To suffer, to labor, to toil and force your way through the spikes of life, to crawl through its darkest caverns, to push through the worst, to struggle under the weight of economy, to make money—only to become the father of a fourth-rate man of the world like this, so flat-looking, with his ordinary, clean, rosy, uninteresting, self-satisfied, fundamentally bourgeois face.

“A Father-To-Be,” by Saul Bellow

people working on building during daytime — A lot of toiling, forcing your way through the spikes of life

I was driving, listening to The New Yorker Fiction podcast, with Camille Bordas and Deborah Treisman discussing Saul Bellow’s short story, “A Father-To-Be,” when they turned to Bellow’s sentences. Treisman asked, why the pile-up of adjectives to describe the man’s face?

(I’d add: why the pile-up of infinitives at the beginning?)

Camille said if she had a student who wrote like that she’d say, pick one.

Wait a minute. Not so fast.

With the opening, and its effusion of infinitives (a verb with the word “to” in front of it), something more is happening than a pile-up. I feel the protagonist’s exhaustion from endless work, from the struggle to make a living. Imagine if there were only two: “To suffer, to labor—only to become the father…” It’s not so emotional.

With the adjectives describing the “fourth-rate” man’s face, this, too, is more than a pile-up; the character’s disgust, even disdain for the man feels alive and squirming on the page.

There is nothing calm or reasonable about this sentence (well, sort of a sentence—more later). It pulses with heightened emotion, it fizzes with heightened energy. In the story, Rogin is riding the subway, studying this “fourth-rate man,” who reminds him of his aristocratic fiancé and her father. He begins to imagine that if he marries his fiancé, he’ll end up with a son like this and he’ll be cursed. But you knew this from the structure of the sentence.

photo of a man and woman newly wedding holding a balloons — and he’ll end up with a “fourth-rate man”

Winston Weathers in his essay, “The Rhetoric of the Series,” wrote that a four-or-more series moves the reader out of the realm of the reasonable and logical (the world of threes) and into the human, the emotional, the diffuse, and inexplicable. Choosing four-or-more creates another layer of content, an emotional layer.

Bellow likes the four-or-more series. It’s one of the reasons why James Woods writes in the introduction to Saul Bellow Collected Stories, “But again, many writers are called “great”; the word is everywhere, industrially farmed. In Bellow’s case it means greatly abundant, greatly precise, greatly various, rich, and strenuous. It means prose as a registration of the joy of life: the happy rolling freedom of his daring, uninsured sentences….This prose sometimes cascades in poured adjectives…there is joy, simple joy, to be had from reading the sentences,” writes Woods.

And perhaps because the form of the sentence contains greatly abundant emotion.

The Making

To use Bellow’s architecture, write eight infinitives. Start with these infinitives, and then add more rhythm by using infinitive phrases (modification of the infinitive—”to crawl through the darkest caverns”). This series serves as the subject of the sentence.

Now use an em-dash, which is a hinge for the sentence. The next infinitive is no longer about the daily struggle, but “to become,” and the initial infinitives build to this new infinitive.

Now, I noted this wasn’t a complete sentence. What’s missing is the verb. To make it a complete sentence, it would look something like this: To suffer, to labor, to toil…was what I did to become the father…

Bellow uses a fragment to capture Rogin’s thoughts and rarely do we think in complete sentences.

Finally, after the em-dash, can you add six adjectives to one of your nouns to heighten the emotion?

Try it!

Let me know what happens or what else you see in this sentence.

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