The books of Charles Dickens brim with finely wrought characters—to read David Copperfield is to make several new friends and one or two nemeses—but this particular passage from Copperfield is remarkable for its dearth of human beings. Yet the portraitist in Dickens can’t help but to personify the scene: houses have carcasses, wooden piles grow a substance like green hair, and rusty objects were vainly trying to hide themselves. The narrator deduces human history from visible artifacts: without conducting any interviews, he can tell that the houses were inauspiciously begun and never finished, and those rusty objects were accumulated by some speculator. Dickens has already betrayed his interest in people.

The passage’s main achievement, though, is to connect decay with industry by juxtaposing images. Nominally, we are presented with a neighborhood and a factory. But “the neighborhood” is a misnomer—it consists of a prison and a sort of graveyard for rotting houses, “rusty iron monsters,” and “drowned men.” We are left to infer that the factory is to blame, as it disturbs “everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke,” apparently the factory’s flagship product. A century after Copperfield, Joseph Schumpeter described the “creative destruction” of capitalism, but Dickens here shows us capitalism’s unredeemed destruction: abandoned houses, decaying wares (left by a “speculator”), and unidentified slush, ooze, sickly substance, and slimy gaps. The market may have a solution for every problem (”…last year’s handbills, offering rewards for drowned men”), but this passage displays, without overt commentary, capitalism’s grotesque aspect.

Further reading: David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)

I tremble a little before writing about Samuel Johnson. I cannot claim to illuminate his prose, but I will attempt to express the things I like about this little passage concerning Scottish windows (and the paragraphs that follow it) in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, Dr. Johnson’s rather intimidating version of “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.”

Dr. Johnson describes what’s not present as much as what is. The technique distinguishes a wise observer from one who is merely keen. The window pieces were not joining like cracked glass, the windows do not move upon hinges, and are seldom accommodated with weights and pullies. An experience is made equally of expectation and observation, and Johnson captures them both. Does this make Johnson a cultural imperialist, imposing his own standards and notions of window-ness upon a foreign people? Why, yes, actually. His Journey is filled with comparisons between England and Scotland, usually to the humiliation of the latter. I am guilty for laughing with him. The last sentence of the paragraph above was the funniest thing I read all week; I love the image of a man holding open a window to keep cool, and then the phrase “good contrivers” almost killed me. (The humor, of course, is that the “good contrivers” in England were a sight more clever.)

What I like about Johnson’s prose is that it is laden with both morality and understated wit, even in the mundanest details. What I love about it is that he cannot stay focused on these details for long, because his mind is busy understanding the generality at stake. That ability — perhaps I should say tendency or even constancy — to discern a large truth in detail endows Johnson’s prose with a gravity that I regard as greatness. He continues on the subject of Scottish windows:

What cannot be done without some uncommon trouble or particular expedient, will not often be done at all.

(Let me interrupt briefly to say how much I like that sentence. It is simple truth that needs no evidence, explanation, or citation, presented in a way that asserts: if you understand the semantics, you agree with the statement. The sentence could have been written by God Himself.)

The incommodiousness of the Scotch windows keeps them very closely shut. The necessity of ventilating human habitations has not yet been found by our northern neighbours; and even in houses well built and elegantly furnished, a stranger may be sometimes forgiven, if he allows himself to wish for fresher air.

Johnson simply cannot contemplate his subject without giving thought to both generality (What cannot be done…) and morality (a stranger may be sometimes forgiven…). I would that all writing about windows, pies, pets, and wildlife did not shy from such noble thoughts. I would that such writing had Johnson’s good manners, too: if he allows himself to wish for fresher air. Here is a man equally in control of his words and his desires. It’s like reading the prose of Jupiter, or King Solomon.

