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Dirda on Books
Hosted by Michael Dirda
Washington Post Book World Senior Editor
Thursday, May 15, 2003; 2 p.m. ET
Washington Post Book World Senior Editor Michael Dirda took your questions and comments concerning literature, books and the joys of reading.
This Week's Topic: Favorite first/last lines in literature
Each week Dirda's name appears -- in unmistakably big letters -- on page 15 of The Post's Book World section. If he's not reviewing a hefty literary biography or an ambitious new novel, he's likely to be turning out one of his idiosyncratic essays or describing his travels to, say, a P.G. Wodehouse Convention. Although he earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell, Dirda has somehow managed to retain a myopic 12-year-old's passion for reading. He particularly enjoys comic novels, intellectual history, locked-room mysteries, innovative fiction of all sorts -- just the sort of range you'd expect from a Pulitzer Prize winner in criticism (1993).
These days, Dirda says he still spends inordinate amounts of time mourning his lost youth, listening to music (Glenn Gould, Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Krall, The Tallis Scholars), and daydreaming ("my only real hobby"). He claims that the happiest hours of his week are spent sitting in front of a computer, working. In the fall of 2000 Indiana University Press published "Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments," a selection from Dirda's Book World columns. He hopes to bring out a companion volume soon.
Dirda joined The Post in 1978, having grown up in the working-class steel town of Lorain, Ohio and graduated with highest honors in English from Oberlin College. His favorite writers are Stendhal, Chekhov, Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, Nabokov, John Dickson Carr, Joseph Mitchell and Jack Vance. He thinks the greatest novel of all time is either Murasaki Shikubu's "The Tale of Genji" or Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu." In a just world he would own Watteau's painting "The Embarkation for Cythera." He'd also like to spend six months in Florida writing a book that would become a runaway best seller, a critical success, and the hottest cinematic property of the year. A guy can daydream, right?
The transcript follows.
Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control
over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
Math Puzzle:
The opening line of O. Henry's "The Gift of the Maji" is
"One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies."
Is there anything wrong with this?
Answer in separate submission.
Michael Dirda: Welcome to Dirda on Books, coming to you from a remote outpost in Silver Spring, Maryland this week. I'm at home, selecting among my, ahem, essays and reviews for another collection. Mind is groggy after reading so much of my deathless prose. Worse yet, or perhaps better yet, I feel more and more certain that I should never write about books again. Maybe I'll feel differently tomorrow. Anyway, for the next hour I"ll answer questions about books, reading, etc., but please bear in mind that things may be a little slower than usual.
Hmmm. I seem to remember this challenge from somewhere else. I suppose there isn't anything wrong because we used to have two-cent pieces or something like that. Let us all know the answer.
Lexington, K.Y.:
HI Michael, Favorite opening line, " A screaming comes across the sky." From, of course, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. I have many other favorite lines but that one has stuck with me through years (certainly apropos today! ). GR brings up a question, though. Encyclopedic fictions as Edward Mendelson called them, like THE RECOGNITIONS, GR, ULYSSES are extremely demanding books, almost resisting readers, insisting upon being read on their own terms; you have to really enter the book and learn to read it as you go along. Now some are worthwhile, like the above, and many are not. What do you think of these fictions and do you have any that you personally like and would add to the list?
Michael Dirda: Great opening, of course. I sometimes think of such books as mega-novels. I tend to like novels stuffed with learning, and besides the ones you mention am fond of Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, Norfolk's Lempriere's Dictionary, Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, Pavic's Dictinoary of the Khazars, and lots of older classic books like Don Quixtoe, Tristram Shandy, The Manuscript found at Saragossa, The Arabian Nights, Zola's various novels, Proust. But it's hard to know where the encyclopedica novel stops and the long or dense book begins.
Crystal City, Va.:
"And me, back into a man." -Clifford D. Simak
"I am the master." -Harry Bates
Michael Dirda: City, no? I forget the title of the other, something like Farewell to the Master? Or am I dead wrong? These are last lines, by the way.
Washington, D.C.:
Favorite first and last lines? Here are two favorite opening lines:
From a Hemingway short story (can't remember the title): When we came in the bartender reached over and pulled the cover over the free lunch.
There's more information packed into that sentence than you will find in most ten sentence paragraphs.
From Anthony Burgess's "Earthly Powers"
I was in bed with my catamite when the Arch Bishop and his suffregan walked through the door.
As an attention grabber, that can't be beat.
Michael Dirda: I think you're slightly misquoting the Burgess too, but they're both great lines.
