Back in May — the 26th, to be exact — Steve King’s invaluable and always entertaining Today in Literature newsletter informed us that on that day in 1891, Edith Wharton’s first story was accepted for publication, by Scribner’s Magazine. The story was called “Mrs. Manstey’s View.”
(Yes, by the way: that’s accepted for publication — not actually published. I can’t imagine how Mr. King manages to keep all these dates organized or, for that matter, how he learns of them in the first place.)
I confess, with some embarrassment, that I have never read any of Edith Wharton’s books. (Now that I’ve written that, I guess I should commit to filling that gap in my education.) Yet I do have a few connections with her.
If you’ve ever spent time in the Berkshire Mountains area of western Massachusetts, and of course have kept your eyes open while doing so, you are probably familiar at least with the phrase (if not the actual place) “The Mount.” This is the ginormous residence which Wharton had built for herself in 1902.
(By convention and I guess officially, by ZIP code, The Mount claims to be in Lenox, MA. I’ve always thought of it as being on the outskirts, though. None of which really matters.)
Lesser known than The Mount is the former bed-and-breakfast establishment inarguably in Lenox, called The Gables. Built in 1885, the house was known originally as Pine Acre; and during the run-up to The Mount’s completion, Edith Wharton lived there and of course continued to write. The Missus and I stayed there on a trip through Massachusetts in June 1996. (Sometime after our visit, the inn was converted into condominiums. Sigh…)
And that’s the first connection.
The second connection, I wasn’t aware of until reading the Today in Literature write-up about “Mrs. Manstey’s View.” It quotes one passage:
Mrs. Manstey, in the long hours which she spent at her window, was not idle. She read a little, and knitted numberless stockings; but the view surrounded and shaped her life as the sea does a lonely island. When her rare callers came it was difficult for her to detach herself from the contemplation of the opposite window-washing, or the scrutiny of certain green points in a neighboring flower-bed which might, or might not, turn into hyacinths, while she feigned an interest in her visitor’s anecdotes about some unknown grandchild. Mrs. Manstey’s real friends were the denizens of the yards, the hyacinths, the magnolia, the green parrot, the maid who fed the cats, the doctor who studied late behind his mustard-colored curtains; and the confidant of her tenderer musings was the church-spire floating in the sunset.
That’s it. Four sentences, 140 words. Nothing unusual about that, is there?
Er, well, yes.
Toss out the first sentence, disregard the second. Together, they comprise 38 words. The remaining two sentences, therefore, average 51 words each. Even counting those first two sentences, the average works out to 35 words apiece.
These are by contemporary standards, enormous sentences.
All right, Wharton was writing a hundred years ago. “Times change. Tastes change,” as an old cigarette ad used to say — just before adding, “And I’ve changed, too!” (That’s a copy of the ad at the top of this post. I’m tellin’ ya, the Interwebs have everything.) In writing styles as in all else, I guess.
Just for the heck of it, I went back to look at the statistics for some of my writing — actually, for a good deal of it: two novels, two novellas, and seven short stories.
Why go through this exercise? Well, in writing workshops one of the common critiques of my writing has been length, both overall (I tend to write 8- to 10,000-word “short” stories) and per-sentence. I’ve always sort of waved my hands dismissively at such statistics-driven complaints, but never bothered to see if I really do write “long.”
And you know what? Across that entire sample of eleven works, I got the following results: one averaged 14 words/sentence; six, 15; one, 16; two, 17; and one, just under 19.
Which on the one hand makes me want to do a little nyah-nyah-nyah dance. But I can’t, not if I’m honest with myself (and you). For one thing, of course, that my stuff (at least, what I sampled) averages about half the sentence length of a single paragraph of Edith Wharton’s doesn’t tell us squat about how good — or even how readable — my writing is, relative to hers. (“Readable”? Yeah… because for all I know, my average word length is two or three times hers.)
And I do love to write long sentences — especially lists/catalogues, like the last one of Wharton’s above. Here’s a sample paragraph from an as-yet unpublished novel of mine:
As always at this time on a Saturday, unless snow was falling, one garage door was open tonight, beckoning them into the laundry room which opened into the garage. Since the White Lady was Al’s only vehicle and she would clearly not fit in either of the two bays — nor, for that matter, beneath the ceiling — Al’s garage did not serve a garage’s stated purpose. No; it was merely a dumping ground — for tools, groundskeeping machinery, wobbly sawhorses, two or three snow shovels, brooms, buckets, cardboard boxes, and assorted odds-and-ends pilfered by Al from his own company, over the course of the thirty-odd years before retirement that he’d been Castle MetalCo’s chairman of the board and CEO. Picked his own back pocket, George thought, to stock his garage with all this stuff — kilns, lathes, punches, metalworking hammers, and random steel and cast-iron doo-dads of unaccountable purpose.
Got that? One hundred fifty-one words. Four sentences. Nearly 40 words each. (Egad. No wonder this paragraph blew the workshop’s mind.)
[I just talked to The Missus, who had participated in said workshop. I pointed out that yes, that sample was pretty out there. But the average was still only fifteen words per sentence! She said, “Maybe the reason we complained was exactly it stuck out so much from the rest of the book.” Note to self: You don’t have to talk to The Missus about everything, you nitwit.]…And you know what the kicker is? I just found “Mrs. Manstey’s View” online, and pasted its contents into a word-processing document to ensure that the passage quoted in King’s newsletter was typical. Want to guess the average sentence length?
Thirteen words.
Sh!t.
[Update, from the Insult-to-Injury Department: Average sentence length, the above blog post — fourteen words and change.]
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