Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

  Literary journalism couples cold fact and personal event, in the author’s humane company. And that broadens readers’ scans, allows them to behold others’ lives, often set within far clearer context than we can bring to our own. The process moves readers, and writers, toward realization, compassion, and in the best of cases, wisdom.

  I’ll even claim that there is something intrinsically political—and strongly democratic—about literary journalism, something pluralistic, pro-individual, anti-cant, and anti-elite. That seems inherent in the common practices of the form. Informal style cuts through the obfuscating generalities of creeds, countries, companies, bureaucracies, and experts. And narratives of the felt lives of everyday people test idealizations against actualities. Truth is in the details of real lives.

  What a chasm seems to lie between these two worldviews. How modest Kramer’s claim that the “literary journalist” might in some way act politically—act that way, in effect, by not acting that way, by not directly engaging the great forces that dominate our time. This is how many of the current generation of writers have lived, at least as writers. Or so it sometimes seems.

  One would never want to say that writing has not played a part in great events, but its power to do so has never been straightforward or certain. James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book of social protest, an enduring portrait of the miseries of Depression-era southern sharecroppers. It is felt to be a classic now, but was ignored during the era it describes. Even John Milton could go unheard in his time. Areopagitica, his eloquent plea for freedom of expression, was addressed directly to the British Parliament, which, we are told, ignored it. But countless writers of the past clearly believed in the possibility of affecting their times through writing. Certainly some modern nonfiction writers lack that faith—or have been cured of it. But not all, and many who may indeed lack the faith still strive to write “politically.” The essayists who publish their reasoned protests in small-circulation magazines, for instance. Or the journalists who believe that recounting the experiences of individuals is one powerful means of describing the real costs of an era’s social ills, and who feel that even if their protest isn’t heard, it will be lodged; that there is value in “bearing witness.”

  In 2012, an American writer named Katherine Boo published a book about a slum called Annawadi, situated near the international airport and opulent hotels in Mumbai. The book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, is built on the intersecting stories of several families and individuals in the slum: garbage pickers, petty thieves, worried parents, all victims of gruesome poverty and outrageous injustice. This is difficult material transformed by story, by Boo’s skill in making those unfortunate people real—people with hopes and plans and flaws and virtues, all looking for ways to improve their lives, people at bottom not all that different from anyone else, people the reader roots for and occasionally against. One hardly notices while reading their stories that the author is also supplying some of the sociopolitical context in which the stories occur, not a sanitized but a distilled context, so lightly insinuated that we feel we understand the forces that afflict these people.

  It is only at the end of this book, in her “Author’s Note,” that Boo addresses us directly. We learn that she spent almost four years in Annawadi, conducting, among other things, both interviews and door-to-door household surveys. (The “vagrant sociology approach,” she calls this. She also collected, laboriously, more than three thousand official documents.) She allows that the story of one slum can never be called “representative of a country as huge and diverse as India.” But, she writes, “I was struck by commonalities with other poor communities in which I’ve spent time.” She writes briefly but persuasively on several big subjects in this note—about corruption, for instance, telling us that one of its great and underacknowledged effects is “a contraction not of economic possibility but of our moral universe.”

  And she also tells us her intentions: “When I settle into a place, listening and watching, I don’t try to fool myself that the stories of individuals are themselves arguments. I just believe that better arguments, maybe even better policies, get formulated when we know more about ordinary lives.” This is one contemporary author’s “Why I Write.” Her approach is different from Orwell’s but the spirit is much the same. She too, it seems, is trying to make political writing an art.

  The passage from Orwell and the contemporary code expressed by Kramer—“Truth is in the details of real lives”—represent a spectrum of possibility for a writer. No one should presume to tell anyone where to fit on this spectrum, but one should recognize that it exists. Even those who have been trained in a language of distance and irony toward everything institutional, and especially toward government, must feel from time to time that there is something that justifies thinking in Orwell’s terms—that there is something about one’s own time that demands response. But what response, and how to make it? One can only say it is possible that writers live most fully when their work moves beyond performance, beyond entertainment or information, beyond pleasing audience and editor, when it does all that and yet represents their most important beliefs.

  * * *

  *I read the first paragraph and flung the magazine across the room, and picked it up again about twenty years later. —TK

  6

  THE PROBLEM OF STYLE

  H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage belongs on every writer’s shelf, and there it was on mine, but the book became a real presence in my life only when William Whitworth took over as the eleventh editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Whitworth had no connection with New England. He grew up in Arkansas and still had the soft accent of the region, and he had previously worked as a senior editor at The New Yorker, but in a way he was more Boston than Boston itself, proper and punctilious. Before Whitworth, most of the editors concentrated on politics, foreign affairs, literary trends, and long lunches, not always in that order. The finer points of grammar and punctuation were handled on another floor. But under Whitworth, commas became everybody’s business. He quickly became known for his acute, if sometimes demoralizing, marginal comments on proofs. He wrote with a mechanical pencil in a tiny but astonishingly legible hand. Most maddening of all was his occasional apology—“I’m reading fast”—appended to an observation that most editors could not have made if they had taken all day. His comments often concerned subtle grammatical violations, and after noting one, such as “a possessive can’t be an antecedent,” he might add, “See Fowler.” “See Fowler” became a popular sotto voce mutter among the temporarily traumatized staff. We had not thought ourselves in need of reform, but a reformer was upon us.

