Pursuant to posts on “first words” and Charlotte Gray I am asking: What is your favourite “book end“: the end of a book. Mine is, has been and always will be the closing para’s of ”The Western Lands‘ by William Burroughs:
“I want to reach the Western Lands – right in front of you, across the bubbling brook. It’s a frozen sewer. It’s known as the Duad, remember? All the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history flows bewteen you and the Western Lands. Let it flow! My cat Fletch stretches behind me on the bed. A tree like black lace against a gray sky. A flash of joy.
How long does it take for a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he “wants”?
You have to be in Hell to see Heaven. Glimpses from the Land of the Dead, flashes of serene, timeless joy, a joy as old as suffering and despair.
The old writer couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words. And then? “British we are, British we stay.” How long can one hang on in Gibraltar, with the tapestries where mustached riders with scimitars hunt tigers, the ivory balls one inside the other, bare seams showing, the long tearoom with mirrors on both sides and the tired fuschia and rubber plants, the shops selling English marmalade and Fortnum and Mason’s tea…clinging to their Rock like the apes, clinging always to less and less.
In Tangier the Parade Bar is closed. Shadows are falling on the Mountain.
“Hurry up, please. It’s time.“”
To me this is the perfection of Burroughs’ work in a few paras, everyword judged and despatched like his beloved bullets. He wrote too much at times, but here it is pared down and barely fleshed out. To me, all life is in these lines…
So what last lines and paragraphs slay you?
3 Responses to Last Words – Book-ends.
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ―
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
I’m trying to remember which well-known writer it was said in an interview that they read Gatsby once a year every year just to remind themselves how good writing can be. I know that sounds a bit Pseud’s Corner but I know what he or she was getting at.
Thanx CC. Burroughs was very big on F. Scott. It’s worth noting that Burroughs, the great destructor of the old literary order, derived his powers largely from a very broad and also detailed knowledge of the classics. Much as he could write 1000s of words of blow job bilge, he could also rally – as he did in his last novel I quote from – and deliver prose worthy of his own heroes.
Nothing gets close to the final two paras of Beyond The Barrier of Space by Pel Torro (Star Books, date not logged). Indeed, the last five words are so mind-bogglingly magnificent that I’m considering having them engraved on my tombstone.
For those who don’t know, Pel Torro was one of many partial-anagrammatic names for Robert Lionel Fanthorpe, an author who flourished in the 50s and 60s. A highly intelligent man, he produced sci-fi and fantasy books at the rate of one a month for a company called Badger Books, some of which are masterpieces of unintentionally hilarious speed-writing and invariably produce howls of anguished delight when I read from them at social gatherings.
You can learn more about Mr Fanthorpe at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Fanthorpe#Badger_Books
So, to return to Beyond The Barrier Of Space, the plot, insofar as one is discernable, involves an outer space battle for control between two races, one basically nasty and fascistic, the other nice and brave and liberal.
After 153 pages of cosmic derring-do, Fanthorpe clearly realises he’s only got a couple of hundred words left before he exceeds the publisher’s word-limit, but battle is raging all over the planet and the story is nowhere near its climax.
Undeterred, Fanthorpe speedily contrives for Recman, the evil dictator, to conveniently run slap-bang into good guy Coningsby in a tunnel, knocking himself out in the process.
Thus we arrive at the final two paragraphs of the book…
“And without Recman,” said The President, “the totalitarian regime will rapidly collapse.”
Subsequent events proved him correct.
-THE END-