Openings

Elif Batuman wrote an entertaining blog post over the weekend about Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele inadvertently mixing up his Tolstoy and his Dickens: after citing War and Peace as his favorite book, apparently he started in on, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Batuman points out, sympathetically, that War and Peace doesn't really open memorably; its first words are in French, for one thing, and they're dialogue, for another. Rather than announce that The Book is Beginning, Tolstoy merely draws back the curtain and invites the reader inside.

That got me thinking about opening lines. Unlike War and Peace, Anna Karenina does open memorably, with the famous aphorism:

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Unforgettable, certainly . . . but tell me, does it ring true to you? It's so familiar that I've always taken it as a commonplace, but the more I actually attend to it, the more I doubt. It strikes me as more a flourish than a thought, an overly writerly phrase rather than a genuine observation about human character. It's the sort of phrase that a writer lays down in the fervid inspiration that accompanies the beginning of work on a novel . . . and then should be sure to go back and cut.

It simply doesn't fit, either with what immediately follows or with the long rest of the novel. If Tolstoy hadn't already had such a strong epigraph--"Vengeance is mine. I shall repay."--he would have been better off relegating his opening to that status and beginning the book with the second paragraph instead:

All was confusion in the Oblonskys' house. The wife had found out that the husband was having an affair with their former French governess, and had announced to the husband that she could not live in the same house with him. This situation had continued for three days now, and was painfully felt by the couple themselves, as well as by all the members of the family and household.

Wouldn't it be better to be plunged directly into that irony and bustle, rather than being given Tolstoy's solemn pronouncement first? Isn't that paragraph far more true to the feeling of Tolstoy's world, in all its particularity?

Not that Tolstoy's alone in falling for his own beauties. Take L. P. Hartley, whose similarly well-known lines that open The Go-Between I adapted for the title to Monday's post:

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

Those lines work better than Tolstoy's with what's to come: in the immediate moment, the discovery by an adult of a journal he kept as a boy; in the course of the novel, his realization that his youthful self was missing, or misunderstanding, key elements of a drama in which he had played an unwitting part. But even so, those lines stand out as too chiseled, too separate; they'd do much better as an epigraph--that's the proper place for such an overarching, guiding observation.

And what about Dickens, and his (apparently Tolstoyan, per Michael Steele) "best of times, worst of times"? Those lines, bombastic as they may be, at least are tied to the book's theme of duality (overplayed though it may be in this weakest of Dickens novels)--and, because the passage is rarely quoted in full, it's easy to forget that Dickens intentionally deflates the tone by the end, a reminder that his true genius lay in his eye for the comic and self-important:

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, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Steele, it's only fair to say, is far from the first politician to fail to read far enough into a quotation to reach the sting in its tail. Methinks Dickens would have put him solidly into that category of "noisiest authorities."

For my money, however, Dickens's best opening lines come from the book of his that has been most effaced, as a piece of writing, by its many adaptations--A Christmas Carol:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Is there a better way to open a story that's to begin with the visit of a ghost?

In fact, as far as setting a tone and giving the reader a sense of what's to come, I can only think of one line that beats it:

When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.

That's from Richard Stark's Firebreak. What more do you need to know, other than how much time you've got left for reading before you have to drag yourself away to bed?

"The sale of letters is a strange thing, though, a very different matter, it seems to me, from books," or, Letters Week Part V!

What set me paging through my various collections of letters this week were the reviews heralding the publication in England of So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald--whose collection of essays and reviews, The Afterlife (2003), was the subject of my first published review, in the Bloomsbury Review--has long been a favorite, her concise and moving novels a forceful reminder of the power of leaving out; now that I have the volume of her letters in hand, I'm pleased to find that the intelligence, gently ironic humor, and deep sympathy that mark her novels are in evidence in her correspondence as well.

