An Apology for the Adverb

What tools do we need to do the job? . . . shovel and pickaxe on a US Army Jeep during the Liberation of Paris.

Now that they’ve banished Pluto, we have eight planets in our solar system. We also have eight parts of speech in the English language, but there seems to be a movement afoot to banish one of them. I’m speaking of the adverb, which for many years has been under attack by the type of writer who enjoys giving other writers advice about what they do.

“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs,” states Stephen King in his engaging text, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. “And I will shout it from the rooftops.”¹ Instead of actually screaming from the roof of his house, he does the literary equivalent by expressing his opposition in italics: “The adverb is not your friend.” Coming from such an accomplished and successful writer, this statement carries the force of a commandment: Thou shalt not use the adverb under any circumstances.

Before he died, the crime writer Elmore Leonard published an article in the New York Times that consisted of ten “rules” he thought aspiring writers should try to follow. In rule number four, he stated that one must “Never use an adverb to modify the verb ‘said.’” In discussing his eighth rule, he praised a Hemingway story for being written with “not one adverb in sight.”²

When I told him that I wrote considerably, he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which I meant . . .

In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White offer a selection not of rules or commandments, but of what they call “mere gentle reminders” for those who wish to write effective prose. One not-so-gentle reminder is to “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs.”³ William Zinsser, in his influential text On Writing Well, agreed with this recommendation and stated rather primly that “Most adverbs are unnecessary.”⁴

So many other writers and editors have jumped aboard this self-consciously stripped-down bandwagon that the advice not to use adverbs has acquired the currency of an internet meme. This makes me wonder. What Poe called “the imp of the perverse” prods me to ask: Does the adverb really deserve all the contempt that has been poured on its unassuming head? Is there really no room for this part of speech in the writer’s arsenal of words and phrases? Or is hostility to the adverb a relatively recent fad, one that over time will be abandoned and forgotten?

To answer these questions, I re-read certain works by three American masters of English prose: Henry David Thoreau, J.D. Salinger, and James Baldwin. I paid special attention to the way these writers employed the adverb, and I began to suspect that a discrepancy might exist between the advice being given and what good writers actually do in practice. In the following pages, I will examine one book from each of these three writers to illustrate two points. First, far from avoiding the adverb, they used it extensively throughout the books in question. Second, in specific instances, they relied on the adverb to enhance the significance of their work by driving home a point they could never have made so forcefully without it.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN
I’ll begin with Thoreau by taking a quick look at his masterpiece, Walden, or Life in the Woods. In the chapter called “Visitors,” he tells of the French-Canadian lumberjack who visited him at Walden Pond. “He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal: a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes.”⁵ This untutored wood chopper was fascinated by the art of writing: "He particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Their performances were miracles. When I told him that I wrote considerably, he thought for a long time that it was merely the handwriting which I meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand himself."⁶

“Our life is frittered away by detail," wrote Thoreau, 'Simplify, simplify.” Yet it was Hemingway who took his advice to heart in the paring down of encumbered sentences. [o]

Note that in this short passage of three sentences, Thoreau has made the decision to use four adverbs (the words I have underlined). This is a fairly typical passage in Walden and gives the reader an accurate idea of the way the author employed the adverb throughout the book.

I’d like to focus on one phrase from this passage and especially on the adverb it contains: “I told him that I wrote considerably.” I suspect Thoreau must have chosen his adverb carefully here because the word “considerably” is multivalent, that is, it has more than one meaning. When Thoreau uses the word at this point in his book, he means to say, for one, that he wrote a great deal, which was undeniably true. In addition to the books and essays he published during his lifetime, he kept a journal that eventually ran to more than two million words.

But “considerably” also means he wrote thoughtfully, that he took time to think about what he wished to say before setting it down in words. Furthermore, as Jorge Luis Borges once noted, “consider” is an example of a word that is metaphorical at its root, since it is derived from the Latin word for “star,” sidus. “If we go in for abstract thinking,” said Borges in a lecture at Harvard in 1967, “we have to forget that words were metaphors. We have to forget, for example, that in the word ‘consider’ there is a suggestion of astrology — ‘consider’ originally meaning ‘being with the stars,’ ‘making a horoscope.’”⁷

Keeping this etymology in mind, I would suggest that when Thoreau tells the lumberjack he wrote “considerably,” he is also priming the reader for the four brief but unforgettable sentences at the end of Walden into which he distills the contents of the entire book: "The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.^"8

Thanks to its multiple connotations — of multitude, of thoughtfulness, of illumination — the adverb “considerably” plays a significant and pivotal role in Walden. To a certain extent, it is the Atlas that bears the weight of the whole book on its spry and skinny shoulders.

