A new beginning. Something fresh, preferably even startling. I like to think that I am uniquely equipped to assert that a truly original beginning is an exquisitely rare novelty; my cranky impatience seldom permits me to indulge an author or singer past his opening sentence, because my attitude towards popular culture is essentially this: I am a busy, bored, irritable man, so I require you to present me with a bold, daring experience, and it had best grab me right from the start.
This seldom happens, of course, and one can only tolerate “Once upon a time…” and “It was a dark and stormy night…” so many times, and so my pursuit of narrative novelty has led to the development of an unlikely hobby. I can trace its beginnings to 2002, when I wrote a review of Robert Mailer Anderson’s Boonville for a now-defunct website. Here is an excerpt from that review: “If I told you that the first word in the novel is ‘Boonville’ and the last is ‘Yee-haw,’ you might fairly assume that Robert Mailer Anderson lets the obvious gags write themselves.”
In response, Anderson told me via e-mail that “Boonville. Yee-haw.” is the “Reader’s Digest condensed version” of his novel. Ever since then, I have made a point of studying the opening and closing sentences of novels and songs. There is nothing clever or noble in this enterprise. It is not criticism; it is trivia. Still, the results are often amusing, and sometimes revelatory. For example, when taken together, the opening and closing lines of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany are powerful enough to bring one to tears:
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
O God—please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
Normally, I might finish a given book and then happen to look back at the opening sentence for a quick first-last comparison, or some half-heard lyric might inspire me to hastily google a song to compare its opening and closing words. For this essay, I actively sought dozens or perhaps even hundreds of books and songs for the first-line/last-line experiment. (As many books as were readily available at our small school in Eritrea; as many songs as I brought with me from the States in my iPod.)
Some of the books I’d never read before (I assured myself that I’ll have forgotten any unwelcome spoilers by the time I sit down to read these books from beginning to end), and others, like A Prayer for Owen Meany, are old favorites. (Incidentally, I attended a reading by John Irving back in 2005, and it’s worth noting that before Irving begins reading his chosen selection, he first reads the final sentence from the selection so as to assist the audience on a pacing level and to avoid any awkward pre-applause pauses.)
Another favorite author of mine is Larry McMurtry, whose Pulitzer-winning Lonesome Dove is one of the most violent and tragic epics available in print. Not that you’d know that if you only had the first and last sentences to go by:
When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one.
They say he missed that whore.
McMurtry’s readers will not be surprised by the understated quality of these sentences, nor by their brevity. Somewhat less concise are the opening and closing sentences of E.L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate:
He had to have planned it because when we drove onto the dock the boat was there and the engine was running and you could see the water churning up phosphorescence in the river, which was the only light there was because there was no moon, nor no electric light either in the shack where the dockmaster should have been sitting, nor on the boat itself, and certainly not from the car, yet everyone knew where everything was, and when the big Packard came down the ramp Mickey the driver braked it so that the wheels hardly rattled the boards, and when he pulled up alongside the gangway doors were already open and they hustled Bo and the girl upside before they even made a shadow in all that darkness.
There was some confusion after that, of course, we had to go out and buy bottles and diapers, he didn’t come with any instructions, and my mother was a little slow remembering some of the things that had to be done when he cried and waved his arms about, but we adjusted to him soon enough and what I think of now is how we used to like to go back to the East Bronx with him and walk him in his carriage on a sunny day along Bathgate Avenue, with all the peddlers calling out their prices and the stalls stacked with pyramids of oranges and grapes and peaches and melons, and the fresh bread in the windows of the bakeries with the electric fans in their transoms sending hot bread smells into the air, and the dairy with its tubs of butter and wood packs of farmer’s cheese, and the butcher wearing his thick sweater under his apron walking out of his ice room with a stack of chops on oiled paper, and the florist on the corner wetting down the vases of clustered cut flowers, and the children running past, and the gabbling old women carrying their shopping bags of greens and chickens, and the teenage girls holding white dresses on hangers to their shoulders, and the truckmen in their undershirts unloading their produce, and the horns honking and all the life of the city turning out to greet us just as in the old days of our happiness, before my father fled, when the family used to go walking in this market, this bazaar of life, Bathgate, in the age of Dutch Schultz.
I confess: there’s no startling parallels or haunting symmetry whatsoever to those two sentences. I was just amused, during my research, to note that any two sentences from E.L. Doctorow are as long as a complete story by most other writers. (Would that PopMatters paid by the word; I’d contrive some feeble manner of justification for quoting Doctorow every month — perhaps they’re on to this.)
To my knowledge, S.E. Hinton and Stephen King are unique in having used the same line to open and close a novel. In Hinton’s The Outsiders, Ponyboy begins the tale thusly: “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight, from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman, and a ride home.” By novel’s end, the reader learns that the entire novel has been Ponyboy’s school essay; the story ends with Ponyboy beginning his essay: “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight, from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman, and a ride home.”
