Openings (2021)

If there were a contest for the best all-time opening lines of literature, either the Old Testament (‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’) or the Gospel according to John (‘In the beginning was the Word’) might well take the prize. Great novels would be just behind. Entire interpretations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina have pondered whether their plots bear out their respective first lines that ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’ and ‘All happy families are happy in the same way but an unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ After these curtain-raisers the novels step back and begin properly.

By contrast, the openings of short stories are already the first act and move swiftly to present subject, event, and motivation, using techniques of speech, viewpoint, description, situation, and timing. Their impact is more pointed on the whole than novelistic openings, as in ‘Angela had only one child, a daughter who abhorred her’ (Joy Williams, ‘Hammer’): like Anna Karenina, this start is also about family relations, but concerns one family and one relationship rather than bourgeois families in the abstract. Yet, as Frank O’Connor notes in The Lonely Voice, every significant literary story has an initial thesis, covert or declared, that goes beyond the development of plot.

(page 17)p. 17That said, attention-grabbing first lines can provide their own pleasure. Memorable openers are one of the noteworthy features readers have come to expect in genre fiction. Horror stories exploited the framing device that creates out of a social situation, such as a gathering at a club or an after-dinner drink, a chance for one person to recount something uncanny to curious listeners. Numerous classics of the 19th century, from the early E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ to the late R. L. Stevenson’s ‘The Body-Snatcher’, as well as Victorian pieces like Vernon Lee’s ‘Dionea’, Conan Doyle’s ‘Lot No. 429’, and M. P. Shiel’s ‘Vaila’, milk this storytelling aspect. ‘I have always maintained, my dear Currier, that if a man wishes to be considered sane, and has any particular regard for his reputation as a truth-teller, he would better keep silent as to the singular experiences that enter his life,’ says the hero of John Kendrick Bang’s ‘Thurlow’s Christmas Story’ (1894), who luckily for us does not keep silent. Revealing the source of his occult wisdom piques our interest in Robert Howard’s ‘The Black Stone’: ‘I read of it first in the strange book of Von Junzt, the German eccentric who lived so curiously and died in such grisly and mysterious fashion. It was my fortune to have access to his Nameless Cults.’

Pulp detective stories also have their equivalent opening pattern, normally catching their investigating dicks on the move: ‘Inspector Béchoux was in a hurry’ (Maurice Leblanc, ‘The Arrest of Arsène Lupin’); ‘Radford, on his way home one evening, had a fancy to call at the Clover Club to partake of a cocktail’ (E. Phillips Oppenheim, ‘The Great Bear’). Inevitably, the literary craft of classic detective fiction improved on the devices automatically used in magazine writing, replacing tawdry with snappy, dramatic with cynical. Celebrated detectives like Raymond Chandler’s Sam Spade and Samuel Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Operative need cases to solve. But they can wait for opportunity to knock: ‘I wasn’t doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling’ (‘Goldfish’).

(page 18)p. 18Authors best known outside genre fiction—that is, fiction that ‘offers readers more or less what they would expect upon the basis of having read similar books before’—sometimes borrow a leaf from the practices of genre fiction to strike the right tones of horror and existential absurdity. ‘I don’t know when I died’ is how Samuel Beckett launches ‘The Calmative’. Few pulp fictions could outdo that for macabre effect. Serious literary fiction can be double-edged about suspense, setting up tension but deflating the whodunit aspect as irrelevant to other aspects of content. D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Fox’ introduces a vagrant male into the rural habitation of two women, and at the beginning strikes a note of inevitability that looks like a classic spoiler: ‘Unfortunately, things did not turn out well.’

Writers like Ray Bradbury (in ‘The April Witch’ for example), Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King, pioneers in horror and sci-fi, create narrators who are much less self-conscious and mannered than the gentlemanly storytellers. Speakers get right to work in sowing unease: ‘Floyd, what’s that over there? Oh shit. The man’s voice speaking these words was vaguely familiar, but the words themselves were just a disconnected snippet of dialogue, the kind of thing you heard when you were channel-surfing with the remote.’ But O’Connor’s rule about a thesis only sometimes looks right. While it suits ‘The Fox’ and stories that move inexorably to a turning point (when will the fox strike?) and then come full circle (see Chapter 5), there are stories that regress from a starting point and then advance no further. Deborah Eisenberg devised an ingenious temporal structure for ‘A Cautionary Tale’. The story begins smack in medias res as the characters prepare to board a train and moves forward only to loop back to the beginning just as they enter the station. It has taken the entire space of the story to come full circle, invisibly. Perhaps the title of the story is intended to warn readers about the story itself as much as its plot: namely, not to expect a story to tie everything up neatly.

