Regarding the Em Dash

Essays
January 4, 2018 | 1 book mentioned 29 6 min read

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Punctuation, largely invisible and insignificant for normal people, as it should be, is a highly personal matter for writers.  Periods, commas, colons, semi-colons:  in their use or non-use and in their order and placement, can represent elaboration, conjecture, doubt, finality.  And in aggregate, over the course of a text, the rhythms of punctuation advance an author’s worldview and personality as surely as any plot or theme.  Patterns of punctuation usage are the writerly equivalent of an athlete’s go-to moves, or a singer’s peculiar timbre and range—those little dots and squiggles, in a sense, encode your voice.  Anthony Powell’s colon (pardon the inadvertent image) is as signature as Kyrie Irving’s crossover or Rihanna’s throaty cry.

For me, there is no punctuation mark as versatile and appealing as the em dash.  I love the em dash in a way that is difficult to explain, which is, probably, the motivation of this essay.  And my love for it is emphasized by the fact that many writers never, or rarely, use it—even disdain it.  It is not, so to speak, an essential punctuation mark, the same way commas or periods are essential.  You can get along without it and most people do.  I don’t remember being taught to use it in elementary, middle, or high school English classes; I’m not even sure I was aware of it then, and I have no clear recollection of when or why I began to rely on it, yet it has become an indispensable component of my writing.

It might be useful to include an official definition of the em.  From The Punctuation Guide:  “The em dash is perhaps the most versatile punctuation mark.  Depending on the context, the em dash can take the place of commas, parentheses, or colons—in each case to slightly different effect.”  The “slightly different” part is, to me, the em dash’s appeal summarized.  It is the doppelgänger of the punctuation world, a talented mimic impersonating other punctuation, but not exactly, leaving space to shade meaning.  This space allows different authors to use the em dash in different ways, and so the em dash can be especially revealing of an author’s style, even their character.

coverThe maestro of the em dash—as he was with many things (and apologies here, it is difficult not to annoyingly play, or seem to play, on a punctuation’s usage while writing about it)—was probably Vladimir Nabokov.  The locus of Nabokov’s attention is usually at least half trained on the fictional document he’s producing, so em dashes often serve as a kind of in-text footnote.  But in a more general sense, he simply employs them as part of his exemplary stylistic machinery, using them as counterweights against commas, as parenthetical ballast and rhetorical cog.  In Lolita, Nabokov is engaged in creating a calibrated ironic voice that half-emulates speech while retaining its smooth literary surface, and em dashes enable a more precise pacing of words and thoughts from the sentence to paragraph level.  A representative passage chosen completely at random:

I launched upon an “Histoire abregee de la poesie anglaise” for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the forties—and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest.

I found a job—teaching English to a group of adults in Auteuil.

Notice how the use of em dashes here, not strictly prescribed by any pressing grammatical need (the first could be justly replaced with a comma, the second eliminated), are used to create an internal structure that bridges paragraphs.  The long sentence at the end of the first paragraph closes with a short clause set off by an em dash, and the short sentence at the beginning of the next starts with a shorter clause also enclosed by the em.  The chief effect of this kind of bracketing is, I think, intuitive and rhythmical, adding to Humbert’s pompous purr, but there is a secondary effect of conjoining the ideas of transgression (his arrest) and seeming normalcy (finding a job), a pas de deux central to Lolita’s thematic heart.

A more contemporary user of the em dash is Donald Antrim.  Antrim’s em dash helps to create a faltering narration that expresses the pervasive emotional mood of his work, an almost paralytic anxiety.  Take this first sentence, from the story “Ever Since:”

Ever since his wife had left him—but she wasn’t his wife, was she? he’d only thought of her that way, had begun to think of her that way, since her abrupt departure, the year before, with Richard Bishop—Jonathan had taken up a new side of his personality and become the sort of lurking man who, say, at work or at a party, mainly hovers on the outskirts of other people’s conversations, leaning close but not too close…

The narrator has only just begun to have a thought about Jonathan’s wife before a new thought intrudes, needlessly clarifying who she is to him before we even know who he is.  “Needlessly” in story terms, though the larger narrative need is to exemplify, through halting syntax, Jonathan’s excruciatingly circumspect mental process.  This is, to a degree, Antrim’s own process, and we get doses of it even in more remote, comic narration, such as in the long beginning sentence—Antrim is a great lover of long beginning sentences—of “An Actor Prepares:”

Lee Strasberg, a founder of the Group Theatre and the great teacher of the American Method, famously advised his students never to “use”—for generating tears, etc., in a dramatic scene—personal/historical material less than seven years in the personal/historical past; otherwise, the Emotion Memory (the death of a loved one or some like event in the actor’s life that can, when evoked through recall and substitution, hurl open the floodgates, as they say, right on cue, night after night, even during a long run)—this material, being too close, as it were, might overwhelm the artist and compromise the total control required to act the part or, more to the point, act it well; might, in fact, destabilize the play; if, for instance, at the moment in a scene when it becomes necessary for Nina or Gertrude or Macduff to wipe away tears and get on with life; if, at that moment, it becomes impossible for a wailing performer to pull it together; if, in other words, the performer remains trapped in affect long after the character has moved on to dinner or the battlefield—when this happens, then you can be sure that delirious theatrical mayhem will follow.

Here, Antrim actually violates, as he sometimes does, a basic rule of parenthetical em dash usage, that you can only use one set per sentence.  The violation of this stricture is unsettling and makes it difficult to keep up with meaning.  Which, in a sentence and story about artistic chaos and loss of control, is, of course, the point.

