Grove Koger

A couple of weeks ago I discussed the artists who had, over the decades, illustrated H.G. Wells’ 1897-98 novel The War of the Worlds. I like the work’s opening paragraph so much that I wanted to include it, but it didn’t fit it in very well. However, the paragraph (which you can read here, along with the rest of the novel) stuck in my mind, and I realized pretty quickly that there are any number of books with striking opening lines or paragraphs. Today I’m going to share the best ones that come to mind, beginning with D.H. Lawrence.

I don’t have any interest in Lawrence’s wordy novels, but I think he was a first-rate travel writer, and Sea and Sardinia (1921) may be his best book in that genre. In fact, its first line is a small masterpiece, and it could stand as a tribute to travel itself: “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move.” Has anyone ever written a better sentence? (I almost adopted part of it for my 2002 book When the Going Was Good, but, obviously, chose another phrase.) Lawrence continues, a little unnecessarily I think: “And what is more, move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.” Yet his first sentence says it all.

Kingsley Amis is the author of the funniest book in the English language, Lucky Jim (1954). He’s also the co-author of the 1965 novel I’d rate as the second-funniest, The Egyptologists, which he wrote with his friend Robert Conquest. The latter work begins with a sentence as simple as Lawrence’s: “Their lives were built on caution.” I laugh every time I read it. The Egyptologists is about a small band of men who pretend, in the most agonizingly boring manner imaginable, to attend periodic meetings devoted to Egyptology in order to cheat on their wives. Amis has a reputation as a male chauvinist, and I’m told that some women don’t find him all that funny, which is their loss. However, you (and they) may be glad to know that the pseudo-Egyptologists are actually fooling themselves. Well, what’s new? you ask. Or, as the novel itself asks in conclusion, “Well, what next?”

Lawrence Durrell begins his novel Justine (1957), the first volume of his “Alexandria Quartet,” with this dazzling passage: “The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes …” By “planes,” a reference that some readers have found puzzling, the erudite Englishman was referring to the trees known to most North Americans as sycamores. In any case, the passage is a promise of the wide-ranging sensory delights to come.

Ford Madox Ford opens his 1915 novel The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion with a sentence that might have been designed to discourage readers: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” But if you persevere, you’ll realize at some point that Ford’s narrator is strikingly unreliable, and that the novel may be the best analysis of self-deception in the English language. (Which doesn’t mean that it isn’t sad.) Ford actually wanted to use the title The Saddest Story, but, given the fact that World War I had begun only a few months before, his publishers dissuaded him. Instead, Ford suggested, with more than a little irony, The Good Soldier. A panel of distinguished literary figures, including novelist Graham Greene, subscribed to a statement declaring it to be “one of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels produced in English in our [i.e., the twentieth] century.”

American novelist James M. Cain wrote short, dark studies of greed and lust in razor-sharp prose. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936) are his best-known novels, and both begin with starkly memorable sentences. In the case of The Postman, we read, “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” And in Double Indemnity, we read, “I drove out to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewery company bond, and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywoodland. I decided to run over there. That was how I came to this House of Death, that you’ve been reading about in the papers.”

Hollywoodland, of course, was the original name of Hollywood, and the famous hillside sign advertising it was erected in 1923. The last four letters were dropped in 1949. It’s since become an iconic landmark, and has figured in numerous books and films, symbolizing as it does a melancholy mixture of bright hopes and broken dreams.

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