I've only spent a couple of hours with the book so far, but I've already found much that's worth sharing. As I do with any book related to twentieth-century literary culture, I started with the index: Powell, Anthony. Powell does turn up, playing an unexpectedly heroic role, in a letter that is most likely from 1979 (Note to young writers: always include the year on your letters!) to novelist Francis King. At the time King was helping Fitzgerald research a biography of novelist L. P. Hartley, but Hartley's great love, Lord David Cecil, was stymieing her; she wrote,

My LPH situation has got better and worse, (in a way) as Anthony Powell, whom I went to see, rang up Lord David, out of pure kindness of heart, and told him to come off it, as Leslie's biography was sure to be written some time.

Powell's entreaty--delivered in perfectly Powellian fashion, relying equally on old-chap camaraderie and the inevitability posed by time's relentlessness--worked, as Lord David wrote Fitzgerald to say that he had "withdrawn all objections." Sadly, he soon adduced new ones, and the biography was never finished; our loss and Hartley's both, one has to believe, as Fitzgerald was a talented, perceptive, and kind biographer. She argued for the value of her approach in another letter to King:

A primary biography by people who know the subject and are really fond of him or her is a protection, I think. Perhaps artists should be judged by their work, but it's only too evident that they aren't.

That sympathy was where Fitzgerald rooted herself as a biographer; as she explained, first in a letter to her friend Hugh Lee in 1978, then again in more polished form to her American editor Chris Carduff in 1987,

[O]n the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

Fitzgerald frequently returned in her letters to the myriad difficulties facing a biographer. Here, for example, in a letter to her publisher Colin Haycraft, dated October 12, 1978, she noted early problems getting needed information about Hartley:

I asked for information about Leslie Hartley in the TLS and got a number of replies, some referring discreetly to the drink problem--one of my difficulties however is that the only person I can find who was actually at Harrow with Leslie (in 1910) is Paul Bloomfield, who is at the same time much too easy and much too difficult to deal with, and also I wonder how much longer he'll last?

I particularly enjoy that letter because, though Fitzgerald is writing it from the perspective of a biographer, the line about Bloomfield--who is simultaneously too easy and too difficult--is the thought of a novelist, marveling at layers of complexity. A similar tone inflects a line from a letter to writer Harvey Pitcher, whom she was attempting to buck up about a biography he was struggling with:

What is odd is that the people concerned, it seems, both did, and didn't, want to conceal everything.

In another letter to Pitcher, from 1988, she succinctly defended the biographer's art, while addressing the question--inescapable for fans of the form--of the lasting emotional effect of digging so deeply into another's life:

I was surprised, though, at what you said about biography. It seems to me that (particularly if you have the letters, and if you knew the subject yourself or can get hold of someone who knew the subject) you can know him or her at least as well as anyone you meet in real life. The trouble is that it's rather difficult to shake the people off when the book is written, and return to yourself. They're not to be got rid of so easily.

Fitzgerald's biographical endeavors also caused her to be particularly attentive to the fates of letters. Still wrestling with the Hartley problem, she wrote to King on June 2, 1978 that, unfair though it may be, she's sure that a new, revealing biography of Edith Sitwell will frighten friends and relations of Hartley into reticence, and

I'm sure going to upset Norah very much and cause more wholesale destruction of letters &c. Well,--"publishing scoundrels!"

Of an earlier biographical subject, the poet Charlotte Mew, she wrote to Forster scholar Mary Lago in 1994,

I never did manage to find the crucial letters or information, although I'm sure they exist; Professor Friedmann said to me--"if there's no proof that a letter's been burned, it must exist somewhere.

Alas, I fear that Professor Friedman is overly optimistic, time and chaos being the fiends they pride themselves on being.

I'll close with a line that made me break out in a broad smile, from a letter of November 20, 1980 to her editor Richard Ollard:

It would be better to write long novels and short letters.

No fan of Fitzgerald's novels could wish that she'd taken her advice seriously; now that I've gotten a chance to enjoy her letters, I'm doubly glad.

One last post on Thomas and Emma Hardy, and Jude

I'm worn out from working the election today, but nothing puts a tired mind to rest like forcing it to make some sentences, so here are a few last thoughts for the week about Thomas Hardy.