J. D. SALINGER, NINE STORIES
In some ways, J.D. Salinger seems like a very different kind of writer from Thoreau. Most of Salinger’s published work is set in an urban environment, often New York City, while Thoreau’s work is deeply rooted in the country. Perhaps partly because of this divergence in settings, their writing styles are also dissimilar. Thoreau based his style on the rhythmical and complex sentences of the ancient Greek and Latin writers he studied during his four years at Harvard. Salinger, who was mainly self-taught as a writer, modelled his prose on the speech patterns of the well-educated young men and women who inhabited the urban megalopolis that stretched across the northeastern United States in the mid-twentieth century. Thoreau writes in a high style, one that is formal, ornate, and deadly serious. Salinger’s style is unashamedly low, that is, colloquial and with an emphasis on the comic, even though his comedy is often only one step removed from the madhouse or graveyard.

Paul Fitzgerald, who served alongside him as a counterintelligence agent during the Liberation of Paris, late August 1944, took this photo immediately before he met his idol, Ernest Hemingway. Salinger gave Hemingway a copy of the Saturday Evening Post in which Salinger’s story “Last Day of the Last Furlough” had appeared — and yes, there were adverbs.

Many of Salinger’s contemporaries, even those who were, in a sense, competing with him, testified to his gifts as a writer and to his mastery of the short-story format. The Irish writer Frank O’Connor, who was not exactly famous for dishing out the compliments, said that Salinger had done more to advance the short-story format than anyone since Chekhov.⁹ Harold Brodkey, another curmudgeon of long standing, said of his fellow-contributor to The New Yorker: “His is the most influential body of work in English prose by anyone since Hemingway.”¹⁰

I am belaboring Salinger’s accomplishments because I think he achieved the same high rank, as a writer of English prose, that Thoreau attained before him. In spite of their differences, both of these writers exerted a shaping, fundamental influence on the development of a prose tradition that the poet William Carlos Williams identified as “the American grain.”¹¹

In his role as a master stylist, Salinger did not hesitate to employ the adverb. All of the stories in Nine Stories are awash with adverbs. For one example, “The Laughing Man,” a story of about 5,000 words, contains (I counted by hand) more than 150 adverbs, or roughly three percent of the total. That adverbs played a crucial role in Salinger’s prose style is particularly evident in his finest story, “For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,” a story Frank O’Connor rated as “a masterpiece if there ever was one.”¹²

This story is divided into two distinct parts. Taking a tip from the title, I might say that the first part deals with love and the second with squalor, or that the first is set in a kind of heaven and the second in hell itself. The story opens in England, two months before the D-Day invasion, and treats of an encounter between an American soldier and a young English girl. Midway through, the narrative changes from first to third person, and the scene shifts to Germany shortly after V-E Day. The American soldier is still the protagonist, but after a year of combat, he finds himself on the verge of a complete emotional collapse.

The transition between the story’s two divisions, from happiness to despair, from peace to war, hinges on one sentence near the end of the first part, and the operative word in that sentence is an adverb. To make it clear how this happens, to understand the way Salinger succeeds in propelling his reader from the first half of his story and into the second, a brief summary would be helpful.

An American soldier is walking through the English village where he is quartered. It is late in the day and raining steadily. He comes to a church, where he can hear children singing. On a whim, he goes inside and sits at the front, a few steps from the choir. One of the singers is a girl of about twelve with an exceptionally fine voice. After the practice ends, the soldier stops in a café for a cup of tea. Before he can finish, the girl from the church comes in with her younger brother and a middle-aged woman, the children’s governess. They sit at a nearby table, but after a few minutes, the girl and boy come over to see the soldier. While her brother clowns around, the girl peppers the young man with a series of questions. Through the give-and-take of their conversation, it becomes evident that the soldier finds the girl charming. At the moment the girl prepares to leave, he stands up and shakes her hand, then watches as she and her companions walk out of the shop. “It was,” the narrator says, “a strangely emotional moment for me.”¹³

This brief sentence represents the epiphany, or point of crisis, in the first half of the story. It is an understated but eloquent summary of the soldier’s frame of mind as he finds himself suspended between peace and war, between security and terror. The tenor of the statement is modulated by the adverb “strangely” with its dual significance of the unusual and the foreign. The adverb conveys the soldier’s awareness of his precarious position. He is a stranger in a strange land and about to embark on an adventure that could end in death. Yet, he has just had an encounter, an experience that in a way he doesn’t entirely understand has prepared him for the unknown.

Why did he feel compelled to include so many examples of this supposedly superfluous part of speech within the pages of his finest work?

One other point is worth noting about Salinger’s use of adverbs in this story. He employs them to help define the character of Esmé, the English girl whose conversation has such a mesmerizing effect on the American soldier. Esmé is an orphan. She has lived with her aunt since her father was killed while serving in North Africa. She has a title, and her easy eloquence suggests the type of education that at the time was standard for the upper crust of English society. She rarely speaks a sentence that doesn’t come freighted with at least one adverb. Her favorite word appears to be “extremely,” but she also makes (sometimes frequent) use of “terribly,” “exceedingly,” “fortunately,” “actually,” and “dreadfully.”

