Jerome Kagan and the Passion for Abstraction

Jerome Kagan (Photo by Rick Friedman)

I see in the Times that Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan died recently. In his Three Seductive Ideas (1998), Kagan analyzed human nature’s “passion for abstraction.” He said, “The human brain, like the brain of a rat, is biased initially to attend to generality rather than particularity.” 

If you believe, as I do, that specificity is the key to effective writing, you'll find that Kagan’s observation explains a lot. It explains why specificity doesn’t come naturally, why we have to school ourselves to use definite, specific, concrete language. William Strunk and E. B. White, in their classic The Elements of Style (1972), wrote,

If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on any one point, it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers – Homer, Dante, Shakespeare – are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.

This, to me, is writing's golden rule. It’s a difficult rule to apply because, as Kagan pointed out, it runs counter to our natural inclination to generalize. 

Interesting Emendations: Anne Boyer's "The Undying"

Here are two versions of the same passage:

1. We are supposed to be legible as patients while navigating hospitals and getting treatment, and illegible as our actual, sick selves while going to work and taking care of others. Our actual selves must now wear the false heroics of disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery and smiling after it, too. 

2. We are supposed to be legible as patients and illegible as our actual selves while going to work and taking care of others as our actual selves now with the extra work of the false heroics of legibility as a disease: every patient a celebrity survivor, smiling before the surgery, and smiling after, too, bald and radiant and funny and productively exposed.

The first version is from Anne Boyer’s great personal essay “The Undying” (The New Yorker, April 15, 2019); the second is from her Pulitzer-prize-winning book of the same name. Which is more effective? To me, it’s no contest. The New Yorker version is much clearer.

The same applies to other passages in Boyer’s book; the New Yorker versions appear superior. Here are three more examples:

New Yorker	Book
In the week before chemotherapy begins, it is like preparing for a winter storm, or a winter storm and a house guest, or a winter storm, a house guest, and the birth of a child.	In the week before chemotherapy begins, it is like preparing for a winter storm, or a winter storm and a houseguest, or a winter storm, a houseguest, and the birth of a child; also, maybe it is as if preparing for all three of these and a holiday, a virus, and a brief but intense episode of depression, all while also suffering the effects of the previous storm, houseguest, birth, holiday, virus, and depression.
The day before chemotherapy, a friend arrives from someplace I would rather be—California or Vermont or two different towns named Athens. I do everything to look healthy so that my friend will praise the skillfulness of my camouflage, its materials purchased at Wigs.com, CVS, and Sephora. We don’t speak of chemotherapy except for the practical exchange of information, like what time to set the alarm for and the best route to the pavilion. We pass our time as friends would, roasting vegetables and listening to music and speaking excitedly of other friends or ideas or political events.	The day before chemotherapy, a friend arrives from someplace I would rather be—California or Vermont or two different towns named Athens or New York or Chicago. Then it is exactly as it is: as if a friend has arrived from far away. On that day, I do everything to look healthy so that my friend will praise the skillfulness of my camouflage, its materials purchased at Wigs.com, CVS, and Sephora. On the day before chemotherapy, we don’t speak of chemotherapy any more than is necessary for the practical exchange of information, like what time to set the alarm and the best route to the pavilion. We pass our time as friends would, roasting vegetables and listening to music and speaking excitedly of other friends or ideas or political events.
The day of chemotherapy, we wake up early and arrive at least fifteen minutes late. We predict how well the treatment will go by what song is playing on the car radio: “Bohemian Rhapsody” (not so good), TLC’s “Waterfalls” (better). Chemotherapy, like most medical treatments, is boring. Like death, it is a lot of waiting for your name to be called. It is also waiting while the potential for panic and pain hangs around, too.	The day of chemotherapy, we wake up early and arrive at least fifteen minutes late. We predict how well the treatment will go by what song is playing on the car radio: “Bohemian Rhapsody” (not so good), TLC’s “Waterfalls” (better). Chemotherapy, like most medical treatments, is boring. Like death, it is a lot of waiting for your name to be called. It is also waiting while the potential for panic and pain hangs around, too, waiting for its name to be called. In this it is like war. The aesthetics of chemotherapy appear to have been decided by no one. That makes them like everything ideological. Later we begin to understand the costumes, machines, sounds, rituals, and architectures.

