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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for December 6, 2005

OGIC: Fortune cookie

December 6, 2005 by Terry Teachout

“I have said about that night that it was a night like all the rest, a night beginning so usually I wasn’t even looking when it happened. But going back over it now I can see in how many ways this was not in the slightest true. For one important exception, a heavy fog had folded us up into its cold grey blanket. For three days we’d groped and gasped our way through a London from which streets, pavements, cars, even buildings and people had been quietly erased. A London no longer a city but a great cold, glowing field where the refraction of the street lamps, unable to pierce the fog’s opaqueness, none the less lit up the vast loneliness with an eerie yellow glow.”


Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me

OGIC: That’s a wrap

December 6, 2005 by Terry Teachout

Arts & Letters Daily says this lovely, generous essay about the last lines of novels is by Philip Hensher, and I’m glad they say so, because the page itself gives no indication of authorship. I call the piece “generous” in the sense, simply, of “long,” because you know this same piece assigned by the NYTBR or most other American papers would never be permitted to run more than half this version’s nearly 2,000 words and would, accordingly, be much impoverished.


Hensher has a great and true premise: as much as we literary types love to recite and dwell on and argue about great first lines, the way a novel ends is a more interesting and revealing matter. There’s far more at stake. Especially after modernism, it’s hard to see the question of how to end as anything other than a great problem for novelists. How they tend to solve it may tell us something about the philosophical temperament of their time and place. Writes Hensher:

But there are two questions at stake here, in what Frank Kermode called “the sense of an ending.” One is how far a novelist believes in the end of a story, either through perfect happiness or complete catastrophe. The other is just the sense of a cadence; the sort of thing that sounds final, even if the novel’s concerns are provisional, incomplete. A novel with an unimpeachably happy ending may finish on an incomplete cadence, like Bleak House‘s “even supposing -“. Conversely, a novel where all the questions remain unanswered at the end can, more rarely, have a resoundingly firm cadence, just like [Henry] Green’s Loving.

(The Green novel ends, ironically, “Over in England they were married and lived happily ever after.”)


I don’t have a whole lot to add to what Hensher writes. He covers the topic admirably and, whew, comes up with a wholly satisfying last graf. Read the whole thing. But his piece did send me scurrying to various bookcases to see precisely how some beloved books left matters. And yet the problem with endings, one that doesn’t vex beginnings, is that in many cases you can’t share them without perhaps compromising a new reader’s experience of the book. The final line of The Turn of the Screw, for instance, is remarkable for its ambiguity and yet all too revealing. Here’s one that gives nothing away, is pretty bracing, and, I skirts all of the categories Hensher delineates:

Poor all of us, when you come to think of it.

It’s from Graham Greene, The Third Man, and it’s a long sight down a one-way road from “God bless us, every one!”

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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