The Perfect Sentence

“The short sentence can be powerful, but only in the company of the long sentence. We don’t want a herd of elephants thundering across the page, no more than we want an infestation of mice nibbling away at a subject and getting nowhere.”

Cultural products – that, I suspect, is the proper term in the brave new world of the entrepreneurial that has reigned supreme for the last forty years – are profoundly different from one another in a way that other products aren’t. Motor cars and tubes of toothpaste, to take two examples at the opposite ends of the spectrum, obviously differ to some extent but they both follow fundamental specifications that determine what they are. Books, which do have, it’s true, the basic specifications of a spine holding together varied numbers of pages between a soft or hard cover, are mere containers for the text which in almost every case is entirely unique. That is something I have always believed, but I had given little thought to how each edition (of those books lucky enough to have had more than one) can differ from one other and acquire other additions as they sit out the passing years – until I came across a slim cloth-bound volume squeezed between larger tomes on my bookshelf just a few days ago.

The book looks as though it was published in the first three decades of the twentieth century, which makes sense because German innovations to the more rudimentary paperbacks of the past in 1931 opened the way for them to dominate the mass market. But I can’t know exactly when it was published because it doesn’t have the imprint page we’re now accustomed to. No ISBN, no copyright statements, nothing. The only information it offers up is that it was produced by “T. Nelson and Sons Ltd, Printers and Publishers”, which was founded in Edinburgh in 1798 and Wikipedia tells me that it has been subsumed in fairly recent times into News Corporation with its headquarters in America. Immediately after opening the “cloth” cover I find that my mother’s name has been written three times for some reason, once in pen and twice in pencil, using for her forename the nickname of her childhood. It is not her handwriting as I knew it, which was jagged and impatient. This is relaxed, rounded and very regular. This made me think of the multiplicity of human lives which are not only the seven billion or more currently existing on the planet and the innumerable ones of the past, because each life is a long and stringy thing, even a short one. Each life is a collection of lives and constantly changing cultures. This triple autographed assertion of her possession of this book came from a time in her life I know only through the vague shading of a few anecdotes. Her father dug deep into his pocket to pay for the last two years of the schooling his only child went through, so she left her Highland village for Edinburgh. This brief sojourn in the capital changed her more than he probably intended. It unsettled her. It encouraged her to disown (to some extent) her language and the embrace the Anglo-Saxon one, and gave her the desire to leave the Highlands and to leave Scotland. It also gave her a homing device for the Edinburgh middle classes which she could unearth in any part of the world with the olfactive precision of a bloodhound. This was not a subservient relationship but a love-hate one: the desire to please and the desire to control and impress. The calligraphy I encountered at the very start of this book undoubtedly belonged to her pre-boarding-school self.

I moved on to the title page and discovered that it was none other than Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. This edition comes with an introduction by the author himself, called “My First Book”, in which he explains that it wasn’t his first book, but his first published novel. The readers had elected it to be his first book and he was happy follow his “paymasters” in that. The twelve pages are full of information on his attitude to technique and the various vicissitudes that led to the book’s success. You sense that he enjoyed writing this “story for boys” which had “no need of psychology or fine writing”. “I have begun (and finished) a number of other books, but I cannot remember to have sat down to one of them with more complacency.” You also feel that it was in his own mind slightly beneath him or at least beneath his later self: “[It] seemed the springtide of a somewhat pedestrian inspiration.” A friend of his was dismissive of the whole thing: “… the very name of my enterprise would suggest to him only capitulations of sincerity and solecisms of style. Well, he was not far wrong.” “[Comparing] it with the almost contemporary Merry Men … no expert can fail to see that one [style] is much more difficult and the other much easier to maintain.” I wonder if modern editions of Treasure Island also come with this intriguing essay.

Then I read the first sentence of the book, which is also the first paragraph. “Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17–, and go back to the time when my father kept the ‘Admiral Benbow’ inn, and the brown old seaman with the sabre-cut first took up his lodging under our roof.” Not bad for “a story for boys”! But I doubt that this ninety-word and fairly Italianate sentence would meet with much approval amongst the current exponents of belles-lettres. They prefer the minimal and the succinct. The striking feature of this first sentence is its density, which imparts a great deal of information as well as setting the scene. I now know from the introduction that the map of the island predated even this first sentence. For Stevenson, images suggest words, and words, if they’re doing their job, evoke images.

The death of the long sentence – sinuous, dense and complex – has been unfortunate, to say the least. Not that I’m suggesting the ubiquity of the Victorian long sentence, which was just another kind of uniformity. The short sentence can be powerful, but only in the company of the long sentence. We don’t want a herd of elephants thundering across the page, no more than we want an infestation of mice nibbling away at a subject and getting nowhere. The problem is that if the reader loses the ability to read long, complex sentences, we have a problem. And we learn such skills in childhood.

I read somewhere that a French novelist claimed that a novel is written to justify a single sentence that lies at its core. This, at the very least, is a gross exaggeration, even if we’ve recalled that Stevenson wrote a novel initially to justify a map he drew while in the company of a friend who was painting. Like most exaggerations, there is a kernel of truth: a novel departs from a sometimes very circumscribed idea, but in the writing other ideas are generated which very often turn out to be more significant. Every sentence is important, and every sentence has a particular job to do, which also defines the length of the sentence. Length is important not only because it generates the rhythm of the prose, but also because it is open to greater syntactical variety, having in its length room for more complex forms. It adds colour.

The perfect sentence is not the central subject of Rein Raud’s The Death of the Perfect Sentence (translated beautifully by Matthew Hyde and published by Vagabond Voices in 2017); he doesn’t answer the question but he does ask it in the age in which the novel hasn’t died, as had so often been predicted in the last half century but has been demoted from its central position in our culture during the last decade or so. This novel, however, is so much more than literature yet again examining itself. It is above all this prolific author’s attempt to investigate his country’s second independence with its achievements and disappointments. Here we return to Estonia and the literary culture we have most closely engaged with.

Given the imbalance of power, small countries become independent because of external events, and Estonia did this twice in a century. Long ago I witnessed the run-up to the war that led to the independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan. It was triggered by the electoral victory of a party that only wanted greater autonomy, but the suppression of parliament and the brutal military campaign that followed could only lead to secession. However, loyalties did not exactly follow national ones, so I was unsurprised by the tangle of intrigues that characterise this Estonian thriller’s plot: for example a Russian takes risks to get information to the young hotheads, who have their own KGB spy in their midst who happens to be Estonian. Typically the older generation are sometimes more cautious. Quite reasonably they want to sit it out.

Raud is an exceptional linguist even in a nation where a good knowledge of two or three languages on top of the native tongue appears to be common. He is amongst other things a scholar of Japanese, and teaches at Tallinn and Helsinki universities, as well as occasionally teaching as a visiting professor at other European universities. We hope to bring more of his books to your attention in the future.

Allan Cameron, Glasgow, June 2020