Description’s Noiseless, Unseen Tread

I was a voracious reader growing up. I often say that my best memories are of my mother, my sister and I going to the library, scanning the shelves, searching for new books, and later carrying a huge, tottering pile full of promise to the car. As a young girl I devoured The Count of Monte Cristo, Three Men in a Boat, The Hobbit, My Family and Other Relatives, All Creatures Great and Small, and The Red and The Black. My mother used to tell me to read the first 100 pages before deciding if I’m interested in a book, and not surprisingly, I finished reading almost every novel I began.

Recently, I decided I wanted to read Three Men in a Boat again. The novel is filled with poetic, rambling nature descriptions such as this one: “From the dim woods on either bank, Night’s ghostly army, the grey shadows, creep out with noiseless tread to chase away the lingering rearguard of the light, and pass, with noiseless, unseen feet, above the waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes; and Night, upon her sombre throne, folds her black wings above the darkening world, and, from her phantom palace, lit by the pale stars, reigns in silence.” (Chapter 2).

Shockingly, I find that now, at age 40, I have less patience for nature descriptions than I did at age 14. All I want is action. I pick through exposition to find Harris attacked by the swan or losing his way in the maze, Jerome burying the cheeses on the beach or taking a young lady on a boat ride, or even George trying out the banjo. Anything seems to me more interesting than wallowing in a description of night. And yet I love Jerome K. Jerome’s descriptions. I love his lyrical prose, his light, ironic touch, how he seems to make fun of himself and his comrades while giving an articulate description of the English countryside.

In Gary Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars, Holling’s teacher Mrs. Baker assigns him Hamlet. Holling says the tragedy is pretty good, if you skip all the long speeches. His friend Meryl Lee objects:

“You can't just skip the boring parts."
"Of course I can skip the boring parts."
"How do you know they're boring if you don't read them?"
"I can tell."
"Then you can't say you've read the whole play."
"I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark."
"Who knows?" she said. "Maybe you can't.”

These days, novels brim with action. Descriptions take second place -- a distant, less conspicuous second place. Writers are told again and again: “Show, don’t tell!” And yet the description above adds a lot of meaning to Jerome’s romantic, indolent character. I can tell how happy he is just to lie around and look around him, and when I stop rushing ahead to the next action scene I have to admit: I am perfectly content to sit there with him, watching Night as she folds her black wings. Living the happy, description-full life.

The Fairies Save Me from the First Line

Interspersed in my novel are sentences which have managed to hang on through five revisions and come out unscathed. There is one chapter that I love just the way I first wrote it: the dragons attacking, the aquatic monster raising curtains of water, and a young girl standing atop the monster’s watery shoulder, shouting suggestions in her ear. No part of the novel changed as much as my first line. After all, first lines are the first thing the reader sees in the book and must tantalize him or her into wanting to read more. Writers often attach great importance to their first words. In one sentence they try to hook the reader, give a hint to what comes next, present the world, the character, the action, and create a sense of mystery and suspense.

My favorite beginning of a novel comes from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead: “Howard Roark laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water.” Can you see him standing there? I can. I read those words and knew this story would be extraordinary, that Roark would be different from anyone else I’ve ever known. It helped, perhaps, that I read the book very young. I’m not sure what I would have thought of Roark’s rigid perspective of life as an adult. This beginning, however, influenced me, and I have always striven for a similar effect in my writing, an unbending and clear introduction of what my story is about.

Of course, I have loved novels with less dramatic beginnings. The first two sentences of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat always leave me feeling confused: “There were four of us -- George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were -- bad from a medical point of view, I mean, of course.” Somehow, these two bewildering sentences appeared endearing and characteristic after I got to know the narrator, but when I began the novel, I could not figure out why Jerome names six men when he says they were four but the book is titled three, or why he uses so many commas.

A great first line can be a treat, like the first bite of a truly delectable dish. “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” writes Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice what is universally acknowledged as one of the very best first lines ever written, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” My first line, not quite there, might still change and change again. I wouldn't be so sure that it might not end up simply being: “Once upon a time in a faraway land there lived a princess who was not going to go on a birthday adventure.”

What is your favorite first line in a novel?

How I Missed Having Tea With Jerome K. Jerome

I read a quote by Jerome K. Jerome this morning which said: “It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one.” The quote appeared in Kristin Neff’s Self Compassion, in a section on interbeing, the idea that we are all interconnected, one with each other and the world

Today, after I read his compassion quote, I googled Jerome, wondering if he was still alive. Turns out he had died back in 1927, long before I was born. So I guess I missed my chance for having tea with him. I’m a little sad about that. I think he would have made an amazingly funny tea-mate.

My mother gave me Jerome K. Jerome’s wonderful Three Men in A Boat (to Say Nothing of the Dog) when I was still in elementary school. I loved it! I loved how immensely innocent Jerome pretends to be when he tells about his long-term liver disease which he diagnosed himself by his also long-term laziness (one knock on the head, he says, is a better cure for it than many pills). I loved his stories about Harris and George, how they got stuck in the maze (I will never forget them going in circles right by  the half-eaten roll again and again), how Harris was attacked by the swans, how all three were almost run over by a boat in the river, and how even an undertaker with a dead body did not want to sit in the same train car Jerome rode with a package of specially stinky cheeses.

One of my fondest memories is going with my mother to the library. My mother had somehow arranged so that we were able to borrow twice as many books as were generally allowed. We would move from shelf to shelf, looking at the books, and my mother would suggest ones she thought I might enjoy. A huge pile went home with us, and during the week I would quickly devour one book after another. Soon enough, I had run out of books in the children’s library, and my mother and I began the same ritual in the adult section. I read Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, The Red and the Black, The Winds of War, King Rat, and many, many others.

Growing up, these books were more real to me than many people. When it was difficult for me to feel interconnectedness with the world, whenever I felt too weird, I could identify with a character in a book and feel a little less sad. As I followed Jerome’s blundering passage up and down the Thames, laughing at himself, his friends, and anyone who dared brave the river with them, the world became a lighter, more humorous place also for me, and for that, Jerome K. Jerome, I am grateful.