Two things ended for me today: my annual week at Writers in Paradise at Eckerd College and “The Girl in the Raincoat.” And I’m a little wistful about both, although there’s no way I could sustain the pace of either for much longer.
As it happens, Sterling Watson, one of the directors of the writers conference at Eckerd (his former student, Dennis Lehane, is the other), gave a talk on endings during the week, a provocative one. He argued for feeling as a standard and reviewed some of the best, and best-known, endings. The Dead, The Great Gatsby, and who would argue with those?
It got me to thinking about some endings I love. So here’s a list, and feel free to add to it, but — under the rules of The Memory Project — you can’t look them up first. Try to get them as close as possible, then look them up and see how closely you rendered them.
“And it was still hot.” (Where the Wild Things Are)
[Nailed it.]
“Let’s get stinko.” (Mildred Pierce)
["Yes -- let's get stinko."]
“That’s nice, but I knew something better, a place where dreams came true.”
(Emma Who Saved My Life.)
[". . . that's nice, that's real nice, but I knew a place where the lights were brighter, and the air was filled with dreams."]
“They sleep.” (Homicide)
["They sleep until dark."]
“Now perhaps ve begin to see?” (Portnoy’s Complaint)
["Now ve may perhaps to begin. Yes?"]
“It is your face, it is always for you.” (Endless Love.)
['I see your face, I see you, you; I see you in every seat."]
“Good grief — it’s Daddy!” (Candy.)
[Nailed it.]
My hunch is that only those of us who have made a point of memorizing endings will get many right, but I don’t mind being proved wrong on this point.
My other hunch is that endings need context in order to be great. But so do first lines.
I’m thinking of aurochs and angels, blah blah durable pigments, something about art. And this is the only immortality we may share, Lolita.”
[Total whiff.]
“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.”
I can’t come up with a single memorized ending using TMP rules! Wow, my brain is in a sad state. What I can remember is the beginning of the end of things. For instance:
“Reader, I married him.” from “Jane Eyre” at the beginning of the final chapter.
“Our revels now are ended.” — the beginning of Prospero’s last speech in “The Tempest”.
“…May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” — Horatio speaking to his best friend’s body at the end of “Hamlet”, but not the very end. There’s Fortinbras still to come with that boring informaiton.
Now what does this say about me? Short attention span? Or just that the more emotional parts of the ending stay with me more than the actual ending.
I admire those of you who can do this!
Marjorie, I suspect most people would have trouble doing this unless they a) have freakishly good memories b) teach/re-read certain books over and over c) memorize things for the heck of it.
Also, still in teacher mode — I can’t help noticing that the actual endings are always better than the ones that appear in my memory.
Oh hell, Marjorie, I can’t either. it’s like those folks who can name 3 books or 5 CDs or their favorite X or Y.
The one that came to mind surprised me. It’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and came up with “i said goodnight to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”
Let’s see how I did – can’t find my copy so we had to google, and i found the true line:
“I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”"
the original being far better. I got the cadence though.
I’m hugely annoyed that i can’t find my copy of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD because the list line is simple, poignant and it’s my favorite novel. It’s something like “and Aticus would be there in the morning, when Jem woke up.”
Here is the last line from the film that Scout speaks (as the narrator/voice over)
“I was to think of these days many times. Of Jem and Dill and Boo Radley, and Tom Robinson – and Atticus. He would be in Jem’s room all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”
The film was fantastic at using the book verbatim but I don’t know if it’s exact.
Grapes of Wrath:
“She (Roseasharron)looked up across the barn and her lips came together in a mysterious smile”
Absalom, Absalom
“I don’t hate it! I don’t! I don’t”
Atonement
“If I could summon them again, Robbie and Cecelia, laughing at “The Trials of Arabella.”
But now I will sleep.
To Kill a Mockingbird: “He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”
I never would have remembered that. But I had Brighton Rock pretty close: “She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.”
