1 of 3
In her wonderful book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard tells this anecdote:
A well–known writer got collared by a university student who asked, 'Do you think I could be a writer?'
"Well," the writer said, "I don't know … . Do you like sentences?"
Since I first read this story many years ago, I have thought that the unnamed author—was it Dillard herself?—gave one of the best possible answers to that eternal question. For writing, the writing of prose anyway, is largely a matter of making sentences: hammering one together, connecting it to another, eventually framing a whole edifice. But one sentence at a time is the only way you can do it.
I may not be much of a writer, but I do like sentences; indeed I love them, and think about them a lot—shockingly often, really. I am one of the few remaining Americans blessed with the opportunity to walk to and from work each day, and as I walk I am likely to be rolling sentences around in my head. I have even stopped listening to This American Life on my iPod, the better to facilitate concentration. Sometimes, when I want extra time to consider my options—the walk is only about fifteen minutes—I take a detour to Starbucks. I enjoy the coffee, but I'm really just prolonging my commute for the sake of the sentences.
I am not sure that this obsession is wholly healthy. Not long ago I was writing an essay in which I planned to say a few words about a critic named Ilan Stavans, and I thought it appropriate to note that Stavans has a curious cultural situation: he was born Ilan Stavchansky, not in Russia or New York City or anywhere else you might expect someone with such a name to grow up, but in Mexico City. As a boy he attended a Yiddish school there, and now—he teaches at Amherst College—he seems to live at the intersections of the Yiddish, Spanish, and English languages. (You can learn more about Stavans' internal multiculturalism in his fine book, On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language.) All these reflections were appropriate, I thought, because the essay was about dictionaries, about language. But I found myself also wanting, perhaps without so much justification, to note that Stavans looks, in one photo anyway, rather like the actor Nick Nolte.
Now, at the time that I made the Nolte connection, I didn't know that Stavans was born Stavchansky; I wasn't sure what to make of the name Stavans. I just knew that he grew up in Mexico City and was Jewish. So I started trying to make a sentence based on my imperfect knowledge. Eventually I came up with something like this: "You wouldn't think Stavans was Jewish or Mexican, any more than you would think Nick Nolte (whom, to judge by the author photo on Dictionary Days, Stavans resembles) was Jewish or Mexican." But, I started asking myself, is that awkward? Does the parenthesis carry the point strongly enough? Perhaps I should use dashes instead. Now, "whom"—that's accurate, but it will sound wrong to some readers—should I rephrase? Maybe I should break the whole thing into two sentences, though getting it all into one sentence is the challenge, and therefore part of the fun … .
Lost in verbal carpentry, I did not for some time reflect that what the sentence said was probably not something I should commit to print. Of course, I was trying to make a little joke, but the reward of getting a smile from one or two readers was not worth the risk of sounding like a bigot: "Gee, he doesn't look Mexican! He doesn't look like a Jew!" Besides—the non–sentence–making portions of my brain creaked into action—Nick Nolte, though he looks pretty Northern European, did after all play an Italian in Lorenzo's Oil … and come to think of it, one of the reasons Stavans looks like Nolte is that his eyeglasses resemble the ones that Nolte wore in that movie. But wait: was it in that movie that Nolte wore the glasses? Maybe it was some other flick.
RSS Feed
