A poll commissioned by Amazon Books U.K. asked 2,000 Amazon readers to vote for the 'most memorable opening lines from the world of literature,'. Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities won, unsurprisingly, with 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.' Orwell came second with 'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.' from 1984. J.K. Rowling made the Top Five, surely due to her popularity rather than the literary genius of 'Mr and Mrs Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.' from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
But why didn't they ask me? Perhaps I wasn't considered to be an 'Amazon reader'? To make up for that I asked myself and had a rummage through my collection. Here are some of my favourites:
'May it please heaven that the reader, emboldened and having for the time being become as fierce as what he is reading, should, without being lead astray, find his rugged and treacherous way across the desolate swamps of these sombre and poison-filled pages; for, unless he brings to his reading a rigorous logic and a tautness of mind equal at least to his wariness, the deadly emanations of this book will dissolve his soul as water does sugar.' - Maldoror, Lautréamont.
How about that!
'Listen to my last words anywhere.' - Nova Express, William Burroughs.
That's cheating. Nova Express isn't a proper 'novel'!!! Ha-ha.
'PFFFRRRUMMMP.' - Inside Mr Enderby, Anthony Burgess.
You can't top that. No-one ever has.
My favourite opening paragraph has always been this one from Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller:
'I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.'
I mean, that's sensational.
George Orwell was a great admirer of Tropic of Cancer. He wrote about it in his 1940 essay, Inside The Whale, describing Miller as 'the only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.' Orwell must have got hold of an Obelisk Press copy since it wasn't published in the UK until 1963. This, then, being the 60th anniversary of that date, you might expect a media outlet to be discussing it but...no. I can't find one. Why? It's as toxic as hell!
'Misogyny' and 'sexism' being current buzz words, by which I mean everyone is on the look out for both, no-one is going to sing the praises of this filthy book. Should they dare to do so whilst being remotely popular on X they would no doubt be mobbed within seconds, banned themselves (like the book), lose their job etc.
We live in censorious times, whilst professing to be mercifully free of the kind of censorship that plagued countries run by a dictatorship or those that tried to ban risque novels because the Establishment were shocked by them. Miller's brazen amorality would shock young readers today, certainly. To them it would be as unacceptable as it was to bowler-hatted prudes 60 years ago. It is one thing to masquerade as a social justice warrior, a 'radical' activist, but quite another to find any redeeming qualities in a free-thinking novelist who dared to say what the hell he liked.
Henry Miller has never been fashionable. When I featured him in my fanzine, Ego, in the early-90s, it was, in retrospect, an anomaly even then. I mean, the kinds of writers zine-makers featured were the 'hip' ones, such as Burroughs, Kerouac, Bukowski etc. My ex-girlfriend, upon seeing him in the zine, even chastised me for featuring that 'sexist' swine. She, by the way, was probably a lesbian by then. She converted after a three-year affair with me, which is understandable since no man could be good enough afterwards! Ha-ha. That is neither here nor there, except to say that she was quite the French-lover, by which I mean adoring Sartre and Simone and Gide, not a filthy American in Paris like Miller. It was, in the 80s, acceptable for my ex to applaud Sartre, since he was a Marxist.
Orwell often wrote about the left-wingers who excused the Russian leadership for their sins. As with many things, he was prescient regarding matters of blinkered ideological thought and censorship. His appraisal of Miller in the 40s no doubt raised many eyebrows amongst his socialist friends. Such books as Tropic of Cancer (there was nothing like it, though) were, after all, mere 'bourgeois individualist indulgence'! No doubt all novels which lacked the correct political ideology were condemned as criminal when there was a revolution to maintain.
Reading just a few lines of Tropic of Cancer now feels as daring as it must have done in all those years ago. It still has the power to shock. It does so because we live in what feels like an increasingly sanitised age, when anything may be deemed 'incorrect'. It is very easy to offend, even when no offence is intended. Miller did not write to offend intentionally. He wrote freely and to hell with what people thought. That, today, may in itself constitute a 'thoughtcrime' and as in Orwell's 1984, we would do well to consider the implications of punishing freedom of thought and expression.
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