Iowa City, Iowa:
"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne we was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint outside of Sonoma, Calfornia drinking the heart out of a fine spring afternoon"
James Crumley, Last Good Kiss
I might have mangled it a bit but that is the opening line I recall more vividly than others.
Are you a fan of his at all?
Thanks.
Michael Dirda: The Last Good Kiss is the best private-eye novel--if you can call it that--of the past 25 years. And the most heartbreaking. I've never read The WRong Case, which friends tell me is Crumley's best book. I find it hard to imagine anything better than Kiss.
Math Puzzle Answer:
No, the United States issued a two-cent piece from 1862-1875.
Michael Dirda: No? Huh? Oh, I see. You sent this without seeing that I suggested there was a two cent piece. So I was right. Ah, the vagaries of the internet.
Great Opening Lines:
Here's one from a book I am finally reading after years of trying to get my hands on it:
"It was a pleasure to burn."
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
A chilling reminder not to take the power and joy of books for granted.
Michael Dirda: Yes, it is a great line. I've often wondered whether Bradbury was also thinking of St. Paul's remark that it was better to marry than to burn. Especially since the novel chronicles the break up of Montag's marriage, among other things.
Paris:
"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."
D. Copperfield, of course. BTW, Michael, any books to recommend on Marseilles? Planning a trip there soon.
Michael Dirda: In ENglish: M.F.K. Fisher's A Considerable Town. In French: read Marcel Pagnol--espeically Marius, Fanny et Cesar. THat's old Marseille, of course.
Oberlin, Ohio:
Sr. Dirda,
I have heard tell that you hail from migty Lorain County, OH. I did my undergraduate at that fine and storied institution in 44074. So good to see you here. I think I've driven your friend Lloyd crazy with my Oberlin references.
Anyway, I'm reading White Teeth now. Started it last week. What do you think of it?
Michael Dirda: Yes, I grew up in Lorain and went to Oberlin College. My forthcoming memoir, An Open Book, is about those places and how I discovered reading.
Haven't read Zadie Smith. Which Lloyd?
Washington, D.C.:
My mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday
Michael Dirda: Camus's The Stranger. Terrific opening, indeed. By the way, did I tell you the first sentence of AN OPEN BOOK:
"Daydreaming is my only hobby."
Winston-Salem, N.C.:
A couple from non-fiction:
My favorite opening line is from New Yorker non-fiction writer Richard Harris in a book title, "The Fear of Crime:" "The most distinctive trait of a successful politician is selective cowardice."
Some of my favorite openings are those of John McPhee. In his book on Oranges he relates the various diseases that the orange trees are subject to, the worst being a form of mold (as I remember) that ravages whole swaths of orange groves called blight. Later as the farmer and McPhee travel the a farmer's groves looking at the trees, they crest a hill and see a housing subdivision where a neighboring farm used to be. "Blight," explains the farmer.
Michael Dirda: Nice, especially the McPhee. I think the other is a little too abstract, needs a bit of explaining--which I'm sure followed right on.
OOooh, great topic!:
Favorite first line:
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."
Favorite last line:
"Well, I'm back, he said."
Michael Dirda: Oooh, I like the ones where I get to show off by knowing the book titles: FEar and Loathing in Las Vegas and Lord of the Rings. Again, great lines. I suppose that like good ledes in reviews and news stories, a novelist must spend more time on his first and last sentences than on any others.
Falls Church, Va.:
"In my family, there was no clear line between religion an fly fishing."
"I am haunted by waters."
Michael Dirda: Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It. Not sure of the last--is it Maclean too?
Silver Spring, Md.:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. My favourite... Pride and Prejudice.
Michael Dirda: That must be up there among everybody's top ten favorite openings, along with Call Me Ishmael, and Hwaet! and Many years later as he faced the firing squad Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
Bowie, Md.:
Can you explain what is so awful that a contest uses the following as its paradigm for awful writing:
"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
This has never struck me as being a terrible sentence.
Michael Dirda: Bulwer Lytton--Paul Clifford, I think. Nothing wrong with it at all. The phrase got picked up as a sign of bad writing because so many later writers used it, chiefly Snoopy in Peanuts. It became the cliche phrase announcing a certain kind of fustian, old-fashioned tale.
Lenexa, Kan. "the aforementioned clerihew":
DIRDA ON BOOKS
Dirda the Brain,
Our friend from Lorain:
Amuses us weekly--warm, Turing-deft, droll;
Peruses death bleakly--sirens stirring his soul.
--"Lenexa, Kan."
Michael Dirda: Lovely. Turing-deft is particularly suggestive. Would that I were half as smart as Alan Turing--though his sad end is one I instinctively identify with. I must copy this out.