“I’m pregnant” was the nailed ending of Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters.
It is so strange that you write about endings today, as my 88 year old father passed away early this morning.
I think VANITY FAIR opens with the weather. I’ll be right back with confirmation (or not)!
Yep! (If you don’t count the prologue “Before the Curtain.”) “While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour.” It’s that last phrase that makes it… and really there’s only a dab about the weather. But I thought of a huge example that’s one of my favorite beginnings… BLEAK HOUSE. Aren’t there, like, a couple of pages about fog right off the bat? And aren’t we asked to imagine a dinosaur coming through the fog? But I love Elmore Leonard and would never contradict him.
Here’s that pesky memory thing. The first paragraph of BLEAK HOUSE is about mud, and the second is about fog. But the second or third sentence (fragment) in the book is “Implacable November weather.” In fact, there are so many sentence fragments in those first couple of pages that it really reads like a screenplay. Okay, sorry to take things so far off track. Somebody come along and get us back in the groove.
Well, despite only just finishing To the Power of Three a day ago, I couldn’t recite the last sentence of the book if my life depended on it. Nonetheless, I recall that Kat’s dad was looking out the back window at three little girls walking in the overly tall grass (which, come to think of it, he blamed on his ex-wife’s carelessness) and then they disappeared – almost as if they had never existed, at all.
The imagery was striking, but the last sentence? Gone! Gone with the wind!
Brian,
I think you might have nailed it. Yesterday, I was straightening up some things and I picked up my fancy-schmancy copy of “Three.” (My publisher sends me specially bound, gilt-edged copies of my book for Christmas, which makes me swoon, as my father received the same special edition books when he wrote political biographies.) And I read the ending. I was feeling a little sensitive about it because I was thinking about Tom Perrotta’s endings, which hang in the air almost like . . . well, I’m tired and I’ll fall short of getting it right. Let’s just say I like the endings of Perrotta’s last two books, which happen to be the two I remember just now. They managed the trick of ending the book, while implying the entire world that will continue after the book, if that makes sense.
At any rate, I worried that I — to use a phrase I like to invoke in writing class — kind of frosted the burrito on that one, made it a little too on point. So it’s lovely to hear that you liked it.
I think I struggle with endings because journalism, where we were often “bit from the bottom” — and it’s almost as painful as it sounds — taught one not to become too enamored of an ending. It’s still hard for me to believe that I’ll get to have the last word, even in my own book.
(And, yes, you’re right about Dale’s irritation with his ex-wife’s carelessness. For one teeny, tiny moment, he feels the pleasant surge of righteous irritation, then remembers that the events of the book have taken him to a place where he’s no longer entitled to be irritated with her, or, really, anyone.)
Jack, you’re so polite. I think it’s good to point out that Mr. Leonard’s rules, while generally helpful, can be flouted by some. And if not Charles Dickens or Thackeray, then who?
Laura a gra
A fine ending for me right now would be to see a certain Baltimore gal lift the Edgar
My other favourite is
‘They threw a dead dog down into the hole after him’
Slan
Ken Bruen
This may be a cheat, but I know I can trust my memory on this one….the last line in “Angela’s Ashes”….
‘Tis.
It’s only a cheat if you looked it up first, Linda.
But if you did — well, it’s The Memory Project. To paraphrase the famous saying by the guy whose name I won’t get right: Those who forget the past are doomed to look it up. Over and over again.
Hey, that line from Mildred Pierce is Theresa’s favorite ending! Did you ever notice how it’s tucked away in MILLER’S CROSSING? I’m going to make a fool of myself… I can’t remember the last line of the Dead… I mean I know it’s “on all the living and the dead,” but that’s just half a line. The part I love comes a little earlier in that section, and here I go to misquote: “The newspapers were right. Snow was general all over Ireland.” Something about how suddenly we are swept up and given that omniscient view… By the way, “They sleep until dark” hit me like a ton of bricks when I read it.