In fact, Johnson can’t even think about Scottish windows without thinking about the nature of writing about small things. His thoughts finally collect into quite a nice passage about writing, rich in images, long on truth. I refuse to injure the Doctor by taking the last word here for myself, so you must contemplate the paragraph on your own. The chapter on windows in Bamff terminates thus:

These diminutive observations seem to take away something from the dignity of writing, and therefore are never communicated but with hesitation, and a little fear of abasement and contempt. But it must be remembered, that life consists not of a serious of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments; the greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procurement of petty pleasures; and we are well or ill at ease, as the main stream of life glides on smoothly, or is ruffled by small obstacles and frequent interruption. The true state of every nation is the state of common life. The manners of a people are not to be found in the schools of learning, or the palaces of greatness, where the national character is obscured or obliterated by travel or instruction, by philosophy or vanity; nor is public happiness to be estimated by the assemblies of the gay, or the banquets of the rich. The great mass of nations is neither rich nor gay: they whose aggregate constitutes the people, are found in the streets, and the villages, in the shops and farms; and from them collectively considered, must the measure of general prosperity be taken. As they approach to delicacy a nation is refined, as their conveniences are multiplied, a nation, at least a commercial nation, must be denominated wealthy.

Further reading: A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (Samuel Johnson)

This medical mini-tract comes from that dark angel of English prose, Sir Francis Bacon. I don’t have any deep thoughts about it, but I do appreciate the use of a list or litany, even though I have no idea what any of the curatives are or how they are to be taken (my apothecary was fresh out of sarza, steele, flowers of sulphure, and castoreum). After setting up a complete thought (”you may take sarza to open the liver”), Bacon can convey similar thoughts just by naming the pairs of nouns to go in the appropriate places (”sulphure for the lungs”, “castoreum for the braine”). If he had so chosen, he could have pared down his prose even further, eliminating the word for (e.g., “flowers of sulphure, the lungs; castoreum, the braine…”), and his meaning would have been just as clear.

A list in prose serves the same purpose as a grocery list on the fridge; if you’ve already spent time driving to the store or thinking up a high-octane verb, bring home as many victuals as the trunk of your sentence can hold. And after Lord Bacon, append to the list something sweet and surprising (no receipt openeth the heart, but a true Frend…).

Further reading: The Essays of Sir Francis Bacon

In one scene, the newspaperman (Cary Grant, left in the picture above above) reads aloud a story-in-progress written by his ex-wife (Rosalind Russell, right). It concerns a murderer named Earl Williams and his confidant, Mollie Malloy:

And so, into this little tortured mind came the idea that that gun had been produced for use. And use it he did. But the state has a ‘production-for-use’ plan too. It has a gallows. And at seven a.m. unless a miracle occurs, that gallows will be used to separate the soul of Earl Williams from his body. And out of Mollie Malloy’s life will go the one kindly soul she ever knew.

This prose is the epitome of quick-witted journalism, the sort that perhaps can be composed only on a heavy typewriter while smoking unfiltered cigarettes in rapid succession. Each sentence kindles the next. Watch how produced for use in the first sentence lights up the next two sentences (use it he did, ‘production-for-use’ plan), which in turn provide the spark for the gallows, and then we get a sentence, lit in the middle, that burns both forwards and backwards (“that gallows will be used”), whose ends fortuitously meet at the end of the passage (“the one kindly soul she ever knew” is both the soul of Earl Williams and yes, a sort of miracle). These fissioning, dancing embers of prose, I must confess, left me with a pretty good secondhand buzz.

Further watching: His Girl Friday (written by Charles Lederer)

It started with a bill to form a committee to recommend whether sales of public lands should be suspended for a time. The bill reached the Senate floor in 1830; the debate should have been a snoozer, and it would have been, if Robert Hayne, the senior Senator from South Carolina, had not risen to speak about the bill’s connection to the nature of the American Union, and had not Daniel Webster risen to rebut him. The passage above comes from Webster’s second speech, delivered, if you can imagine, to the United States Senate, on January 27 of that year.

I like the passage because it is so thoroughly steeped in a sense of the past without actually animating it with detail (say with tales of fallen soldiers, or the Bill of Rights, or landscapes of the republic’s dark fields or purple mountains, or whatever); indeed the only specifics refer to accidents of our national flag’s design.

This sense of history (vague though it might be) comes not just from Webster’s basic conceit of bemoaning his fallen country from his deathbed; it is embroidered in the language itself, in his selected parts of speech. For instance, the two sentences above contain eleven past participles: broken, dishonored, dissevered, rent, drenched, known, honored, advanced, erased, polluted, and obscured.

Why are the parts of speech important? The past participle implies past action, that something was done; it is in its nature more historical than the equivalent adjective. To appreciate the effect, take the last two phrases:

not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured—

A lesser writer might have written, synonymously though less euphoniously:

not a stripe dirty or missing, nor a single star invisible—

dirty and missing tell us what the stripes are, to be sure; but they don’t tell us what happened. (Perhaps someone needed the flag fabric for a wedding dress?) Erased and polluted tell us how things are and how they came to be.

