Great sentences are like earworms: they stick with you, sometimes without consent. I am an inveterate earworm sufferer. If I’m stuck with a song (one day of Northwest Passage is great, three or four days are more than enough) I find the best way to rid myself of it is to listen more closely, to think about the lyrics and the rhythm and try to put my finger on what it’s holding over me.
It’s the same experience if you’ve ever scribbled down a line from a book or a quote from an author. You might not really know why you like the line so much, but you’re still compelled to collect and keep the sentence. If, as Virginia Woolf tells us, words themselves are ‘highly democratic’, believing (amongst themselves) that ‘one word is as good as another’, why are some sentences so much better than others? And how do the writers we idolise pull it off?
As with an earworm, the way to answer these questions is to pay close attention. In his essay on Claire-Louise Bennett from his new book, SUPPOSE A SENTENCE, Brian Dillon talks about the idea of writerly ‘sensibility’ – the thing that distinguishes a writer’s voice and style:
Old-fashioned word, but how else to describe this fog of feelings, attachments and fantasies […] express[ed] so precisely and yet so enigmatically in her prose?
It is this often-intangible quality that Dillon is looking to unpack and introduce to his reader in SUPPOSE A SENTENCE, the thing that turns a good sentence into a welcome earworm, the sort of thing worth copying into and between notebooks and that rewards twelve pages’ close reading. Each of the twenty-seven essays collected in SUPPOSE A SENTENCE examines a single sentence that has stuck with Dillon throughout his time as a reader and a writer.
Some essays stretch to ten or fifteen pages, others cover little more than a page. We move from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, starting with Shakespeare and ending with Anne Boyer. Often they come from a writer’s B-side: we’re read to from John Ruskin’s diary; Joan Didion’s Vogue captions; John Donne’s funeral elegy and Shakespeare’s early drafts. (Even they had howlers.) In some essays, Dillon focuses on a single word choice, or possible word choices, examining the etymology and history of the verb or noun upon which a sentence hinges; in others, he considers how different clauses are weighted and stacked against one another and how this shapes meaning and expression. Dillon is a knowledgeable guide, and alongside the practical criticism his asides about how he came to each author give SUPPOSE A SENTENCE a personal, persuasive tone. Here is an interesting friend talking you through something cool he once read, oh, years back now.
With each sentence acting as a roundabout introduction to a writer, I ended up treating SUPPOSE A SENTENCE as a collection of biographies-in-miniature, a set of potted histories that introduced me to a handful of new writers I’d never heard of and whetted my appetite to finally take a punt on a few others I’ve been neglecting. This was something I enjoyed most about SUPPOSE A SENTENCE, the sense of discovery; I’m grateful for the tip-offs, and I will look out especially for Whitney Balliet and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
More than this, Dillon illustrates how each writer’s prose style typifies their anxieties as writers and the conditions under which they wrote. The extreme rigour of Joan Didion’s editors at Vogue in the 1960s, who pared down her captions to the minimal and often left journalists in tears – ultimately this experience taught her to write well and better. John Ruskin’s cloud-diaries reveal more than anticipated about his mental anguish and the encroaching terror of modernity. Woolf’s thought on illness is etched into the rhythm and grammar of her language. And has anyone ever been so bodied in prose as Norman Mailer when James Baldwin called him “a real sweet ofay cat, but a little frantic”? These sentence crystalise the essence of how great writers write so well, and go some way to illuminate the greatness of their works.
From Trump’s loggorea to the wording of a user license agreement, the language we use matters as much as what we mean to say by it. Looking at how some talented writers have wielded the nuts and bolts of language, Dillon raises compelling questions about where the sentence has been and what we can do with it next. That essay on James Baldwin introduced me to the word ‘ofay’, which I hadn’t heard before. Ofay is an offensive term for white people but, as Dillon reveals, its origins, meaning and the rudeness have never been fixed. Baldwin’s using it to describe (indirecily) Norman Mailer, a witless cultural appropriator of the Afro-American jazz scene, is a brilliant taste of how a writer like Baldwin can break down and remake language and make words do something new and interesting.
These sentences have been collected over a lifetime’s reading, sifted from the hundreds of lines and phrases that Dillon has copied into the A5 commonplace books ‘at home in the hand or on the desk’. It is a novel constraint for an essay collection; Dillon’s earlier collection ESSAYISM (2017) touched on a similar idiosyncrasy in considering how to critically approach, somewhat paradoxically, the tricksome essay form. I was prompted to look back over my own A5 notebooks and see which sentences have stuck with me over the years. I want to give this a go myself. Whose sentences would I choose; whose would you? Dillon surprised himself with who he left out – no Melville, Sebald, Joyce or Burton (‘No Proust – no Proust!), and other writers didn’t make the cut, whether because working on them was too dull or because Dillon felt ‘shamefully, in at least one case, I found I was not up to the task’. But the sentences which did make it into the final manuscript are those worth the time. These are Dillon’s earworms, and SUPPPOSE A SENTENCE is a delightful exercise in taking pleasure in writing and good craft.
Brian Dillon’s SUPPOSE A SENTENCE is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Buy it from their website or from Foyles or Waterstones.