“Omit needless words!” cried William Strunk in his classic The Elements of Style (1972). The New Yorker followed this injunction when it edited Boyer’s manuscript. Yet, when Boyer published her book, she put those words back in. Why? The obvious answer is that she doesn’t consider them needless. Those additional words mean something to her. Sometimes concision isn’t the only aim. Artist’s necessity plays a role, too – fidelity to his or her own consciousness. And if that means breaking Professor Strunk’s rules, so be it. 

August 7 & 14, 2017 Issue

For me, the key ingredient of great writing is specificity. William Strunk, in his The Elements of Style (1959), wrote,

If those who have studied the art of writing, are in accord on one point, it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete. The greatest writers – Homer, Dante, Shakespeare – are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.

“Specificity” is used in this week’s New Yorker at least twice: Richard Brody’ “Movies: Girls Trip” (“The view of middle-class African-American women’s lives behind closed doors, despite its antic exaggeration, has a lived-in specificity”); and Judith Thurman’s “World of Interiors” (“In Cusk’s recent novels, it isn’t the drama of the events but their specificity that keeps you riveted”). And it’s evinced in at least three inspired passages:

When the unruly menswear label Hood by Air staged its 2014 fall runway show, it tapped this subversive d.j. to create the score. The resulting twenty-four-minute composition, “10,000 Screaming Faggots,” wove together soaring Beyoncé samples and poetry by Juliana Huxtable, all laid under silver-bullet drums and synths that clawed at warehouse walls. [“Night Life: Total Freedom”]

A woman with a glittery backpack ordered a Woolynesia, tropical punch with gin, lime, chili, cinnamon, and puréed stone fruits, served in a woolly-mammoth-shaped mug. Paintings, prints, and statuary of the extinct beast, a lugubrious mascot, lurk everywhere you look. The woman took a sip, smiled at her man-bunned companion, and said, as far as an amateur lip-reader could tell, either “I love you” or “Elephant juice. [Carolyn Kormann, “Bar Tab:The Wooly Public”]

On exhibit were a palm-leaf book the size of a sheaf of paint samples, a big ball of raw rubber from a rubber tree (one of Sri Lanka’s resources), boxes of Ceylon tea (“We have the best, best tea”), a large stone grinder for spices (“Sri Lankan women were strong, back in the day”), her grandmother’s sitar, a replica of a seated Buddha considered to be the fifth-greatest statue in the world, and a statue of the fasting Buddha (“For six years, he ate no food and never opened his eyes”) that was made of welded iron. [Ian Frazier, “Extra Credit”]

The opposite of “specific” is “generic.” Dan Chiasson’s “Paper Trail” (in this week’s issue), a review of Susan Howe’s new poetry collection, Debths, recalled, for me, the concluding essay in his One Kind of Everything (2007), in which he says of the lines in a passage from Howe’s Hinge Picture,

Their indeterminancy, their conscious evasion of affect and style as those words are usually understood, their elevation of spatial constraints over formal ones, their rejection of the personal dimension, make them generic, and deliberately so.

To me, this is damning. But Chiasson expresses it quite neutrally. He doesn’t dismiss Howe’s poetry. He seems to value it. In “Paper Trail,” he writes,

The result, “Hinge Picture” (1974), translated to the page Howe’s visual installations, in which isolated phrases had been offset by the stark white of a gallery wall: the gutter, a unique feature of books, divided the visual “picture” into distinct zones. The friend had inadvertently launched one of the great careers in recent American poetry. All of Howe’s volumes since have tested the limits of the printed page; in doing so, they reaffirm the page itself as a necessary check on—and an expressive feature of—her imagination.

In “Paper Trail,” Chiasson doesn’t use “generic” to describe Howe’s poems. Instead, he concentrates on their look, the way they “test the limits of the printed page.” By treating Howe’s poems as “visual installations,” he shows their aesthetic specificity. 

February 17 & 24, 2014 Issue

William Strunk’s advice to “Make the paragraph the unit of composition” (Elements of Style, 1972) is undoubtedly right. But, for me, reading’s deepest pleasure is sourced in the colors, contours and textures of artfully crafted sentences. This week’s issue contains two gems. The first is from Amelia Lester’s “Tables For Two” piece on the Empire Diner:

Young families, their tabletops littered with sippy cups and mezcal cocktails, tend to finish their meal by attacking the Platonic ideal of the banana split, all wet walnuts and melting Neapolitan ice cream.