Emily Dickinson is probably the most well-known user of the dash, to such an extent that “em” might justly be taken as short for “Emily.”  She habitually ended lines with em dashes, sometimes to an obvious effect, sometimes not.  Here is her most famous stanza:

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.

What are the dashes doing here?  On the one hand, since they don’t serve any obvious syntactical function, they can be read simply as a stylistic tic.  But they do create a feeling of hesitation that serves the poetry.  Without them, this stanza is a nicely crafted, clever piece of thinking about the inevitability and dignity of death.  With them, we feel Dickinson’s hand hovering over the page, considering her subject.  This lends a poignancy to the poem, a sense of the artist thinking through her subject, considering the terms of her own death.  Her use of the em dash obliquely posits writing as an elaborative act, and in many of her poems the em transforms what would otherwise be somewhat inert, though great, common meter into something alive to itself, process-oriented.

My own favorite use of the em dash is for elaboration, similar to the way many writers use colons.  As a personal rule, I only use colons in a specific context:  that is, if what follows answers the question what?  Em dashes, I find useful for both narrowing and expanding a train of thought that might lose momentum in a new sentence—in this sense, they also stand in for the semicolon, but semicolons are best used (in my fuddled cosmology of punctuation) as dividing walls between two related but independent thoughts of approximate equal value (I wholly reject, by the way, that old bullshit about eliminating semicolons).

In truth, I probably overuse the em, find too much pleasure in asides, in explanation.  But I can’t do it, I cannot write terse little impregnable Tobias Wolffian sentences that stand on their own.  Though I can admire a page of these sentences—the calm presiding rationality, like civilized people queueing to exit the building in a fire drill—I am drawn instinctively to the dithering em, some contingency always butting up, worrying the previous sentence before it’s had a chance to end.  As Noreen Malone put it in a self-deprecating Slate article, “The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing.  It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence.”

This is true.  But is efficiency the point or purpose of writing?  It seems to me that novels, especially, are almost anti-efficiency devices.  Yes, we want to communicate clearly, but sometimes, just as crucially, we also want to clearly communicate the difficulty of communicating clearly.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

is a staff writer for The Millions and the author of two novels: The Grand Tour (Doubleday 2016) and The Hotel Neversink (2019 Tin House Books). His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, VICE, The Iowa Review, and many other places. His podcast, Fan’s Notes, is an ongoing discussion about books and basketball. Find him online at adamofallonprice.com and on Twitter at @AdamOPrice.

Essays

Pants on Fire: The Genre That Cannot Be Named

Essays
June 22, 2015 | 1 book mentioned 4 8 min read

In her April review of Thomas Kunkel’s Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, Janet Malcolm discussed Mitchell’s beloved, beautiful stories — “cryptic and ambiguous and incantatory and disconnected and extravagant and oracular and apocalyptic” — and his inclination toward invention — toward “radical departures from factuality.” “Mitchell’s genre,” she wrote, “is some kind of hybrid, as yet to be named.”

Almost three-quarters of a century after The New Yorker published Mitchell’s first story, Mitchell’s genre, some kind of hybrid, still has yet to be named. Or, rather, perhaps, Mitchell’esque genres have yet to be given a name that fits. Literary Journalism? New Journalism? Literary Nonfiction, Narrative Nonfiction, Immersion, Creative Nonfiction, Faction? Fiction?

Some time ago, I received the suggestion that I conflate two characters in a manuscript I hoped would someday be a book that, in the tradition of, say, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, combined field reporting, memoir, essay, and history. Some kind of hybrid.

Conflating my characters — two children, in this case — would create a single and more compelling protagonist, I was told. Reflexively, I etched in quotes. “My” characters? But I also felt a different urge: It was true. Inventing one composite kid from two could make the story stronger. Certainly it would make writing the story easier for me, and I wanted that too. But how did what I want matter? I come in part from cheating stock — thieves, adulterers, at least two murderers, as far as I know. I was curious: Could I be a cheater, or, more precisely, a compositor, too?

According to Dan Ariely, absolutely. We all are cheats and liars, his research suggests, and, for writers of some kind of hybrid, this matters, perhaps a great deal. Professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, Ariely has spent more than a decade studying why humans don’t tell the truth. Last month, with collaborator Yael Melamede, he released a documentary film, (Dis)Honesty: The Truth about Lies In 2012, he published a book, The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone — Especially Ourselves, including a back-cover blurb by A.J. Jacobs, author of the immersion memoir The Year of Living Biblically: “…those who claim not to tell lies are liars.”

Humans, evolved to find advantage at the lowest possible cost, possess “a deeply ingrained propensity to lie to ourselves and to others,” Ariely reports. We are dishonest to serve the self — the ego, Latin and Greek for “I,” distinct from the world and others. We are dishonest to serve our fears — of inadequacy, of rejection, of difference, obscurity, going broke, oblivion, death. We are dishonest to serve our desires — for meaning, love, power, fame, a single compelling protagonist. In Joseph Mitchell’s case, perhaps, for art.

Sometimes, he says, we’re dishonest so we can think of ourselves as good and honest people. As Marcel Proust once also observed, “It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.” To further complicate matters, says Ariely, “The more creative we are, the more we are able to come up with good stories that help us justify our selfish interests.” This, it seems to me, is both the good news and the bad.