If I wanted to summarize Esmé’s character in a single word, I might call her pretentious. Even her name, with the accent aigu over the final vowel, reinforces this idea. What the reader comes to understand, however, is that it is precisely in her pretentiousness that her charm lies. It is in the way she overburdens her speech with adverbs that we become acquainted with her fragility and vulnerability, her bravery, and her generosity of spirit. All that deleting those adverbs from the story would accomplish would be to transform this beguiling character from a living human being into a cardboard cut-out.

JAMES BALDWIN, THE FIRE NEXT TIME
If Thoreau wrote in a high style and Salinger in a low, then James Baldwin’s style was neither high nor low but distinctly middle of the road. He deliberately crafted a prose style that would appeal to as wide an audience as possible and would help deliver his work specifically to those who would be most disturbed by it: white, middle-class Americans. His style united Thoreau’s formality with Salinger’s emphasis on the colloquial, and he shared their preoccupation with the spiritual life. Whether he was writing fiction or nonfiction, long works or short, his topic was always the same, what he identified as the “racial nightmare” that afflicted his native land.¹⁴

Although he read widely and profoundly, Baldwin’s writing style was not so much the result of education as of experience. It developed directly from the three years he spent as a teen preacher in one of Harlem’s evangelical churches. “Those were three years,” he told an interviewer from the Paris Review, “that probably turned me to writing.”¹⁵

Baldwin’s style is declamatory. The tension of the pulpit — the contrast between a perfect God and his fallen creation — runs like an electric wire through everything he wrote. The rhythm that governs his prose comes from his immersion in the Biblical text (St. James version) and the gospel hymn. This declamatory style means that his most successful books are the nonfiction works rather than the novels, and that The Fire Next Time ranks as his undisputed masterpiece.

In this book, one of the rhetorical devices that Baldwin, like any good preacher, employs again and again is repetition, and the part of speech that he seemed most to enjoy repeating is the adverb. What is striking about the way he uses adverbs in this work is his habit, from beginning to end, from virtually the first page to the last, of deploying them in pairs.

   • unutterably different and fantastically present
   • how frequently — indeed incessantly
   • morally bankrupt and politically unstable
   • finally…and…even more disastrously
   • probably unwilling and certainly unable, etc.¹⁶

James Baldwin working . . . restfully. 1963. Photo by Everett. [o]

The question to ask is, Why? Why did Baldwin feel compelled to include so many examples of this supposedly superfluous part of speech within the pages of his finest work? The answer lies in the nature of that work as a polemic. A polemic is not just an argument, no matter how spirited. It is, as the Greek root of the word suggests, a declaration of war. Baldwin believed that the United States had served as a battleground for a war between the races from its foundation to his own time, and that the war would persist until either the country destroyed itself or it somehow arrived at a just accommodation. In fashioning his argument, Baldwin used the paired adverb for two purposes. The first was for emphasis, and the other was to reveal, through the inclusion of the second term, another facet of the idea under discussion.

Consider the paragraph in The Fire Next Time that describes what Baldwin thought was the foundational event of his life, his conversion experience at the age of fourteen. This was something he always associated with the pangs of guilt he felt over his sexual awakening around the same time: "The summer wore on and things got worse. I became more guilty and more frightened, and kept all this bottled up inside me, and naturally, inescapably, one night when this woman had finished preaching, everything came roaring, screaming, crying out, and I fell to the ground before the altar. It was the strangest sensation I have ever had in my life — up to that time or since."¹⁷

Note the set of paired adverbs in this passage — “naturally, inescapably” — and think of what they achieve in setting the stage not just for Baldwin’s conversion, but for his life after he decides to leave the church. First, he wants the reader to know that his conversion experience was only to be expected, given his circumstances and time of life (“naturally”). But he also means to imply that he felt cornered (“inescapably”) and could not have avoided his fate even if he’d wanted to.

There is something in the preordained nature of the conversion experience that is cause for both relief and resentment. The resentment will remain with him until, three years later, he leaves the church to find his own way in life as a writer and social activist. Baldwin’s past, present, and future are all implied by that paired adverbial placement of “naturally, inescapably.” If those words were deleted from the passage, his readers would lose what he so obviously wanted them to understand: the sense of complexity that comes with any conversion, the idea that the experience is simultaneously liberating and oppressive, that it is both a victory and a defeat for the person who is transformed by it.

They do not hesitate to use modifiers, be they adjectives or adverbs. The vocabulary they use is correspondingly more sophisticated than that found in the plain style.

