!) Sometimes, however, it does need to be read out loud. More than a decade ago, I started working on a project led by the Norwegian choreographer and artist Mette Edvardsen. Inspired by the Book People in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the project — entitled Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine — recruited people to start committing books to memory, which would then be recited from memory in one-on-one readings, with the visitor as the “reader” and the learner as the “book”.
I was, at my best, the first three chapters of J G Ballard’s 1972 novel Crash. Yes, dear reader, THAT Crash, the sex-and-wrecks book you may well never have read which was adapted into the David Cronenberg film you may well never have seen. I’ve recited Chapter 1 most often of all, for readers in Birmingham, London, Brussels, Kortrijk, Oslo and Helsinki. I’ve read it many times in libraries, including (to my great joy) in the stacks away from public areas. I read it in Oslo inside a car which had been covered in a photographic wrapping that depicted a wrecked vehicle in Delhi. My last reading was in Helsinki, on the floor of a sauna in a nightclub, for three German performance artists.
I’m not a performer and I have no training in supporting my voice or managing my breathing. But I’d like to think I brought a writer’s (and a reader’s) sensibility to the process, and over many years of delivering the same sections of text over and over, I got better at moderating my speech to at least try and honour what I felt were the emphases implicit within Ballard’s pacing and punctuation.
READER DISCRETION ADVISED:
I’m going to reproduce a section of Chapter 1 of Crash below to demonstrate my point, but the section in question contains references to violence and injury, and features language which may cause offence. So if you prefer not to continue reading, click away now.
But if you’re still with me, here’s the paragraph.
“I think now of the other crashes we visualized, absurd deaths of the wounded, maimed and distraught. I think of the crashes of psychopaths, implausible accidents carried out with venom and self-disgust, vicious multiple collisions contrived in stolen cars on evening freeways among tired office-workers. I think of the absurd crashes of neurasthenic housewives returning from their VD clinics, hitting parked cars in suburban high streets. I think of the crashes of excited schizophrenics colliding head-on into stalled laundry vans in one-way streets; of manic-depressives crushed while making pointless U-turns on motorway access roads; of luckless paranoids driving at full speed into the brick walls at the ends of known culs-de-sac; of sadistic charge nurses decapitated in inverted crashes on complex interchanges; of lesbian supermarket manageresses burning to death in the collapsed frames of their midget cars before the stoical eyes of middle-aged firemen; of autistic children crushed in rear-end collisions, their eyes less wounded in death; of buses filled with mental defectives drowning together stoically in roadside industrial canals.”
The first sentence, up to the full stop, always felt like warming up before taking a huge jump. The second and third sentences were my practice attempts before committing fully to the big one. And then before I knew it, the fourth sentence would start and refuse to stop, piling more and more outlandish and operatic images and ideas into my (and the reader’s) head before coming to an abrupt and unexpected and breathless halt.
I can still remember my frustration during the times when I got my breathing wrong, when a phrase would literally run out of air before a semi-colon, or where the urge to gulp was too hard to resist, and I knew I’d broken the rhythm, and that I’d failed Ballard on those occasions. Such failures would occur more often than not. I told you, I’m not a trained performer.
But on the rare readings when I got it right, when I came out of the traps slowly and didn’t sprint ahead, when I saw each hurdle coming and vaulted over each semi-colon with air to spare, it felt exhilarating — for me, and, I hope, for my readers, who were unwittingly being treated to the joys of a long sentence, a thing which we are nowadays encouraged to avoid on the basis that readers cannot cope with processing more than twenty words before a full stop, but which, in thoughtful and sensitive hands, can be a thing of great beauty and a tool of magnificent narrative power. (Sorry – couldn’t resist doing that, either.)