Orwell for one believed that “all writers are vain, selfish, and lazy.” He himself was sometimes a cheat, and also a coward, at least as far as we know. I’ve read Homage to Catalonia several times over now, and an essay he wrote about writing books. “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle,” he observed, “like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

The Polish author Ryszard Kapuściński, complicated, enigmatic, alternately choleric and charming, comes to mind. “One Kapuściński is worth more than a thousand whimpering and fantasizing scribblers,” said Salman Rushdie of his friend. Said John Updike, Kapuściński wrote “with a magical elegance that…achieves poetry and aphorism.” Yet, in Imperium, a personal account of communist Russia — the camps, the purges — Kapuściński reports nothing of his onetime collaboration with the communist party in his homeland Poland. When the director of Iranian studies at Stanford met with Artur Domoslawski, Kapuściński’s biographer and friend, he said to Domoslawski, “You can open Shah of Shahs at any page, point to a passage, and I will tell you what’s wrong or inaccurate.” And then he proceeded to do so.

Kapuściński once yelled at a friend asking about his books’ omissions and fabrications. “You don’t understand a thing! I’m not writing so the details add up — the point is the essence of the matter!” On this point, Kapuściński was right. In literature, the essence of the matter rather than the adding up of details is the point. But, if in the end, readers perceive that “essence” comes in disregard of the worlds of possibility found between writer and reader — and if readers never pick up another of your books again — what’s the point at all?

Fabricators like Mitchell and Kapuściński may now be the exception, as Charles McGrath wrote in his New Yorker review of Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker, “because now…it’s harder to get away with,” but their stories, Ariely’esque in the telling, are enduring, and enduringly stirring.

Consider anthropologist Wendy “Wednesday” Martin, for instance. Her new book, The Primates of Park Avenue, one of two books she’s written that she describes as “very research-intensive blendings of memoir and social science,” earned this New York Post headline in early June: “Upper East-Side Housewife’s Tell-All Book Is Full of Lies.”

After The Post published its revelations of Martin’s practices — compression, conflation, fabrication — Cary Goldstein, vice president and executive director of publicity at Simon & Schuster, told The New York Times, “It is a common narrative technique in memoirs for some names, identifying characteristics and chronologies to be adjusted or disguised, and that is the case with Primates of Park Avenue.”

Ariely argues that the human inclination toward deception, highly evolved and driven by dread or desire, has a slow corrosive effect on society. Think subprime mortgage crisis. Neural MRIs show the more we lie, the less the region of the brain associated with guilt responds, suggesting the act of lying desensitizes us to the shame of lying. There are those who argue dishonesty has a slow, corrosive effect on nonfiction. Think Jim Fingal, the one-time Harper’s fact-checker who took John D’Agata and his fictionalized essay “About a Mountain” to task in the book they co-wrote, called The Lifespan of a Fact. Near the end of the book, Fingal and D’Agata come to verbal fisticuffs. Fingal writes, exasperated, “I mean, the whole point of all these shit storms over the last ten years…isn’t that the reading public doesn’t understand that writers sometimes ‘use their imaginations.’ It’s about people searching for some sort of Truth…and then being devastated when they find out that the thing they were inspired by turned out to be deliberately falsified…for seemingly self-aggrandizing purposes.”

Or maybe don’t think of Jim Fingal, however spot-on his words. Maybe we ditch Jim Fingal, who, it was revealed in post-publication coverage, partially reinvented his correspondence with D’Agata for their nonfiction book. “Contrary to the impression created by the promotional material, and the way it has subsequently been characterized in reviews,” wrote Craig Silverman on Poynter.org, “…The Lifespan of a Fact isn’t, you know, factual. D’Agata never called Fingal a dickhead, to cite but one example.”

In journalism, where truth is an explicit part of the deal between writer and reader, shit storms are understandable and necessary, as real harm is often a consequence.

Ironically, during filming, Ariely and Melamede couldn’t find any journalists who’d talk to them about deception in their field.

Yet in hybrid genres where rules are less clearly defined, the consequences of unreliability are also often felt at great intensity. Even in memoir, recently described by Daphne Merkin as an “elasticized form for truths and untruths,” outrage and pain seem to register when a writer is perceived to betray the trust.

It is curious to note the research that suggests the emotional experience of social pain, and betrayal specifically, lights up the same regions of the brain as physical pain. Humans remember social pain more acutely and for a longer duration than physical pain. Neurologically, the experience of being cast away appears to mirror that of being burned. Like, with fire. I confess to feeling something akin to this when I learned the cat in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek didn’t exist. It was a metaphorical cat. Jesus Christ. Annie Dillard. I thought she was perfect.

The truth is, many readers want to believe they know who the author is. Readers have for millennia. In Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self, novelist Gish Jen reminds us that the independent self — “the self unhitched from the collective” — has been “making things up [since] even before the words ‘fiction’ and ‘poetry’ were coined.” In ancient Rome and Greece, writers who fabricated were eyed with suspicion, “not only because they could make the untrue seem true, but because they tended to be highly individualistic, with interests that might or might not be yours.” This has not changed. Many readers still eye with suspicion writers who fabricate. Which, if we’re really being honest with ourselves, (which, as Ariely notes, is harder than it might first appear) is quite a lot of writers. Hell, many readers eye with suspicion writers who don’t fabricate. As author Robin Hemley observes in A Field Guide for Immersion Writing, “Whether you’re putting yourself in harm’s way emotionally, psychologically, or physically, it’s almost a guarantee that you’re going to get pummeled in one way or another.”

Orwell called for “discipline.” In Homage, he copped, “…beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.”

In her essay for the anthology Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations on the Fringes of Nonfiction, Naomi Kimbell advises, “[T]he first and most important gesture a writer can make to the reader is letting him or her in on the joke.” And yet, in the words of author Lee Gutkind, founder of Creative Nonfiction magazine, there are no “creative nonfiction police” handcuffing those who don’t, nor should there be.

