It is not out of egotism that I say “I”; it is simply the quickest way to tell the story.
Accusations of complacency directed at the authors of autobiographies and memoirs were deftly deflected once and for all by Alexander Herzen in The Pole Star, with:
Who is entitled to write his reminiscences?
Everyone.
Because no one is obliged to read them.
* * *
The overtures of some novels have become virtual proverbs. Think, for instance, of the first words of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”; and I suppose even those who have never read Anna Karenina would recognise its opening sentence:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Sometimes, lesser writers are also capable of a stroke of genius. The first words of The Go-Between are in all memories — even in the memories of those who have never heard the name L.P. Hartley:
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
Conversely, there are masterpieces that begin in a most inconspicuous manner, and it is only in hindsight that their low-keyed openings have come to acquire the magical resonance they have for us today. When Proust wrote, “For a long time I used to go to bed early…” his first readers could hardly have foreseen where this deceptively bland and modest statement would take them. Some 4,000 pages later, however, they found themselves in the position of a swimmer who, having slipped quietly into the waters of a lazy river, is soon overwhelmed by an invisible current and carried away to the middle of the ocean.
In philosophical fables, however, the usual aim is to puzzle readers and catch their attention from the outset. In Metamorphosis, for example, Kafka entraps us at once in an inexorable nightmare:
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Grown-up fairytales observe the same method. When you read the first sentence of a story by Marcel Aymé, you immediately react like a child — you must find out what happens next. The Dwarf begins:
As he reached the age of thirty-five, the dwarf of the Barnaboum Circus started to grow.
* * *
Some writers find the initial spark in words, others in ideas, and others again in an image — an inner vision. The latter are perhaps the quintessential fiction writers. For them, very often, writing is an obsessive activity, sometimes performed as if in a trance, and generally conducted under the blind dictation of their subconscious. Writing is the safety valve that preserves their very sanity; if they did not write, they would hardly survive: Graham Greene, Georges Simenon, Julien Green — however different as individuals — are typical of this remarkable breed. Their novels — and particularly their opening scenes — linger hauntingly in the memory. Yet what we remember is not words or phrases; it is the visual impact of cinematic frames on the screen of our imagination. When Greene was still an obscure journalist and met the film producer Alexander Korda, he was abruptly asked if he had any story in mind that might be turned into a film. Greene immediately improvised the opening scene of a thriller: “Early morning on Platform 1 at Paddington; the platform is empty — except for one man who is waiting for the last train from Wales. From below his raincoat a trickle of blood forms a pool on the platform.” “Yes, and then?” asked Korda. “It would take too long to tell you the whole plot,” Greene replied, not having a clue how he would go on: “It still needs some more working out.” But a friendship was struck that eventuated in the making of The Third Man. We will never know what the bleeding man on the platform was up to, but his image remains with us, as it did with Korda.
The impeccable wordsmith and original thinker Paul Valéry’s preamble for his philosophical essay “Monsieur Teste” stays etched in the mind when the essay itself is a blurry impression:
Stupidity is not my strong point. I have seen many people; I have visited a few countries; I have taken part in various undertakings without liking them; I have eaten nearly every day; I have caressed a few women. Today I can still recall a good hundred faces, two or three great shows, and perhaps the gist of some twenty books. What I remember is neither the best nor the worst of these things: simply what has managed to remain, remains. This arithmetic relieves me of any surprise that I am growing old.
But the hyper-rationality of Valéry’s intelligence produced in him a strong prejudice against the art of fiction. To his mind, a novelist’s invention was deplorably devoid of intellectual necessity. He toyed with the idea of compiling an anthology of first lines from famous novels, to demonstrate the asinine triviality of a literary genre in which a book may begin with a statement as vacuous as: “The marchioness went out at five o’clock,” a phrase that became a shorthand indictment for a certain type of fiction. The surrealist movement appropriated Valéry’s gibe in its ferocious literary crusade against all novels and novelists — but these inquisitorial outbursts had no noticeable impact upon the general health of European and American fiction, which continued to flourish. Here are two brilliantly effective novel openings from the 1930s (one could think of many dozens more). First, Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies:
It was clearly going to be a bad crossing.
With Asiatic resignation, Father Rothschild S.J. put down his suitcase in the corner of the bar and went on deck. (It was a small suitcase of imitation crocodile hide. The initials stamped on it in Gothic characters were not Father Rothschild’s for he had borrowed it that morning from the valet-de-chambre of his hotel. It contained some rudimentary underclothes, six important new books in six languages, a false beard and a school atlas and gazetteer heavily annotated.)
We sense that the book will contain resources just as surprising and diverse. Or again, George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air:
The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
One could not suggest with greater economy the mood of gloom and despair that is going to pervade this prophetic indictment of a modern world poisoned by synthetic food, cretinised by commercial advertisements and ransacked by real-estate developers.
* * *
Chekhov remarked that writers would often benefit by cutting off the beginnings and the endings of their stories — for these are usually the weakest parts in their work. It would not only be inconceivable but simply impracticable to effect such surgical interventions on Chekhov’s own stories; their beginnings and endings are all the more effective for being virtually invisible — and there lies one of the secrets of his art.
Lopping off the introductory sentences of a narrative is a conceit often used to startling effect in eighteenth-century literature. We don’t really begin to read Sterne’s Sentimental Journey: we are casually and unexpectedly dumped into it:
“They order,” said I, “this matter better in France.”
This sort of abrupt opening produces the youthful and exhilarating feeling one experiences when jumping into a train already in motion. We are carried away with similar speed and whimsicality by Diderot at the beginning of Jacques le fataliste—and, quite significantly, here again it is travel that provides the leading metaphor:
How did they meet? Perchance, like everybody. What were their names? What does it matter to you? Where did they come from? From the nearest place. Where did they go? Who knows where he is going? What were they saying? The master said nothing; and Jacques said, that his Captain used to say, that whatever happens to us on earth, good and bad, was already written in heaven.