It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

How to begin? How to cross that terrible threshold between not-saying-something and saying-something? Preachers often begin with a joke. Some newscasters say a quick "good evening" before reminding their viewers that lawmakers are still myopic and that the rest of mankind is still murderous. Complainers always begin with "I don't mean to complain, but."

For fiction writers, general wisdom and tradition says to follow the advice of Horace's Ars Poetica: begin in medias res, or in the thick of action. Consider the opener of The Sound and the Fury: "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting." No introductions. We don't know what fence it is, who "I" is (am?), or who "they" are. But whoever "they" are, "they" are already hitting when the book opens. Or take a look at the first line of Catch-22: "It was love at first sight." Part of what makes that such a good first line for a novel is that in lesser hands it would work so well as a second line. "Once a guy named Arnie was standing at a street corner when a beautiful girl in a blue '72 'Vette drove up and stopped. It was love at first sight." In any case, novel writers usually start in the middle of the action. Unless you know how to finish a chapter that starts "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," you don't begin a novel with a chapter of exposition and background.

Anthony Trollope begins Doctor Thorne, the book I started two days ago, with three chapters of exposition, although he calls it two chapters when he apologizes for it. So he breaks the rule, miscounts or lies about the severity of the infraction, and then calls attention to his misdeed with the apology . . . and I love it. Trollope knows he's making a joke, and he makes sure the reader is in on it.

Like a Bauhaus architect, Trollope leaves all the vital works of his edifice showing: he talks explicitly about himself, his choices, and the reader's choices. The first sentence announces that "before the reader is introduced to the modest country medical practitioner who is to be the chief personage of the following tale, it will be well that he should be made acquainted with . . . the neighbors among whom our doctor followed his profession." He then proceeds with a chapter about the Greshams and explains that the story will begin with a coming-of-age party held, in honor of young Frank Gresham, in the park of Greshamsbury. Near the end of the chapter, after providing some geography and a lot of back story, Trollope says "we have kept the Greshamsbury tenantry waiting under the oak-trees far too long," but still the story does not begin. In chapter 2, he says with a wink, "A few words must still be said about Miss Mary before we rush into our story." Two chapters later, he reminds the reader again that the story is to begin with the party. I'm now 18% of the way through (according to the Kindle), and the "main" narrative thread still sits on Frank's twenty-first birthday.

The reader's part in the jest is revealed at the beginning of chapter 2: "As Dr Thorne is our hero -- or I should rather say my hero, a privilege of selecting for themselves in this respect being left to all my readers -- and as Miss Mary Thorne is to be our heroine, a point on which no choice whatsoever is left to anyone, it is necessary that they shall be introduced and explained and described in a proper, formal manner." And here's another layer in the joke: even though Trollope at various times refers explicitly to the characters as creations of his own mind, he treats them with all the respect afforded to his flesh-and-blood readers, obeying all the niceties of social intercourse and making all due obeisances to class. At one point he asks the reader's indulgence as he attempts to drop "Lady" from references to Lady Alexandrina simply for the easier flow of the prose. But two pages later he finds that his pen will not allow him to take the liberty. Sly dog, that Trollope: the device is both a piece of self-referential humor and a not-so-subtle nod to the democratic reforms that Lady Alexandrina's family fears.

Of course the comedy works because the first chapters are anything but dull, despite Trollope's protestations. But before I rush into that story, I must rest the pen and enjoy a night's rest.

post scriptum The words of my title, often considered the worst opening line in the history of literature, do not open Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford. Chapter one begins in fact with a poetic epigraph suggesting that dark and stormy nights forebode evil times. To the reader belongs the privilege of deciding whether this information makes the opening of that novel better or worse.

Periodical, Episodical, and Methodical

Every fan -- probably about half the population of New York City, although it seemed like everyone -- every fan, as I say, wanted to know: Is Nell Dead?  The story's followers had been left with a cliffhanger and had to wait two months to learn the outcome.  They discussed the topic with friends and strangers, on the street and at dinner; they read the reviews and prognostications in the newspapers.  You ask: was Nell a character on a nighttime soap?  Was this suspenseful interruption a ratings-boosting trick by television producers that the public just doesn't remember as well as they remember wondering, Who shot J.R.?

No, this happened in the winter of 1841, and Nell was a character in a book.  Throngs of fans went to the piers in New York harbor looking for British ships and calling up to passengers and crew: "Is Nell Dead?"  The scene repeated itself each day until the new copy of a periodical called Master Humphrey's Clock showed up on one of those ships, and the Americans at last found out the answer to their question.

The book was The Old Curiosity Shop, and it was published (as were all of Charles Dickens's novels) serially.  Master Humphrey's Clock presented two of his early novels and a handful of his stories in its monthly numbers.  Later, after his popularity and wealth were secured, Dickens started his own journals: Household Words in the 1850s and All the Year Round in, roughly, the 1860s.  Each issue of these periodicals offered the subscribers a new portion of the current Dickens novel; portions of one or more other novels by, say, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, or Edward Bulwer-Lytton (of "It was a dark and stormy night" fame); various vignettes; and short stories, sometimes even just one part of a short story.

Now, in some of his novellas, including several of the lesser-known Christmas stories I've been reading this month, Dickens let Collins and others write some of the interior chapters.  As we've seen recently on television series with single overarching plots -- X-Files, Buffy, or LOST, for instance -- the story, characters, tone, and theme can remain coherent and consistent even if the creative genius who starts the story lets others write occasional installments, always stepping in again at crucial episodes, especially the last.  For nineteenth-century subscribers, "Dickens's" novellas appeared as seamless as these television series seem to us.  But for any reader since the 1890s, when these novellas were first collected and published in book form, giant gaps appear; the chapters by other writers simply aren't included, not even in online sources of the books such as Project Gutenberg.  My response to the predicament has always been divided: part of me wishes I knew how the story got from point A to point D, and part of me remembers that I'm reading these stories for Dickens's special style -- for everything he could do with or without a plot.

But a great, blessed event has occurred in just the last couple of months.  The University of Buckingham has completed its labor and given birth to Dickens Journals Online.  Every issue of Household Words and All the Year Round has been scanned and posted online.  These lovely, clear reprints are probably available in multiple places, but the most convenient entryway I've found is at http://www.archive.org/.  (Just search there for "Dickens Journals Online.")  Now I can read all the missing parts to these novellas, all the stories by other writers.  If I wanted to, I could log on once a month (both in the sense of "sign in" and in the sense of "put a log on") and read a novel the way it was first read.  Maybe for my third ten-year reading plan!

By the way, Nell died.  (I know, it's really not nice to give away plots.  The next thing you know, I'll be telling you that Rosebud is a sled.)  Twentieth-century critics have denounced the scene of Nell's death as sentimental, and so did I on my first reading of TOCS, in the early 1980s.  But when I reread the book a couple of years ago, the scene struck me as beautiful and completely justified.  First, sentimental looks different at 50 than it does at 25.  Having children and grandchildren probably contributes to that change.  Second, I know more about Dickens's method now and what he was trying to say with his death scenes.  In almost all that he wrote, and especially in those scenes, Dickens tried to inspire each reader to examine his life, to find the points at which he had strayed from the path, and to let go and give over to sanity again.  To Dickens, every person is Scrooge.  Third, after Nell walks with her grandfather through the fires of Hell and then leads him into the safety and rest of the Church, what else was a good writer supposed to do with her?