What a mélange of delightful, surprising ingredients! I particularly like the incongruous juxtaposition of “sippy cups” and “mezcal cocktails.” And the combination of abstraction (“Platonic ideal”) with specificity (“banana split, all wet walnuts and melting Neapolitan ice cream”) is ravishing. The whole thing is like a gorgeous Rauschenberg – Washington’s Golden Egg, say, or Monogram. I’m glad to have read it.

The other line that caught my eye is in Roger Angell’s wonderful “This Old Man”:

I’ve also become a blogger, and enjoy the ease and freedom of the form: it’s a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window.

The analogy between blogging and making (and launching) a paper airplane is brilliant. It exactly expresses the “ease and freedom of the form” that I feel when I post an item here. Praise of blogging by a master writer like Angell is inspiring.

Interesting Emendations: Gabrielle Hamilton's "The Lamb Roast"

Do you remember these lines?

On weekend mornings, we piled in the car and ate breakfast at Smutzie’s, in New Jersey, then filled up the tank at Sam Williams’s Mobil, in Pennsylvania.

The day before the party, we drove out along the winding roads, past Black’s Christmas tree farm and the LaRue bottle works.

They’re from Gabrielle Hamilton’s wonderful memory piece "The Lamb Roast" (The New Yorker, January 17, 2011). They are, in their rich simplicity, examples of my idea of the ideal sentence. I was looking for them when I recently read Hamilton’s Blood, Bones & Butter (2011), in which a variation of “The Lamb Roast” appears as Chapter 1. I found them. They’re different from the New Yorker lines. They now read:

On weekend mornings we had breakfast at Smutzie’s in Lambertville, on the Jersey side, but then we got gas for the car at Sam Williams’s Mobil on the New Hope side. [My emphasis]

So on this bluish early summer weekend, Jeffrey drove his new jalopy out the winding country roads, past Black’s Christmas tree farm, and past the Larue bottle works. [My emphasis]

In the first sentence, “we piled in the car” has been deleted, “ate” has been changed to “had,” “in New Jersey” has been changed to “in Lambertville, on the Jersey side,” “then filled up the tank” has been changed to “but then we got gas for the car,” and “in Pennsylvania” has been changed to “on the New Hope side.”

In the second sentence, “The day before the party, we drove” has been changed to “So on this bluish early summer weekend, Jeffrey drove his new jalopy,” “out along” has been changed to just “out,” “winding roads” has been changed to “winding country roads,” and “past Black’s Christmas tree farm and the LaRue bottle works” has been changed to “past Black’s Christmas tree farm, and past the Larue bottle works.”

I’m pleased to see that those glorious names – Smutzie’s, Sam Williams’s Mobil, Black’s Christmas tree farm, LaRue bottle works – remain untouched, except that the “R” in “LaRue” is now lowercase. It’s the marvelous specificity of these great names that, for me, makes the sentences so alive. The New Yorker versions are simpler; I prefer them. Both versions are excellent, illustrating the truth of William Strunk’s old adage: “the surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definite, and concrete” (The Elements of Style).  

August 6, 2012 Issue

Paragraphs may be “the units of composition” (Strunk & White, The Elements of Style), but sentences are the indicia of style. Sanford Schwartz, in his brilliant “Georgia O’Keeffe Writes a Book” (The New Yorker, August 28, 1978), says of Hemingway, “He takes the anonymity out of language, and shows how personal and three-dimensional the use of words can be, how a sentence can have a profile and be as contoured as a carving.” Reading The New Yorker, I’m always on the look out for creative, evocative, stylish sentences – sentences that “have a profile” and are “as contoured as a carving.” I found four in this week’s issue:

Just don’t arrive hungry, and leave any frumpy totes – or friends – behind, and you may enjoy the novelty of a Savage Detective (a mescal Old Fashioned with sherry, maple syrup, and charred pineapple) amidst the buzzy blend of flirting, texting, and social climbing that is Abramcyk’s signature dish. (Ariel Levy, “Tables For Two: Super Linda”)

Siodmak makes performance his subject, with scenes of an orchestra playing Wagner (her ecstacy) and Beethoven (her fate), lovers singing at a piano in a parlor, and a society band at a swank café, where, in a cunning crane shot of a saunter down a staircase – with Kelly’s leonine grace and Durbin’s homely footfalls – he condenses the drama to a thwarted dance. (Richard Brody, “Critic’s Notebook: Screen Fright”)