The passage has a hundred other merits, but rather than drone on about them, I’ll leave you with the rest of the passage, which formed the conclusion of Webster’s famous speech. It is a bit bombastic to 21st century, headphone-insulated ears—probably bombastic to 19th century horn-assisted ears as well—but its diction and drama merit study:

…not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single start obscured—bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as, What is all this worth? Nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first, and Union afterwards—but every where, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole Heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseperable!

Further reading: The Webster-Hayne Debate on the Nature of the Union (Daniel Webster, et al)

If one can get past H.L. Mencken’s harshness (his writing, I note, expanded my adolescent vocabulary to include cad, bounder, bosh, buncome, poltroon, charlatan, and mountebank), one can discover a number of admirable qualities in his prose. Among them I quite like the faux statistic, the technique of comparing two things, or else asserting a near-universality, with unresearched numerical specificity. The device appears in the passage above here: There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac. An acre, eh? Not a hectare, a square click or square mile? Mencken talks as if he had consulted his Atlas of Accomplished Gentlemen to arrive at his astonishing conclusion, but of course he consulted nothing other than his Muse.

The faux statistic instructs the mind to comprehend a particular magnitude; in expending the energy to imagine the size of an acre (how large is my backyard?), the imagination spends more time with the image and therefore finds it more vivid and compelling, even though the ratiocinating faculties demand more (some!) evidence. This trick might cause your college professor to spill half an ounce of red ink in protest, but if your concern is not cautious argument but a more spiritual Truth, there’s nothing more effective than a few made-up facts.

It’s tempting to discuss the sentence structure of this passage from Nixon Agonistes by Garry Wills; but the technique is so similar to our previous excerpt from Catch-22 that I’ll leave it alone. Instead I’ll discuss (briefly) the passage’s remarkable word pictures.

“RICHARD NIXON” makes a metaphor with typeface; the rest of the sentence tells us that Nixon is to be equated with a train, but without the caps we imagine Nixon (flesh and blood) jogging over railroad ties. The capital letters impress the image of a train car, with great block letters on the side. They simultaneously inspire awe, quite similar to indignant nouns and adjectives in revolutionary pamphlets (INDIGNANT NOUNS and ADJECTIVES).

The second picture is aural: “this churning engine that knew-that-it-could (rack-it-ty-tack), knew it would (racky-rack).” Wills turns an ethic into an image by way of parenthetical ideophones; the phrase is the sound, and the sound, in turn, is the engine. It’s imperfect onomatopoeia; imperfect only because Wills resorts to nonsense words to get the sound he needs (racky-rack). As a classics Ph.D., Wills must have known perfect onomatopoeia, and perhaps bemoaned its difficulty in English. The technique (conveying the sense of words by their sounds) was named by the Greeks and brought to perfection, I think, by the Romans. One of the most beautiful passages from The Aeneid goes:

Hunc circum innumerae gentes populique volabant,
ac velut in pratis ubi apes aestate serena
floribus insidunt variis et candida circum
lilia funduntur, strepit omnis murmure campus.

You think Wills did well to fit two word-pictures in one paragraph? Virgil packed three word-pictures in two lines of poetry. You need to read Latin to spot the first two (they’re visual, and slightly more subtle than RICHARD NIXON), but anyone can appreciate the last one, a picture in sounds: strepit omnis murmure campus. Say it aloud several times, maybe with a little bit of an Italian accent, like this:

strepit om-nis mur-mur-ay cam-pus.

(That’s where the accents fall in the line’s meter… just trust me here.) Can you guess what Virgil is describing? Here’s a hint: om, mur, cam… hum, hum, hum… buzz, buzz, buzz…

Bees! “The whole field hums with the murmur.”

Garry Wills probably was probably thinking more of Watty Piper than the poet Virgil while he was writing knew-that-it-could; but I suggest the classics connection because I don’t think Wills could have written that paragraph without the heightened sensitivity to language that comes with an education in ancient tongues. In my opinion, the best thing a writer of English can do, besides read English and write English, is to study Latin; to spend a little time with each word on the page; to comprehend the combined effects of their sound, order, and origin; and lastly to use that understanding to compose elegant, imaginative English.

