In a recent Guardian Review piece on literature and political events, Ferdinant Mount refers to the paucity of writing about the Italian front during WW1, noting positively Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms as an exception. ”I thought, in a superior way,” he says, “that I had grown out of Hemingway, but when I re-read the book recently I was recaptured from the first page.”
And what a first page!
It begins …
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterwards the road was bare and white except for the leaves.
And the chapter ends, just one page later with …
At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.
It’s one of my favourite pieces of writing, a model of control and effect and meaning; one of the finest pieces of short, sustained prose I know. Straightforward, declarative sentences, but with such subtle variation. Sentences much of whose craft is in the disguise of the craft itself. Look, for instance, at the final sentence of that first paragraph, the way it’s movement echoes/implies the movement of the troops; and the simple, unstrained metaphor linking the soldiers with the falling leaves. And then, in the last sentence of all, the word ‘only’. Brilliant!
2 responses so far ↓
Bill Blackwell // July 29, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Your recommendation led me to Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, and even if Charlie Resnick were to forsake Monk, Billie, and Ben Webster for Mariah Carey, I’d be grateful to you and Mellotone70up. Would you consider writing a guide to “crime” fiction? Taking the Prose approach that “The trick to writing is reading,” you could present examples of the best and the un(der)appreciated.
harvey70plus // July 29, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Give me four or five years of otherwise unimpeded activity and I might give it a try. There’s a shortened version,of course, in the shape of a list, elsewhere on the blog.