Awareness that closure and resolution have been built into the conception of the story from its start brings an expectation of great economy in plotting and characterization, taking the character briskly up to a turning point and possibly up to but not beyond a new awareness based on an experience. Less usually, cycles of interconnected stories can also take up in stages the resolution of a single predicament such as the gradual decay of a relationship or a family history. The first impression of a character matters critically not only in relation to an endpoint as a measure of whether things have worked out, or a lesson been learned, but also because we wonder whether outcomes are determined by personality or by chance or both. In that respect, the short story, no less than the novel, achieves the illusion of reality by showing characters engaged in making choices, exerting their will, and responding to circumstance based on their own philosophy and interpersonal ability. Stories can have only one opening but they can have more than one introduction.

First impressions in reading stories, rather like meeting people, are an individual and subjective business. In literature and life, how encounters work is open to some generalization more than strict analysis according to rules. The genre has given rise to variation among form-busting writers as well as traditional masters. There might even be debate about where beginnings begin and end. With the title, or the first sentence, or the first page? Paragraphing and changes in narrated speech can be used to demarcate an opening from the body of the story. No fixed rules, however, govern the transition, marked by a change of voice or change of time-frame, from incipit to main story.

Lydia Davis is justly admired for her inventiveness with the short story form. If Munro can push plot and characterization toward the novel, Davis sometimes tests the practice of narrative and (page 20)p. 20definition of structures with microscopic length. Beginning, middle, and end are all seemingly telescoped into a single sentence. ‘The Busy Road’, which is twenty words held in a single sentence, captures the reaction of the narrator to traffic. While minimalist, it also suggests a back story since the first-person speaker has become accustomed to the noise; and while details of location and time are omitted entirely, the sentence conveys this unknown person’s sensitivity when they (gender unknown) remark that the cessation of the noise is disturbing. A single sentence noting a pattern and its disruption contains the past, an event in the present, and an anticipation of the future, and the shape of the story looks like an elaboration of the standard definition of a sentence as subject–verb–object. Its course is impossible to anticipate. There are other stories like ‘Almost Over: What’s the Word?’ that contain more signals. Two people—we presume they are people—met in the past, one remembers the event, and now sums up by commenting on estrangement. The relation of the title to that single utterance puts a spin on a story whose beginning is also, it seems, its end. Beginnings such as these contain enticing and playful effects. But the micro-story or flash fiction is not Davis’s primary mode and many of her stories are substantial. Length may not have much bearing on how she achieves aesthetic effects. Her beginnings can be enticing and playful, they can also be true to life by virtue of the situations they create (as in ‘The Fish’ in which a woman contemplates her propensity for making mistakes while preparing to cook a fish); or funnily absurd (as in ‘My Husband and I’: ‘My husband and I are Siamese twins’); or uncanny and unsettling because pronouns do the grammatical work of being subjects of sentences but are not named or described and minimal subjectivity can be mismatched with their actions (‘Her Damage’). In ‘Kafka Cooks Dinner’ the title makes clear who the ‘I’ of the first sentence is, corroborated by the mention of ‘Milena’. But many stories will predicate universal statements of an ‘I’, ‘she’, ‘he’, and ‘we’ who remain unnamed.

(page 21)p. 21Who, then, introduces characters to readers? Sometimes it may be the characters themselves. Often, if the intermediary is invisibly subsumed into the prose and the story not told from the viewpoint of anyone in particular, then narration can be assumed to be in the third person. That narrative perspective is assumed to be transparent, and whether the narrator is omniscient and frank or selective with information, or whether the narrator only has partial knowledge, is a matter over which readers might pause to ask questions like, ‘How much should be taken on trust?’ ‘How objective is this?’ Classic short stories of the 19th century favoured a third-person narrator in order to create the impression of a window onto life. The strategy cultivates the illusion of knowledge, reaching into the interior of characters as well as seeing their appearance. Yet impersonality may not be entirely what it seems, since third-person viewpoint can offer nuanced judgements.