Chance has it that the table where I write this is covered by a sheet of glass. Through my sleeves I feel the chill of that cold slippery stuff. How I would prefer to dictate, for none can match the written words of Lord Bacon. Only the humble working impromptu of live speech could stand up to that dark angel of English prose. It would be less wary than this, but more manly. Yet I feel, or have persuaded myself, that this cold plate under my elbows is somehow appropriate.

There is chill in the Essays too. It runs up the arms, it leaves one a little sick and shaken. Perhaps nowhere in literature do we more clearly see a Mind at work, and it frightens us. My Lord’s Northern Lights burn and steam like dry ice; our reason is thrilled, but also (in his own words) we find we are ‘full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to ourselves.’…

I am full of admiration for this passage. Like a good newspaper article (Morley was a reporter), it starts with a fact that begs a question: the fact being, the author’s table is covered in glass; the question being, who the hell cares?

This mystery pulls us through the author’s apology for taking on so great a subject, and on to the second paragraph where our answer is. I like the technique; if the preface had begun, “How I would prefer to dictate, for none can match the written words of Lord Bacon,” I would have thought, “Then why waste my time with this admittedly inferior preface?” and flipped through to the essays. But now I have to know why the glass is important.

Aha! The cold! The metaphor grabs you. “It runs up the arms, it leaves one a little sick and shaken.” No one can read that sentence and retain the heart to enforce the traditional prohibition against run-ons. “Northern Lights” is uncommonly witty: it continues the frigid theme, and in two words speaks to Bacon’s rarity, sublimity, and iridescence. The preface then segues into quoting bits of Bacon, each preserved in Morley’s magnificent frozen conceit, an aurora in its own right. Shortly after the ellipsis in the passage above, he calls Bacon’s writing “icicle aphorisms,” “winter-talk by the fireside,” “iced vermouth,” and—in a clause so elegant Morley had to crack it in half—”frostfires of beauty that coruscate—even against his will—in the arch of his arctic sky.”

The ice metaphor is, perhaps, overextended; one wonders whether Morley thought of every English word related to frozen water and made it a game to pack them into one paragraph. But they are all part of a larger design, not apparent in those first two paragraphs, nor in the middling paragraphs, which are altogether devoid of references to coldness. It is the final paragraph, simply written (no frostfires or coruscations), where the metaphor is fully realized, made affecting by its connection with the memorable beginning. Morley concludes his preface to Bacon thus:

As I write this it is snowing; one remembers the legend that a spring snowstorm killed him. He died as he lived, in a practical zeal for exact knowledge. To learn whether refrigeration really arrests decay he went outdoors to buy a drawn fowl and stuff it with snow. Maybe the Essays have kept so well, and will keep forever, for that same reason. Their entrails are packed with ice.

“How steady she goes,” thought Jim with wonder, with something like gratitude for this high peace of ease and sky. At such times his thoughts would be full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness, they passed before him with a heroic tread; they carried his soul away with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself. There was nothing he could not face. He was so pleased with the idea that he smiled, keeping perfunctorily his eyes ahead; and when he happened to glance back he saw the white streak of the wake drawn as straight by the ship’s keel upon the sea as the black line drawn by pencil upon the chart.

This passage, taken from one of many wandering footnotes in The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, bears a peculiar stateliness. Many of its great verbs have been freeze-dried into nouns, gerunds, and gerundives (gesticulative adaptation, extinguishing oscillation, lighting of a cigarette), such that the remaining predicates have all the sensory intensity of iceberg lettuce (has given rise to, could serve as, has been surrounded, is not one I would willingly forgo). I’m not sure whether I like it—I’m not sure whether I like astronaut ice cream—but it’s at least interesting.

I did enjoy the second half’s unprefaced list of images, people using the furnishings of modernity in specific ways, and its elegant synthesis in the ultimate sentence. It’s a great technique: first scatter the mind, and then reveal the hidden order. That revelatory sentence has an affecting grace: balance between technical invention and behavioral invention; mute folklore, a fine oxymoron if there ever was one; and three pairs of well-matched words in the final clause (”unregistered, unpatented, adopted and fine-tuned without comment or thought”).

The writing reminds me of a cathedral: carefully architected, its action frozen in so many panels and frescoes. It is conducive to silent meditation.