Obie Girl:
Lloyd Grove is nuts with my insertions into his chats, particularly those references to Oberlin-style behaviors.
Can't wait to see your work.
I'm ready to get back into classics again, and have decided to read Candide this weekend. Where else should I go in this vein?
Michael Dirda: Read more Voltaire--Zadig and Micromegas. Then go on to Diderot's novella Rameau's Nephew. Ah, yes the Great Tradition: Diderot, Derrida, Dirda.
Providence, R.I.:
"One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin."
Michael Dirda: Yes, but I still like better the old translation--not as accurate--that had him transfromred into a "gigantic insect."
Washington, D.C.:
Hi Michael,
I really love Michael Chabon's writing and he often gets compared to John Cheever. First, are these comparisons warranted? And second, what is a good book by Cheever to start with since I've never read him?
Thanks a lot.
Michael Dirda: Does he get compared to Cheever? News to me. But they're both very smooth stylists, limpid, rain-water prose and pleasures to read. Cheever is best in his short stories, of which there is a mammotth Collected. AMong the best known are The Country Husband (my favorite), The Swimmer, The Enormous Radio, The Sorrows of Gin, oh and a dozen others. He portrays New York and environs in the 1950s, a time of commuter trains and heavy drinking, suburban angst and urban temptation.
Washington, D.C.:
A favorite last line:
"Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?"
Michael Dirda: Ah yes, The Sun Also Rises. So sad.
Washington, D.C.:
Favorite First line: "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." From The G0-Between."
Michael Dirda: Another heartbreaking book. I wrote a short piece on it for the ATlantic last year when it was reissued. But the phrase has become so famous--like that first line of Pride and Prejudice--that it's become a cliche.
Sacramento, Calif.:
"None of them knew the color of the sky." Although from a short story, not novel.
Was quite interested in your essay in Readings about your taking up physical fitness. Are you still running, lifting, etc?
Michael Dirda: Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat." Yes, I'm still running and trying to lift weights. I like the running, but somehow I don't seem to see much results from all my pumping iron. Maybe the weights aren't heavy enough, or I'm not getting enough protein. Just reviewed a book by Gina Kolata called Ultimate Fitness where she stresses the importance of intensity.
Venus:
A favorite opening line (in more ways than one):
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
And also perhaps:
"Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime..."
Michael Dirda: Do either work? As opening lines, of the other sense? I'd be surprised. Shakespeare and Marvell. I once read a wonderful story by Barry Targan about an affair between a middle aged male professor and his young female student. At its climax the poem is recited or read, and the professor, on the edge of desperation, asjs her what is it about? She answers "Sex." And he cries back in despair, "No, death."
Charlotte, N.C.:
"I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." After all the angst and mystery and melodrama, this calming last line allowed me to breath in relief at the end of Wuthering Heights.
Michael Dirda: I am Heathcliff. What a strange book that is.
Fairfax, Va.:
Hi Michael, how about the last lines from Joyce's "The Dead?":
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamp-light. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
-----
And he was so young when he wrote that...
Michael Dirda: Yes. One could make a case that he went downhill afterward. I read that close when I was in 8th grade and realized for the first time that prose could be poetry. My other favorite, somewhat similar, moment is when in Portrait STephen goes to the prostitute: "His lips would not bend to kiss her" building to "deeper than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.
Rockville, Md.:
Favorite Opening Line:
At the begining of summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague buisness.
Even better when considered in relation to the two final lines of that section of the book:
That night he flew back to Washington, and the next day, for the first time in years, I looked in the newspaper for some lurid record of the effect of his visit, but of course there was none. He wasn't that kind of gangster.
Michael Dirda: Don't know these, or at least don't remember them. What's the book? They're great.
Fairfax, Va.:
Not long ago someone asked about biographies of Winston Churchill. May I suggest that a fascinating alternative (or addition) is "Fringes of Power: the Downing Street Diaries, 1939-1955," by John Rupert, Sir Colville. Colville was one of Churchill's secretaries and clandestinely kept his diary. It is full of background info and insights -- the impression I got was valuable "real-time" reactions to historical events and people.
As to actual biographies, I liked William Manchester's books.
Michael Dirda: THanks
Another last line:
This one also from a short story:
'Romance at short notice was her speciality.'
Michael Dirda: Last line of Saki's The Open Window.
Alexandria, Va.:
Hello, Michael, and thanks for taking my question.
What's the buzz on Margaret Atwood's new novel? I've read just about everything she's written (that has been published, anyway), including her alliterative children's book, Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut, which my kids love. My favorite line: "She was not predisposed to accept this particular prince as her life partner, although he was properly appareled and partially presentable..." I heard she is coming out with a new one featuring the letter R.
