The Musicality

To assume that style is distinct from substance still remains a commonplace yet peculiar view.

Long Beach, New York 2021

Here’s a typical sentence from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby:

And on Monday eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

What’s curious about this sentence, however, is how much it reveals about Fitzgerald’s approach to writing: you might even conclude that he discovered his story and created his meaning by the sound of his words. Forget about context, ignore the descriptions, and look closely at the rhythm. Nearly every word that Fitzgerald selects is the result of an aesthetic decision, and, as in every novel, those aesthetic decisions shape the story that emerges.

So Fitzgerald forces his gardeners to carry scrubbing-brushes rather than simply brushes because that’s what fits the beat; and his gardeners must also use garden-shears rather than mere shears because that’s what balances the list. In this collection of four tools it isn’t an accident that he stresses the second and forth items. Fitzgerald also makes sure to hire eight servants rather than seven or nine, but that’s only because eight balances with extra in the next clause. This is a sonorous world, with setting and story and character a consequence of what best fits the beat. We can’t know, for instance, whether Fitzgerald first thought of the word repairing or of the word ravages, but we can know with certainty that the second word resulted from the first.

Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.

Consider this list of twelve names, scramble them, and find the rhythm that works best. Feel free to add or subtract middle initials or use abbreviations to suit the pace of your sentence. Ensure that the names contain puns and allusions and a bit of absurdity for the careful reader. Right before your list reaches its end, insert a tiny lilt—divorced now—to give the reader a shove toward the finish. And, in a nice touch, begin and end the sentence in New York.

It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hat-boxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of wind-shields that mirrored a dozen suns.

Gatsby’s car arrives with a series of hyphens, along with several little flourishes that too many writing teachers would toss away—such as, swollen here and there—but the descriptive terms are what I consider most revealing. Because his sentence already has that beat of hyphens, an established rhythm for the reader to follow, he doesn’t linger or stress his other descriptions. So you can endlessly sing swollen, monstrous, triumphant, labyrinth without finding a pattern and without repeating a prefix or suffix—there’s already a repetition in the sentence and Fitzgerald doesn’t want it disturbed. Now rich just might work with bright, and terraced and mirrored just might give you a tiny pulse, but all of the descriptions away from the hyphens occur, you might say, on the downbeat.

Explore writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.

Subscribe to Desk Notes

But to assume that style is distinct from substance still remains a commonplace yet peculiar view. Implicit to this assumption is the claim that what Fitzgerald writes about is distinct from the voice that he uses on the page. It is the claim that there’s some core meaning that’s intrinsic and enduring and that’s not contingent upon what’s visible—in novels and paintings and every aspect of life. Thus you have to scratch the polish from the surface, it seems, to find the true substance. The polish is a mere distraction or flourish, an incidental aspect of appearance, a patina atop what’s real, even though simply walking around the world makes this a tricky assumption to justify. Doesn’t the architecture of a building quite clearly shape the experience and potential of a building? Isn’t the cut of a suit intrinsic to the sensation of wearing that suit? Although there’s an infinite number of containers that we might call cups—isn’t drinking water from one distinct from choosing another?

Of course any assumption about separating style from substance collapses most quickly when you concentrate on art. A painter, for instance, doesn’t labor with the substance of a painting and then, at the end, add a dollop of style. From the first brushstroke to the last, there’s no distinction between how the canvas is painted and what is painted. Nor does a writer grind out sturdy, structurally ideal paragraphs and then, later, add a splash of style by dressing up the sentences in more formal attire. Can you even imagine a jazz musician partitioning how they play from what they play? To not see that these elements are symbiotic—that how always influences what; that what always influences how—is to not hear jazz.

Fitzgerald obviously excels at inducing his words to dance across the page, but every writer, regardless of how grandiose or substandard or banal, creates substance from their style. What they write always emerges from how they write. This is a trap that can’t be escaped: even the writer that pretends to convey nothing but facts, logic, and meaning still conveys a style. And Fitzgerald’s prose happens to provide the remarkable opportunity to see how, for him, the symphonic creates the story, with the picture in your mind the result of the sound in his ear.