Inflecting neutral language with minute gradations of opinion is a pervasive fictional technique, bridging omniscience and full subjectivity. (The technique has various names, most commonly ‘free indirect speech’, and Chekhov was one of its most skilful users.) Hints of bias do not necessarily imply that the narrator is a half-hidden character whose motivation might be revealed. The blended viewpoint, in which the objective third person dominates, enables the author to presume on some common feeling from the reader. In Dubliners, one of the great collections whose individual stories rise finally in ‘The Dead’ to a novelistic complexity of character, Joyce largely filters the personal through the seemingly universal. ‘There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke’ goes the first line in ‘The Sisters’, the first story in the book. A character’s fate is revealed even before ‘he’ has been described. ‘Hope’ is what the narrator assumes we all feel for a character in extremis. ‘It was the third stroke’ delivers the man’s fate objectively. But it also emphasizes the helplessness of the victim and his watchers. ‘Night after night I had passed the house…’ is (page 22)p. 22how the second sentence begins, and the position, age, and status of this speaker in relation to the events inside the house gradually come together over the course of the story. The narrator’s restrained tone in the description of intimate scenes, sometimes scenes of depravity and squalor, avoids sensationalism and even strikes a note of sympathy.

The third-person narrator remains hard to beat as a default mode. Confidence in the reliability and disinterest of third-person omniscient narrators—Tolstoy and Turgenev are often cited as best practitioners—continues in a fine tradition of latter-day realists, including names such as William Trevor, Yiun Li, Anita Desai, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, whose works often (though not always) allow readers to accept statements about characters as true. Postmodernist writing had a field day undermining omniscience, nowhere better seen than in the stories of Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme, masters of metafiction who love to reveal the narrative scaffolding for the contrivance it is. In recent years, post-postmodernist short story writing in many countries seems to have relaxed back into a less ironic and self-reflective concern with the story as its own subject. But one legacy of the current version of realism may be a move away from plain third-person narration. Lorrie Moore likes to mix up voices by splicing snippets of external viewpoint into the stream of conversation, pushing the narrator onto the same level as characters. Even bodies talk in her stories: ‘The grumblings of their stomachs were intertwined and unassignable. “Was that you or was that me?” she would ask in bed, and Dench would say, “I’m not sure.” ’ (‘Wings’) In fact, Dench, reminiscent of Densher, the hero of Henry James’s Wings of the Dove, puts his finger on something else, something more general about the short story. Being ‘not sure’ is a state of mind that the short story excels in revealing, and the genre is comfortable with leaving readers uncertain about characters as well as depicting uncertainty felt by characters themselves.

(page 23)p. 23Viewpoint can be multifaceted. Consider another type of third-person narrator, one whose knowledge of characters really makes them first-person speakers in disguise. Saul Bellow’s speaker in ‘The Old System’ exhibits a remarkable knowledge of his subject, Dr Braun, starting from the bottom up (‘He dried himself with yesterday’s shirt, an economy’) and ending with: ‘It was a thoughtful day for Dr Braun.’ So close is the narrator to Dr Braun, a psychiatrist, that we might wonder whether in fact Dr Braun and the narrator are actually one and the same. Has Bellow split Dr Braun, a psychiatrist, into the voice of the narrating superego and Dr Braun the object of his attention? That would be an artful twist on the usual role of each vantage point. Full-fledged first-person narrators would seem to promise authentic psychological exploration of character. Who better than the ‘I’ to explain states of mind and actions set out either as an oral monologue or in the form of a story written as a memoir or diary?

In practice, ‘I-narrators’ tend to be larger-than-life personalities who revel in performative display, spilling their guts or playing mind-games with themselves (and the reader) or simply talking aloud. They can also be accomplished dissemblers. Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw begins in that familiar manner of the third-person frame (‘The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless…’), and shifts into the voice of an ‘I-narrator’ whose latent hostility gives the psychological twist to the story. Not all of these figures need to take themselves too seriously, however. Etgar Keret’s stories are barely more than anecdotes with a single plot line and closer to stand-up. His opening lines have that sort of improvisational feel: ‘I talk too much’ (‘Upgrade’), to which the reader might say ‘Who am I to disagree?’; ‘There are conversations that can change a person’s life. I’m sure of it. I mean, I’d like to believe it’ (‘Joseph’), about which the reader might say, ‘Are you sure? Really?’ The illusion of immediate interaction with the speaker is the hook that draws us in. These wise guys are not very distant cousins to the unstoppable (page 24)p. 24monologists, who speak directly to the reader and plumb the depths aloud.