In King’s case, none of his novels technically open and end with the same line. However, the first book in his series of seven Dark Tower novels begins with the same sentence with which King closes the final volume: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
Poo-tee-weet
Meanwhile, inspired by nothing more literary or intellectually lofty than a mild man-crush on Robert Downey Jr., I recently started making my way through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s various novels and short stories starring Sherlock Holmes. I was startled to discover that Holmes is a cocaine enthusiast. Here are the opening and closing sentences from the second Sherlock Holmes novel, The Sign of the Four:
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.
“For me,” said Sherlock Holmes, “there still remains the cocaine-bottle.” And he stretched his long, white hand up for it.
(Incidentally, that opening line is followed by several sentences vividly describing the process of shooting up; Watson’s weary interrogation of his friend soon makes it clear that Holmes is also fond of morphine.)
Then there is the curious case of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, which begins “All this happened, more or less” and ends, “Poo-tee-weet?” but within which it is claimed by the author that the tale begins, “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.” (This is actually the start of chapter two; the opening chapter is a typically self-conscious Vonnegutian introduction of sorts.)
I just read Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked last month, and while its first and final sentences don’t necessarily summarize the entire novel, they serve as an accurate and damning epitaph for the relationship between its two protagonists:
“They had flown from England to Minneapolis to look at a toilet. Dear God.”
L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz offers nothing particularly striking in the way of first-last symmetry, but in studying the recent Signet Classics paperback edition, I was delighted to find that the introduction begins with a quote from the Marin Independent-Journal’s plot summary of the classic Hollywood adaptation: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.”
Murder is as good a place as any to segue from novels to songs, particularly if one intends to begin with a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song. (Doubly-particularly if the song appears on an album called Murder Ballads.) In “The Song of Joy”, a vagabond in mourning stands at a stranger’s doorstep and relates his tragic tale in the hopes of procuring shelter for the night:
Have mercy on me, sir, allow me to impose on you.
Are you beckoning me in?
This is an instance, as perhaps Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany might be, of first-last juxtaposition or symmetry having more impact for someone familiar with the work in question than for someone who has yet to experience it; being unfamiliar with the works of John Milton, I never grasped the significance of some passages of “The Song of Joy” until I studied the liner notes and noted that certain passages were italicized. The italicized bits were quotes from Milton, and suddenly, the narrative was turned on its head and what had been merely a sad tale of murder and loss instantly became something far more chilling, to such an extent that “Have mercy on me, sir, allow me to impose on you… Are you beckoning me in?” is a disturbing excerpt in and of itself.
A highlight from Nick Cave’s Henry’s Dream is “John Finn’s Wife”, a beautiful murder ballad with a first-last combination that summarizes not only the full song, but arguably the full Nick Cave catalog:
Well, the night was deep, and the night was dark, and I was at the old dance-hall on the edge of town.
And the flies did hum, and the flies did buzz around poor John Finn, lying dead upon the ground.
Some songs feature lyrics that are arguably improved by the first-last streamlining process. Oingo Boingo finished their career by shortening their name from its original Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo to simply Boingo, and in 1994, they released a final self-titled album, which opened with a track called “Insanity”, which is powerful and creepy and beautiful and strange, but which suffers from a literal-minded and pedantic chorus wherein Elfman feels compelled to counter every lyrical example of insane behavior with a tiresome chant of, well, “Insanity”. Still, there’s something comical about the contrast between the song’s opening and closing lyrics:
I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.
I’d love to see you dead!
Meanwhile, Marty Robbins could have saved himself and his listeners a few minutes by embracing Robert Mailer Anderson’s “Reader’s Digest” philosophy when he penned “The Master’s Call” in 1959:
When I was but a young man, I was wild and full of fire.
I gave my life and soul the night the Savior called my name.
(I get what Robbins is trying to say here, but his choice of words is unintentionally funny; the whole point of the song is that God saved his life during a stampede, so perhaps “I gave my life” isn’t the best way to express his newfound religious dedication.)
An equally succinct summary appears in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical, Once More With Feeling; Spike’s moody power ballad says all it needs to say with its first and final lines:
I died so many years ago.
Let me rest in peace.
Or consider Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”:
Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses.
Begging mercies for their sins; Satan, laughing, spreads his wings.
Or Judy Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”:
Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high, there’s a land that I heard of once in a lullaby.
If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why, oh why can’t I?
My most interesting discovery was an album which features a message that one can only discern by reversing the first-last structure: the latest Alice In Chains album, Black Gives Way to Blue, which is of course the band’s first studio album since 1996, and the first with their new vocalist, William DuVall. I suspected beforehand that the death of original frontman Layne Staley would inform the new album, and I even looked forward to it; Staley remains one of my favorite singers, and I was more than willing to indulge the surviving band members if they opted to use their new album as an opportunity to mourn.
A sense of loss does indeed pervade the album; one need look no further than the title. However, the title also implies a steady progress through the mourning and into some tentative sense of hope, and the album delivers on this theme, as well, albeit not necessarily in a linear sense; Black Gives Way to Blue is at its most powerful when one takes the final line from its closing track, “Black Gives Way to Blue,” and follows it with the opening line from the first track, “All Secrets Known.” I can think of no greater way to end this essay than by sharing these lines with you:
Lay down, black gives way to blue. Lay down, I’ll remember you.
Hope. A new beginning.
Image (partial) found on Polyvore.com