Gutkind, identified on his website with a quote from Vanity Fair as “the Godfather behind creative nonfiction,” advises writers to rely upon conscience. Yes, fact-checking is critical, he writes in You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction, but so too “following the old-fashioned golden rule by treating your characters and their stories with as much respect as you would want them to treat you.” “Conscience,” he writes, “a reminder and an invisible artbiter over us all.”

And, yet, as Ariely’s research and the nonfiction world’s regular shit storms reveal, relying on conscience is slippery business.

Ariely recommends concrete approaches designed to address the conflict of interest between self and other — a signed legal contract, if you’re a trader at J.P. Morgan Chase & Company, for instance. If you’re a writer of some kind of hybrid that blends fact and invention, an author’s note, disclaimer, afterword, use of the conditional tense, caveat, or limitless other artful and crafty techniques. It’s reasonable to assume this is why Simon & Schuster announced soon after The Primates of Park Avenue shit storm that they would add “a clarifying note” to the e-book and subsequent print editions. At the back of the Kindle edition I consulted in mid June, in addition to an introduction that describes the book as “an academic experiment,” is now an author’s note:
This work is a memoir. It reflects my experiences over a period of several years. Some names and identifying details have been changed, and some individuals portrayed are composites. For narrative purposes and to mask the identities of certain individuals, the timeline of certain events has been altered or compressed.
“Every time we lie, we dilute the trust,” Ariely said when we corresponded. Ariely can’t prove this with empirical evidence, but he believes it to be true. When Ariely was in high school in Israel, a magnesium battlefield flare exploded at his feet, and he was trapped in a chemical fire. He spent three years in a hospital. “The experience of pain has led me to beauty,” he later wrote in an essay. Also, “as I am not very concerned with my personal ‘small problems,’ I…can’t get too excited about the ‘small problems’ others are experiencing.”

All the same, Ariely took time to respond to my questions: Given everything we know, why do nonfiction writers continue to make stuff up and not tell readers? Given everything we know, why do readers continue to feel betrayed and outraged when nonfiction writers do this?

“I don’t think this is planned,” Ariely said in a recording he made because typing can be hard. “I think people start writing something that is based in reality, and then the boundary for what is acceptable and what is not acceptable is not very clear.” He said, “It’s very human.”

So, too, the timeless desire for a good story well told. Writes Malcolm of Mitchell, “We should respect his inhibiting reverence for literary transcendence and be grateful for the work that got past his censor.”

While Mitchell’s genre remains nameless, there is a name for the startling discovery of the truth of it: Anagnorisis, Aristotle wrote in his Poetics, the moment of change from ignorance to knowledge. I was wrong. It is here, he believed, “the finest recognitions.”

This essay was adapted and updated from a longer article about constructing nonfiction personae, originally published in the pedagogy department of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies.

Image Credit: Flickr/Alexa Fades Away.

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 4 8 min read
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Essays

Henry James for Every Day of the Year

Essays
October 21, 2016 | 1 book mentioned 5 min read
This book more or less vanished. A few older works of criticism list it in their bibliographies, and a small press in Pennsylvania reissued it in 1970. But no scholar has ever paid it much attention, and for decades it survived in the only way that forgotten books do survive: undisturbed in the stacks.
Essays
| 1 book mentioned 5 min read
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Essays

What Edith Wharton Taught Me about Marriage

Essays
April 17, 2017 | 1 book mentioned 3 7 min read

I’d been married five years when I found myself at a point I never thought possible — on the precipice of becoming an unfaithful wife.

My husband and I are high-school sweethearts, and I’ve led the entirety of my adult romantic life (and my adult life for that matter) with him by my side. As a new wife, I viewed the world from a moral high ground where love existed in the simplest terms. I thought of marriage as a seal on the heart, such that a love powerful enough to lead two people into a lifelong commitment could never legitimately fade. Although I knew couples who divorced, sometimes ten or twenty years into their marriage, I saw these ruptures as signs of the couple’s fragility or immaturity rather than evidence that my own perception of romantic partnership might be flawed.

And then I almost became one of those couples, too. Looking back, now fifteen years into my marriage, I can only shake my head at my younger self. I had so much to learn.

My journey as a wife and lover has included several well-loved novels, sought out for escape or nourishment over the years, but it is my shifting perceptions of one story that I feel places my own emotional evolution in stark relief: the classic love triangle in The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.

I first read The Age of Innocence as a high school senior, when my husband and I began dating. He was a freshman in college. We’d met a few years before in a youth orchestra (I played the oboe, he played percussion), but despite mutual interest our courtship had stalled until he called one day months later and invited me, of all things, to a band concert.

It was at the height of my own heady teenage love that I discovered Wharton’s story of Newland Archer and his marriage to one woman despite his love for another. Not surprisingly, the tale struck me then as a tragedy. My young and untested heart saw the story in terms of missed opportunities and romantic foreclosures. I was angered, in that first reading, by Newland’s choice to marry May despite his knowledge that he did not truly love her the way he loved May’s exotic cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska. In a scene several weeks before his wedding to May, Newland confesses his feelings to Ellen, only to immediately retreat back into the safety of his engagement to May.
“May guessed the truth,” he said. “There is another woman—but not the one she thinks.”

Ellen Olenska made no answer, and did not move. After a moment he sat down beside her, and, taking her hand, softly unclasped it, so that the gloves and fan fell on the sofa between them.

She started up, and freeing herself from him moved away to the other side of the hearth. “Ah, don’t make love to me! Too many people have done that,” she said, frowning.