  Kidder ran afoul of Whitworth’s pencil more than once. He (that is, Kidder: a possessive can’t be an antecedent, remember?) submitted his first manuscript of the new regime on “corrasable bond,” the thin paper that once made life easy for erring typists. “Never again this paper, please,” said the tiny handwriting, darker and more emphatic than usual and suggestive of strong feeling. Kidder, no doubt encouraged by my grumblings, had already formed a low opinion of the interloper who was threatening the clubhouse good spirits of the magazine where we had both been trying to make our mark. Kidder did not take this rebuff well.

  The Atlantic was to publish an excerpt, actually a condensation, of his forthcoming book, The Soul of a New Machine. This was logical—not only was it an Atlantic Monthly Press book, but it had virtually been written in the offices of the magazine—and it was also good news for the book’s prospects. By this time, the book had been copyedited, but it still had to go through the magazine’s own routine. Kidder’s galleys now faced Whitworth’s scrutiny.

  A number of issues came up, but the one I remember best had to do with an indelicate quote. A computer engineer was quoted as saying of the new machine he was designing that it would go “as fast as a raped ape.” Whitworth struck the line on grounds that it was vulgar, which, of course, it was. But was that sufficient reason to deny the writer th
e use of it, given the distancing effect of quotation marks? And (my immediate concern) how was Kidder going to react to this proposition?

  There are two kinds of dog. One will drop a stick at your foot. The other will clamp down harder on the stick the more you try to pry it out of his mouth. Reporters tend to be the second kind of dog. Kidder is ordinarily quite open to suggestion, but it was clear that he did not want to let go of his quote, and he resented the assumption that he would do so.

  I was caught in the middle. On the one hand, one would not want to lose one’s life or job, or even a night’s sleep, defending the phrase “raped ape.” On the other hand, this was my writer, and the quote was the quote and it was only a quote, and to lose it would leave a hole in the scene. It did seem to me that the dignity of the magazine could survive our printing the distasteful words.

  Whitworth was so exercised on the point that he had devoted a long sardonic marginal note to imagining the sort of person who would use the phrase. He said among other things that it sounded like a college sophomore who had bongo drums in his room and fake African tribal masks on his wall (admittedly a telling argument).

  But we were not the people who used it, I argued.

  But by implication we were, Whitworth countered. Our use of it, he said, was “endorsive.”

  What does he mean by that? said Kidder, in a more emphatic way. Where did he come up with that word?

  In the end the quote did not survive. Whitworth showed no sign of yielding and Kidder, though not convinced, stopped insisting. Was the right thing done? It’s certainly true that Whitworth was trying to protect the elegance of his new magazine’s pages. But he also had a point, which we might have seen more clearly had antler bashing not been involved. Out of curiosity I recently looked back at the passage in question. It was one in which Kidder describes his subject in a way that was clearly meant to make the engineer sound interesting to the reader. If the reader thought the author was impressed with the wit of “raped ape”—well, that would indeed have been “endorsive,” and bad news for the author.

  This miniature moment suggests the varieties of ways in which the style of a piece of writing is formed—the choice of a quote, a single word, the honoring or dishonoring of a grammatical nicety. We think of an author’s style as if it were some sort of fixed identity, but it is made up of an accumulation of granular decisions like this one. I remember once in those early days giving Kidder some advice about style. I said in effect, “Look, you are not always the calmest and most reasonable person in the room, and there is no need to be. But you admire such people. Why don’t you just pretend to be a reasonable man in your prose?” I think it was useful advice, actually, but it’s not as if a style is a one-time discovery. It is created and re-created sentence by sentence, choice by choice.

  Whitworth and Kidder ultimately made their peace and became friends. One day years later, in a different situation, Kidder and I found ourselves wondering without irony if the use of another questionable quotation sounded “endorsive.” Meanwhile, The Atlantic under Whitworth’s direction went on to become what was, at least at the level of sentence and paragraph, the best-edited magazine in America.

  A couple of H. W. Fowler’s more eloquent pronouncements appear in this chapter. Perhaps they will win some more converts. Really, every writer who doesn’t already have one should buy a copy of Modern English Usage. Note that I said “buy,” however, and not “purchase.” No one who has read Fowler on “genteelisms” will ever again use “purchase” as a verb.

  —RT

  “Omit needless words” goes the advice from Elements of Style, by Strunk and White, and no one would disagree. On the other hand: How do you recognize a needless word? Should Lincoln have written not “Four score and seven” but “eighty-seven”? In King Lear’s dying speech—“Never, never, never, never, never”—which word would you cut?

