In the Matter of the Commas

1.

At the Art Institute of Chicago, Joan Didion and her daughter, Quintana, were looking at a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. The work, Sky Above Clouds IV, hung across a landing, so they had a gulf of air between themselves and the flat white shapes that span a long wall at the museum. It is a giant painting, practically a mural, as wide as the abstract Barnett Newman canvases that you can walk along and let fill the whole of your vision. But this work floats at a distance, celestially, and you just look out at it. There are 192 square feet of clouds. You are in an airplane. “Who drew it?” Quintana whispered to her mother. “I need to talk to her.” On which Didion reflected, in her 1979 essay collection The White Album:

My daughter was making, that day in Chicago, an entirely unconscious but quite basic assumption about people and the work they do. She was assuming … that the painting was the painter as the poem is the poet, that every choice one made alone—every word chosen or rejected, every brush stroke laid or not laid down—betrayed one’s character. Style is character.

Didion held on to that belief throughout her career. How you write or paint is who you are, she thought. Sometimes she went further. Style not only showed your character but, as she wrote in a late novel, might even reveal your politics, your ideas about the world—what you had come to think and believe.

In his review of The White Album for The London Review of Books, Martin Amis mocked the scene with Quintana at the Art Institute. Style had nothing to do with character, he wrote. It was a ridiculous notion. In Chicago, Didion showed “how quickly sentimentality proceeds to nonsense,” Amis wrote. “If style were character, everyone would write as self-revealingly as Miss Didion. Not everyone does.” Plenty of writers remain anonymous, or produce books that seemingly have little to do with their real lives. Didion had fallen in love with an idea that could not withstand scrutiny, according to Amis. “The extent to which style isn’t character,” he wrote, “can be gauged by (for example) reading a literary biography, or by trying to imagine a genuinely fruitful discussion between Georgia O’Keeffe and Miss Didion’s seven-year-old daughter.”

2.

The most conspicuous mark of Renata Adler’s style is its abundance of commas. In her two novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983), there are a few sentences that edge on the absurd: “For some time, Leander had spoken, on the phone, of a woman, a painter, whom he had met, one afternoon, outside the gym, and whom he was trying to introduce, along with Simon, into his apartment and his life.” A critic tallied it up, counting “40 words and ten commas—Guinness Book of World Records?” Each of those commas had its grammatical defense, but Adler’s style did not comply with the usual standards of fluent prose. She cordoned off phrases, such as “on the phone,” that other writers would just run through. One reader, responding to a 1983 New York magazine profile of Adler, wrote in a letter to the editor, “If the examples of Renata Adler’s writing … are typical, Miss Adler will never make it to the road. The way is ‘jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption’ blocked by commas.” The reader was quoting one of Adler’s own comma-laden critical phrases against her. The editors titled the letter “Comma Wealth.”

Adler’s comma usage differs from the balanced rhythms of 18th-century essayists, as well as from the breathless lines common among American writers after Hemingway. Her punctuation jars, and turns abruptly, like a skater’s blade stopping and sending up shards of ice. She likes to leave out conjunctions in chains of adjectives, as in her film review of  “a leering, uncertain, embarrassing, protracted little comedy.” Certain lines of hers work almost entirely by carefully placed commas, which tighten the style, each one a rivet on the page: “But this I know, or think I know, that idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.” A hesitation, a stutter, and then a swing into the qualification (“unless they sleep a lot”). Interestingly, no comma in “bored and bored people”: grammar sacrificed for rhythm and speed.

Not everyone saw the elegant precision in how she pointed her sentences. After one of her books came out, a critic wrote that “virtually every sentence is peppered with enough commas to make the prose read like a series of hiccups.” Another letter writer complained of her “muddled syntax and wandering, endless sentences.”