This was my first taste of James Salter himself, and his prose is exquisite, so well groomed that I was surprised to come to a sentence with what I considered a superfluous comma: “Eve was across the room in a thin, burgundy dress that showed the faint outline of her stomach.” It stopped me.
One of my duties as an apprentice on the copydesk was setting up the Christmas shopping lists that The New Yorker ran: columns and columns of merchandise, padded with as much charm as possible. There were gifts for children and for men, gifts for the house, and columns and columns about gourmet food, but it was the gifts for women that gave me the hardest time. Shopping for women invariably involved shopping for clothes, which meant strings of adjectives for color and fabric and nap and neckline and sleeve length: “old-fashioned Alpine house shoes, made of mouse-colored cattle-hair felt,” “an Anna Karenina muff of purple suède with a lavish trim of red and black fox fur and with a hidden zippered pocket-purse” ($985!), “coats in dense and furlike hand-knitted angora,” “roomy, below-the-knee culottes,” “a floor-length cardigan coat in leaf-patterned black silk jacquard” (followed by the price, the store—sometimes a possessive—and the address, all punctuated with military precision). I would get lost in the throngs of adjectives. What are the rules governing a comma between adjectives preceding a noun? I studied the Gould proofs, trying to divine the difference between the qualities that an adjective conferred on a noun and why sometimes whole long strings of them did not call for any commas. The usage guides say that if you can substitute “and” for the comma it belongs there. I gave James Salter the “and” test, and “thin and burgundy” did not pass. If this had crossed my desk, I would have taken the comma out and made it “a thin burgundy dress.”
The logic behind this rule is that the two adjectives are not coordinate: they do not belong to the same order. One adjective (“burgundy”) clings more tenaciously to the noun (“dress”) than the other (“thin”). Bryan Garner, the expert in American usage, offers another test: reverse the order of the adjectives. Would you ever say “a burgundy, thin dress”? I wouldn’t.
I wondered whether this was the author’s comma or whether it had slipped past the copy editor. I doubted that it was something a copy editor would add. This edition of Light Years was typographically flawless. Was it possible that the comma was retained at the author’s insistence? Consider the context: “Eve was across the room in a thin, burgundy dress that showed the faint outline of her stomach.” Was the author trying to emphasize the thinness of the fabric in order to linger over the “faint outline” of her stomach? If so, I thought he was misguided, not to say lecherous. (Her name is Eve: she’s obviously a temptress.) But was I going to let a superfluous comma prevent me from enjoying a good read? It didn’t stop me in Dickens, and it wouldn’t stop me in Salter. I persisted.
I have to admit that I was not completely impartial. Light Years had an introduction by Richard Ford, whose work I once tried to take a comma out of. The offending comma followed the word “So” at the beginning of a line of dialogue, and Ford preferred to retain it. The choice of Richard Ford for the introduction suggested to me that James Salter, like Richard Ford, might be stubborn about his punctuation. He might be one of the “ear” guys, the ones who think they have to orchestrate each sentence. I didn’t read Ford’s introduction. I never read an introduction that is not by the author: I find that it gets in the way, and can even prevent me from reading the book. I once tried to read Ivanhoe, because it was cited in some children’s series—Trixie Belden or Betsy and Tacy—and I got so bogged down in the scholarly pages with lowercase roman numerals that I never got to Sir Walter Scott. I still have never read Ivanhoe.
Then it happened again: “She smiled that stunning, wide smile.” The phrase “stunning and wide” doesn’t make it for me, and neither does “wide and stunning” (although I would have read right over “wide, stunning smile”). The narrator has already remarked on the wideness of the character’s smile (hence the “that” in “that stunning, wide smile”) and is intensifying its attractiveness at the second reference. “Stunning” qualifies the wide smile. Adjectives not coordinate. No comma.
Again: “It was as if they were aboard ship: some old, island steamer.” An “island steamer” is a kind of boat. There is no danger of someone’s misreading the phrase as a steamer from “some old island.”