His black jeans puddle around white sneakers that looked like they were cut from blocks of foam. (Lauren Collins, “The Question Artist”)

When I met Aung Min this spring in Rangoon, he had about him a Brylcreem crispness that evoked an Asian Robert McNamara. (Evan Osnos, “The Burmese Spring”)

Interesting Emendations: Michael Ondaatje's "The Cat's Table"

Here are two variations of the same passage. One is from Michael Ondaatje’s short story “The Cat’s Table,” which appeared in The New Yorker, May 16, 2011. The other is from his novel of the same name. Just from looking at their composition, can you tell which one is the New Yorker version?

Out on the street you could have the shape of your head read, your teeth pulled. A barber cut Cassius’s hair and poked a vicious pair of scissors quickly into his nose to clear away the possibility of any further hair in the nostrils of a twelve-year-old.

Out on the street, you could have the shape of your head read, your teeth pulled. A barber cut Cassius’s hair and poked a narrow, vicious pair of scissors quickly into his nose to clear away the possibility of hair in the nostrils of a twelve-year-old.

The two passages differ in three ways: (1) one has a comma after “street,” the other one doesn’t; (2) in one, the scissors are described as “vicious”; in the other, they are described as “narrow, vicious”; (3) one says “the possibility of any further hair”; the other simply says “the possibility of hair.”

Of the three differences, the most telling, in terms of identifying the New Yorker version, is the deletion of the extraneous “any further” in the second passage. The New Yorker consistently follows the principles set out in Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, chief amongst which is “Omit needless words.” The second passage is from The New Yorker.

Here from the same sources are two more extracts for comparison:

I was used to the lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, that smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut (a throat-catching odour), and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall.

I was used to the lush chaos of Colombo’s Pettah market, the throat-catching smell of sarong cloth being unfolded and cut, and mangosteens, and rain-soaked paperbacks in a bookstall.

Note the elimination of the parenthesis in the second passage, and the insertion of “throat-catching” immediately before “smell.” The second version strikes me as more concise and, as Strunk & White would say, definite. It’s my favorite passage in the short story. I was surprised to see it altered in the novel.

The Cat’s Table contains many such differences. In almost every instance, I prefer the New Yorker version. I wonder why Ondaatje didn’t use the New Yorker edits in his novel.

Credit: The above portrait of Michael Ondaatje is by Patrick Long; it appears in The New Yorker, June 4, 2007, as an illustration for Louis Menand’s “The Aesthete.”

Interesting Emendations: Anthony Bailey's "Outer Banks"

The variation between New Yorker pieces and subsequent versions of them that appear in books fascinates me. The variation shows that The New Yorker has its own way of doing things, even basic things like punctuation. Take Anthony Bailey’s great book The Outer Banks (1989), for example. It’s about a trip that Bailey took along North Carolina’s Outer Banks in 1985. Written in the first-person singular and in the present tense – a combination I find irresistible - it tells us what Bailey did and saw and heard and ate and felt, in detail after palpable detail, as he walks, drives, camps, and noses his way across the precarious Banks. A portion of the book appeared, in slightly different form, titled “Outer Banks,” in the May 25, 1987, issue of The New Yorker.

Comparing the two versions, I find differences in almost every paragraph. For instance, here’s an excerpt from the magazine piece describing a walk that Bailey takes on the beach:

Then I turn left – north – along the beach. The tide is at half ebb, so I am able to stride easily on firm, damp sand at the water’s edge; higher on the beach, the sand is dry and loose, too soft for comfortable walking. Some people are sitting on porches, or in beach chairs in front of their cottages. A few fishermen are casting into the surf, and several youths on surfboards are floating some way out, waiting for the right wave. Toward the horizon, a small white blob is a solitary sportfishing boat. At the water’s edge, I pass a child swimming and being watched by his father, who gives me an affable nod. I make my turnaround point a structure called the Nags Head Fishing Pier. It is battered-looking, spindly-legged, and wobbly-kneed, yet a number of customers obviously feel secure enough to be angling from it; on the landward end, it has a bar, a luncheonette, and a fishing-tackle store. As I walk back, I observe driftwood; the black egg cases of skate, like dark pouches of ravioli or wonton, sealed as if with a twist at each end; all sorts of shells; and a plastic fork or two.