Michael Dirda: Our reviewer Tom Disch liked the new dystopia book a lot. Other reviewers have been more temperate, but generally feel positively about it. I'd give it whirl.
Washington, D.C.:
Perhaps you can help me, because I cannot remember the exact quotes. Favorite opening -- the first one or two (or three?)lines from "The Bell Jar," something about the execution of the Rosenburgs (I remember as a young woman starting the book and the opening made me gasp). Favorite ending, from the Great Gatsby, something beautiful about carrying on forever forward into our past.
Michael Dirda: Don't remember the Plath, but you can drive out to Rockville and visit Fitzgerald's grave where the words are etched on his tombstone: "And so like boats against the current we beat back ceaselessly into the past."
Alexandria, Va.:
Howdy, Mr. Dirda!
Last week you mentioned favorite first and last lines as a loose theme for this week. Not the greatest in Western literature, but surely my favorites:
First line: Marley was dead, to begin with.
Last line: Juno was a man!
Michael Dirda: There's range for you! Charles Dickens Christmas CArol and MIckey Spillane. Can't remember which Mike Hammer book, though. Not I the Jury because that one ends something "How could you, MIke. . . It was easy." Perhaps My Gun is Quick?
Alexandria, Va.:
One of the powers of last lines is that some of them are very subtle, and have a power from that subtlety. If the reader is expecting a blockbuster last line because we talked about it then the effect is ruined.
Are you worried that if we reveal the last lines of books that we will spoil these books for people who haven't read them yet?
Michael Dirda: No, if I was writing a review I wouldn't do this, but we're just talking. It's not quite the same. Of course, if you know that the last line 1984, the book does lose a certain suspense.
Arlington, Va.:
Mr. Dirda,
Just a comment on a remark you made
in last week's discussion regarding WWI books.
A reader suggested Ferguson's "The Pity
of War" as an useful work on the Great
War, and you alluded to it being
somewhat leftist in tone. I think a better
description would be revisionist.
Ferguson certainly questions much of the
perceived wisdom on the war (he's not the
only one these days) re German
intentions, responsibility, killing efficiency
on the battlefield and so on, but his
conclusions are all over the map. I
suppose the most controversial was his
assertion that GB's entry turned a quick
German victory over France into a four
year world catastrophe; it's a provocative
view that he toys with using
counterfactuals. Seeing as very few recall
WWI as a righteous war, Ferguson's
attitude lies in the more in the
mainstream, not on the left. Note that in
his most recent book, he is almost
nostalgic for the Empire; certainly not a
leftist view but seeing as WWI began the
slow collapse of the Empire, his view of
the Great War makes even more sense.
But I would read "The Pity of War" after
consuming a standard text on the Great
War; Ferguson's work is more a book of
essays than a narrative so a reader
lacking basic knowledge of the war may
be a bit confused and unsatisfied.
Michael Dirda: thanks for the clarification.
Washington, D.C.:
Of all the books I've read, I think the opening line of Don DeLillo's Underworld is the best:
"He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful."
In this sentence, DeLillo describes Cotton, the young "protagonist" of the amazing first chapter of this book. DeLillo could also be describing every other major character in this book, and describing himself as he begins writing, and describing you crack open the book. In fact, he's describing all of us -- tethered to the identity of this nation, vulnerable superpower, land of ignobility and fame, of unbridled optimism and collective individuality, of ballparks, canyons, landfills...
It's The Everyman's opening sentence in the Everyman's classic novel.
Michael Dirda: I like Underworld a lot, especially the Pasco at the Wall opening, but I can't say that I'm taken with that sentence. It's a bit overblown for my taste. Better is the opening to Augie March: "I am an American . . . and I go at things free style"--can't quite remember it right.
Oh no, not her again...:
"Howard Roark laughed"
Michael Dirda:
Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. ANd then there's "Who is John Galt?"
Well, time's up for this week, and I need to go back to my work. Next Thursday I'll be back at my usual desk, staring out at the world and wondering about the future. etc etc. Must go back and copy out that clerihew. Till then, everyone, keep reading!
Lenexa, Kan.:
Crumley also has a great definition of pleasure in the "Kiss" novel: "The fifth drink in a new town."
Great opening lines: "If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head." (Brady Udall's "The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint".)
Also, Irving's "A Prayer for Owen Meany" has a similar start. I think both it and the movie version "Simon Birch" are splendid.
Michael Dirda: Oops. Lenexa, can you send that clerihew to my email address--dirdam@washpost.com--it seems to have vanished into the archives already. thanks.
ta ta, everyone.
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