It was the best of lines, it was the worst of lines.

One seldom encounters a single sentence of over one hundred words, but having previously discussed the first lines to Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (“It was a dark and stormy night…”) and A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”), that weighed in at 58 and 119 words respectively, and having proved to myself that it is not as difficult as I first thought to produce such a lengthy sentence (though arguably ill-advised), I became curious about the longest first lines from modern novels familiar to me, believing without much doubt that Coover or Eco, Roth or Gardner, any of them really, could dash off a sentence of that length without even breaking a sweat and of course it turns out I was correct and was easily able to find the following three examples of opening sentences over one hundred words long.       [154]

First, though, let’s look back at Bulwer-Lytton’s purple prose and that overwrought continuation by Dickens to what could well have been one of the best first lines had he known when to stop:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."       [58]

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, "Paul Clifford"

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.       [119]

--Charles Dickens, "A Tale of Two Cities"

On my shelves I found many examples of first lines exceeding fifty, sixty, even seventy words, some fairly familiar ones, too, including Holden Caulfield’s rant to open The Catcher in the Rye:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.       [63]

--J. D. Salinger, “The Catcher in the Rye”

Sixty-plus words is not common, certainly, but exceeding one hundred words is extreme, yet I was able to find examples from both John Gardner and Robert Coover:

Sometimes the sordidness of his present existence, not to mention the stifling, clammy heat of the apartment his finances has forced him to take, on the third floor of an ugly old house on Binghamton’s West Side—“the nice part of town,” everybody said (God have mercy on those who had to live in the bad parts)—made Peter Mickelsson clench his square yellow teeth in anger and once, in a moment of rage and frustration greater than usual, bring down the heel of his fist on the heavy old Goodwill oak table where his typewriter, papers, and books were laid out, or rather strewn.       [105]

--John Gardner, “Mickelsson’s Ghosts”

On a winter evening of the year 19--, after arduous travels across two continents and as many centuries, pursued by harsh weather and threatened with worse, an aging emeritus professor from an American university, burdened with illness, jet lag, great misgivings, and an excess of luggage, eases himself and his encumbrances down from his carriage onto a railway platform in what many hold to be the most magical city in the world, experiencing not so much that hot terror which initiates are said to suffer when their eyes first light on an image of eternal beauty, as rather that cold chill that strikes lonely travelers who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.       [117]

--Robert Coover, “Pinocchio in Venice”

But the surprise winner of my brief search was W. P. Kinsella in a novel called “Box Socials” which was his undistinguished follow-up to the outstanding “Shoeless Joe,” a novel too few have read, but almost everyone knows from the cinematic version, Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner. So until I spot something longer, here’s my current first place entry by Kinsella:

This is the story of how Truckbox Al McClintock almost got a tryout with the genuine St. Louis Cardinals of the National Baseball League, but instead ended up batting against Bob Feller, of Cleveland Indian fame, in Renfrew Park, down on the river flats, in Edmonton, Alberta, summer of 1945 or ’46, no one can remember which, though the date in question has brought on more than one disagreement, which turned first to a shoving match, then to an altercation, and finally a fist fight, though not a brouhaha, the general consensus in the Six Towns area being that it takes more than two people to staff a brouhaha, the fist fight though, usually resulting in bent cartilage of someone’s proboscis, and blood spots on a Sunday shirt.       [128]

--W. P. Kinsella, “Box Socials”

Just to give Mr. Kinsella his due, however, here is the much more praiseworthy opening line from Shoeless Joe:

My father said he saw him years later playing in a tenth-rate commercial league in a textile town in Carolina, wearing shoes and an assumed name.

--W. P. Kinsella, “Shoeless Joe”

[Note: to make this whole exercise nice and tidy and entwined with circular references, let me point out that the writer called Terrance Mann (a nod to Thomas, perhaps?) and played by James Earl Jones in the movie, in the novel is none other than “The Catcher in the Rye” author, J. D. Salinger.

And Ray Kinsella, the character played by Costner in the movie, was also the character name from a short story by Salinger called, “A Young Girl From 1941 With No Waist At All.” And Ray’s fictional brother Richard Kinsella, appears in “The Catcher in the Rye” on pages 183-4 as the student who is always guilty of digressions in his Oral Expression course, and isn’t there poetic justice in noting that?]