Here is the same walk as described in the book:

Then I turn left along the beach, northward. The tide is at half-ebb, so I am able to stride along on firm, damp sand at the water’s edge; higher on the beach the sand is dry and loose, too soft for easy walking. Some people are sitting on porches or in beach chairs in front of their cottages. A few fishermen are casting into the surf, and several youths on surfboards are floating some way out, waiting for the right wave. Toward the horizon, a small white blob is a solitary sportfishing boat. I pass at the water’s edge a child swimming and being watched by his father, who gives me an affable nod. I make my turnaround point a structure called Nags Head Fishing Pier – battered-looking, spindly-legged, and wobbly-kneed, though a number of customers obviously feel secure enough to be angling from it. On its landward end the pier has a bar, luncheonette, and fishing-tackle store. As I walk back, I observe driftwood, the black egg cases of skate, like dark pouches of ravioli or wonton, sealed as if with a twist at each end, all sorts of shells, and a plastic fork or two.

Comparing these two passages, I count fifteen differences: (1) The first sentence in the magazine version is “Then I turn left – north – along the beach,” whereas the book version’s first sentence is “Then I turn left along the beach, northward”; (2) the magazine version says “stride easily”; the book version says “stride along”; (3) the magazine version has a comma after “beach”; the book version doesn’t; (4) the magazine version says “comfortable walking”; the book version says “easy walking”; (5) the magazine version has a comma after “porches”; the book version doesn’t; (6) the magazine version says, “At the water’s edge, I pass”; the book version says, “I pass at the water’s edge”; (7) The magazine version has a period after “Nags Head Fishing Pier”; the book version has a dash; (8) the word after “wobbly-kneed” in the magazine version is “yet”; in the book version, it’s “though’; (9) the magazine version has a semi-colon after “angling from it”; the magazine version has a period; (10) “the” before “landward” in the magazine becomes “its” in the book; (11) “it has a bar” in the magazine” becomes “the pier has a bar” in the book; (12) the magazine says “a luncheonette”; the book just says “luncheonette”; (13) the magazine says “a fishing-tackle store”; the book just says “fishing-tackle store”; (14) in the magazine, there’s semi-colon after “driftwood”; in the book, there’s a comma; (15) in the magazine, there’s a semi-colon after “end”; in the book there’s a comma.

These differences – most of them minor syntactical adjustments – show the numerous decisions Bailey faced in structuring his piece. They are typical of the differences that exist between the two texts in almost every paragraph. It’s difficult to say which version is better. Looking at the two versions of the “beach walk” passage, I like that “left – north” in the first sentence of The New Yorker version; it’s a subtle touch, signaling that we’re in the presence of a walker for whom direction is important, so much so that when he says “left,” he immediately wants to be more precise, and so quickly adds “north” in the same breath. Also, I find The New Yorker version’s “At the water’s edge, I pass a child” smoother than the book’s “I pass at the water’s edge a child.” But I question The New Yorker’s use of semi-colons to separate the driftwood, black egg cases of skate, shells, and plastic fork(s) in the last sentence. The book uses commas to mark the separation, and even though there are two additional commas within “the driftwood, black egg cases of skate, shells, and plastic fork(s),” the sentence still makes sense and flows much better than it does when it’s riddled with semi-colons. I also prefer the book’s use of a dash after “Nags Head Fishing Pier” that immediately ushers in the vivid adjectives “battered-looking, spindly-legged, and wobbly-kneed.” In the magazine piece, the use of a period, instead of a dash, delays the occurrence of these adjectives until after the start of the new sentence.

Both versions are great – full of open-air immediacy, fresh and vibrant as Winslow Homer watercolors. I think the New Yorker changes reflect its Strunkian approach to style, particularly Strunk’s well-known injunction, “Omit needless words!” My favorite sentence in The Outer Banks is the simple, but thrilling, “Saturday morning, and I drive northward up the Banks.” It’s the beginning of an excursion, and I’m happy to be along. But what about that "and”? I don't consider it needless, but I'll bet William Strunk would. I check The New Yorker version. Sure enough, Strunk has struck again; “and” is omitted; "northward" is trimmed to "north." The sentence - “Saturday morning, I drive north up the Banks” - is cleaner, but somehow less buoyant and carefree.