As the line is poetry’s basic unit, the sentence is the breath of prose. The mastery of the sentence is the writer’s truest hallmark. At the heart of every sentence is a subject and a predicate, and mastery means never losing track of them, and knowing how to put things between one and the other without sacrificing clarity or sense, where every new word can carry its own weight and is an enhancement of the whole.
Now and then I run across a sentence whose beauty – sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle – holds me breathless. Fiction is, of course, replete with such marvels, such memorable lines that resonate well beyond the novels or stories that gave rise to them. These lines often occur at the very beginning or at the very end of things.
There’s that famous opening paragraph – actually one long sentence – of Nick Joaquin’s "May Day Eve," too long to be reproduced here but peerless in its command of material and mood. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ending to The Great Gatsby lingers long after the book, so accurately and so poignantly does it capture what we cannot resist: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Rather more effusive is Kerima Polotan’s ending to "The Virgin," where Miss Mijares yields to a man’s touch: "I must get away, she thought wildly, but he had moved and brushed against her, and where his touch had fallen, her flesh leaped, and she recalled how his hands had looked that first day, lain tenderly on the edge of her desk and about the wooden bird (that had looked like a moving, shining dove) and she turned to him with her ruffles wet and wilted, in the dark she turned to him." The repetition of "she turned to him" emphasizes the action, is the action.
Bobbie Ann Mason begins her story "Shiloh" with a line that’s been called one of American fiction’s most startling, because of its unexpected twist at the end, which turns out to be emblematic of the important reversals of roles that will happen in the story: "Leroy Moffitt’s wife, Norma Jean, is working on her pectorals." It’s unusually brief, especially for an opening line (though no briefer than "Call me Ishmael"), but it’s invested with potentially explosive power – especially considering that "Leroy" is king (le roi) and "Norma Jean" can’t but recall Marilyn Monroe, the quintessential sex goddess, whose real name it was.
In truth, however, a great sentence shouldn’t even have to make you think or work like that; it should just feel right, or feel significant, for some reason you have yet to divine but can safely assume for the time being.
Some of the sharpest prose can be found not in fiction, but in non-fiction – in the personal essay, the editorial, the political speech (well, much of that’s fiction), the journal entry.
In his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), Thomas de Quincey described what he called his "oriental dreams" thus: "I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud." Writing on the crest of Romanticism, de Quincey may have indulged in the fashionably exotic, but the best writers will always find some wonder in the backyard.
In his musings on "Death in the Open" (in the book The Lives of a Cell), biologist Lewis Thomas observes: "All of the life of the earth dies, all of the time, in the same volume as the new life that dazzles us each morning, each spring. All we see of this is the odd stump, the fly struggling on the porch floor of the summer house in October, the fragment on the highway. I have lived all my life with an embarrassment of squirrels in my backyard, and they are all over the place, all year long, and I have never seen, anywhere, a dead squirrel."
A few days ago, I was reading Objects of Desire – a book on the American antiques trade by a journalist-historian named Thatcher Freund. It was this sentence that caught my eye and urged me to write this essay: "Decorators tend to see objects in the context of a room, while the eyes of a collector always fall on a single object." It’s a perfect example of rhetorical balance and contrast – but more to the point, it makes terrific sense.
Obviously, you cannot have a good sentence without a worthwhile thought or insight. The sentence merely shapes the thought in the best way possible, playing with sound as much as sense. The way sentences sound – whether they use short Anglo-Saxon derivatives (like "bleed") or long Latinate constructions (like "exsanguinate") – can color our reception and understanding of them.
Long sentences can sound leisurely, knowledgeable, authoritative. The best of them can get drawn out to near infinity like a fine filament, a spider’s handiwork, without breaking.
In her story "Lines," Lakambini Sitoy writes: "It’s discovering infinitesimal variations in a multitude, a paradox of flavors and textures, like the salmon and capers in that sandwich I once had at The Pen, at once tart and yielding, oozing pleasure onto your tongue." And note the way the cadence of this sentence from "Self with Dog" by Angelo Lacuesta keeps shifting, but with good reason: "To restore his calm Jorge reminds himself that he is speaking to a middleman, a mercenary, someone who can easily read quick excitement and naïve contemplation, and convert such muddled feelings into passion, even obsession."
This long sentence from a 1962 speech on "Duty, Honor, Country" (the "they" which is its subject) is made even more remarkable by the fact that it was spoken by a military man, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, from whom one might normally expect terse commands: "They give you a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of ease." (Note the way "appetite for adventure" contrasts syllabically with "love of ease.")
But sometimes it’s the short line that says as much, if not more. In a triumphal visit to a homeland still under Communist rule in 1983, Pope John Paul II exhorted his countrymen to find value in their suffering: "We do not want a Poland which costs us nothing." Sitoy ends her story with an all-encompassing "That’s all we look for basically, a little joy." In her prizewinning "Foggy Makes Me Sad," Socorro Villanueva describes a couple in Baguio, forced to sit together after an argument, with sure economy and precision: "Mama and Papa were staring blankly at the blur of trees and grass, their faces stiff, their breaths steaming." Such efficiency is the painterly skill of capturing a condition, an image, or an action with a few deft strokes.
Given a range of options, you can’t go wrong saying and describing things as artlessly as you can – an art in itself – as Villanueva again does in the same story: "Everywhere I looked was the sight of mist descending, of things fading away into nothing, and I panicked at the thought that I would never be found." (Note the heaviness and finality of the N and D sounds.)
Sentence-making can, of course, be full of pitfalls, not all of them grammatical. Sometimes we mistake lyricism for beauty, overloading a sentence with palpably dazzling images and musical words. Sentences can be too pretty in themselves. Good sentences don’t exist in isolation; they’re good because they blend well with everything else around them, even while maintaining a slightly higher profile. Long or short, they will often juxtapose the concrete with the abstract, or possess elements that produce internal reflections and internal echoes.
In my own fiction, there must be two or three sentences I’ve been very happy to have written. One of them comes at the very beginning of a short story titled "Heartland." I can remember writing this sentence in the early ’80s with a Bic ballpoint pen on yellow legal pad paper, not knowing why I was writing it this way but feeling that it would set the tone for the story yet to follow. It went: "The dawn broke weakly, like a soldier of a defeated army rising at reveille, for nothing." My satisfaction hardly gives the sentence merit, but how often can we please ourselves with subjects, predicates, objects, and appositives?
When imagination, insight, precision, and flair come together, then we can have sentences like those E. B. White wrote, in "The Ring of Time," one of the great discoveries of my freshman year, ages ago:
"The circus comes as close to being the world in a microcosm as anything I know; in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade. Its magic is universal and complex. Out of its wild disorder comes order; from its rank smell rises the good aroma of courage and daring; out of its preliminary shabbiness comes the final splendor. And buried in the familiar boast of its advance agents lies the modesty of most of its people. For me the circus is at its best before it has been put together. It is at its best at certain moments when it comes to a point, as though a burning glass, in the activity and destiny of a single performer out of so many.
"Under the bright lights of the finished show, a performer need only reflect the electric candle power that is directed upon him; but in the dark and dirty old training rings and in the makeshift cages, whatever light is generated, whatever excitement, whatever beauty, must come from original sources – from internal fires of professional hunger and delight, from the exuberance and gravity of youth. It is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars."