It was in the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
In this case, the fisherman scored a bite — for I bought the book — but he did not actually land the fish — since this weighty volume has been majestically gathering dust on my shelves, still unread after nineteen years. In a way, I wonder if Burgess’s clever opening is not to genuine literature what an artificial fly is to natural insects: a little too shiny, and ultimately indigestible. The search for effect comes, here, dangerously close to one of those tongue-in-cheek entries in the competition named after Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the once popular author of The Last Days of Pompeii, and his now notorious opening of Paul Clifford: “It was a dark and stormy night…” An example of a winning entry:
Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting edge of narcissism, was about to give his body and soul to a back alley sex-change surgeon to become the woman he loved.
For Earthly Powers, Burgess contrived an opening that was striking indeed; the only problem was precisely that it was contrived, and this is probably why, in the end, it could not provoke, in this reader at least, a real urge to persist.
The danger with talented artists is that too often it is their very eagerness to impress that ruins their more ambitious efforts. This willingness to resort to gimmicks reflects the domination of advertising over every facet of contemporary culture.
Hemingway was an early and influential exponent of this trend, often apparent in his stylistic mannerisms. See, for instance, the self-conscious wit displayed at the start of his story “In Another Country”:
In the fall, the war was still there, but we did not go to it anymore…
How smart indeed! If only the author’s cleverness had been better concealed. In some writers this fatal desire to show off their ability betrays a competitive streak, which taints their writing with vulgarity and ultimately kills their art.
The disease was accurately diagnosed by Arthur Koestler half a century ago, in an interview he gave to the New York Times shortly after he settled in the United States. His comments remain so pertinent that they deserve to be quoted at length:
The longer I live here the more I get the feeling that there is something radically wrong with the literary life in America… If you were to ask me what a writer’s ambition in life should be, I would answer with a formula.
A writer’s ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years, and for one reader in a hundred years. But the general atmosphere in this country directs the writer’s ambition into different channels… on immediate success here and now. Religion and art are the two completely non-competitive spheres of human striving and they both derive from the same source. But the social climate in this country has made the creation of art into an essentially competitive business. On the best-seller charts — this curse of American literary life — authors are rated like shares on the Stock Exchange… Can you fathom the whole horror of what this implies? And can you fathom the grotesqueness of Hemingway, America’s greatest living novelist, talking of his books in terms of “defending the title of champ”? I know he meant to be funny, but it just isn’t. It is a give-away; it betrays the basic assumption that writing is a competitive business like prize-fighting.
What appeared in 1950 to a European writer as a weird and barbaric American practice has become a common feature of international literary life. Yet do not misunderstand me; in principle I have no objection to first lines that generate instant excitement. Effective openings are first and foremost inspired openings.
Inspiration is most enchanting and free when the writer is on the threshold of a new creation. Victor Hugo — a compulsive creator — jotted down dozens of dazzling openings for novels he never completed, nor seriously contemplated writing; he was simply indulging in the pure magic of beginnings.
Inspired openings in literature have much in common with the overtures of great operas. A literary equivalent of the feverish expectation the orchestra can foster before the curtain rises is in the first paragraph of Moby-Dick, which opens with a breathtaking allegro con brio:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever there is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet… then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
Melville brusquely grabs you by the lapels and his grip never relaxes until, some 600 turbulent, bewildering pages later, he finally lets go of you. At that point, at long last, as the drama is finally over, there is a sudden change of pace: the narrator’s voice turns into largo maestoso, then softly fades away. Ishmael’s ship is lost with all hands, Ishmael alone survives, the coffin of his mate Queequeg becomes his lifebuoy, until another ship, searching for some of her own missing crew, rescues him:
The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago… Buoyed up by the coffin for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by, as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage seahawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.
Coffins had been evoked on the first page, and a coffin bobs on the surface on the last: the ending is linked to the beginning with an invisible thread that crosses the oceanic immensity of the narrative. But it is too early to raise the issue of endings — I shall return to it.
* * *
The trumpet-blast overture is a feature of political essays. Jean-Jacques Rousseau made brilliant use of it in his Contrat Social:
Man was born free; yet he is everywhere in chains.
Nearly a century later, Karl Marx injected similar impetus into the first words of the Communist Manifesto:
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.
Its 150th anniversary was celebrated last year. The criminal bankruptcy of all the states that used to call themselves “communist” has given a bad name to Marxism, which is perhaps unfair; after all, where has it ever really been tried? I am not competent to assess whether Marxism might still have a political future; one thing, however, is certain: whatever is well written is bound to last. On literary grounds alone, the future of Marx’s Manifesto is secure.
Rousseau’s philosophical treatise heralded the French Revolution, and in the private realm his impact was as momentous: his Confessions opened the floodgates for the effusions of Romanticism.
From the start, Rousseau’s autobiography presents a heady cocktail of naïve simplicity and stunning megalomania:
I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent and which, once complete, will have no imitator. I propose to display before my fellow-mortals a man in the full truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.
Half a century later, however, Stendhal introduced a cool distrust of all cant in exploring the self. With its swift and casual elegance, the opening of his Mémoires d’un touriste offers the best antidote to Rousseau’s egomania: