Less or More

Let’s consider two possible extremes of prose style—one of direct sentences that lack syntactic complexity and offer breathing space, the other of a complex density of words packed with information revealed though a richness of shifts and clauses.

It’s easier for writers to deliberately work to develop the less method as many emulated Hemingway during his peak, when his approach to storytelling because the model. Attempting such a style involves cutting and deletions, a minimum of adverbs and adjectives and complex sentences. To seek prose density is much harder if the writer doesn’t start with a strong inclination for verbal complexity.

What made me think of this contrast was a musical analogy developed in A New York Times op-ed by Aaron Gilbreath in which he focuses on Miles Davis’ trumpet solos as models of what he calls “doing more with less.” The same could be said about Hemingway’s prose. Of Davis in the mid 20^th century, Gilbreath says, “He was melodic and economical, and his approach can teach prose writers a lot about the power of concision, suggestion and space.”

He contrasts that with what he calls prose that is labyrinthine and digressive. One of the Davis recordings he cites as an example to emulate with words is a version of “Diane” that can be heard on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAF6XPF_WIY&t=26s.

What Gilbreath doesn’t discuss is the solo that follows Davis’ opening of the recording, the contrasting equally excellent saxophone solo of John Coltrane that is anything but economical. Instead Coltrane, whose style has been called sheets of sound, fills the sonic space with an ongoing richness of notes and tones. His playing has been described as involving rapid arpeggios and successions of notes in a dense, harmonic texture, resulting in a rich, cascading sound. A term for parallel prose could be sheets of words.

Fortunately, the recording of “Diane” offers a clear musical analogy of these contrasting approaches. Now I’ll include examples of the two prose extremes with passages from short stories. Their role in the plot doesn’t matter. It’s the wording that matters. 

First, the less style.

Hemingway, “The Undefeated”

He went down the stairs and out of the door into the hot brightness of the street. It was very hot in the street and the light on the white buildings was sudden and hard on his eyes. He walked down the shady side of the steep street toward the Puerta del Sol. The shade felt solid and cool as running water. The heat came suddenly as he crossed the intersecting streets. Manuel saw no one he knew in all the people he passed.

Just before the Puerta del Sol he turned into a café.

It was quiet in the café. There were a few men sitting at tables against the wall. At one table four men played cards. Most of the men sat against the wall smoking, empty coffee-cups and liqueur-glasses before them on the tables. Manuel went through the long room to a small room in back. A man sat at a table in the corner asleep. Manuel sat down at one of the tables.

A waiter came in and stood beside Manuel’s table.

“Have you seen Zurito?” Manuel asked him.

“He was in before lunch,” the waiter answered. “He won’t be back before five o’clock.”

“Bring me some coffee and milk and a shot of the ordinary,” Manuel said.

The waiter came back into the room carrying a tray with a big coffee-glass and a liqueur-glass on it. In his left hand he held a bottle of brandy. He swung these down to the table and a boy who had followed him poured coffee and milk into the glass from two shiny, spouted pots with long handles. 

Joy Williams,  “Nettle”

He was not happy at the school, but his performance there was acceptable. He was selected for various teams and given the equipment and instruction that enabled him to participate on those teams. He was attracted to a boy with a white blaze in his hair, but so was everyone else. The boy ignored him.

He had a crush on the headmaster’s daughter as well. She was several years older. Her face was broad and like a mask. He wished that his own face could be like a mask. He wondered if that was still possible. With every moment, something was lost to him, to everyone, forever. She wore bright-red, uneven lipstick and was known to be intelligent and a runner. She ran daily for miles, in all weather. Once, he asked if he could accompany her, run beside her, perhaps after supper, after he had finished his assignments, and she laughed at him. 

Note that each of these passages contains sentences that are discrete statements with an assumed pause between them that allows the piece of information to sink in. Several of the sentences are extended with phrases after commas or dashes. But otherwise, they are simple or compound. Perhaps what is most import is that they focus on the matter at hand, the developing information all about the immediate situation.

