My first blog entry of 2009. From now on, at least until the next great national political crisis, I’m turning all my attentions here to books, mostly fiction.
In 1989, I attended the Aspen Writer’s Conference, where I took a fiction workshop with Ron Carlson. Aside from a seventy-something, rakish drivel-pulp-writing M.D. in the workshop who didn’t like “lyricism” or experimentation in fiction and who told me that I shouldn’t be writing at all because I hadn’t lived life yet, this was a great experience: a lot of writing time, kindred spirits, a memorable descent into to the grottos with a group from the dorms, and far too many hours and dollars spent in Explore, the Aspen bookstore. The doctor’s probably sold a slew of bestseller paperbacks by now under some soap-opera pseudonym like Devon Drake. I, meanwhile, took the old doctor’s words to heart along with Ron Sukenick’s comments that my writing was “too bourgeois” and stopped writing fiction altogether. Until now, I hope, almost 20 years later. We’ll see.
I’ll share a wordcount on my first novel at the end of every blog posting. I’ll shoot for a weekly post. Today’s wordcount: approximately 2,000. Wish me luck.
I can’t remember who led the discussion at the Aspen conference, but one day we all assembled and some of the fiction writers, maybe Marge Piercy or William Kittredge, handed out or posted a list of opening sentences from famous novels. Our challenge was to try to the identify the authors and the novels. So for your own edification and my amusement, here are the first sentences of twenty famous novels. These are mostly easy ones. Harder ones later, maybe. Don’t cheat. Don’t Google. Feel free to suggest other great first sentences in the comments. [A caveat: I'm not counting first sentences of Author's Prefaces, though there's a case to be made for their first sentences as the true beginnings!]
Probably best not to spoil it for others and post the answers in the comments. But you should report how well you did in the comments. Be honest.
Someday, we’ll try it the other way around; I’ll tell you the novels, and you tell me their first sentences.
- “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
- “September. It seems these luminous days will never end.”
- “Yes, but who will cure us of the dull fire, the colorless fire that at rainfall runs along the Rue de la Huchette, emerging from the crumbling dooorways, from the little entranceways, of the imageless fire that licks the stones and lies in wait in doorways, how shall we cleanse ourselves of the sweet burning that comes after, that nests in us forever allied with time and memory, with sticky things that hold us here on this side, and which will burn sweetly in us until we have been left in ashes.”
- “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
- “[Character's name deleted], handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home, and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”
- “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; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.”
- “I am an American–Chicago born, Chicago that somber city–and go at things as I have taught myself, free style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”
- “Whether I turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
- “An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who keeps a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.”
- “1801.”
- “From March to December, writes Rudolf, while I was having to take large quantities of prednisolone, a fact which I am bound to record here, against the third acute onset of my sarcoidosis, I assembled every possible book or article ever written by or about Mendelssohn Bartholdy and visited every possible and impossible library in order to acquaint myself thoroughly with my favorite composer, and his work, preparing myself with the most passionate seriousness for the task, which I had been dreading throughout the preceding winter, of writing — such was my pretension — a major work of impeccable scholarship.”
- “[Chacter's name deleted] light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”
- “Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable.”
- “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
- “A screaming comes across the sky.”
- “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.”
- “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”
- “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink flowering thorn.”
- “On. Say on.”
- “Hopping a freight train out of Los Angeles at high noon one day late in September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara.”
postscript: “Call me Ishmael.” Too easy, so I have thrown a hard one or two in after all.
Posted by thinandlight 