Usually he seemed so complete and impervious, with his springy compact energy and pugnacious sharp jaw, shapely head alert and sensuous like an emperor’s.
Late in the Day, by Tessa Hadley
The British author, Tessa Hadley, is considered one of the finest and most innovative prose stylist.
In this sentence, she introduces the rhythm of doubles. It’s orderly and at the same time lively. Long ago, I learned this technique, and now it seeps and slithers into a lot of my sentences.
We looked at parallelism (See A Balancing Act). A sibling (maybe a younger brother or sister) is balance. Balance is the pairing of things. You can pair sounds, vowels, consonants, syllables, words of the same length, phrases of the same construction, words from the same grammatical category. Really anything. The key here is two.
The Making
In the Hadley sentence, she has a cascade of pairs:
“Complete and impervious”
“Springy compact energy” (the pairing of two adjectives),
“pugnacious sharp jaw” (the pairing of two adjectives)
And those two are paired together: “springy compact energy and pugnacious sharp jaw”
His shapely head is “alert and sensuous”
Here is Hadley’s sentence again in all its loveliness:
Usually he seemed so complete and impervious, with his springy compact energy and pugnacious sharp jaw, shapely head alert and sensuous like an emperor’s.
With balance, there’s tension between the repetition of the pairs and when the double beat rhythm might change. Hadley varies the rhythm at the end. Instead of leaving it at “alert and sensuous,” she adds “like an emperor’s.”
A sentence with a balanced form draws attention to itself. (Look at me!) So use it when you want the reader to pay attention. They are fun to write, and it’s easy to get carried away.
Here’s William Gass writing about Borges:
Borges is a fine poet, too, but he revolutionized our conception of both the story and the essay by blending and bewildering them. He will not be forgiven or forgotten for that.
Go ahead, pair up!
Let me know how it goes.
I love the Borges comment especially because in the last pairing, "he will not be forgiven or forgotten," there's that dissonance in signification: he's brilliant and unforgettable in his blending of essay and story, but also raised the bar so far in doing so that he is also unforgivable. I like the humor in that pairing.
Sylvia Plath:
Widow Mangada's house: pale, peach-brown stucco on the main Avenida running along shore, facing the beach of reddish yellow sand with all the gaily painted cabanas making a maze of bright blue wooden stilts and small square patches of shadow.
1st sentence of Widow Mangada, seems like the perfect place for a sentence to draw attention to itself.