Archer, changing color, stood up also: it was the bitterest rebuke she could have given him. “I have never made love to you,” he said, “and I never shall. But you are the woman I would have married if it had been possible for either of us.”
I saw Newland Archer as a coward, and May’s choice to say she was pregnant well before she knew it to be true seemed a cheap trick that proved her own selfishness. The only member of this love triangle who I felt had any decency was Countess Olenska, who loved Newland and yet resisted his affections in order to avoid harming her cousin. Naturally, the end of the novel where we find the widowed Newland eschewing the opportunity to see Ellen again annoyed me even further, and confirmed my opinion at the time that Newland was incapable of any form of brave passion.
It’s more real to me here than if I went up,” he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.

He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. At length a light shone through the windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters.

At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.
My take on this classic tale remained set throughout the next several years of my relationship with my future husband. We developed a strong and deep connection with each other as we pursued our undergraduate studies, eventually finding ourselves as newlyweds in our early twenties at the beginning of graduate school and our adult lives together. I was decidedly brash as a young spouse — and desperately in love.

At my bridal shower, I remember a family friend, herself married some forty years, wished my husband and I great luck in our marriage. Although I cringe now to recall it, my 20-something-self responded with, “Oh, we won’t need luck,” a sentiment I sincerely believed. Unlike Newland, my husband and I were marrying with a passionate love as our foundation and with no one competing for our affections. I still thought of love as a stable and intractable force — once found, it would never leave. My retort brought what I thought was a smug smile to my family friend’s face and I felt disappointed by her critical view of marriage. Now, though, I see her advice and her smile for what it was: Wisdom.

Five years into married life and ten years into our relationship, my husband and I hit an impasse. As anyone who’s been in a long-term relationship can attest, happy couplings erode slowly over time, so slowly that you can’t see the disintegration until one day you find yourself crying into your cereal and wondering why your husband seems to dislike you so much. It was this period of my marriage that marked my second reading of Newland, May, and Countess Olenska’s love triangle. It was also the first time I realized I was capable of cheating on my husband.

The causes of our unraveling marriage are difficult to identify even now, years later and in a much more solid and loving place. In general, I believe it was the usual suspects: criticism, entitlement, and laziness. On both of our parts. Regardless of the catalyst, the facts remain that I was a young married woman who’d begun to recognize that perhaps my husband was not the only source of affection. Perhaps he wasn’t ‘the one’ for the rest of my life.

It was a scary prospect for me, but I also found myself invigorated. Although my options for potential new partners were not exactly manifold, I found myself fantasizing about different men in my life who I felt might provide the emotional love I no longer experienced in my marriage. And of course, in reading The Age of Innocence again, my views of Newland were entirely changed. My disdain was replaced with a whole-hearted empathy for him. I saw Newland as a man flailing in a loveless marriage while another pathway for real affection remained just out of his reach. It’s not going too far to say that I identified with Newland on this second read. Although I hadn’t secured a new pathway for love, I had accepted its possibility and that, if presented with the option, I would likely pursue it.
Archer choked with the sense of wasted minutes and vain words.

“Then what, exactly, is your plan for us?” he asked.

“For us? But there’s no us in that sense! We’re near each other only if we stay far from each other. Then we can be ourselves. Otherwise we’re only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska’s cousin, and Ellen Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer’s wife, trying to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust them.”

“Ah, I’m beyond that,” he groaned.

“No, you’re not! You’ve never been beyond. And I have,” she said, in a strange voice, “and I know what it looks like there.”

He sat silent, dazed with inarticulate pain.
But just when I’d accepted our relationship was irretrievable, another surprise came: My husband named the darkness taking hold in our love. He told me about his struggles within our marriage that I’d ignored entirely, being so focused on my own self-assigned role of victim in our relationship. And I listened. And then I told my husband how I was feeling. I laid it all out there — the fantasies, the divorce-lawyer shopping online, the misery. And he listened. It was a conversation that set us aright — not immediately, and not without effort and tears and one time where I childishly yelled expletives at him from the front porch as he headed off to work — but I can look back ten years later, from the vantage point of a happy and loved spouse partnered with another happy and loved spouse, and see that discussion as a turning point in our marriage. I’m so very grateful that I didn’t jettison years of friendship and affection because even the idea of other options seemed more attractive in the moment. I’m also grateful that my husband helped me grow into a better partner, rather than simply giving up on us.

Reading The Age of Innocence again this past year brought with it yet another perspective on the star-crossed trio: for me, May has become the hero of the tale. It was May who loved Newland enough to forgive him his indiscretions with Ellen. Although May is portrayed in portions of the novel as naive and even vapid, Wharton weaves throughout the story hints at May’s true depth of understanding. She wasn’t stupid or self-absorbed. May saw Newland’s emotional affair with the Countess for what it was — a fantasy of love that would not hold with time.

Much like my own perusals for future partners, I’d argue Newland’s devotion to Countess Olenska was more a response to his dissatisfaction with his own life rather than a real affair of the heart. Even if he were to leave May and love Ellen, his problems would follow him, much as my own failings as a partner would have followed me into my next relationship. Rather than viewing it as an entrapment, May’s early revelation of her pregnancy strikes me currently as auspicious in its timing, as it helped prevent Newland from throwing away his marriage for a fleeting romance.

Near the end of the novel and now a widower, Newland has a conversation with his son, Dallas, where he discovers this powerful and loving intervention of his wife:
“Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent for me alone — you remember? She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted.”