Now, the more style. 

Alice Munro, “Floating Bridge”

Neal had spent nearly all his spare time, in the years she had been with him, organizing and carrying out campaigns. Not just political campaigns (those too) but efforts to preserve historic buildings and bridges and cemeteries, to keep trees from being cut down both along the town streets and in isolated patches of old forest, to save rivers from poisonous runoff and choice land from developers and the local population from casinos. Letters and petitions were always being written, government departments lobbied, posters distributed, protests organized. The front room was the scene of rages of indignation (which gave people a lot of satisfaction, Jinny thought) and confused propositions and arguments, and Neal’s nervy buoyancy. And now that it was suddenly emptied, it made her think of when she first walked into the house, straight from her parents’ split-level with the swag curtains, and thought of all those shelves filled with books, wooden shutters on the windows, and those beautiful Middle Eastern rugs she always forgot the name of, on the varnished floor. The Canaletto print she had bought for her room at college on the one bare wall. Lord Mayor’s Day on the Thames. She had actually put that up, though she never noticed it anymore. 

They rented a hospital bed—they didn’t really need it yet, but it was better to get one while you could because they were often in short supply. Neal thought of everything. He hung up some heavy curtains that were discards from a friend’s family room. They had a pattern of tankards and horse brasses and Jinny thought them very ugly. But she knew now that there comes a time when ugly and beautiful serve pretty much the same purpose, when anything you look at is just a peg to hang the unruly sensations of your body on, and the bits and pieces of your mind.

William Faulkner, “Barn Burning”

Presently he could see the grove of oaks and cedars and the other flowering trees and shrubs where the house would be, though not the house yet. They walked beside a fence massed with honeysuckle and Cherokee roses and came to a gate swinging open between two brick pillars, and now, beyond a sweep of drive, he saw the house for the first time and at that instant he forgot his father and the terror and despair both, and even when he remembered his father again (who had not stopped) the terror and despair did not return. Because, for all the twelve movings, they had sojourned until now in a poor country, a land of small farms and fields and houses, and he had never seen a house like this before. Hit's big as a courthouse he thought quietly, with a surge of peace and joy whose reason he could not have thought into words, being too young for that: They are safe from him. People whose lives are a part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch, he no more to them than a buzzing wasp: capable of stinging for a little moment but that's all; the spell of this peace and dignity rendering even the barns and stable and cribs which belong to it impervious to the puny flames he might contrive ... this, the peace and joy, ebbing for an instant as he looked again at the stiff black back, the stiff and implacable limp of the figure which was not dwarfed by the house, for the reason that it had never looked big anywhere and which now, against the serene columned backdrop, had more than ever that impervious quality of something cut ruthlessly from tin, depthless, as though, sidewise to the sun, it would cast no shadow. Watching him, the boy remarked the absolutely undeviating course which his father held and saw the stiff foot come squarely down in a pile of fresh droppings where a horse had stood in the drive and which his father could have avoided by a simple change of stride. But it ebbed only for a moment, though he could not have thought this into words either, walking on in the spell of the house, which he could even want but without envy, without sorrow, certainly never with that ravening and jealous rage which unknown to him walked in the iron like black coat before him. Maybe he will feel it too. Maybe it will even change him now from what maybe he couldn't help but be. 

Not only are the sentences much longer and packed with phrases—especially the Faulkner, who is known for taking a full page with a single sentence—they go far beyond the present scene in the information presented. Munro brings in thoughts of the personal past and the associated politics. The final thought projects the future. The Faulkner also ends with the future, though a possibility rather than an inevitability. But beyond that, this passage is certainly a sheet of words that ranges widely in both sentence construction, the sounds of syllables, and the focal character’s thought patterns. Faulkner, of course, is unique.

Much prose fiction is not as easily divided into examples of less or more, with writers often integrating both approaches in a single work, though the tendency is to favor one or the other.

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