Endings 3

 To round off this mini-anthology of endings (and the month of April), here is a miscellaneous collection with no obvious linking features...

First, an ending I think one of the most beautiful in literature – the final paragraph of Ruskin's autobiographical Praeterita. In it he recalls his last visit to Siena, with his American friend and correspondent Charles Eliot Norton, and he remembers the fireflies...

'Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly gold sky calm behind the gate of Siena's heart, with its still golden words, "Cor magis tibi Sena pandit," and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.'

A wonderfully haunting ending is that of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The narrator, and the party he is with (on the Thames in London), have just heard the last of Marlow's terrible tale...

'Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.' 

Here is the closest Samuel Beckett ever came to a happy ending – the beautiful, pared-to-the-bone closing passage of Ill Seen Ill Said:

'Farewell to farewell. Then in that perfect dark foreknell darling sound pip for end begun. First last moment. Grant only enough remain to devour all. Moment by glutton moment. Sky earth the whole kit and boodle. Not another crumb of carrion left. Lick chops and basta. No. One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness.'

I was going to post the closing passage of The Trial, but really it's just too grim. Instead, here are a couple of endings from left field. First, the resonantly abrupt original ending of Mark's Gospel – 

'And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were affrighted.

And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.

But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.

And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.'

And finally, a diversion into poetry, though it is could be classified as prose poetry – Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, in which the past and the present, the lives of King Offa and of the young Geoffrey Hill, intermingle to extraordinary effect. For some reason, I find the ending quite wonderful: 

'[XXIX]

'Not strangeness, but strange likeness. Obstinate, 
  outclassed forefathers, I too concede. I am your
  staggeringly-gifted child.'

So, murmurous, he withdrew from them. Gran lit the
         gas, his dice whirred in the ludo-cup, he entered
         into the last dream of Offa the King.

[XXX]

And it seemed, while we waited, he began to walk to-
       wards us            he vanished

he left behind coins, for his lodging, and traces of
       red mud.'


It's probably just me...

Endings 2

 Eudora Welty said of the last sentence of Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, 'If I had written that sentence, I'd be happy all my life!' High praise from a writer of her calibre, and well merited: the sentence is indeed beautiful and eloquent, when read in context.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant ends with Ezra finally managing to bring the whole of his dysfunctional family together, after his mother's funeral, for a dinner at his restaurant – even including Beck, the errant father who deserted them all long ago. But then Beck absents himself, and the rest of the family go in search of him to bring him back. Cody, Ezra's troubled and troublemaking brother, is the one who finds him. In the closing paragraph, Cody recalls  a boyhood incident when he accidentally shot his mother with his new bow and arrow, with dire consequences...

'Cody held on to his elbow and led him toward the others. Overhead, gulls drifted  through a sky so clear and blue that it brought back all the outings of his boyhood – the drives, the picnics, the autumn hikes, the wildflower walks in the spring. He remembered the archery trip, and it seemed to him now that he even remembered that arrow sailing in its graceful, fluttering path. He remembered his mother's upright form along the grasses, her hair lit gold, her small hands smoothing her bouquet while the arrow journeyed on. And high above, he seemed to recall, there had been a little brown airplane, almost motionless, droning through the sunshine like a bumblebee.' 

Another American novel from much the same time (forty years ago!) as Dinner at the Homesick is Jayne Anne Phillips's Machine Dreams, which also follows the members of a broken family, but in less straightforward manner, drawing in particular on their dreams (and quoting letters). The emotional heart of the book is the close loving relationship between Danner and her younger brother Billy, who is fascinated by machines, especially aeroplanes, becomes a pilot in the Vietnam war, and is shot down and killed. Here is the closing dream of the book, Danner's. It gets me every time...

'Danner and Billy are walking in the deep dark forest. Billy makes airplane sounds. Danner, oblivious to her brother's play, is stalking the magic horse. There are no cloven tracks, but the dust on the path is disturbed and the horse seems to be circling. Occasionally Danner looks over her shoulder and sees the animal watching them through thick leaves. The mare's eyes are large and certain. Certain of what? Billy pays no attention and seems to have followed his sister here almost accidentally. They walk on, and finally it is so dark that Danner can't see Billy at all. She can only hear him, farther and farther behind her, imitating with a careful and private energy the engine sounds of a plane that is going down. War-movie sounds. Eeee-yoww, ach-ack-ack. So gentle it sounds like a song, and the song goes on softly as the plane falls, year after year, to earth.'

I guess the most famous ending of an American novel is that of The Great Gatsby, which I quoted recently, on the centenary of its publication – 

'Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And then one fine morning – And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

And then, in a very different register, there is the equally famous (?) ending of Huckleberry Finn: 

'Tom's most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and I ain't agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before.'