I was so close! “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.”
“Snow was general all over Ireland” is the only part I can ever remember. Why is that? (This is not a rhetorical question, as I said roughly 7,599 times in class last week.) Is it because it’s such an unusual phrase?
Meanwhile, let us all swoon:
“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 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.”
(I think this constitutes fair us, but just in case (C) James Joyce.)
Also, I think this is a pretty good counter to Elmore Leonard’s advice to leave out the weather. I’ll grant that you might have to be James Joyce to write about the weather, but I’m a sucker for a good weather story. In my newspaper days, when the weather story was part of my duties as the night rewrite, I was known as the Duchess of the Five-Day Forecast, an allusion to San Antonio’s Fiesta traditions.
I think I’ve got these two, but I’m too lazy to try and find the book.
Scarlett O’Hara wasn’t beautiful but men never noticed…. ending with
I won’t think about that now, I’ll think about it tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day.
Oh! Never leave out the weather! It’s a shared experience – very communal when a storm (thunder or snow) approaches; and a source of shared simple truths, such as that feeling when late summer is staging a ‘last-stand’, but we all (of a certain age, anyway) know it is soon to pass away (and many secretly welcome the change).
If you took the weather OUT of the Lippman books I have read….well, it wouldn’t be pretty!
There’s only two endings I remember word for word.
From I The Jury – “It was easy,” I said.
And the best of all time, Eight Million Ways to Die -
“My name is Matt and I’m an alcoholic.”
And then the damndest thing happened, I started to cry.
And then there are two more where I remember a line almost at the end.
From Catcher in the Rye – Don’t ever tell anyone anything.
From Wonderboys – “I guess there’s no point in hanging on to this tuba then.”
Other than that my memory is for shit which makes for enjoyable rereading experiences.
Aw, wouldn’t you know, my memory fouled it up. To Mr. Leonard’s credit he said, “Never open with the weather.”
Still, I think I could find some exceptions even to that rule, if I searched my bookshelves. And, no, I’m not thinking of the opening of my second book, which I think does start with the weather. Or, to be more precise, sort of an absence of weather, a list of all the rotten things the weather isn’t doing on that particular night.
If you ever open a book with Tess sculling out onto the Patapsco, then opening with the weather isn’t just accpetable, but necessary! (at some time or other, she should end up at the Assawoman Wildlife Area – if only for an incidental chuckle; I gabbed with a guy from there – and we both got to laughing! I asked him what they do for summer festival…)
I find I remember the last lines of movies more clearly than books unless I’ve read a book multiple times.
However, there’s a first line that I always remember, and yes, it’s partly because I did teach with it once. (But I chose to use it because I already liked it.) It’s the first line of “War in Heaven,” by Charles Williams, he of the Inklings that included Tolkien and Lewis. The line?
“The telephone was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.”
There’s only one ending I remember by heart. It’s from George Burns’s memoir GRACE: A LOVE STORY. In the course of the book, George explains that when your engagement was over in vaudeville, the manager give you back your pictures that you supplied for the lobby display, and you took them to your next engagement. In fact, f you were fired, that would be the way they would let you know gently. They’d give you back your pictures.
At the end of the book, after Gracie dies:
“So I gave her back her pictures and said goodbye.”
(Okay, now I’ll get it off the shelf and see if I got it right. “Then I gave her back her pictures and walked out of the room.” Fairly close.)
To my shame, the first one to come to mind is cinematic (as opposed to literary) but here goes:
�Forget it Jake, it�s Chinatown.� (what can I say? I�m a populist. Also the sense of despair at that moment in the film is truly striking.)
And speaking of despair�
�But then we�ve all been things we aren�t anymore� –Richard Aleas, �Songs of Innocence.�
A comparatively recent thriller available via the much-praised Hard Case Crime. But to talk about it at all would be to spoil it.
Aleas is one of the guys to watch, I think.