‘I am a sick man…I am a nasty man. An unattractive man am I,’ says the unnamed hero of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, a long short story that is a landmark in ego-narration, a classic work of urban alienation and portrait of the neurotic. Its brilliance as a story lies in the illusion that somehow the way into the irrational self, the pure id that lies at the bottom of personality, is through constant self-consciousness that requires a listener who cannot talk back. Heirs to Dostoevsky’s monologist include Woody Allen’s story ‘Notes from the Overfed’ (‘I am fat. I am disgustingly fat. I am the fattest human I know’), whose narrator’s riff is on the morality and metaphysics of fat—the substance itself, the bourgeois morality of fat, its advantages and disadvantages. The opening salvo of David Foster Wallace’s ‘Good Old Neon’ bypasses Allen to revive the example of the Russian master: ‘My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people.’ Sustaining that impression over the course of the story is a matter of doing the voices, techniques discussed in Chapter 3.

First-person is the natural mode for retrospective stories that explore the past. Stories written this way look to the past for a formative emotional truth. Often the act of recounting conflates past and present as characters relive what they felt at the time. Very much in this retrospective vein of analysis and nostalgia are stories such as ‘Doorways’ by John McGahern and ‘Communist’ by Richard Ford. Each of these retrospective stories begins with a sympathetic musing aloud, spoken perhaps more to the self than to a stranger. ‘There are times when we see the small events we look forward to…’, says McGahern’s narrator, uttering a universal about how we live life forward but understand by looking back. The past may be as distant as a moment ago. A day in the life of a teenager, now remembered for not clarifying his state of confusion, constitutes the action of Ford’s story as narrated by the older hero:

(page 25)p. 25

My mother once had a boyfriend named Glen Baxter. This was in 1961. We—my mother and I—were living in the little house my father had left her up the Sun River, near Victory, Montana, west of Great Falls. My mother was thirty-one at the time. I was sixteen. Glen Baxter was somewhere in the middle, between us, though I cannot be exact about it.

Memory is a mixture of precision (the year, the names, the places, the age), helping to effect closure on an episode, and the impressionistic by delicately hinting at an element of sexual rivalry between the adolescent boy and his mother’s boyfriend complicated by his own need, perhaps hinted at here, for a substitute father figure.

First-person stories are by no means the retreat of Dostoevskyan solipsists. In Ann Beattie’s collection The Burning House, the narrator continually tries to batten down her own identity while being aware of the fluidity she sees in the behaviour of others: ‘Freddy Fox is in the kitchen with me. He has just washed and dried an avocado seed I don’t want, and he is leaning against the wall, rolling a joint. In five minutes, I will not be able to count on him’ (‘The Burning House’). The narrator remains at ease describing the states in which characters find themselves (‘more comfortable’, ‘feeling affectionate’, ‘so lucky’) but the observation that ‘I have known everybody in the house for years, and as time goes by I know them all less and less’ bears out Margaret Atwood’s view of that collection as a bulletin on ‘what’s happening out there on the edge of that shifting and dubious no man’s land known as interpersonal relations’.

Novels can give the impression of omniscience and open-endedness. In the short story, knowledge is understood to be limited by time and perspective. Plots might last long enough to get to the heart of a personality. Information about characters is (page 26)p. 26on a need-to-know basis, meaning just enough of the salient personality traits and physical features, inevitably short of a complete picture, is revealed. Part of the writer’s assumed contract with the reader is that we piece together what we can’t know. This phenomenon is something Eudora Welty recognizes in her essay ‘Looking at Short Stories’ in which, putting some justifiable vagueness into the equation, she speaks of how stories operate according to first impressions rather than fixed logic. Readers are sometimes allowed to know characters better than they know themselves, or to participate in the confusion.

Katherine Mansfield’s stories regularly begin in medias res with people and events in unsettled states—characters in motion, on thresholds, evading routine, or finding that it evades them. Vagueness about location captures the state of muddle out of which her characters never quite manage to talk themselves, despite an amusing loquacity. In ‘The Garden Party’, one of her most famous works, well-laid plans teeter on the brink of disaster—the recognition that ‘after all the weather was ideal’ is no reassurance. In ‘Marriage à la Mode’ (1921), a family is thrown into bohemian tumult by the wife’s love life that keeps a thwarted husband in uncertainty (‘On his way to the station William remembered with a fresh pang of disappointment that he was taking nothing down to the kiddies’), an opening that suggests that this is a story about the inattention that causes people to stray. In ‘Bains Turcs’, a terse opening instruction (‘ “Third storey—to the left, Madame,” said the cashier’) gets a young woman more than she bargained for in a public bathhouse when some odd strangers stripped naked lay bare their feelings. All characterization is necessarily incomplete, but there are cases when the reader’s insights cannot exceed the characters’ own blinkered self-knowledge.

