OWW 1: Other Writers' Words

My kids brought home some horrible illness this week, so it’s a good time to start a recurring feature that I’ll put here, and perhaps also on social channels: OWW (other writers’ words). Yes, this hints at one of the less defensible parts of my ego, because seeing a perfect sentence that someone else wrote is a bit painful.

But in general OWW will be a chance to look at some great writing by other writers, to explain what I like about it, and hopefully to start a conversation about other bits of language that have lodged in your mind for whatever reason (comments welcome!). I have two for this week.

Edith Wharton’s purse

Here’s a small example from “The House of Mirth.” The protagonist Lily Bart is asking her aunt Julia for help. Julia is Lily’s guardian and has supported her, but Lily is in debt. Julia knows about the debt, but Lily doesn’t know that she knows. When Lily finally alludes to her situation, saying only that she has had “worries”, her aunt’s response is to say “Ah” […] “shutting her lips with the snap of a purse closing against a beggar.” This phrase does so much, from the pure descriptive precision of the thin-lipped snap, to what it reveals about Aunt Julia’s attitude towards charity. In this moment she sees her dependent niece, her heir, as a beggar, and we see this flash of miserliness and realize in that single syllable how this whole interview will go. One of the incredible achievements of this book is that there’s no clear-cut villain, and Lily’s progression throughout is due to individual choices that are each defensible. We might wish Julia had been more generous, but it’s certainly reasonable for her to refuse to pay her niece’s gambling debts. And yet you could argue that the trajectory of the entire second part of the novel proceeds from that reflexive moment of close-minded self-righteousness (I won’t spoil it - go read it!).

James Joyce’s snow

The other example this week is much better-known: the ending of “The Dead.” The character Gabriel has just had an epiphany as he thinks about his wife’s past life, which included a tragic romance. He realizes that many people, himself included, don’t fully live, and they’re all progressing towards death. And at the end of this description Joyce writes: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.“ When I first read that sentence over 20 years ago, the inverted repetition of falling faintly / faintly falling bothered me - it seemed showy and cheap. That’s the arrogance of a college student. Now, as far as I can tell, any change to that sentence makes it worse. It starts with this moment of drawn-out suspension, before it evokes snowflakes being tossed about on their slow path to the ground. The repetition-with-alteration is perfect for that kind of progress through eddies and updrafts. And as an exercise, try to relocate or remove that “all” in the final clause. As Salieri says of Mozart’s music in Amadeus: “Displace one note and there would be diminishment.”

That’s the kind of writing I want to occasionally highlight on OWW. What do you think? What perfect sentences do you think everyone should know?