The Secret Life of Stories

By David Mckie

Dead. That was what the Chicago Tribune’s City News service was found to be as the New Year dawned. It had operated as an agency service since 1890, but, as Julian Borger reported from Washington on Monday, the Tribune, which has owned it since 1999, had grown tired of sharing its best stories with its competitors. Many celebrated writers learned their trade there. "It taught me how to tell a story," the writer Kurt Vonnegut, who worked for it in the 1940s, told the Associated Press. "You learned about good reporting and bad reporting," the celebrated investigative journalist Seymour Hersh recalled.

But the kind of rigorous, even brutal, training in which the City News specialized did not work for everyone. It did not work for the great American humorist James Thurber, who found himself subjected to just such a regime when, after a spell as a Tribune correspondent first in Paris and then in Nice, he joined the New York Evening Post. His editors kept sending his copy back demanding snappier intros (the term in the newspaper trade for the opening sentence of a story) until one day something snapped. No doubt knowing his days were numbered, he handed in a fresh version of something the desk had rejected.

"Dead." it began. "That was what the man was when the police found him in an area way last night." He didn’t last long after that: he went to work for the New Yorker, where he was able to write the kind of gentle reflective openings that ease the reader seductively into a piece. We ought to be grateful for that. Had his editors on the Post had their way with him, he might never have gone on to publish The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, or My Life and Hard Times, or such stories, for children to dream through and for adults to read as parables, as The Thirteen Clocks ("we all have flaws," said the cold duke, "and mine is being wicked"), The White Deer and the Wonderful O.

Most readers have a collection of favorite opening sentences from great novels: the fog in Bleak House, the clocks in George Orwell’s 1984 striking 13, Jane Austen’s truth, universally acknowledged, or perhaps Rose Macaulay in the Towers of Trebizond: "’Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from the animal on her return from High Mass." "All you have to do is to write one true sentence, and then go on from there," Ernest Hemingway wrote, and took his own advice when he began The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber with an opening sentence that defies you not to read on. "It was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened."

And yet there are many fine books by great writers that begin quite ineptly. Bleak House has the fog, and A Tale of Two Cities the best of times, but who would not flinch from the start of Barnaby Rudge? Even Mansfield Park falls short of perfection.

The most famous dud introduction, which is so bad that there’s now an annual contest to devise something even worse, comes in a novel by Bulwer-Lytton: "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness." No copy editor would sanction that now. Yet it didn’t do Bulwer-Lytton much harm. His books, most of them nowadays quite unreadable, sold mightily, in the manner of Jeffrey Archer’s today.

But where a sharp introduction really matters - and here James Thurber’s masters at the Evening Post were quite right - is in newspapers, where a stale, flat, unprofitable first sentence more or less guarantees that the rest of the article is not going to be read. In a world where so many thousands of words clamor daily for our attention, this is also a useful guide in choosing what to read and what to discard.

That death-dealing formula: "Am I alone in believing/resenting/being driven into a state of puce-faced apoplexy by ... " is rarely found nowadays except in letters to editors. But one still finds in certain columns reliable warnings of dross to come. "I have a confession to make" is one such tiresome formula. "I don’t know about you, but ..." is another. "Call me a flibbertigibbet/ fantasist/old curmudgeon ..." is a pretty reliable third. Call me an old curmudgeon, but that is where I stop reading.