Suppose a Sentence
What are days for?
Well, sentences are also where we live, those of us who are readers, writers, teachers, students of language. Meaning might start in the building blocks of individual words, but it only comes alive in sentences. They express our thoughts and our personalities. They carry the DNA of our sensibilities.
Brian Dillon's latest book (following on from Essayism and his fine personal memoir In the Dark Room) is a highly pleasurable look at 28 individual sentences. Just the thing for an English teacher. In each case Dillon teases the author further out into the light, with the chosen sentence being a springboard to a deeper examination of style, of the longer work, of biography. This is analysis of an impressive quality, and unquestionably 'high-brow': you'll not find John Grisham in these pages. Here we have Thomas de Quincy, Beckett, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag and Gertrude Stein (who gives the book its title). And the sentences aren't the usual suspects either (such as the famous openings of 1984 or A Tale of Two Cities or the ending of The Great Gatsby). Instead they surprise right from the start, many of them being not conventionally beautiful or sonorous but initially puzzling and even awkward. The enjoyment is in how determinedly Dillon works through his own puzzlements, worrying away at the meanings and structures until he is satisfied.
The first sentence he looks at is the briefest, Shakespeare's 'O, o, o, o,' heard in different forms in all the great tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth (in the final essay on Anne Boyer he comes back to 'O'). By the way, I think here of one of Shakespeare’s most audacious lines, the five-time repetition of ‘Never’ by Lear at one of literature’s most devastating moments, the death of his daughter Cordelia.
As favourites I am going to choose the pieces on John Donne ('Wee have a winding sheete...') and on Joan Didion (a wonderful exploration of a dense Vogue photo caption and its mutation over the years:
Opposite, above: All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence.
Dillon's own sentence about this is pretty good in its own right:
The sentence sounds like Didion: in its rhythm, care and thrift, then also in the swerve towards something more troubling or mysterious, the suggestion in the final phrase of an impish curating personality at work in the house.
There is also in this chapter a memorable description of Didion's veteran editor at Vogue, Allene Talmey, who said in an NYT profile of Didion
how she would ask Didion to write a caption of three or four hundred words, and together they would cut it down to fifty. 'We wrote long and published short and by doing that Joan learned to write.’
Now there’s a lesson.
There are a lot of other pleasures here - on James Baldwin (his use of ofay), Elizabeth Bowen (her sentences are by turns exact, easeful and bristling), Roland Barthes (his sentences are frequently perforated by parentheses as if nothing may pass before his gaze without some nuance and qualification attached). A surprise: in his piece on Claire-Louise Bennett, Dillon writes that he has never heard nor read the phrase 'horse into', 'but it makes perfect sense’. As another Irishman, I've heard it a lot.
Late in the book, in discussing Anne Carson, Brian Dillon quotes Emerson, from his journal in 1843:
The maker of a sentence ... launches out into the infinite and builds a road into chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.
As, in this book, we do.
(END)
The LA Review of Books has an audio interview with the author (below).