In his rich and heartfelt Meanjin essay ‘In Praise of the Long Sentence’ (no. 1, 2016, pages 56–65), the novelist Gerald Murnane disclaims having received any thorough grounding in English grammar during his ‘patchy’ education across a number of schools. Nonetheless much of his essay is strong on, even you might say soaked in, grammatical analysis, particularly with regard to the structure of paragraph-long sentences. Unfortunately, despite Murnane’s confident presentation and his rightly esteemed fine literary record, his own sentence analysis occasionally invites challenge.
The essential concept here is the distinction between main and subordinate clauses, a main or principal clause being one that can stand by itself as a sentence while the subordinates, like branches from a tree, enrich the main with further information but are unable to stand independently. The two quotations here from his essay include his own quotations of another’s and of his own work. The racial issue and literary taste involved in the first inner quotation are weighty and even eye-goggling but not to the present point.
A distinction is sometimes made between right-branching and left-branching sentences. This is a right-branching sentence from a short story by Flannery O’Connor:
She was a long-faced blonde schoolteacher who boarded with them and Mr Cheatham was her admirer, a rich old farmer who arrived every Saturday afternoon in a baby-blue Pontiac powdered with red-clay dust and black inside with negroes that he charged ten cents a piece to bring into town. The main clause is at the left, and the subordinate clauses all follow. It is not hard to compose a very long right-branching sentence—not much harder than thread-ing beads … You absorb the main item to start with and you don’t have to strain to swallow all the extras afterwards. (p. 64)
(A left-branching sentence is one where the subordinate clauses precede the main clause.)
Murnane’s analysis of the sentence is not correct. The principal clause that begins O’Connor’s sentence is: ‘She was a long-faced blonde schoolteacher’. It has a subject, verb and predicate and can stand by itself. To it is then attached a subordinate clause: ‘who boarded with them’. Then comes, attached to the preceding by the conjunction ‘and’, a second principal clause: ‘Mr Cheatham was her admirer’. It has a subject, verb and predicate and can stand by itself. To this second principal clause all the rest of the sentence from ‘who arrived every Saturday’ applies, qualifying and enriching it with detail. This can be made very clear—allowing for a small stylistic change—by inserting a full stop and a capital letter:
She was a long-faced blonde schoolteacher who boarded with them. And Mr Cheatham was her admirer, a rich old farmer who arrived every Saturday afternoon in a baby-blue Pontiac powdered with red-clay dust and black inside with negroes that he charged ten cents a piece to bring into town.
To conclude his essay Murnane offers a favourite long sentence from his own work, not from one of his published books but from an unfinished and unpublished manuscript called ‘O, Dem Golden Slippers’ (again, racial issues are not to the present point). Although he does not describe this as a classically right-branching sentence, he direction and weight of his immediately preceding remarks suggest strongly that he sees it as a good example of one: ‘this for its directness, its interconnectedness, and its needing only four commas among its more than 100 words and its six clauses’:
During each morning of his holidays, the chief character of this story and the owner of the collection of racebooks had checked the level of the water in the drinking troughs for fifty and more Hereford steers in a paddock of grass and had poured buckets of water into the soil around the roots of each seedling in the lines of seedlings of cypress and sugar-gum that the owner of the racebooks, who was also the owner of the Hereford steers, had planted a few months previously along one of the paddocks of grass, which he rented from three men who were the sons of one of the sisters of his father. (p. 65)
Although a much longer sentence than the first, its structure is similar to it and his error is similar. He is correct that it possesses six clauses but, again, two of them are principal clauses. Its breakdown is this:
Adverbial phrase qualifying principal clause 1: ‘During each morning of his holidays’
Principal clause 1, having a subject (bifurcated but referring to the same person), a verb and a phrasally elaborated predicate: ‘the chief character of this story and the owner of the collection of racebooks had checked the level of the water in the drinking troughs for fifty and more Hereford steers in a paddock of grass’
Conjunction linking to principal clause 2: ‘and’
Principal clause 2, having a subject, verb and elaborated predicate: ‘(implicit subject he) had poured buckets of water into the soil around the roots of each seedling in the lines of seedlings of cypress and sugar-gum’
Subordinate clause 1 (first part), to previous principal clause 2: ‘that the owner of the racebooks,’
Subordinate clause 2: ‘who was also the owner of the Hereford steers,’
Continuation of subordinate clause 1: ‘had planted a few months previously along one of the paddocks of grass,’
Subordinate clause 3: ‘which he rented from three men’
Subordinate clause 4: ‘who were the sons of one of the sisters of his father’.
Again, this can be made clear by bringing the implicit ‘he’ to explicitness (italics mine):
During each morning of his holidays, the chief character of this story and the owner of the collection of racebooks had checked the level of the water in the drinking troughs for fifty and more Hereford steers in a paddock of grass, and he had poured buckets of water into the soil around the roots of each seedling in the lines of seedlings of cypress and sugar-gum that the owner of the racebooks …
Murnane at the beginning of his essay laments comments by Frank Kermode about the author Thomas Pynchon, such as: ‘Pynchon loves very long sentences.’ Declaring adherence to a theory of fiction deriving from Wayne C. Booth, Murnane remarks:
Kermode, in his careless attribution of a love of long sentences to an entity that he named ‘Pynchon’, betrayed his ignorance of Booth’s common-sense distinction between the flesh-and-blood Thomas Pynchon and the implied author of the texts that he put his name to. (p. 57)
This is marvellous PoMo toshery, part of that historical-critical attempt, by first separating authors from their real-life bodies, to eventually define them out of existence. Kermode’s inference is perfectly defensible. And Gerald Murnane loves long sentences. •
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