Paint me a small railroad station then
A couple of weeks ago, in an installment of National Public Radio’s “You Must Read This,” T.C. Boyle talked about John Cheever. Says Boyle:
Few prose writers can touch Cheever for the painterly precision of his descriptions, and the reward of them too — his characters, locked in the struggles of suburban and familial angst, regularly experience moments of transcendence and rebirth in nature.
I’d been thinking about Cheever lately, ever since pulling down Bullet Park from my bookshelf a couple weeks ago and being reminded of its great opening paragraph:
Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark. Beyond the platform are the waters of the Wekonsett River, reflecting a somber afterglow. The architecture of the station is oddly informal, gloomy but unserious, and mostly resembles a pergola, cottage or summer house although this is a climate of harsh winters. The lamps along the platform burn with a nearly palpable plaintiveness. The setting seems in some way to be at the heart of the matter. We travel by plane, oftener than not, and yet the spirit of our country seems to have remained a country of railroads. You wake in a pullman bedroom at three a.m. in a city the name of which you do not know and may never discover. A man stands on the platform with a child on his shoulders. They are waving goodbye to some traveler, but what is the child doing up so late and why is the man crying? On a siding beyond the platform there is a lighted dining car where a waiter sits alone at a table, adding up his accounts. Beyond this is a water tower and beyond this a well-lighted and empty street. Then you think happily that this is your country — unique, mysterious and vast. One has no such feelings in airplanes, airports and the trains of other nations.
(Read more from Chapter 1 of Bullet Park here.)
I love using what Amazon calls “statistically improbable phrases” like “Paint me a small railroad station” when I’m trying to find a particular text on the web. Try it yourself. The first hit you get is an interview on Powells.com with novelist A. M. Homes.
What is your favorite literary first line?
“Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark,” from John Cheever’s Bullet Park. For years I’ve wondered about the placement of the word “then.” What does it mean? Why is it there?
That’s a great point. What does “then” mean, or rather do, in that sentence? In fact, what does “paint me” mean? I guess it means “imagine,” sort of. And “then”? For me, it carries just the faintest hint of a continuing conversation, and smooths out the otherwise abrupt transition the reader undertakes in the opening sentence or paragraph of any story: from knowing nothing about the world of the story to accepting that world not only as extending forward through time as we follow the events of the narrative, but extending also backwards in time, before the events of the story occur, and before we came along. (See further and better musings on time in the novel here.)
Anyhow: Cheever’s style. A gift to you and me, albeit indirectly, from some of the laziest bastards on earth.
August 29th, 2006 15:22
The technical term for what the “…then” creates is “in medias res”–starting out a story in mid-narrative, which immediately jars the reader into wondering what came before. The method really sucks the reader in, if it’s done right. (Lest I appear a Latin-spouting smartypants, I had never even heard of the term until a fellow writer used it to describe the intro to one of my stories. I then had to look it up to make sure it wasn’t some sort of insult.)
“Paint me” is more problematic. It’s as if the narrator is asking the addressee to desribe the railroad station scene to him–while the words which follow clearly indicate the narrator already had a sharp vision of the scene.
All in all, it’s definitely writing that makes you think. (By the way, I’d like to think Cheever was exempting Algren from his WPA Writers comment, assuming the two even knew each other back then.)
September 12th, 2006 09:30
Right you are Pete. From Horace’s Art of Poetry (18 BC):
“Nec reditum Diomedis ab interitu Meleagri,
nec gemino bellum Troianum orditur ab ouo;
semper ad euentum festinat et in medias res
non secus ac notas auditorem rapit, et quae
desperat tractata nitescere posse relinquit,
atque ita mentitur, sic ueris falsa remiscet,
primo ne medium, medio ne discrepet imum.”
Meaning, in Philip Francis’s (1740) translation:
“He would not, like our modern poet, date
His hero’s wanderings from his uncle’s fate;
Nor sing ill-fated Ilium’s various woes,
From Helen’s birth, from whom the war arose;
But to the grand event he speeds his course,
And bears his readers with resistless force
Into the midst of things, while every line
Opens, by just degrees, his whole design.”
Nice article on a more recent (1998) Horace translation here.
February 24th, 2008 11:36
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