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Decermber
12, 2002, 8:00 a.m. |
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kay, Impromptus-ites, here is our last installment of Great First Lines
— am devoting the entire column to it (them). I can’t really
remember how this got started. I had some occasion to mention my two favorite
opening lines in literature. (They are, “It was a morning when all
nature shouted Fore,” from P. G. Wodehouse’s “The Heart
of a Goof”; and “Job was not a patient man,” from Marchette
Chute’s The
Search for God.) Then, I was sort of inundated with others’
favorite opening lines. And I published a few. And then I was further
inundated — and it snowballed (to switch from water to colder water).
We have already decided — we, the great collective “we”: my readers and I — that “In the beginning . . .” is the all-time champion. Everything else is competing for second place.
So, I will publish final responses below. I will do so in no particular order. Sometimes I’ll just give basic information (and, as before, I have done no checking, so this is just the memory or word of the particular contributor); sometimes I’ll publish an entire letter, just for context, further observations, and kicks.
Anyway, it’ll be fun. Enjoy. I have.
“The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.”
Peter Benchley, Jaws
“Dear Mr. Nordlinger: My candidate is ‘The road was blue with them.’ In six words it sets the storyline of Unto This Hour by Tom Wicker, a historical novel of the Civil War.”
(Don’t say that nothing good was ever said about Tom Wicker in this column. I haven’t read any of his novels, but I do remember his Times column.)
“High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.”
David Lodge, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses
“I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead.”
Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits
“It was the day my grandmother exploded.”
Iain Bainks, The Crow Road
“A sky as pure as water bathed the stars and brought them out.”
Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Southern Mail
“I was a bad kid.”
Babe Ruth, The Babe Ruth Story
“The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.”
Stephen King, The Gunslinger
“It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon when he was king of all England and so reigned, that there was a mighty duke in Cornwall that held war against him long time, and the duke was called the duke of Tyntagil.”
Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur, first romance
“In May, when every heart flourisheth and burgeoneth (for, as the season is lusty to behold and comfortable, so man and woman rejoiceth and gladdeth of summer coming with his fresh flowers, for winter with his rough winds and blasts causeth lusty men and women to cower and sit by fires), so this season it befell in the month of May a great anger and unhap that stinted not till the flower of chivalry of all the world was destroyed and slain.”
Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur, final romance
“It was my devil’s own temper that brought me to grief, my temper and a skill with weapons born of my father’s teachings.”
Louis L’Amour, Sackett’s Land
(Remember how smart people were terribly upset when Ronald Reagan gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Louis L’Amour, one of his favorite authors?)
“Ryan was nearly killed twice in half an hour.”
Tom Clancy, Patriot Games
“Mr. Nordlinger: Just wanted to add in the line that starts Proust’s glorious ramble A la recherche du temps perdu: ‘Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.’ Moncrieff and Kilmartin translate this: ‘For a long time I would go to bed early.’”
I just love that description of that book: a “glorious ramble.”
“All beginnings are hard.”
Chaim Potok, In the Beginning
“Five friends I had, and two of them snakes.”
Frederick Buechner, Godric
“Dear Mr. Nordlinger: An obvious classic is from hack Lawrence Sanders. Actually I’m being unkind, as several of his books were quite good. Anyway the first sentence of his The Tomorrow Files is, ‘She was naked.’ Maybe this makes me a perv, but I got a kick out of it as a first-sentence attention-getter.”
Don’t you just love the word “perv”?
“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”
E. A. Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”
“In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.”
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
“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.”
John Irving, A
Prayer for Owen Meany
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, General Aureliano
Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him
to discover ice.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Hundred Years of Solitude
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
“Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.”
Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
“Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
“Night. The river shouldered its way through the forest.” (Two lines, but okay.)
Jean Giono, The Song of the World
“Marley was dead: to begin with.”
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (Nice timing.)
“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”
George Eliot, Middlemarch
“Mr. Nordlinger: My choice is from the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant: ‘My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.’ Vintage Grant — blunt, clear, vaguely un-PC, proud yet matter-of-fact.”
“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration.”
Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August
“It was a Monday in Washington, January 21; Jefferson Davis rose from his seat in the Senate.”
Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative
“For forty years my act consisted of one joke. And then she died.”
George Burns, Gracie: A Love Story
And now, eight opening lines from Peter DeVries:
“It wasn’t until I had become engaged to Miss Piano that I began avoiding her.”
“‘The last place to have a ball, my dear Mrs. DelBelly, is at a formal dance.’”
Peckham’s Marbles
“Man is vile, I know, but people are wonderful.”
“For as long as I can remember, my father hibernated.”
“Like most irritable people I rarely lose my temper (a dog that’s let out for regular exercise isn’t apt to run away when it does escape), but I was losing it this morning.”
The Mackerel Plaza
“I had just been through hell and must have looked like death warmed over walking into the saloon, because when I asked the bartender whether they served zombies he said, ‘Sure, what’ll you have?’”
“We must love one another, yes, yes, that’s all true enough, but nothing says we have to like each other.”
“The trouble with treating people as equals is that the first thing you know they may be doing the same thing to you.”
End of DeVries
“The Navy is very old and very wise.”
Rudyard Kipling, The Fringes of the Fleet
Ah — one more DeVries (from a separate reader):
“Call me, Ishmael.”
The
Vale of Laughter
“The Sun rose slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth the
effort.”
Terry Patchett, The
Light Fantastic
“Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A.
and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world
I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me:
has it happened at last?”
Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins
Another Wodehouse:
“‘After all,’ said the young man, ‘golf is only a game.’” (“The Magic Plus Fours”)
“Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage.”
H. H. Munro, The Byzantine Omelet
“Dear Mr. Nordlinger: I noticed the first line of Atlas Shrugged in your list. Of course, the opening line of The Fountainhead is much better [please, no mail, Objectivists]: ‘Howard Roark laughed.’ I love that, given the context of standing naked on a cliff, preparing to dive into the water below, laughing at fear, laughing with life. Outstanding.”
“Mr. Nordlinger: My most unforgettable first line comes from Camilo José Cela’s classic Spanish novel about the ultimate dysfunctional family, La familia de Pascual Duarte: ‘Yo, señor, no soy malo, aunque no me faltarían motivos para serlo.’ (Loosely translated: ‘I, sir, am not evil, although I have no lack of grounds to be such.’) Those words have resonated in my head ever since I read the book 19 years ago in a graduate-level Spanish-literature course.”
“Dear Mr. Nordlinger: If you can have the first sentence from the baseball rulebook, you can surely have the first line from the preamble to The Laws of Cricket: ‘Cricket is a game that owes much of its unique appeal to the fact that it should be played not only within its Laws but also within the Spirit of the Game.’”
Now, that is beautiful.
“This is what happened.”
Douglas Fairbairn, Shoot
“London.”
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
“I always get the shakes before a drop.”
Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
“‘a \’\ n, pl a’s or as \’az\ often cap, often attrib (bef. 12c) 1 a : the 1st letter of the English alphabet b : a graphic representation of this letter c : a speech counterpart of orthographic a.”
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition
“We, the People of the United States . . .”
The Constitution
I think that’ll hold us, don’t you, guys? Thanks so much.
P.S. I will be away until sometime past Christmas, and won’t be Impromptu-ing. Please let me indulge in one gooey moment and say how thankful I am for my regular and supportive readers. It’s such a joy to write, rant, and generally screw around for you all. God bless you.
