Wired Mesh

First Things

The bimonthly journal American Book Review has published a list of the top 100 first lines in novels. It's a better selection than I've come to expect from these sorts of things, so long as I ignore the inherently arbitrary ordering (what makes Ellison's "I am an invisible man" eight places finer than Ford's "This is the saddest story I have ever heard"?) and good deal of dross, mostly of the too-clever-by-half school. (Walter Abish's opening line makes me want to smack the author in the face with a pole.) But a number of priceless overtures are included:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

Any of these lines, as well as the entries from Nabokov, Joyce and Chesterton, belong in the pantheon. (I'm cheating by allowing the Márquez, since it is literature in translation and really should be at the top of some Spanish first lines list, but please look the other way. Thanks.) But my pick for the finest opening in American writing, and possibly in the English tradition entire, comes from Bellow:

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

For those rhythms—the declarative opening, the diminuendo interjection, the statement of purpose that reveals character—this has no peer. It soars. And its first six words gain resonance with repetition. Try it over the course of an afternoon: the syllables stick around, and begin to carry the power of a brief anthem.

Of course, there's plenty of other fine work not on the list. I would have liked to see a bit of Martin Amis, natch—the openings of The Rachel Papers (""My name is Charles Highway, though you wouldn't think it to look at me. It's such a rangy, well-travelled, big-cocked name, and, to look at, I'm none of these") and The Information ("Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams") continue to reverberate in the gut. (Although in truth Martin fares better in last lines, where he's an undisputed master. Another time.) And then this, from Walker Percy:

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 yet?

Posted by mesh at March 30, 2006 05:33 PM | TrackBack