Archer received this strange communication in silence. . . After a little while he did not regret Dallas’s indiscretion. It seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, someone had guess and pitied. . . And that it should have been his wife moved him indescribably.
Having lived through several phases of love, and with hopefully many more still to come, I stand with May in acknowledging the value of two lives woven together, but I also understand how tempting alternatives can be when you let those threads fray, untended, as both Newland and I almost did. Thankfully, we both had spouses who stepped in just before irrevocable damage was done to guide us over the chasm, our marriages still intact. I don’t know where my life or my heart will be the next time I read Newland, May, and Ellen’s story, but for now Wharton’s The Age of Innocence affirms what has become for me an essential truth: In love, you’ll need hard work, and more than a little luck.

Image: Wikipedia

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 3 7 min read
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29 comments:

  1. Bravo. Though we may differ in our use of such devices, you’ve captured my approach to punctuation precisely. Over time, I’ve pared down my use of any punctuation that may be technically required but not absolutely necessary to guide the reader. At the same time, I’m fond of the em dash, the semi-colon, and the ellipsis for communicating pace, dramatic emphasis, and things like hesitation or uncertainty. I’ve had heated arguments with peers about this practice—the chief objection being that readers, particularly so-called modern readers, don’t know what the punctuation means, that it gets in their way. My position: readers incapable of or unwilling to learn such notation of language are probably going to miss other qualities in my prose. They are not my readers.

  2. Oh my God! I am also a huge fan of the “dithering”—such an accurate characterization!—em dash.

    My TA hates this, of course—a common criticism of his in my essays is my (neurotic?) tendency to be “interventionist”—but eff him!

  3. Also, can this be a series? If you couldn’t tell, I definitely enjoyed geeking out over this.

  4. Damascus,

    Glad you enjoyed it. I don’t know about a series, but I may write something about the unjustly persecuted semicolon!

  7. I don’t think it disrupts flow; although I do miss the semi-colon. Having said that: what is with the Rhianna reference? That does not compute (haha).

  8. One of my favorite discoveries about Word–when I began using it years ago–was that it would automatically substitute an em-dash for a double en-dash. (This comment editor apparently does not.)

  11. I am heartened that there is another writer entranced by the em dash. O’Fallon Price, I applaud your fascination and explanation for it. I personally overuse the mark—it’s easy to do—it creates a pause as if the writer is speaking—as if one is looking for a right word—it is a way to temper a fragile thought.

    Now, take on the en dash. Try to raise it from the dead.

  12. How do you like your em-dash? Set tight (closed)—like this—or set loose (open) — like this — (with spaces) or as a double dash “––” for an extra push, or replacing it with a single loose en-dash ” – ” …all subject to whatever the typeface offers (not all match the “M”).

    I see the author (Adam) and commenters have chosen tight-set. I’m not judging, just observing, and curious about variations in the wild. Whether by feel, font, craft, or unexamined tradition—the preference is underscored by changes in technology, eg. 1780 vs 1890 vs 1950 vs 2007.

    Here’s what I found: A 1979 imprint of J.K. Jerome’s ‘Three men in a Boat’ uses a loose-set en-dash, as does a 1980 imprint of P.G. Woodhouse’s ‘Pigs Have Wings’ and a 2000 imprint of John Wyndham’s ‘The Chrysalids’ … all Penguin imprints. An 1890 imprint of Robert Burns verse uses tight-set long dash (double em? custom dash?), as does a 2015 imprint of Neil Stephenson’s ‘Seveneves’, while the 2013 Orbit imprints of Iian Banks’ ‘Consider Phlebas’, ‘Excession’, etc., follow the Penguin style guide with a loose-set en-dash.

    Oh, and I see Erik Spiekerman’s ‘Stop Stealing Sheep’ is set in loose en-dash — is this a trademark move on his part (because he definitely typeset it), or a style he was projecting for that specific work?

    Most of the other paperbacks I thumbed through are tight-set and full length … most exceed the width of their respective M’s. (And look at all those ellipsis…!)

    I will also add online fonts present new issues; Gizmodo.com for example confuses longer than usual hyphens with shorter than usual tight set em-dashes…hard to tell sometimes if two words are hyphenated or two clauses are being held apart. Just saying.

    FYI: American Press (AP) style guide recommends setting em-dashes open with spaces, as does Canadian Press and UK Guardian, while The Chicago Style Guide and others say the exact opposite.

    Fun with em-dashes — sorry if TLDR;

  13. Thank you very much — I had thought that I was alone in my admiration of em dash as such a friendly mark. Before about 1900, the em dash was usually surrounded by en spaces. That makes it yet more beautiful on the page.

  14. Edgar A. Poe has— if my memory serves me well— a wonderful mini-essay in his collected Marginalia on the value of the dash; I used to describe it as trhe zoom lens of punctuation.

  15. Adam, since I happen to agree with your every word here, I would definitely read a similar piece on the semicolon. If you do indeed write such a post, could you include a section on whether to hyphenate the world semicolon itself?

    You largely use it as a closed compound, which I happen to prefer, although you do hyphenate it early on. But in general I’m puzzled by the sheer number of people who hyphenate it regularly when I can find little justification in any of the major dictionaries or style manuals (with Merriam-Webster, various Oxfords, The Chicago Manual of Style, all favouring the closed version and only Wikipedia allowing for both)! I’m especially curious about this, given the modern dictionary’s claim to be more descriptivist than prescriptivist.

  16. Wonderful. Frankly I have used the dash for many many years but only at this reading have I learned it`s name–and yes, having it named after Em(ily) Dickinson is a gleaming idea which delights me. Cheers.

  18. @Mark Suggitt: Hey there, fellow! Enjoyed your observations! Maybe The Millions ought to solicit your services???