Follow that.  

Endings

 Recently I've been thinking about, and discussing with an online friend, great endings in literature – those passages that close a book with something that resonates long after, that can stir the heart and, in some cases, start the tears. A prime example is the ending of Lolita – or rather its two endings. There is the shattering paragraph that closes Humbert's narrative, the point at which he finally becomes fully aware of what he has done to Lolita, as he stands on a hillside above a playground and hears the childish sounds rising from it (as Nabokov himself did on one of his American butterfly-hunting trips) – 

'What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapour of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.'

And then, as if that is not enough, there is the closing passage of Humbert's confession and of the novel: 

'I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my spectre shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. [Clare Quilty]. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations.  I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.'

Perhaps the most beautiful of all endings is that of James Joyce's 'The Dead', in which Gabriel Conroy, at the end of an awkward and dispiriting social evening, has discovered his wife convulsed with tears as she remembers an earlier love in her life, a young man long dead...

'Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hordes of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. 
   A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey [his wife's dead love] lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.'

Still with Joyce, the ending of Ulysses, concluding Molly Bloom's great inner monologue, is an astonishing passage (and, like the story of lost love in 'The Dead', owes a great deal to the much maligned Nora Barnacle, without whom Molly Bloom would never have come into being) – 

'the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leap year like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a woman's body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn't answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn't know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governor's house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the fig trees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.'

Phew. After which, let's descend to something completely different – the ending of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Here Yorick has been obliged to share a room with an attractive Piedmontese lady, who has an equally pretty maid. Having negotiated a 'treaty' designed to get them through the night with no impropriety, Yorick find himself restless and unable to sleep, and exclaims 'O my God!' –  

' – You have broke the treaty, Monsieur, said the lady, who had no more slept than myself – I begg'd a thousand pardons – but insisted it was no more than an ejaculation – she maintained it was an entire infraction of the treaty – I maintain'd it was provided for in the clause of the third article. 
   The lady would by no means give up her point, though she weakened her barrier by it; for in the warmth of the dispute, I could hear two or three corking-pins fall out of the curtain to the ground.
   Upon my word of honour, Madame, said I – stretching my arm out of bed by way of asseveration – 
   (– I was going to have added, that I would not have trespass'd against the remotest idea of decorum for the world) – 
   But the fille de chambre hearing there were words between us, and fearing that hostilities would ensue in course, had crept silently out of her closet, and it being totally dark, had stolen so close to our beds, that she had got herself into the narrow passage which separated them, and had advanc'd so far up as to be in a line betwixt her mistress and me – 
   So that when I stretch'd out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre's

                                   END OF THE SECOND VOLUME

  I think I might return to this subject, as I have quite a few more notable endings up my sleeve...

'None of them has a yellow blob at the end'

 Exciting news today from the somewhat rarefied scholarly world of penis-counting – specifically counting penises on the Bayeux Tapestry. For some while it has been generally accepted, thanks to the tireless work of Professor George Garnett, that the total number of penises depicted on the tapestry (yes, I know – it's not a tapestry, it's a narrative embroidery) is 93, five of them human and the other 88 depending from horses. Now another scholar and 'Anglo-Saxon nudity expert', Dr Christopher Monk, claims to have identified a 94th penis – and it's a human one, hanging beneath a running man's tunic. Professor Garnett confidently identified this appendage as the dangling scabbard of a sword or dagger, but Dr Monk is equally certain it is a penis: 'The detail,' he declares, 'is surprisingly anatomically fulsome' [fulsome? Really?]. For Dr Monk, the relevant stitches clearly 'depict all the necessary parts  – a penis, with distinct glans and two testicles.' For Professor Garnett, however, that is no glans but a yellow blob intended to depict brass: 'If you look at what are incontrovertibly penises in the tapestry, none of them has a yellow blob at the end.' You can read the whole sordid story here, and see the contested image, which I must say looks like no penis I ever saw in art or nature.  

