Nineteen Sentences, Cross-Referenced

Last week I wrote of a piece of paper with nineteen disconnected, interesting sounding sentences upon it. If you read closely, you may have recognized the fourth sentence which appeared in my First Line Quiz several weeks ago. It is the opening sentence to “Portnoy’s Complaint,” first published in 1969 by Philip Roth. If you’re a Roth fan, you may have noticed that several of the other sentences also sound like his writing, at least the Zuckerman reference may have triggered something for you.

The sentences are, in fact, the first lines of each of Roth’s first nineteen published books taken in order and this time, cross-referenced below:

The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses. [1]   Dear Gabe, The drugs help me bend my fingers around a pen. [2]   Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized—that was the dream of his life. [3]   She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise. [4]   Sir, I want to congratulate you for coming out on April 3 for the sanctity of human life, including the life of the yet unborn. [5]   It began oddly. [6]   Call me Smitty. [7]   Far from being the classic period of explosion and tempestuous growth, my adolescence was more or less a period of suspended animation. [8]   Temptation comes to me first in the conspicuous personage of Herbie Bratasky, social director, bandleader, crooner, comic, and m.c. of my family’s mountainside resort hotel. [9]   First, foremost, the puppyish, protected upbringing above his father’s shoe store in Camden. [10]   It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago—I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman—when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man. [11]   “What the hell are you doing on a bus, with your dough?” [12]   When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do. [13]   “Your novel,” he says, “is absolutely one of the five or six books of my life.” [14]   Ever since the family doctor, during a routine checkup, discovered an abnormality on his EKG and he went in overnight for the coronary catheterization that revealed the dimensions of the disease, Henry’s condition had been successfully treated with drugs, enabling him to work and carry on his life at home exactly as before. [15]   Dear Zuckerman, In the past, as you know, the facts have always been notebook jottings, my way of springing into fiction. [16]   “I’ll write them down. You begin.” [17]   My father had lost most of the sight in his right eye by the time he’d reached eighty-six, but otherwise he seemed in phenomenal health for a man his age when he came down with what the Florida doctor diagnosed, incorrectly, as Bell’s palsy, a viral infection that causes paralysis, usually temporary, to one side of the face. [18]   For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book. [19]

      1. Goodbye, Columbus
      2. Letting Go
      3. When She Was Good
      4. Portnoy’s Complaint
      5. Our Gang

      6. The Breast
      7. The Great American Novel
      8. My Life as a Man
      9. Reading Myself and Others
      10. The Professor of Desire

      11. The Ghost Writer
      12. Zuckerman Unbound
      13. The Anatomy Lesson
      14. The Prague Orgy
      15. The Counterlife

      16. The Facts
      17. Deception
      18. Patrimony
      19. Operation Shylock

It took several library visits and repeated web searches for me to create that cross-indexed list of opening lines to Philip Roth's first nineteen books. But the idea of assembling those sentences into a single, unattributed paragraph was not mine. That's a story in itself and on Friday I'll post Philip Roth's unbelievable explanation.