  19. True confession time –
    I love the em dash! I also use it more often than I should – but I don’t care! I also use the tilde in a completely inappropriate manner – as a prettier version of the em dash. I may as well just admit that I also use {braces} as spiffed up versions of parentheses.
    Now if I could just find a way to incorporate more schwas into my life, all would be perfect!

  20. Very nice essay on one of the less-understood punctuation marks—the em dash.

    As a professional typographer and book designer, I encountered the various dashes and dash-like characters early in my career. I realized that nowhere in my prior education had I ever seen or heard any explanation of the nuances of these various markings. (Though later in my career I was involved in such discussions!) Of course, back in the days when I learned to type (on a manual typewriter) we only had the hyphen — and two were used (as here) to act as a em dash. (There was no concept of an en dash.)

    Another commenter wonders about the open vs. closed (extra space or not between the ends of the dash) em dash. In part, this is a matter of how the typeface designer has created the em dash that accompanies the typeface. They vary in length and they vary in the side bearings allowed (and some are considerably longer than the em space as it is generally calculated). In addition, while I personally prefer close em dashes—I have had clients who couldn’t stand them and insisted in additional space before and after the em dash. This was usually accomplished by adding a “thin space” before and after the em dash itself—but sometimes, if the em dash in the face being used was one fo the extra long ones, I’d just use an em dash from a face with a shorter one—thank goodness for search and replace.

  21. How wonderful—an essay about one of my favourite punctuation marks! Thank you.

    I must admit I am a little confused about when to use an en dash and when to use an em dash.

    Either way, I like to include a thin space either side of them — a purely visual preference. Is this wrong? I’m in The Antipodes and hear the rules may be different than in The States.

    Love to hear your thoughts!

    p.s. Might I thank the hard-working hyphen for all its tireless labour, but I *do* wish the common folk would realise that it falls short (pun intended) when used in place of a nice, long, leggy dash.

  23. Do you distinguish between the em dash and its little brother, the en dash (which is half its length)? I find the en to be less jarring, and so makes for more readable prose. Your mileage may vary, of course.

    As for the semicolon, George Orwell (no mean prose stylist) believed that it was unnecessary, and never used it. While I don’t agree, I do find that I use it too often in situations where a comma or period would set the breath-mark of the prose more accurately.

  24. Rachel + Nemo,

    AFAIK the em is preferred to the en for the purpose of prose writing. I don’t believe they’re interchangeable–the en usually being used for scores, date ranges, etc. I believe no spaces is also preferred by copy editors, but then you’re talking someone who double spaces after periods, so what do I know?

  25. Thank you. I love the em dash — with the proviso that for the digital age we need a new em dash typography. With “[space] em-dash [space]” everything from HTML to .mobi will have readable line breaks. Use “[space] em-dash [space]” please?

  26. The two correct way to write this dash is to a) just write an em dash or b) write en dash with spaces before and after. Most editors prefer the version “a)”. I would like to explain why I am a devoted fan of version “b)”. When one looks at the version “a)” within a block of space—it becomes one of the most distinctive visual signs. It is a strong visual rupture in the rhythm of letters. It has a very long horizontal bar that unapologetically breaks this rhythm. It becomes visually more important than, what should structurally be above it in the hierarchy of information—the marking of the end of a sentence – a dot, space and a first large letter of next sentence. I feel that version “b)” – en dash with two accompanying spaces – looks a bit softer, blends a bit better with surroundings and simply visually belongs to the block of text more.

  27. Ahhh just wonderful. I love the idea of the em dash being named after Emily Dickinson because of her annoying excessive use of the thing. I was fortunate (or maybe not, because no one is as particular as they used to be and it drives me nuts) to have my start straight out of high school as a typesetter back in the day when typesetting was an art. One of our clients was McGraw-Hill, and I would set type for mathematical textbooks, including very long equations. They were extremely particular about spacing around dashes and between certain characters…there were thin spaces, en spaces, em spaces, and even a hair space. After awhile you could tell at a glance which had been used, and whether or not it was correct. And in paragraph copy, you were expected to know what that particular customer’s preference for spacing around en and em dashes should be. All dependent on the font and the customer, but all had to be consistent. No wonder my eyesight is horrible. Thanks for this trip down amnesia lane.

  28. As a huge lover of punctuation in general —I once named a cat Apostrophe — and the em dash in particular, I thank you for this article. My own sense of the em dash is that it can make way for a slightly less linear narrative, and more accurately convey the way that some people think. I recall hearing about some research which identified that the em dash has been noted more frequently in writing by females, however cannot, alas, cite the source. Cheers, Erin

  29. I, too, have an affinity for the em dash. It was a punctuation mark my highschool english teacher actually insisted I practice using – as I had a terrible habit of writing run-on sentences with numerous commas. Your article on semi-colons brought me here, and I enjoyed both pieces of writing. Cheers!

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Essays

Comfort Food: The Importance of Reading Aloud as Adults

Essays
March 13, 2017 | 1 book mentioned 4 5 min read

1.
When I was in the third grade, my neighbor, Mrs. Cris — a 60-year-old woman with grown children — invited me and two other girls to form a weekly reading club. On Wednesdays, Mrs. Cris would serve us buttery Danish cookies, and juice in fancy punch glasses. We would sit on the floor while Mrs. Cris settled into the high-backed chair in front of the fireplace, and she would read out loud to us.

We would lie about it to other kids, what we did on Wednesdays. It wasn’t because I was ashamed, it never occurred to me that a reading club might be considered uncool. I lied because I didn’t want my other friends to be envious, and because I didn’t want anyone else to be added to the club. It was our secret, my favorite day of the week.

