Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

What appeared in 1950 to a European writer as a weird and barbaric American practice has become a common feature of international literary life. Yet do not misunderstand me; in principle I have no objection to first lines that generate instant excitement. Effective openings are first and foremost inspired openings.

Inspiration is most enchanting and free when the writer is on the threshold of a new creation. Victor Hugo — a compulsive creator — jotted down dozens of dazzling openings for novels he never completed, nor seriously contemplated writing; he was simply indulging in the pure magic of beginnings.

Inspired openings in literature have much in common with the overtures of great operas. A literary equivalent of the feverish expectation the orchestra can foster before the curtain rises is in the first paragraph of Moby-Dick , which opens with a breathtaking allegro con brio :

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever there is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet… then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Melville brusquely grabs you by the lapels and his grip never relaxes until, some 600 turbulent, bewildering pages later, he finally lets go of you. At that point, at long last, as the drama is finally over, there is a sudden change of pace: the narrator’s voice turns into largo maestoso , then softly fades away. Ishmael’s ship is lost with all hands, Ishmael alone survives, the coffin of his mate Queequeg becomes his lifebuoy, until another ship, searching for some of her own missing crew, rescues him:

The great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago… Buoyed up by the coffin for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by, as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage seahawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

Coffins had been evoked on the first page, and a coffin bobs on the surface on the last: the ending is linked to the beginning with an invisible thread that crosses the oceanic immensity of the narrative. But it is too early to raise the issue of endings — I shall return to it.

* * *

The trumpet-blast overture is a feature of political essays. Jean-Jacques Rousseau made brilliant use of it in his Contrat Social :

Man was born free; yet he is everywhere in chains.

Nearly a century later, Karl Marx injected similar impetus into the first words of the Communist Manifesto :

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.

Its 150th anniversary was celebrated last year. The criminal bankruptcy of all the states that used to call themselves “communist” has given a bad name to Marxism, which is perhaps unfair; after all, where has it ever really been tried? I am not competent to assess whether Marxism might still have a political future; one thing, however, is certain: whatever is well written is bound to last. On literary grounds alone, the future of Marx’s Manifesto is secure.

Rousseau’s philosophical treatise heralded the French Revolution, and in the private realm his impact was as momentous: his Confessions opened the floodgates for the effusions of Romanticism.

From the start, Rousseau’s autobiography presents a heady cocktail of naïve simplicity and stunning megalomania:

I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent and which, once complete, will have no imitator. I propose to display before my fellow-mortals a man in the full truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.

Half a century later, however, Stendhal introduced a cool distrust of all cant in exploring the self. With its swift and casual elegance, the opening of his Mémoires d’un touriste offers the best antidote to Rousseau’s egomania:

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.