Beginning and Endings

 For anyone who has ever tried to write a novel, the struggle over how to begin and how to end is well known.

One thing that separates a writer with command of his writing is the ability to open and close.

I'm not sure if this is the case with music, or with poetry or with life, but it surely is with writing.

To wit, I offer up two openings and one ending which evoke wonder, at least for me. How did these folks achieve the effect they were looking for? How much work went into these lines? Or did they just sort of flow out, like conversation over a beer?

The first is from "A Farewell to Arms," Ernest Hemingway:

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightening, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.

What Hemingway has done here is to set up the story he intends to tell with a sense of foreboding and beauty. He talks about something which may not interest you, a house overlooking a vista, but then slides into the river bed and for anyone who has every looked at water flowing between rocks, that shock of recognition--"Oh, I've noticed that! I didn't know others had." 

And then, out of this nature study the mention of troops. What? What troops? Soldiers? They spoil the lovely landscape. Who are they? And then the spoilage by dust from the marching, and the suggestion the soldiers, their war spoiled it all, but it pulls you along. Soldiers? What kind of story is this? And then more on the war, but mixed again with nature: artillery, no more to worry about than lightening, and the return to the sensuous beauty of cool nights, but then "a storm coming."

I'm sorry, but if that does not totally hook you into this story, there is something wrong with you. Or, maybe, it's just me.

But, the thing is, it sets up the story so perfectly. Jake Barnes is in the army, meets Catherine Barkley, and against the background of the war, the mangled wounded of their hospital, they decide that love is more important than war, and they try to escape. The natural beauty of love and its product is wrecked by the war. They can flee, but they cannot escape its effects on them.

Then there is the purple prose of the neglected, derided Grace Metalious:

"Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay. In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, an unchartered season which lives until Winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged edged winds of winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard eyed cynicism. But the young wait anxiously, scanning the the chill autumn skies for a sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgement, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenward to seek the first traces of a false softening."

Again, the trees, the natural elements, and the effects of the elements on the human spirit.

And, again, this opening sets up the story perfectly: This is a story about the old and young, the hot passions of youth, and the ebbing of youthful passion and the defeat of love by human venality and violence. And it is often the old against the young--in this case the rape of a child by her stepfather.

And then there are the endings. 

Of all the endings in literature, none is more often mentioned than F. Scott Fitzgerald's wonderful line:

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Again, the perfect summary of what his story was all about--how the past's stranglehold on the present destroyed Gatsby. 

Of course, for my taste, Gatsby was a bit of a silly story about a silly man. But reading biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, who lived his life during the period described by Fitzgerald, the first part of the 20th century--the same time Hemingway was writing about in Farewell to Arms--the poisonous grip of romanticism was what destroyed so many lives. Gatsby was silly but so was Theodore Roosevelt and the whole respectable society which spawned him. Romantic love, the idea of the one and only, the inability to allow for free ranging libidos, the idea of honor, the grip of money and class, all that stuff that made those times nasty and sad, was the operative value system.

Metalious was dealing with all that, but she was more hard boiled and saw the strictures of her small town life clear eyed. She looked at it all with "winter eyes." The fact she addressed sexual desire so openly, so luridly, consigned her book to the trashbin of "potboiler." But she knew better. And so, I suspect, did the reading public. The powers that be dismissed her as a bodice ripper novelist, but she could write and she could connect.

"Only here do I realize the littleness of things that can touch me."

Not a bad line, from a pulp fiction writer.