All God's Children Got Rhythm

part three of How to Sit Down

I once tried to teach a class on style. It was a dud. Nobody got it. I was new to teaching undergraduates, so I probably went about it all wrong. I remember that I started with the King James Bible, then traced its literary influence in the Puritan preachers, in Melville and Faulkner, in gospel blues and roots reggae, in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Davis Grubb’s The Night of the Hunter, in the undulating vacuity of The Book of Mormon. The Bible is the blessing and curse of American culture, and its cadences are familiar to anyone who has spent time in it, even if they cross the street to avoid churches. But when I assigned my students to write on a nonreligious topic of their choosing in biblical style, I got back a lot of uninflected Facebook prose larded with thees and thous and begats. I had failed to convey that style is above all a matter of rhythm.

Virginia Woolf: “Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and I can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.”

As a young adult I spoke my native French seldom, just the requisite Monday phone call with the ‘rents. I did read in French, but that seemed divorced from spoken language, in part because my parents’ vocabulary was constrained by their lack of education, and the household tongue was slipping ever further into Franglais. I was embarrassed by my French and avoided other French speakers. So when I started spending a few weeks every year of the ‘90s in Belgium, I would at first be unable to speak, except to order food or buy a train ticket. But then, after three days, something would click. I would locate the rhythm of French, and with it came grammar and syntax and vocabulary. I started speaking idiomatically, rather than by translating English sentence structure. I connected to the language spoken all around me, and I absorbed it and my vocabulary increased. Nobody had ever told me that rhythm was the key, although I should have suspected it.

When a friend of mine was a DJ on WKCR during our student years, he pulled a double shift during their annual Mozart fest. For a full day afterward, every melody that appeared in his mind—commercial jingles, the Beatles, Shostakovich, James Brown—was immediately translated into Mozart. That, too, was principally a matter of rhythm. When he told me the story I was able to connect it to the imitation exercises assigned in poetry class by Kenneth Koch. We imitated Eliot, Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rilke, Tu Fu. And it quickly became apparent that while you could imitate Ezra Pound’s abstruse citations and Idaho-bred rusticisms, you’d never get him if you didn’t find his rhythm, which was especially sprung and tough. You could locate rhythm by marathon reading, as well as by putting yourself in the poet’s head, a bit like method acting. A decade later, preparing to write my first piece on spec for the New York Review of Books, I spent days reading back issues so that I could absorb the house rhythm and replicate it. For years I’d prepare to write by spending half an hour reading A. J. Liebling, whose rollicking rhythms and mastery of high and low I wanted for myself.

“By now it was dusk and the stores were lighted, so that, coming out of the dark, we galloped episodically between plywood maple-finished bedroom suites in the windows on one side of the street and mannequins with $7.98 dresses on the other, scaring from our course gaunt hounds that looked like Kabyle dogs.” (The Earl of Louisiana)

If you apply yourself to this kind of reading, you will eventually construct a jukebox in your mind, from which you can pilfer at will. Like any jukebox, it will be filled with hooks. Like a seasoned bar-band veteran who has played so many gigs under so many circumstances that you have become in effect a human jukebox, you will have moves at the ready for any changes your bandmates can throw at you, and instinctively you will pull out hooks you have learned, sometimes without knowing it (that’s how George Harrison came to write “He’s So Fine” again, thinking he was the father). Because we’re talking about literature here, they might not be known hooks for anyone else, but if they are hooks for you, that gives them a communicable power. In my first installment I produced just such a hook, quite unconsciously. “Each sentence generates the next, and in doing so creates a whole new set of questions,” I wrote. It sounded vaguely familiar as I wrote it, but it wasn’t until the next day that I recognized “Each era not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking.” (Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”) Yes, Benjamin’s sentence is much deeper than mine.

Not long ago I started keeping lists of such unconscious riffing. In my memoir I wrote, “First coal was in trouble, then steel, then glass, paper, chemicals.” I quickly heard Frank O’Hara: “First Bunny died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock” (“A Step Away From Them”). In the coming-out piece I wrote for Vanity Fair in 2022, I used the phrase “a wave of pure momentum,” and after a spell realized I’d picked O’Hara’s pocket yet again: “a fleece of pure intention” (“Ode to Michael Goldberg’s Birth and Other Births”). I owe Benjamin and O’Hara money (those aren’t the only examples), as well as to Richard Meltzer, Chester Himes, Elizabeth Hardwick, James Agee, Nick Tosches, Gertrude Stein, Manny Farber, Constance Rourke, Thomas Pynchon, Ed Sanders, Veronica Geng, Flann O’Brien, Ring Lardner, and Donald Barthelme. (Good luck collecting, suckers.) That is not an exclusive list of my favorite writers; they are the writers who have taken up permanent residence in my head. I extend my rhythm by fastening on to theirs.

The thing to keep in mind about rhythm is that you feel it in your body. Writing as an activity may be deskbound, silent, hunched, but in your head it can be a dance party. Writing, full of stops and starts, rarely allows you to lay down tracks as continuously as you would on a musical instrument. so you keep having to read from the top, over and over, to keep your rhythm going and not fluttering off into some overgrown branch line of fuss or doubt. The more physical your appreciation of prose—the more percussive, sinuous, crackling, echoing, syncopated it is—the more it will be a physical experience for the reader. And rhythm is the thing that can occasionally, miraculously deliver you unto the zone, where you seem to taking dictation from the ether—but that is a subject for a further installment.

I’ve enabled a chat, if anyone is interested. I may, after the next installment, start charging some kale, because every one of these things is an actual essay, not a blog post, and I’m used to converting those into sandwiches and underwear.