In the preceding pages, I have considered three different kinds of books. The first is a work of philosophy and natural history; the second a collection of fictional stories; and the third forms an argument on behalf of social reform. I have shown that, despite their differences in genre and subject matter, these books have at least one trait in common. Their authors not only used the adverb extensively, but they employed it in ways that enhanced the significance of their works and contributed to their success as enduring works of art.

This raises an obvious question. Why is there such a blatant inconsistency between the advice coming from King, Leonard, et al., to avoid adverbs at all costs and what successful writers do in practice? I think the answer is twofold and involves questions of style on the one hand and what I would call instinct or intuition on the other.

In regard to style, most writers fall into one of two groups: those who write in a plain or simple style, and those whose style is more ornate. Stephen King and Elmore Leonard fall into the first group, while the writers I have considered above — Thoreau, Salinger, and Baldwin — are all in the second.

The simple style is characterized by short sentences and a vocabulary that avoids academic and unfamiliar terms. It is particularly suited to writers of genre fiction such as King and Leonard. Both of these writers considered themselves literary heirs of Ernest Hemingway and found that his pared-down prose style, in which both adjectives and adverbs were kept to a minimum, suited their purposes.¹⁸

Writers who compose their works in the ornate style tend to write longer and more complex sentences that display syntactical features such as subordination and parallelism. The vocabulary they use is correspondingly more sophisticated than that found in the plain style, and they do not hesitate to use modifiers, be they adjectives or adverbs. The opening paragraph of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano is often cited as a prime example of the ornate style, but equally complex passages may be found throughout the works discussed here by Thoreau, Salinger and Baldwin.

In regard to instinct or intuition, this is a quality that the finest writers tend to develop early in their careers. As the English poet and essayist Robert Southey observed, “By writing much, one learns to write well.”¹⁹ It is only through trial and error, success and failure, and unceasing effort that writers come to understand what works for them and that they manage to develop a personal style. In the process of a writer’s development, there must come a point when rules give way to instinct: any writer worth their salt must be able to trust their own judgment. And if their judgment tells them to use an adverb in a particular sentence, they should be able to do so without fear of censure or self-recrimination. ≈ç

NOTES

1. Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Scribner, 2000), p. 125.

2. “Writers on Writing: Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,” New York Times, 16 July 2001, Arts section, p. 1.

3. William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, Second edition (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 64.

4. William Zinsser, On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 94.

5. Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods, in The Library of America, vol. 28, edited by Robert F. Sayre (New York: Viking Press, 1985), pp. 438-39.

6. Ibid., p. 440.

7. Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1967-1968 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 23.
Thoreau, Walden, p. 587.

8. Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, with an Introduction by Russell Banks (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), pp. 42-43.

9. Thoreau, Walden, p. 587.

10. Nadine Brozan, “Chronicle,” New York Times, 27 April 1991, Section 1, p. 26. Brodkey was speaking at an awards dinner sponsored by Brandeis University. Salinger had been named the winner of a creative arts award, but when he refused to accept it, the university withdrew the honor.

11. William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain, with an Introduction by Rick Moody (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2009).

12. O’Connor, The Lonely Voice, p. 43.

13. J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories (New York: Bantam, 1964), p. 102.

14. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York, The Modern Library, 1995), p.105.

15. The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 2, edited by Philip Gourevitch (New York: Picador, 2007), p. 241.

16. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. The list goes on and on. I counted more than 20 examples of “paired adverbs” in this book.

17. Ibid., p. 28.

18. Hemingway never recorded his thoughts on the adverb. However, in A Moveable Feast he identified Ezra Pound as “the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives.” One can only assume this distrust extended to the adjective’s closest relative among the parts of speech.

19. Quoted in Hallie and Whit Burnett, Fiction Writer’s Handbook (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975), p. 24.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: The Modern Library, 1995.

Borges, Jorge Luis. This Craft of Verse. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1967-1968. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Burnett, Hallie and Whit. Fiction Writer’s Handbook. Preface by Norman Mailer. New York:
Barnes & Noble, 1975.

Gourevitch, Philip, ed. The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 2. Introduction by Orhan Pamuk. New
York: Picador, 2007.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Bantam, 1965.

King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner, 2000.

O’Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Introduction by Russell Banks. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Salinger, J.D. Nine Stories. New York: Bantam, 1964.

Strunk, William, Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden: Or, Life in the Woods. Edited by Robert F. Sayer. The Library ofAmerica, vol. 28. New York: Viking Press, 1985.

Williams, William Carlos. In the American Grain. Introduction by Rick Moody. New York: New Directions Publishing, 2009.

Zinsser, William. On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

EDWARD O'CONNOR is an editor and writer who has published stories and critical pieces in magazines and newspapers across Canada, including the Globe and Mail, Quill and Quire, Grain, The Fiddlehead, Canadian Notes and Queries, and The Journey Prize Anthology. He is also the author of the novel Astral Projection. He lives in Toronto. View Edward's website.