The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler. Here is a sentence from the novelist Edward St. Aubyn, an excellent writer: “Walking down the long, easily washed corridors of his grandmother’s nursing home, the squeak of the nurse’s rubber soles made his family’s silence seem more hysterical than it was.” It seems shrewish to find fault with one sentence out of the millions of exquisitely wrought ones in a 680-page compilation of four novels by a prose wizard. But I’m going to anyway. It was not the “squeak” that was “walking down the long, easily washed corridors” (and yes, that phrase conjures up the underpaid mopper of corridors and the layer of hard wax, like corn, over the faint, ineradicable scent of urine), or even “the nurse’s rubber soles” (so hideously clinical), but the “nurse,” who is buried in a possessive.
The editor who would dare tinker with this sentence has two options: she can try an active verb in the participial phrase (“As the nurse walked down the long, easily washed corridors of his grandmother’s nursing home, the squeak of her rubber soles . . .”). Or she can try to change the main clause so that the subject is the thing modified by the participial phrase: “Walking down the long, easily washed corridors of his grandmother’s nursing home, the nurse in her squeaky rubber soles . . .” Well, good luck with that. It’s the squeak, not the nurse, that makes the silence seem hysterical. Nothing I can do would improve this sentence. If it had been pointed out to the author, he might have rewritten it or he might have said he didn’t see anything wrong with it. So it turns out there is a third option: do nothing. Sometimes it’s easier to reconcile oneself to the dangler than it is to fix it. In this instance, maybe the queasiness created by the dangler, that sense of imbalance, whether or not one knows the reason for it, helps convey the sensation of walking down the corridor of the dreaded nursing home.
Not too long ago, in a piece by the incomparable George Saunders, I had to deal with a dangler. Saunders writes fiction, and often his narrative voice is not an educated one. After spending two days on a piece written in the form of the diary of a well-meaning but benighted family man (“The Semplica-Girl Diaries”), I found myself thinking in Saunders’s fragments. Guy sounds like some kind of hick. Inner dialogue like Tarzan. Go home, take strong drink, preferably Negroni (gin, not vodka). Next day, try again.
The story had in its first column a dangler that, even knowing that people use danglers, I found it hard not to want to fix: “While picking kids up at school, bumper fell off Park Avenue.” Technically, in Saunders’s sentence, the bumper is picking the kids up at school. (“Park Avenue” refers to an old Buick.) The fix, though, would do violence to the voice—the narrator’s diary is written in note-taking fashion, so the subject is often left out (“Stood looking up at house, sad”). The easiest fix for the bumper sentence is to put a subject into the introductory phrase, making a proper clause out of it—“While I was picking the kids up at school”—but this would drain the sentence of character. You may wish that Tarzan had gone to school, or at least been exposed to educational TV, but you wouldn’t want to change his diction. As the piece is written in a telegraphic style, I could tell myself that the “I was” was implied, and therefore the bumper was being propped up invisibly (until it fell off).
The piece also had numbers in it—that is, numerals—which I instinctively didn’t touch. No styling $200 into two hundred dollars when a guy is doing his household budget in his diary. He also uses plus signs and equal signs. He does not put quotation marks around speech. His object is to set down “a picture of life and times” for “future people.” He does not need to prettify it. Let him say “hopefully” instead of “it is to be hoped that,” leave the parentheses within parentheses [brackets would be worse], don’t expect him to put commas around “too,” in “he too once had car whose bumper fell off.”