Over the next few years, we read The Hobbit, Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Secret Garden. At home, I read books almost exclusively about horses or dogs — Black Beauty, Misty of Chincoteague, Lad a Dog, The Red Pony, Shiloh. There’s no shortage of great books about horses and dogs, but Wednesday reading club was first a lesson that books didn’t have to be about a topic you liked to be enjoyable.

My mother had spent many years reading aloud to me, but this club was not bedtime reading, it was not something designed to wind us down, put us to sleep. It was a weekly afternoon party, with a certain level of formality that I enjoyed: Mrs. Cris was the only adult in the neighborhood who went by Mrs., we were expected to always sit quietly, and the snacks she served were not advertised on Nickelodeon, instead it was always the Royal Dansk cookies in the round blue tin. It also never felt like we were being babysat. I was keenly aware that Mrs. Cris was not being paid, and I felt she was not doing this as a favor for our parents (although, of course, I know my mother appreciated the time off), instead I was sure that Mrs. Cris was doing it because she wanted to spend time with us. She was not a teacher, not a relative; she was my first adult friend.

2.
Reading club fell apart somewhere in middle school, when soccer practice and clarinet lessons and trips to the mall took up all our after school time. But I still liked to be read to, and I liked to read aloud, even during the awkward, moody teenage years to come. I loved when we read plays in English class, because we’d do a read through of the whole thing. I was too shy to audition for the high school play, but I thought I was a very memorable Martha when our senior English class read Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

When I got to college, my roommate, Jessica, was my only friend for a good chunk of the year. We had the kind of friendship where it felt like you didn’t need anyone else in the world but each other, so we didn’t go looking for other friends until the first year was almost up. Often, before bed, I would read Jess poems from my Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Of course, it seems a little pretentious to me now, except that I wasn’t doing it as any kind of performance. It was just something I’d learned that friends do for one another, something that brings you closer.

3.
Years after college, I visited Jessica at her studio apartment in Virginia, both of us adrift in our mid-20s. After a few glasses of wine, I read her and her new boyfriend a story I loved — “Sea Oak” by George Saunders.

“I didn’t really like your friend until she read us the story,” Jess’s boyfriend would tell her later, and she’d pass that on to me.

“I wasn’t sure if I liked him either,” I teased.

But I have a theory on why her boyfriend liked me by the end of “Sea Oak:” in order to understand a story that is read aloud, you must listen intently. Your mind cannot wander, you must concentrate on the words. Listening to someone read out loud is like that experiment where you stare into another person’s eyes for four minutes and by the end, you’re in love with that person. It’s too intimate an experience to share with someone you dislike.

4.
During those adrift 20s, I worked in a small bookstore for two years, and listened to upwards of 50 readings. There were authors I was extremely intimidated by (Mary Gaitskill) and authors who were easy to talk to (Laura van den Berg liked my glasses and told me about her dog; Rachel Kushner complained about missing her husband while on tour, Jim Shepard hugged me). There were some great performances, some droning voices, and a few authors with overinflated egos, but I never tired of listening. Even books that I didn’t like on the page came alive during a reading. I think that’s a common experience, many of us are much more generous listeners than we are readers. There were only two times my co-booksellers and I ever liked the author less after a reading: an extremely racist travel memoir, and a local author whose crowd trashed the store.

Most times, when authors left the store after a reading, I felt like they were a new friend, even if I’d barely spoken to them. Every time I hand-sold one of their books afterwards, I felt a sense of personal pride, as if my distant cousin had written the book I’d recommended, as if I was keeping the royalty checks in the family.

5.
More recently, my husband and I went through a rough patch — our beloved dog had died. I was growing more and more depressed, the election results didn’t help — and we’d been coping by zoning out in front of Netflix with a bottle of wine. Then, I spent one night reading aloud to him, just on a whim. I plucked Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris from the shelf, since I knew I could count on Sedaris for humor. My husband lay on the floor underneath the loveseat where I perched (someday, when we’re rich, I always say, we’ll buy a full-sized couch that fits both of us) and he listened as I read. He didn’t play around on his phone. When we went to bed that night, I felt like we’d solved something. I didn’t feel so sad, and somehow life didn’t feel as meaningless. It was a way to connect that I’d forgotten about. It launched something healing for me, like a heaping serving of a comfort food. It was a bonding tool I’d been taught when I was young, back when it didn’t matter what size couch you had, because we always sat on the floor anyways, legs criss-cross applesauce.

6.
When Mrs. Cris turned 80 a few years ago, our neighborhood threw a lobster bake. We blocked off the dead-end street my parents live on, we rented folding tables and set up the party on the street. We all wore ridiculous hats that night, at someone’s specific request. During the time for speeches, I stood up in my wide-brimmed Kentucky Derby hat, and talked a little bit about the reading group that Mrs. Cris started 20 years before, and what a profound effect it had on me as a reader and as a writer, and what’s more — as a person. The Reading Club taught me the importance of careful, concentrated listening, and taught me that I could find friends outside my immediate peer group. It taught me reading a story aloud is a way to take care of someone, a kind of care-taking that isn’t overbearing or smothering, and doesn’t feel like babysitting. As adults, reading aloud to one another is something we think we might have grown out of, but that’s only because we’ve forgotten how intimate and cozy it is to be read to, or to read aloud to someone who listens. It’s a simple, low-maintenance way to connect. And if you can tell a good story, I now believe, you can win anyone over, even the most skeptical of listeners. Especially if you serve cookies.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Essays
| 1 book mentioned 4 5 min read
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