My heart leaped up when I read in the Times about an appearance by three stellar British writers—Salman Rushdie introducing a conversation between Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. The reporter, Jennifer Schuessler, described them as “the Three Tenors” of the literary world. Audience members had submitted questions, which Rushdie read aloud. One of the questions was “Is there anything in your books that you wish you could change?” As Schuessler noted, it was poignant to hear Rushdie read the question aloud. McEwan “admitted he’d like to kill some commas in his first story collection.” This was just the kind of confession that I had been secretly hoping to elicit from James Salter.
But it turned out that McEwan meant not superfluous commas that he had stubbornly insisted on but commas pressed into service in place of periods, in defiance of grammar-school teachers everywhere, who call this a “comma fault”: the separation of full sentences by a comma instead of a period. It’s all right in something like “I came, I saw, I conquered,” but in anything longer the period is not just preferred but dictated. It’s an inarguable tenet of punctuation: the period at the end of the sentence makes you stop and tells you that a new sentence is about to begin. Otherwise you have the despicable “run-on sentence.” And yet sometimes in fiction of a very high order you see sentences that have been spliced together with commas and you wonder . . . Chances are that if the piece has been published, the commas are not a mistake: someone, probably the author, insisted. The express-style sentences may be telling you something about the narrator. The Italian writer Elena Ferrante (a pen name) rushes from one sentence to the next, with a breathless pause, and the cumulative effect is of great urgency in the storytelling. I wasn’t able to find McEwan’s early collection; perhaps on account of those commas it has been suppressed. Anyway, he seems to have repented. I’ve copy-edited excerpts from his novels that ran in The New Yorker, and I don’t remember encountering any noxious commas in the terminal position. “I fell under Beckett’s spell,” McEwan said of his early efforts. “I thought it was jolly cunning to have commas and not full stops. But now it doesn’t look cunning at all.”
Now, there’s a writer who would have fewer regrets if he had listened to his copy editor.
Chapter 6
WHO PUT THE HYPHEN IN MOBY-DICK?
I ALWAYS WANTED TO WRITE A BOOK, but it looked really hard: how did you get all the lines to come out even on the right-hand side of the page? I puzzled over this with a toy typewriter in the basement as a girl, never dreaming that one day all I would have to do is click on the icon for “justify right,” and the words would automatically swell or squeeze to fit a line. Justification was never the writer’s problem, anyway, but the typesetter’s, and ever since Gutenberg the typesetter has had a friend in the hyphen, always at hand to break a word, with or without regard for pronunciation or etymology.
People have surprisingly strong feelings about word breaks. A long time ago I met a man on a ship in the Dodecanese who complained to me about the way The New Yorker broke “English” and “England.” We follow Merriam-Webster’s, which divides words phonetically, giving us “English,” “England.” Webster’s New World Dictionary (among others) divides words along meaningful units and goes with “English” and “England.” What bothered my shipmate was the way “glish” and “gland” looked on the next line, especially at the top of a column.
What bothered me was that here in the Aegean an American—a college English professor, to judge by the tan Hush Puppies he wore—was grilling me about word breaks. (He also complained about his subscription.) The truth is that I, too, disliked it: “glish” and “gland” are unsightly stand-alones. Yet I was deeply invested in our way of doing it and resentful about having to defend it while I was on vacation.