Sumptuous Sentences

Somerset Maugham

In his 1928 tale A Chance Acquaintance, Somerset Maugham pulls off the remarkable feat of captivating us with a story about a man sharing a train compartment with a fellow passenger who talks to him (or at him) for every waking hour of an eleven day trans-Siberian railway journey. Here is one of Maugham’s descriptions of this living hell:

He talked with precision, using a copious vocabulary and forming his sentences with deliberation; he never used a short word when a longer one would do; he never paused. He went on and on. It was not a torrent, for there was nothing impetuous about it, it was like a stream of lava pouring irresistibly down the side of a volcano. It flowed with a quiet and steady force that overwhelmed everything that was in its path.

The passage is ingenious in several ways. Maugham uses an interesting form of 'showing' rather than 'telling' – instead of describing the conversation as merely ponderous, he conveys a sense of boredom with words like precision, copious and deliberation.

There is also a rhythm in parts of the piece that evokes the soporific clunking of a train on the tracks (…he never paused. He went on and on…).

Negative constructions such as not a torrent and nothing impetuous are unfashionable nowadays, but Maugham proves how they can lend subtle nuances to description.

The stream of lava simile is amplified beautifully by the word choices - pouring irresistibly, quiet and steady, overwhelmed all reinforce the impression of a relentless onslaught of conversation that might indeed eventually solidify someone into a piece of rock.

Towards the end, the word 'it' occurs four times in two sentences, but technically the pronoun does not link back to a specific noun, aiding the impression that the constant chatter is an anonymous, hypnotising wall of sound.

Virginia Woolf

Following her first two (fairly conventional) novels, Virginia Woolf started her fictional experiments in earnest with her third novel Jacob's Room, which can be regarded as a creative bridge into her more famous modernist works.

This sentence from Jacob's Room illustrates perfectly her quest to capture colour in words, anticipating her later work in The Waves:

The Scilly Isles were turning bluish; and suddenly blue, purple and green flushed the sea; left it grey, struck a stripe which vanished; but when Jacob had got his shirt over his head the whole floor of the waves was blue and white, rippling and crisp, though now and again a broad purple mark appeared, like a bruise; or there floated an entire emerald tinged with yellow.

Using ten colour-words in a single sentence might seem ill-advised, but Woolf illustrates here how there is much more to writing about colour than reeling off a succession of adjectives. For example, nouns can be used to convey colour, as with emerald, or we can qualify a colour adjective as in bluish.

More important is the need to make colour changes dynamic, mainly via graphic verbal constructions such as turning, flushed, struck, vanished, rippling, floated, and tinged, all of which help the colours to move across the writer’s canvas.

Long descriptive passages in fiction are often accused of being self-indulgent padding that fails to move the story along, a charge that could not be levelled justly in this case, because the shifting colours Jacob sees are highly tentative, representing a very apt metaphor for the confusion occupying his mind.

On a technical note, the four semicolons may not follow strict convention, but they capture perfectly the rhythm of the colours shimmering on the sea, which was presumably Woolf's lyrical intention. The semicolons in the first two lines seem ideally placed to carry the deliciously luscious sounds in bluish, flushed and vanished.

James Joyce

At the end of the second chapter in Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus receives his teacher's wages from the school’s self-opinionated and patronising headmaster, Mr Deasy.  While being paid his three pounds and twelve shillings, Stephen endures several minutes of tedious advice from Mr Deasy regarding the ways of the world and how life should be lived.  Eventually, Stephen escapes and reaches the school gate only to find Deasy chasing him up the path in order to have the last word in the form of a deplorably antisemitic joke.

After Deasy has delivered the joke's punch-line, we read the following two sentence paragraph:

A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm.  He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, his lifted arms waving to the air.

The piece is masterly for many reasons.  First, we cannot help but feel that the repulsive description of Deasy’s coughing fit has something to do with Stephen himself feeling revulsion from the joke that Deasy has just told.

Second, however distasteful, the ball and chain description for the unpleasant bodily function is certainly a highly redolent piece of imagery.

Third, the punctuation choices seem perfect.  The first sentence works better for resisting any temptation to place a comma after 'throat', because a pause there would break up the ball and chain concatenation idea.  In contrast, the three successive commas in the second sentence graphically capture the unhinged delight of Deasy laughing at his own joke.

Finally, right at the end of the paragraph we have a marvellous word choice.  It's often easy to forget that changing the smallest words can be every bit as effective as changing the longer, fancier ones.  Deasy does not merely wave his hands in the air, but to the air, which adds enormously to the demonic effect.