Thomas Day, Victim of Theory

 One of the Lichfield luminaries featured in Anna Seward's wildly eccentric biography of Erasmus Darwin (which I wrote about here) is Thomas Day, whose History of Sandford and Merton, one of the first novels written specifically for children, was a big bestseller at the time, and later blighted many a Victorian childhood. Day had strong views on the raising of children – views which were, alas, coloured by his worship of Rousseau, who had cheerfully abandoned all five of his own children to a foundling hospital, leaving him free to tell the rest of the world how to bring up their offspring. Thomas Day, for one, was hugely impressed by Rousseau's writings, and joined another worshipper, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (father of Maria), in bringing up Edgeworth's son Dick in the manner prescribed in Rousseau's Emile.
  Judging this project a success, Day then went on to make his own Rousseauvian experiment: to train up a girl to be his wife. At this point the story gets decidedly creepy. Day applied to the Foundling Hospital in London to take two suitable girls to be, he said, servants in the Edgeworth household – a fact unknown to Edgeworth until several months later. The girls were aged 12 and 11, and Day immediately changed their names to Sabrina and Lucretia. After a short stay in London, Day took both girls to France – a move that put him out of the reach of English law and enabled him to isolate the girls, refusing to hire English-speaking staff or to teach them French. He soon decided that Lucretia, then aged 12, lacked wifely potential, so returned to England and placed her with a milliner's family in London – a lucky escape for her. Sabrina he took with him to Lichfield, where he leased Stowe House (a fine Georgian building which still stands overlooking Stowe Pool). Keeping Sabrina in ignorance of his plans for her, he set about giving her a thorough Rousseauvian training, which among other things involved conditioning her not to fear pain or physical privations. To this end, he would drip hot candle wax onto her arms, make her wade into cold water up to her neck, and shoot at her skirts with a pistol (which might or might not have been loaded; accounts differ). All of which sounds more like a case study in psychopathy than an experiment in philosophy. Fortunately, a year after bringing her to Lichfield, Day abandoned this Rousseauvian project and packed Sabrina off to a boarding school. 
  Day went on to write a heartfelt and influential anti-slavery poem, 'The Dying Negro', as well as his History of Sandford and Merton and the less successful History of Little Jack. He met his end putting another theory of his to the test – that the breaking-in of horses was a harsh and unnecessary practice. Thrown by an unbroken colt at Barehill, Berkshire, in September, 1789, he died almost instantly, perhaps having just enough time to wonder if he might have got that one wrong. 

'Malt does more...'

 If – which heaven forbid – there were to be only one (alcoholic) drink available to you for the rest of your life, which would you choose? Which would be the one that would get you through, even in the absence of all alternative bevvies? For myself, it would have to be Scotch whisky. Not only is it a drink that exists in a wide range of incarnations, of various ages, characteristics and qualities, it is also, I find, the most reliable pick-me-up or calm-me-down, or whatever is required to reconcile a person to existence (as Housman put it, 'Malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man'). To put it simply, as I often do as I raise a glass to my lips, I just love whisky (and, happily, it gives every appearance of loving me).
Recently I was pleased to discover that Igor Stravinsky, no less, felt just the same about whisky. 'My God,' he once declared, 'so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whisky.' And he had medical backing for his predilection: a doctor in Los Angeles once advised him, 'Drink plenty Scotch, it's the best thing. ' (Those were the days, when doctors took a sane and relaxed line on such matters.) Stravinsky's favoured tipple was Ballantine's 30-year-old, a blend that would now set you back around £300 a bottle. He was seldom without a flask of the stuff, and it surely fed his creative flame, as well as his general health and well-being (he lived to 88). Here's to you, Stra-whisky!

Happy Easter

A happy Easter to all who browse here!
And above is my favourite Resurrection painting again – Rembrandt's Christ and Mary Magdalen at the Tomb, which can be seen in the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace. It's surely the homeliest treatment of the subject, with the risen Christ wearing a broad-brimmed gardener's hat. 
'Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."
Jesus said to her, "Mary."
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, "Rabboni!" ( which means "Teacher").'

I often find myself thinking, 'What would Jesus make of it all?' All the 'vast musical moth-eaten brocade' as Larkin called it: the whole establishment of the Church in its various forms, the huge problematic mass of dogma, creed, canon and liturgy, the grand buildings, the accumulated wealth, the terrible history of religious conflict – all of it in His name. Jesus surely would be astounded and bemused by the very existence of Christianity, which was after all not his creation but largely that of the convert Paul.  
And what of Easter? What of Easter eggs? Well, to that one, Kay Ryan (who I suspect might now be our best living poet) has an answer in her wonderful poem, 'The Palm at the End of the Mind' –

After fulfilling everything
one two three he came back again
free, no more prophecy requiring
that he enter the city just this way,
no more set-up treacheries.
It was the day after Easter. He adored
the eggshell litter and the cellophane
caught in the grass. Each door he passed
swung with its own business, all the
witnesses along his route of pain
again distracted by fear of loss
or hope of gain. It was wonderful
to be a man, bewildered by
so many flowers, the rush
and ebb of hours, his own
ambiguous gestures – his
whole heart exposed, then
taking cover.

Ryan's poem takes its title from the first line of Wallace Stevens's great, late poem – one of his last – 'Of Mere Being' – 

The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises

In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason

That makes us happy or unhappy.

The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.

The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.