Yet short stories can also endeavour to extract from a whole life an episode that telescopes a cross-section of past, present, and future. Even in his shorter fiction Thomas Mann looks like the (page 27)p. 27consummate 19th-century novelist because he is able to provide ample back-story for a character before resuming in the fictional present. A writer of naturalistic precision, with an ear for the social nuance of the English and Irish middle classes, William Trevor can scale down an entire life to the aftermath of a childhood incident carefully told, or to a late chapter after a lifetime of routine. He is also an elegiac writer and conveys how the repetition of ritual blunts an awareness of time passing. His characters measure the span of their lives through a yearly routine that sets their social clock.

In ‘Afternoon Dancing’, the lives of individuals look fully realized when set within the history of their friendship. Two middle-aged couples, Alice and Lenny, and Poppy and Albert, have returned ‘every summer since the war’ to the Prospect Hotel to dance (note the name of the venue: the story will be about new marital chances). The third-person narrator takes a more objective view by noting the year when each pair married (1938) and the year in which their children marry and, in one case, emigrate to Canada (1969). Much of the descriptive information could have been rendered as dates only. Would anyone miss the names of children we never meet again or the street addresses? Incidental detail and specific years vouchsafe realism. But from the start character portrayal is built on a substructure of sameness and repetition. The words ‘all’ and ‘same’ recur: ‘same schools’, ‘same street’, ‘all married’, ‘all in their mid-fifties’, ‘all run to fat’, and friendship is built on a litany of common practices, class, and even body shape. Routine puts the life of the friendship on a schedule defined by rhythms that absorbs the shocks of economic and social change. A bereavement occurs. The question for the couples is: what challenge does finding a new dance partner on the floor, and possibly in life, represent?

Writers such as William Trevor, Gabriel García Márquez, and Alice Munro create worlds in a short compass. Stories that in paraphrase might seem to have a linear plot acquire depth from (page 28)p. 28their connectedness to anterior and concurrent stories that can invisibly shape the direction a life takes. Munro’s ‘Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage’ takes up the experience of an immigrant woman, Johanna Parry, who is determined to establish her own home. She reveals in a letter to Ken, the man she decides to marry and the former son-in-law of her employer, that she arrived in Canada as a young girl on ‘a Plan’. Relentlessly gruff and not one ‘to charm or entice’, she has no gift for any of the ‘-ships’ used and coined in Munro’s title. A housekeeper and professional companion, she enjoyed the esteem of a Mrs Willets who left her a legacy on her death and goes about her job unassumingly in service to Mr McAuley. The chronological structure of the story is used to underscore Johanna’s impression of life as something that will fall in place if she wills it: the furniture she appropriates implies a home, a home implies a husband, and that requires marriage. She remains impervious to the hatreds, friends, courting, and love that define most marriage plots and still succeeds. But the story itself undermines her belief that she stands alone because other people with all the feelings she lacks such as hatred, friendship, and romance accidentally produce the outcome she desired. A line from Virgil’s Aeneid appears at the end in a piece of Latin schoolwork, and it is the Sibyl of Cumae’s advice not to ask what fate has in store. If this is not a story primarily about ironic reversal it is possibly because the knowledge of what fate has in store for her means nothing to Johanna.

It is obvious why in the case of some modes, such as genre fiction, formulaic structures work best. If the plot entails exploding a bomb, a fuse needs to be lit early, and the same principle applies outside genre fiction to most stories whose effect of suspense and rescue is central (something we shall see in the case of George Saunders’s ‘Victory Lap’, discussed later). While there is no lack of clear formulas for how to open a story, great short stories elude the foursquare shape of a scheme. Katherine Mansfield, always an innovator in the form, dispensed with introductions as obstacles.

(page 29)p. 29Johanna Parry dreams of destinations, well aware how circuitous life can be. That seems part and parcel with the emphasis of Munro’s opening words, which fall first on her as she considers travel along the ‘many branch lines’, followed by her description as a ‘woman with a high, freckled forehead and frizz of reddish hair’. Munro’s gift in creating characters with an autonomous life was not restricted to separate stories. The sequence of related stories about a mother and daughter in The Beggar Maid has a novelistic scope. ‘Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage’ is not the beginning of a sequence; it is a self-contained story with no unfinished business. Would there be any point in elaborating future chapters in Johanna’s life? Her personality is unified to such a degree that one episode suffices to capture what she has always done and will always do—that is, meet the challenges life throws her way until she can make a home. The lasting impression of characters definitively conditioned by their state of being—widowhood in the case of ‘Afternoon Dancing’, migration in Johanna’s—unfolds organically from first impressions.

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