SIPA and SOPA
Literature from A (straight) to Z
Dark and Stormy Nights
Plus! Hemingway and his Imitators: Featuring Woody’s Satirical Sibling


If you hadn’t known or noticed, Wikipedia was closed on Wednesday. Why? Because they wanted to call attention to two bills in Congress being debated and soon (or so we’re told) to be voted upon: Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. I haven’t read much, but what I have read is distressing and sufficient to have motivated me to voice my objection to both proposed acts. You can learn more at:
https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/
and/or do some of your own searching to get more “objective” points of view.


Literary Firsts and Lasts...

Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words:

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Pretty good, I think, and better than some of his more celebrated work, but more on that later. The topic today is literary first lines and last lines—so unless the story’s first and last line are one and the same as in Ernest’s earnest attempt, there’s quite a big crop out there to harvest. A quick search online yields a seemingly endless bounty, so it wasn’t particularly difficult to cull some nifty examples. Only real chore was screening them and arranging and then seeing if I could find a few works whose openings and closings together might be entertaining too. After going through a dozen or so lists and references, I settled on a few that I thought were pretty good (though not necessarily “good”)—and tried to avoid overloading with too many of the too familiar ie: “It was the best of times, it was the worst…”

First the Openers.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. Ethan Frome—Edith Wharton

And every high school English teacher since has had a different idea about what that story is all about.

A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. Graham Greene—The End of the Affair.

Seems particularly apt from a writer whose major characters usually couldn’t remember their pasts, or were running from it, and rarely knew where they were headed.

“Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond.

Never heard of the book or author, but love the line.

“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.” — The Napoleon of Notting Hill – G. K. Chesterton

It takes a humble and honest writer to acknowledge that the world of the imagination is essentially an immature one.

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing”
A River Runs through it—Norman Maclean

Right from the beginning, you know it won’t be about any family you grew up in.

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” — Voyage of the Dawn Treader – C. S. Lewis

A bit snarky, but he’s got my interest.

One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. The Crying of Lot 49- Thomas Pynchon,

Sorry it went on so long, but I did stop at the first period. And some people wonder why Pynchon isn’t more popular.

I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. - W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge

Hmm, I guess some days you feel it and some days you don’t.


The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Samuel Beckett—Murphy

I love it. Makes me wish Beckett had tried his hand at some hard-boiled noir.

“Call me Ishmael.” Moby Dick. Herman Melville

I know what I said up top, but couldn’t leave it out after my Melville adventures of last year.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter S. Thompson

And that’s pretty much the last sober observation in the book.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Anna Karenina. Leo Tolstoy

Such a cliché that one tends to forget how great it is.

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

And the debate rages on as to whether the word should be insect, or vermin, or monster, or cockroach, or bug, or ….

This is the saddest story I have ever heard. - Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

Pedestrian at best, but hard to resist cause it’s almost like a challenge to find out if you agree.

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Has anyone else ever opened a book with an advertisement for a previous one?

AND NOW SOME ENDINGS…

Are there any questions? –Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

None from me.

Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied ?—Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out Vanity Fair --William Makepeace Thackeray

Guess it helps to know the book, but I love that (like Chesterton) Thackeray regards his readers as children, and that all that has come before was simply a puppet show.

"The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye and sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him- and it was still hot."
- Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

Give the man his due. How many great painters can write like that?

“Mama died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.”
The Stranger—Albert Camus

And existentially speaking, it really doesn’t matter.

"Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn't prove there was no America." The Adventures of Augie March-- Saul Bellow

I think Bellow always thought of himself as a great American explorer as well, in his own disillusioned, ambivalent and masochistic way.

"The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the utmost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky — seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness."
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

Kind of corny to end a book with words from the title, but somehow it works here—since you feel like you’ve been waiting all book long to hear them said.

Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is. –Russell Banks, Continental Drift (1985)

A great personal favorite book, so I’m biased. The line doesn’t really stand on its own…but again, I’m biased.


And Openers and Closers from the same book:


Opener: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Ending: He loved Big Brother."

1984 George Orwell

Perfect.

Opener: It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

Ending: "The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off."

Catch-22-- Joseph Heller

I like that the closer sounds just like a good opener.

Opener: I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me

Ending: L--d! said my mother, what is all this story about?—— A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick——And one of the best of its kind I ever heard. –

Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne

Almost makes you want to read it again. I said almost.

Opening: “First the colors. Then the humans. That’s usually how I see things.”

Ending: “I am haunted by humans."

The Book Thief, Markus Zusak

Considering that the omniscient narrator is Death itself, those are pretty effective bookends.


SO BAD IT'S GOOD.


Charles Schultz made it famous when he had Snoopy begin all his writings from the top of his doghouse with: "It was a dark and stormy night..."


But it was Lord Bulwer-Lytton who began his 1830 novel, "Paul Clifford, with:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents -- except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scenelies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

So bad, it inspired The Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.
I looked it up and had fun reading some of the entries. This was my favorite:

The countdown had stalled at 'T' minus 69 seconds when Desiree, the first female ape to go up in space, winked at me slyly and pouted her thick, rubbery lips unmistakably -- the first of many such advances during what
would prove to be the longest, and most memorable, space voyage of my career.
-- Winning sentence, 1985 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.


The Old Man and the Sea.

Call me crazy, but I’m convinced that Hemingway didn’t write a word of it. Or at least I would like to believe that. Although the innovative master had his occasional off days and off books and off decades—I don’t think he ever created anything so unrelentingly unreadable as this very fishy fish tale. It was a painful revelation when I went back and read Catcher in the Rye and had to fight a gag reflex with nearly every sentence, but the saga of Old Santiago as told by the once formidable Heavyweight Champ of the Lost Generation surpassed even Salinger for “aren’t I special” pretension.
Exhibit A:

"Thank you," the old man said. He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride.

Do we need an Exhibit B?

But I’m not here to throw stones—any more than I already have…I only bring up old Papa H. to let you know that...

The 1985 winner of the Eighth International Imitation Hemingway Competition was Woody’s brother Peter!

Peter (in action on left) is a distinguished journalist /author/ NY Times Columnist/Editor and like his brother Woody, a longtime (going back to pre-consciousness) friend of Ellen and all those other Long Gilanders I spoke about way back when this blog began.



The two books pictured here are terrific—and for the record, he doesn’t even know I’m writing about him, so rest assured, there is no collusion going on here. Besides, if all my readers were to buy both books, his take (minus my commission) would't buy him a pack of gum.

Here’s Peter’s Bad Hemingway contest winning entry—beating out 2450 other competitors.

We were young and our happiness dazzled us with its strength.
But there was also a terrible betrayal that lay within me like a MerleHaggard song at a French restaurant. ...I could not tell the girl about the woman of the tollway, of her milk white BMW and her Jordache smile. There had been a fight. I had punched her boyfriend, who fought the mechanical bulls. Everyone told him, "You ride the bull, senor. You do not fight it." But he was lean and tough like a bad rib-eye and he fought the bull. And then he fought me. And when we finished there were no winners, just men doing what men must do. ..."Stop the car," the girl said. There was a look of terrible sadness in her eyes. She knew about the woman of the tollway. I knew not how. I started to speak, but she raised an arm and spoke with a quiet and peace I will never forget."I do not ask for whom's the tollway belle," she said, "the tollway belle's for thee."The next morning our youth was a memory, and our happiness was a lie. Life is like a bad margarita with good tequila, I thought as I poured whiskey onto my granola and faced a new day.

If Peter were a few decades older, I’d suspect him as Papa’s Ghost-Writer on Old Man and The Sea, but then again, I don't think even Peter could have been good enough to be that bad.