Even more than pubs, old movie houses, and ancient ballparks, I love bookstores. For me, a bookstore is like sex or pizza: even when it's bad it's good. My kind of bookstore has book carts in front of the store, open to the elements, crammed with tattered and water-stained detritus, the ruined remains of remainders. So it was that I approached
A Cappella Books in the funky Little Five Points district of Atlanta, where doorways are shaped like skeleton skulls and a whiff of something not quite legal wafts in the air.
There on the rack was a book I had meant to read for a long time, "There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing up in the Other America," by Alex Kotlowitz. I had recently met Kotlowitz at a writing conference and was impressed, and a bit intimidated, by his fervor for the craft. So I grabbed the copy, plunked down my $1.50, and soon turned to the first page:
Nine-year-old Pharoah Rivers stumbled to his knees. "Give me your hand," ordered his older brother, Lafeyette, who was almost twelve. "Give me your hand." Pharoah reached upward and grabbed hold of his brother's slender fingers, which guided him up a slippery, narrow trail of dirt and brush.
"C'mon, man," Lafeyette urged, as his stick-thin body whirled around with a sense of urgency. "Let's go." He paused to watch Pharoah struggle through a thicket of vines. "Man, you slow." He had little patience for the smaller boy's clumsiness. Their friends had already reached the top of the railroad overpass...
Pharoah clambered to the top, moving quickly to please his brother, so quickly that he scraped his knee on the crumbling cement. As he stood to test his bruised leg, his head turned from west to east, following the railroad tracks, five in all, leading from the western suburbs to Chicago's downtown. His wide eyes and his buck teeth, which had earned him the sobriquet Beaver and kept his lips pushed apart, made him seem in awe of the world.
Just before that spirited introduction, Kotlowitz asks us to consider an epigraph, in this case a famous poem from Langston Hughes:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Both passages show a preference for the active voice. As far back as 1915, teacher and author Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch explained to his Cambridge University students that "the first virtue, the touchstone of a masculine style, is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun." Let's push aside, for the moment, the problems posed by the phrase "masculine style" along with the fact that the great professor uses a form of the verb "to be" to hawk the value of active verbs. Instead, let's test the two passages above for their virtue.
Using a scene, setting, and dialogue -– the building blocks of narrative –- Kotlowitz yanks us from our easy chairs and into the challenging lives of these children. He creates, in a few short paragraphs, a richly symbolic landscape, where two brothers lag behind as they struggle up the hillside, and where the young boy sees the tracks stretched out toward a city –- a way of life –- he will never attain.
And look at the verbs: stumbled, ordered, reach, grabbed, guided, urged, whirled, paused, clambered, scraped, stood. All active, all specific, all pushing the story forward toward the next revelation. The poet's verbs are even more forceful: dry up, fester, run, stink, crust, sags. That string of verbs sizzles like a lit fuse to that final dangerous prophetic word: explode.
What, then, makes an active verb active? If we can figure that out, we can begin to apply what can be a cold academic distinction to the purpose of building interest and making meaning.
By definition, an active verb describes an action performed by the subject of a clause:
Residents poured from their homes as the procession advanced. The hearse passed families sitting on the hoods of their cars, their children wrapped in colorful blankets. One couple stood at the side of the road, their heads bowed. A boy on horseback watched with his dog near a barbed-wire fence. A man in a rusty pickup stared from atop a grassy hill.
This passage from the book "Final Salute" by Jim Sheeler reveals five different subjects, each performing the action of a distinctive verb:
Residents poured...
The hearse passed...
One couple stood...
A boy on horseback watched...
A man in a rusty pickup stared...
Notice that not all actions described by active verbs are equal. "Poured" denotes great energy, but "passed" is quieter. And "stood," "watched," and "stared" might be perceived by witnesses as no action at all. It turns out writers have in their word closet supercharged active verbs: shred, snatch, grimace, dissect, inoculate; and mild-mannered ones: go, get, have, move, own.
As you read this next passage from Sheeler, notice the variety of actions –- some large, some small, some obvious, some subtle –- all described by verbs in the active voice:
Beside the road, three tribal chiefs in feathered headdresses waited on horseback, along with a dozen other riders and small empty wooden wagon.
The procession arrived from over a hill, and as the Marines got out, the two bands of warriors nodded to each other. The Marines lifted the flag-draped casket from the new Cadillac hearse, transferred it to the old pinewood wagon, and fell in line, issuing clipped commands under their breath. They stood at attention in spotless dress blue uniforms, white gloves, and shiny black dress shoes. The Oglala Sioux escorts wore blue jeans, windbreakers, and dusty boots. They spoke to their horses in the Lakota language.
"Unkiyapo," someone said. "Let's go."
It is unwise to attribute some absolute benefit of one syntactical choice or another. It will not get us anywhere to demonize the passive voice or forms of the verb "to be" while we lionize the active. Orwell argues persuasively that the corrupt and powerful often use the passive to avoid responsibility for actions: "The report has been studied and it must now be admitted that mistakes were made." The passive allows the reader or speaker to sidestep any knowledge of who read the report and who made mistakes.
But the active also drags some mines. It did not take me long to find this sentence: "People of the same blood should be in the same Reich. The German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy until they should have brought all their children together in one State. When the territory of the Reich embraces all the Germans and finds itself unable to assure them a livelihood, only then can the moral right arise, from the need of the people, to acquire foreign territory. The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the daily bread for the generations to come." So it appears that Adolf Hitler was capable of using concrete nouns and active verbs.
And so was historian Matthew Paris, who in 1255 passed along as fact the "blood libel," blaming the Jews for the torture and murder of a young Christian boy: "They beat him till blood flowed ... they crowned him with thorns, derided him and spat upon him ... they crucified him, and pierced him to the heart with a lance."
Just as Leni Reifenstahl used breathtaking film innovations to glorify Hitler's rise to power, so writers across the centuries have procured the services of active verbs to spread violence and promote hate. Language itself -– though it helps define our humanity –- is morally neutral. Which is why craft, detached from a good purpose, can be so dangerous.
