Accessorizing Your Wardrobe

Part fifteen of How to Sit Down

I’ve never been sure whether other people think of punctuation the way I do. Punctuation is viewed in some quarters as fussy or mandarin—the very sight of a semicolon is enough to scare some readers off a text. I’m not quite sure why that is, just as I don’t know when or why the serial comma became the “Oxford” comma, as if it were reserved for the elite. (Somebody may have been spooked in infancy by an unusually aggressive comma, and the fear gradually spread to others.) But the grammar involved is straightforward and natural. I visualize the process, arbitrarily, as building a low wall between driveways, a comma-size wall if there’s just one car on each side, but doubled to a semicolon if one or both contain more than one car. I confess that I’m often baffled by British use of the semicolon, which follows different rules, is used to set off phrases in many cases where we’d use a comma. Conversely, the British are more successful than Americans in eliminating punctuation altogether—“Hello Lucy good to see you I have a question” sounds totally plausible in a non-U British voice of a barking sort, with very little space between the words, so it makes sense on the page. The American voice, generally less rushed, will naturally throw in audible commas and periods, so unpunctuated text looks affected or lazy.

And that brings me to my point, which is that while I respect grammatical rules and generally follow them, punctuation for me is above all a set of tempo markers. A period is a full stop; a semicolon is a half stop; a comma is a quarter stop. When I’m fiddling with my text before publication, at least three quarters of the changes will involve punctuation: adjusting tempos, regulating flow, breaking up sentences. When I compose, I begin writing a sentence and it branches off of its own accord. “I have a horse named Charles, who lives in the barn and eats hay; I bought him from a troupe of Shakespearean actors touring the provinces by caravan.” It’s as if I want to cram all of this micro-narrative into one sentence. But then I remember that Charles enjoys his hay cured with a little salt, and the introduction of that detail lops off the purchase of the horse to make a sentence of its own. Then, as more of the story becomes visible to me, I will specify that the actors were Italian and performed the bard’s work in that language, that the caravan wagons were painted in red and gold with a phony coat of arms on the door, that they sold Charles because they didn’t get along, especially at night. The sentences get longer and longer before they snap in two, as in parthenogenesis.

More of this happens in the first paragraph than anywhere else, because I reflexively try to stuff everything into that paragraph, as if afraid that I actually have nothing to say. My voice is rushing pell-mell, tripping over itself. As I begin to relax, the sentences become shorter, because I can more easily separate thought from thought. Too many short sentences can make the text feel semi-literate, but stack of short sentences can be powerfully effective, especially coming after a longer breath, such as run of independent clauses. “There was a gas explosion at the home of Larrieux, in Bordeaux. He was injured. His mother-in-law's hair caught on fire. The ceiling caved in.” (Félix Fénéon)

Quick tempos reach their peak in lists, to which I have an incurable addiction. They can economically survey a room, or a city, or an era, or a personality, or work up a narrative in thin slices, or string together shiny lexemes as if they were pearls: “Duck à l’Orange, Tournedos Rossini, Veal Prince Orloff, Steak Diane”—or should those commas be “ands” instead? The comma gives us a plain succession; separating them with an “and” can, depending on context, imply bounteousness or gluttony or boredom or torment or exasperation. An “and” after the penultimate item in a plain comma list states a clear limit—there were seven dwarves and no more—whereas omitting that terminal “and” makes the list ever expandable by the reader’s imagination: “Rita Hayworth, Porfirio Rubirosa, Mickey Cohen, Dorothy Kilgallen, Sherman Billingsley, Gypsy Rose Lee.” The order of items in a list can be determined by length, importance, music, increasing strangeness or horror, or—as in a comedian’s delivery of jokes—continuous topping of the previous laugh. Or it can just be random. The choices your back office makes are sometimes the best.

It is, as ever, crucial that you test your list by sounding it, aloud or in your head. There is no substitute for this. When I worked as a proofreader at Sports Illustrated many years ago we read aloud in pairs. We had a whole vocabulary: a period was “point,” a comma “com,” a question mark “quirk,” an exclamation “slam.” “John F. Kennedy, Jr.” was “cap John cap F point cap Kennedy com cap Jer point.” When a line in small caps appeared, we would soft-shout it, sometimes cupping hand to mouth. I still hear small caps that way in my head, and along those lines have unconsciously developed a voice for parentheses: uttered low out the side of the mouth. Parentheses indicate an aside, meant less for the room than for the attentive auditors sitting close, who are being admitted into one’s confidence. By contrast, whatever follows a colon becomes authoritative and should be spoken in clear, ringing tones.

The first day I worked as Barbara Epstein’s assistant, she handed me a note to type up. Many of the sentences were separated by dashes, and I reproduced them faithfully. She handed me back the note to redo: “Get rid of those dashes—they make me sound like Jackie O.” Indeed, a profusion of dashes in quick succession makes the writer sound breathless and possibly insane. Dashes should be used sparingly. A dash is a cymbal clash, a break in thought, a sudden swerve. Although their primary function is dramatic, dashes do often end up pressed into service as option number three in a complicated sentence that already includes commas and maybe a semicolon. They may be unavoidable, but they have an impact that is not only inner-ear audible, but visual as well. A field of text with too many dashes looks flighty, half-cooked, emotionally conflicted.

The ellipsis is a fadeout or a trailing off. In French it is called points de suspension, and that’s what it does: it suspends. Naturally you shouldn’t use too many ellipses in a piece, or you will dilute the effect. The ellipsis gives you a second of radio silence, so it should come at the bottom of a paragraph, where it can be allowed to reverberate. There are other ways to use it, although not so much in modern-day English context. Some of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s books, notably Death on the Installment Plan and Castle to Castle, are largely held together by ellipses, which function as ligaments connecting sentence fragments spoken by a dazed and often panicked narrator.

While we were chatting, I was putting my things away…oh, I almost forgot…the injections!…she needed one…two c.c.’s of morphine…she’d drop off to sleep…then I’d leave…I inject my two c.c.’s…I look out the window…I accuse other people of being voyeurs…but actually…I’m hopeless…the complete peeper… (Castle to Castle, tr. Ralph Manheim)

When I worked in a plastics factory as a teenager, the machine cycles were fast, but I was bored nevertheless. I tried to read, but I only had time for about half a sentence between cycles, and kept losing my place, even in the most basic-English crime novels. Then Céline, with his short bursts, came to my rescue, and I somehow read book after book, almost as if I were pulling individual words out of the continuous din of the factory floor. Ellipses were also employed by newspaper gossip columnists of the past, to very different effect. In their hands the bursts sounded like telegrams flooding in, or maybe stock-market ticker tape. Ring Lardner caught the rhythm:

A. Lincoln and Gen. McClellan are on the verge…Jimmy Madison and Dolly Payne Todd are THAT WAY…Aleck Hamilton and Aaron Burr have phfft…The Geo. Washingtons (she was Martha Lorber of the Follies) have moved into their Valley Forge snuggery for the Old Man Shiver days.” (“Your Broadway, Beau, and You Can Have It”)