  The familiar rules about writing turn out to be more nearly half-truths, dangerous if taken literally. They are handy as correctives, but not very useful as instruction. The authorities say to avoid the verb “to be” and the passive voice, and to write with active verbs instead. Sit down at a desk declaring, “Today I write with active verbs,” and you will likely end up in parody or paralysis. But notice that a paragraph depends too much on the verb “to be,” and you may open a route to revision.

  The verb “to be” and the passive voice are unfairly maligned. God invented both for a reason. Just turn to the Bible: “In the beginning was the word, … and the word was God.” No one would accuse that verb of weakness. Or Shakespeare: “There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood …” (the verb “to be” and the passive both). Occasionally the supposed weakness of a verb can accentuate the nouns around it. Hemingway demonstrates this throughout his work. Any writer should use “to be” forms without apology when defining, or naming, or placing something. Consider the passive voice when the thing done is more important than the doer. Don’t lean on these usages, but don’t contort your prose to avoid them, either.

  “Never use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do” said Mark Twain, and this advice seems to be universally accepted. True, there is no faster way to make a passage impenetrable than to accumulate long Latinate words. But much of the force of English derives from the conquests and invasions that gave it multiple sources. It is almost impossible to write prose in English without blending short, blunt Anglo-Saxon with more formal Latinate words, and the way you blend them matters. It is a little-noted fact that a reader’s eye, just glancing at a page, can tell something about the contents simply by registering its texture. The mere look of your prose can invite readers to go on, or can warn them off before they read a word.

  Great writers across the centuries have found their own ways to exploit the great variety of sounds available in English. Take for instance these lines of Emily Dickinson:

  Presentiment is the long shadow on the lawn—

  Indicative that suns go down—

  Notice to the startled grass—

  That darkness is about to pass.

  A vigorous hybrid diction enforces the natural rhythms of English. So do be wary of an abundance of Latinate words, but don’t automatically favor shorter words.

  Although many are simplistic, all rules of writing share a worthy goal: clear and vigorous prose. Most writers want to achieve that. And most want to achieve something more, the distinction that is called a style. It’s an elusive goal, but the surest way to approach it is by avoiding the many styles that offer themselves to you. The world brims over with temptations for the writer, modish words, unexamined phrases, borrowed tones, and the habits of thought they all represent. The creation of a style often begins with a negative achievement. Only by rejecting what comes too easily can you clear a space for yourself.

  Some modes of writing are so familiar that they fall easily into categories. Let’s take four of them, starting with the language in which so many writers have begun their professional education:

  JOURNALESE

  Daily journalism offers invaluable lessons in the venality of human nature and in the universal logic of politics, and also skills of great value to all nonfiction writers: getting facts right, saying no more than facts support, and writing fast. But reporting the news, especially on tight deadlines, is a specialized form of expression, a style of its own that finds its way into kinds of writing where it doesn’t belong.

  It’s as if the world of news is governed by special physical laws. Things skyrocket or soar, or they plummet or plunge. They slam into other things (airplanes into mountainsides, hurricanes into shores). If many journalistic clichés are dramatic, others are unnecessarily cautious. In journalese, events seldom cause one another; they tend to happen in the wake of other events. Sometimes events simply happen amid other events, “amid widespread charges of corruption” or “as corruption charges swirl.” These clichés get used for a good reason: that cardinal virtue of journalism, of not overstep
ping one’s bounds. But the writer unbound by newsroom conventions can avoid such stale evasions.

  It is a premise of newswriting that “space is tight.” Sometimes it is, sometimes not, but by convention it always is, and so methods for compressing language have become conventional, too. Possessives replace prepositional phrases: “Chicago’s O’Hare,” “New York’s Central Park.” Nouns are used as adjectives: “Novelist William Faulkner” (or “Nobel Prize–winning novelist William Faulkner”). Similar identifiers become slightly absurd: “Motorist Rodney King,” “Missing Mom Susan Powell,” “Two-time Grammy nominee …” Many writers outside of newsrooms have adopted this construction, maybe in an effort to seem official or urgent.

  There is no need to rush. Give everything the time it deserves. Here is a very slow sentence from an article by Janet Malcolm in The New Yorker, a magazine that has long stood watch against journalese: “On the second day of David Souter’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in September, 1990, Gordon Humphrey, a Republican senator from New Hampshire, with something of the manner of a boarding school headmaster in a satiric novel, asked the nominee, ‘Do you remember the old television program Queen for a Day?’ ”

  This sentence doesn’t have much urgency. In fact, it has a studied leisure, but one senses that the author is up to something. Here is the sentence rewritten in journalese: “ ‘Do you remember the old television program Queen for a Day?’ asked headmasterly New Hampshire Republican senator Gordon Humphrey of then nominee David Souter at his September 1990 Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings.” That’s about half the words of the original, and with the pertinent information up front. The facts are all there, but the tone is gone. And if you listen to these sentences, you realize that the original has the motion, let’s say, of a woman bending over gracefully to pick something up, while the other is more like a woman falling down stairs.