1) In the past two posts, I've written about Jude the Obscure, agreeing with Claire Tomalin that at points in the novel Hardy's characters suffer tragedies so extreme they les the result of blind, uncaring fate than the effects of a willfully malevolent god--or, in this case, a willfully cruel author. "See--see how bad life can be?" he seems to be saying, but the very intensity of the suffering undercuts our willingness to believe his assertion--it feels, as Nick Hornby has put it before when talking about a different author, as if Hardy has his thumb on the scale.

Anthony Powell, in reviewing J.I.M. Stewart's biography of Hardy for the Daily Telegraph back in 1971 quoted T. S. Eliot saying,

What again and again introduces a note of falsity into Hardy's novels is that he will leave nothing to nature, but will always be giving one last turn of the screw himself, and of his motives for doing I have the gravest suspicion.

In this case I think Eliot is being too general. I have no trouble believing the suffering in Hardy's other great novels (Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Far from the Madding Crowd); once the plot necessities of Victorian serial publication are allowed for, the events of all seem fully within the realm of possibility, potential outcomes of the very real human emotions and ambitions that animate their characters.

After all this complaining, I should say that Jude is still well worth reading, if only for the character of Sue (which Powell calls "astonishingly well expressed") and for Hardy's ability to convey, in the early portions of the book, the palpable ache of Jude's ambitions. As you might guess from how much I've written about it, it's a hard book to forget.

2) The same collection of Anthony Powell's reviews from which I drew the Eliot quote above includes a review of the memoir written by Hardy's much-maligned first wife, Emma, Some Recollections, which despite her lack of literary training is fairly well-regarded. While Powell admits that she does display talent and a "certain gift for appreciation of what was happening round her," he also says,

One can see how captivated Hardy must have been by her; at the same time, what an appalling bore she must have become in middle age. Her egotism was obviously tremendous. What appeared imaginative energy was mostly an immense concentration on herself.

Even if we cut Emma Hardy significant slack to compensate for Hardy's failures as a husband (of attention, of care, of understanding) and for the ill effects of the intensely circumscribed world in which Victorian women were forced to dwell, she still comes across as an inherent problem. Her deep insecurity and outsized sense of self-importance seem a toxic combination. In later years she took to reminding guests of the gap in social standing between her family and Hardy's; she also frequently went so far as to talk of his novels as "their work" and even to hint at coauthorship of important works. It is easy to see why Hardy drew away from her; easy as well to see how that drawing away could easily lead to more of the very behavior by Emma that troubled the marriage in the first place.

Powell, in a 1979 review of Denys Kay-Robinson's The First Mrs. Thomas Hardy says

Kay-Robinson thinks Emma Hardy has been unfairly treated, and one of the aims of his book is to set right the balance. He does convince the reader that Hardy was very much in love when the first marriage took place, and no one would disagree with the view that Hardy was a difficult husband. At the same time, as the list of witnesses to the first Mrs. Hardy's shortcomings are assembled--some of them to a certain degree confused--we begin to wonder whether, if Emma Hardy is to be presented in a sympathetic light, it would have been easier to prove the case without calling on so many people who found her tiresome.

For all that, when Emma died, Hardy embarked almost instantly on a lengthy set of eulogizing poems, ones that Claire Tomalin regards as his best. Those very poems, and the reborn (or reimagined) love they expressed, had the perverse effect of greatly damaging, at its very outset, Hardy's marriage to his second wife, who had been waiting patiently in the wings for Emma's passing.

If nothing else, Hardy's marriages remind us that few people are ever really simple, and that a marriage not one's own is perhaps best thought of as, like L. P. Hartley said about the past, "another country. They do things differently there."

3) From Barbara Pym's diary, the entry for 20 May, 1977:

Seeing a handsome Dorset woman at a petrol pump I thought a Hardy heroine of today might follow such an occupation. Tess for instance.

4) From a letter from Nancy Mitford to Evelyn Waugh, 26 December 1945:

Uncle Matthew has been here, deep in my book. He says he once read a book that ended badly and he hasn't ever been the same since--it was called Tess of the D'Urbervilles. This is news to all of us and very interesting news too.