Just 450 words

Bernard Levin did it, TS Eliot did it a lot in Finnegan’s Wake, and no doubt there are other writers who have written an entire column or even book in a  single sentence, but I shouldn’t think it’s easy -  you have to have at your disposal an armoury of weapons such as parentheses (like these,  within which you can waffle on about anything you fancy); or subordinate clauses, which have nothing whatsoever to do with Santa and Christmas but are rather a way of breaking sentences up into related or opposed sense-groups; or very long lists, catalogues, inventories and enumerations of things or words, such as the massive pile-ups of adjectives that Levin used to build pace and tension (and I do miss Bernard’s lively animadversions on anything or everything that got under his skin, though you have to read his books now because he passed on in 2004); and there are others, all helping to constitute what is generally though indefinably called ‘style’, as though style was something that could be pinned down like a butterfly and taken apart to see how it worked, which of course it can’t be because in the process something gets killed, and what gets killed is something so intrinsic to the form and substance that the exercise is pointless, although I have to say that many literary critics (such as F R Leavis or I A Richards) took no notice and carried on regardless, adding little to the literary canon but paving the way for these dreadful postmodernists, most of ’em French (and we all know how French people enjoy a bit of philosophising over a carafe of  rouge and one of those long loaves that can do you such a nasty injury if it pokes you in the eye, though even the baguette is nothing like as hazardous as the croissant, which must be the messiest item of food every invented, scattering as it does more than its own body-weight in crumbs all over your tablecloth, lap, floor, carpet, and dog) and pretty well incomprehensible to people with only one brain; people like Foucault and Derrida, and one or two non-French people like Skinner and Chomsky, all of whom I blame for the fact that all Eng Lit classes teach nowadays is how to find the sub-text so as to work out what Charles Dickens had for his breakfast on Fridays in 1860 or whether Emily Bronte ever had a boy-friend, and if you think postmodernists are a waste of space as far as Eng Lit is concerned just see what they’ve done to music, which is all repetitive plink and plonk nowadays – and so I’m not even going to try.