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Yesterday
my memory was drawn back to the lovely Scottish city of Edinburgh, whose acquaintance
I first made in the winter of 1952-3, drawn back through the agency of a tiny
little book, seven inches by four and a half, with a faded green leather cover,
a book I bought in one of the marvellous second-hand Edinburgh bookshops of that era, a book that, along with its two
brothers bought at the same time, has
accompanied me through life every inch of my way as I have circumnavigated the
globe several times since that date.
This book came to my attention after
lying for years unregarded in my shelves, because, having just completed the
reading for the second time of Charles
Dickens’s Bleak House (about which my
select little group of readers may feel they have already heard enough), I
began to wonder if any other Dickens novels, of which I once had a goodly
selection, had survived my intensive
cleaning out of the several thousand books I jettisoned before making the move
from Ottawa back to Montreal six years ago.
Thinking about this after going to
bed early last night, I arose, stepped over the recumbent form of my eldest son
Ben, visiting me from Texas, who had relapsed into a well-earned sleep on the
mattress I keep tucked under my desk against the occasional visits of my three
absent children. The fourth, Thom, a screenwriter, lives in Montreal, and
serves the indispensible additional function of being my right-hand man and
staff, watching over me, usually from a respectful distance, making sure that I
neither feel unduly crowded, nor that I might suddenly embark on some madcap
ninety-year-old adventure that might end with me either in hospital or in the
morgue.
I say Ben’s sleep was well-earned,
because on his way to my apartment he had stopped off in Toronto, where, as a
member of the rock and roll band Big
Sugar, he had taken part only the night before in a memorable concert
before 1,500 enthusiastic fans which was designed as a memorial for the band’s recently
deceased bass player, Garry Lowe, a man who was well-known and well-loved
across the rock and roll world, to which he brought his own individual style as
a reggae-inspired, Rastafarian Jamaican.
Gordie Johnson, leader of the band and his wife Alex, had arranged for more
than 40 rock practitioners who had known Lowe across the years, to converge at
the Danforth Music Hall to play a concert in his memory. That the concert was a
huge success was attested to yesterday by an outbreak on Facebook of enthsuaistic encomia by fans and musicians alike, and
my son, who is now playing the bass role vacated by Garry, arrived at my place
in a state of exalted exhaustion that I could well understand. For my son, a
highlight of the concert had been that two rap groups famous across the north
of the continent, Maestro Fresh West
and Dream Warriors, had nervously
performed, accompanied not by canned music, but for the first time with a real
live band, a transition they achieved with spectacular success.
Anyway, to get back to the little
book, I stepped over Ben’s sleeping form into a cubbyhole at the back of my
apartment into which for six years I have been cramming so much stuff that it
reminds me of Robert Benchley’s apartment in the 1930s, about which he wrote that
it had became so crammed with chipped cornices off the old Post Office, abandoned
window frames, old shoes, disused rocking horses, and so on, that eventually
the apartment was “searched by a team from the Missing Persons Bureau, but all
they found were three Chinese labourers.”
Well, my cubbyhole may be deficient
in Chinese labourers, but I did find three precious little books, Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickelby,
and A Tale of Two Cities, being
three of seventeen volumes called The
Oxford India Paper Dickens, Complete
Edition with Illustrations by Cruickshank, Phiz, etc, and published at an undisclosed
date by Chapman and Hall, and Henry Froude, of London, and the Oxford
University Press, American branch, of New York. The two major novels run to 959
and 961 pages respectively, and are so tightly packed on such thin sheets that
I could hold all three books comfortably in my hand, but with the cocomitant
disadvantage, as I soon discovered, that
I find it extremely difficult and time-consuming to separate the closely-packed
super-thin pages.
This morning I awoke at around 2 am,
got up, washed my face and bleary eyes with hot water, and began to try to read
Martin Chuzzlewit, since I had
remembered with pleasure from my first reading his trip to the United States,
and Dickens’s ascerbic comments on the American civilization.
Unfortunately, the re-discovery of
this volume has coincided with a deterioration in my eyesight, temporary I hope;
only a couple of days earlier for the first time I found it impossible to read
some of the smallest print in the newly-reduced Guardian Weekly magazine, and when I started to read Chapter I, I
had some difficulty in actually seeing the words, they being afflicted with a
blurring that caused me to repeatedly stop and try to concentrate on bringing the
words into focus.
The first sentence was typical
Dickens: “As no lady or gentleman with any claims to polite breeding, can
possibly sympathize with the Chuzzlewit family without being first assured of the
extreme antiquity of the race, it is a great satisfaction to know that it
undoubtedly descended in a direct line from Adam and Eve; and was, in the very
earliest time, closely connected with the agricultural interest.”
This compares unfavorably with the
famous opening of A Tale of Two Cities:
“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness; it was the season of Light; it was the season of
Darkness; it was the spring of hope; it was the winter of despair; we had
everything before us; we had nothing before us….” An opening so general as to
advise us that we might expect to be led almost anywhere as the book runs its
course through the French revolution.
Compare this with the opening of
Nicholas Nickleby: “ There once lived, in a sequestered part of the county of
Devonshire, one, Mr. Godfrey Nickleby, a worthy gentleman, who, taking it into
his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young
enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an
old flame out of mere attachment, who, in her turn, had taken him for the same
reason. Thus, two people who cannot afford to play cards for money, sometimes
sit down to a quiet game for love.”
Of the three openings, I must say I
prefer the last, the tale of two cities coming in second and Martin Chuzzlewit
a distant third, although, in favour of that particular book, it has to be said
that as early as Chapter II, Seth Pecksniff makes his appearance, an anti-hero
of gigantic proportions, father of Charity and Mercy, two odious daughters, and
himself one of the most monstrous hypocrites ever portrayed in fiction.
Just in passing, perhaps, I may be
allowed to remark than none of these Dickensian openings can hold a candle to
Jane Austen’s opening of Pride and Prejudice:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a
good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
This is an opening gambit in praise
of which tens of thousands of words have been written, since it establishes the
primacy of marriage as a quintessential value of Regency England, as well as
the primacy of women, and the fact of romance as the subject of the novel that
follows, all that in one short sentence.
Miss Austen was a wow at opening paragraphs,
as evidenced in her lesser-known novel Emma:
“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and
happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and
had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or
vex her.”
What a description of a girl just ready
and waiting to be vexed by some damned plausible admirer!
Or in her novel Mansfield Park : “About thirty years ago Miss Maria Ward, of
Huntingdon with nearly seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate
Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby
raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences
of an handsome house and large income.”
Yes, there’s no doubt about it, Miss
Austen wins the title of best novel-opener in British or any other fiction.
Just for a spot of variety, how’s this from Mr. Damon Runyon, a prose-spinner
of a different kind, from an entirely different world: “Of all the scores made
by dolls on Broadway the past twenty-five years, there is no doubt but what the
very largest score is made by a doll who is called Silk, when she knocks off a
banker by the name of Israel Ib, for the size of Silk’s score is three million one
hundred bobs and a few odd cents. It is admitted by one and all who know about
these matters that the record up to this time is held by a doll by the name of
Ira Teak, who knocks off a Russian duke back in 1911 when Russian dukes are
considered very useful by dolls, although of course in these days Russian dukes are about as useful as
dandruff.”
Mr. Runyon, who became the most
famous and admired newspaperman of his generation, learned his entire writing
craft in the newsroom. Since I spent quarter of a century myself in newsrooms
of various sizes and shapes, could there maybe, possibly, just possibly, be a
future for me in the writing business if I apply myself to it in what little
spare time remains to me?
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