On a dinner date, Henry James explains his approach to literary sentence structure and length, to a young woman he is trying to impress.
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Alright — let’s set the scene: a quiet, candlelit dining room in a London restaurant circa 1908. Heavy drapes, soft piano in the background. A young woman — intelligent, poised, but faintly amused — sits across from Henry James, who is at his most expansive, glass of wine in hand.
JAMES
My dear Miss Harcourt, you see… a sentence, in my hands — if I may be forgiven the mild vanity of the image — is not merely a line along which words obediently file, like schoolchildren to their lesson. No, it is rather the promenade in a garden after a long summer luncheon, where each turn in the path discloses not merely another blossom, but a shifting relationship between sun and shadow, scent and breeze.
(He leans forward slightly, the candlelight catching the arch of his brow.)
It begins, as any walk might, with a point of departure — a gate, an arch, the first word. But from there it proceeds — never, I hope, hurriedly — toward what might seem its inevitable conclusion, though in truth the conclusion is always, for me, an object of artful postponement. Each clause, each parenthesis, each delicate qualification is a way of making the reader — or, indeed, the listener — linger where I wish them to linger, as one might contrive to pause upon a terrace from which the view, though not the destination, proves the true reward.
(He swirls his wine, watching her eyes follow the motion.)
This is why I resist the clipped utterance, the journalistic brevity, however serviceable it may be to those who pursue… other ends. My sentences are designed — if I may confess it — to detain you in their company, to invite a second glass before you even realize you are still at the table.
(He smiles faintly.)
And should they wander — as some critics have dared to say — I would suggest only that a wandering in such company may be preferable to the most punctual arrival, if the company itself is what you had come to seek.
(He takes a slow sip, letting the silence play like the last note of the piano.)
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MISS HARCOURT
Mr. James, I see. Long sentences. Very long.
You start. You keep going. You keep going some more.
Pretty words. Interesting detours. A pause for scenery. Another pause for philosophy.
By the end, I forget the beginning. Sometimes I forget why we began.
I like a sentence that ends before my soup gets cold.
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JAMES
Ah — my dear Miss Harcourt — how very much, in those few brisk syllables, you have contrived to compress an entire philosophy, though one I fear may be somewhat at odds with my own, for while I entirely concede — and indeed admire — the admirable economy with which you dispatch your critique, I cannot, for the life of me, persuade myself that the end of a sentence is a prize to be seized as one might snatch the last éclair from a passing tray, but rather, in my perhaps old-fashioned conviction, a destination to be approached as one approaches, say, the distant spire of a cathedral town glimpsed across a valley, the road winding with a certain deliberation, not for want of directness but for the pleasure of discovering, in each curve and shaded turn, some further grace or human trace that would, in the headlong gallop toward conclusion, be entirely lost — and thus, if in the process your soup cools, may I propose, with all due gallantry, that the conversation itself might serve as the more sustaining nourishment.
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MISS HARCOURT
Bring hotter soup, please.
