Let's Start with the Last & Begin with the End

Like you, I suspect, I spend much of my time reading. And, like any good craft hound, I find myself assigning homework tasks aimed, yes, at craft… but also just to satisfy random curiosity. This week, the randomness came from a novelist friend who wanted to discuss favorite story and novel endings. Particularly, the why of the same.

Now, I’m not talking about the collection of favorite last lines stored up for some dinner party that never comes, I’m talking about the last bit that distinguishes a novel’s world from our own, writer from reader, and that oh-so important soluble lens we take back into our everyday lives.

After hunting through my own shelves and sifting the online compendium of best last-lines, I circled back to three haunting endings from Cormac McCarthy, and then a sentimental yet cruel duo from Evelyn Waugh and Edgar Allan Poe.

After considering the usual suspects: Wuthering Heights, Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Ulysses, et all, I fell away from such pseudo-intellectual parlor tricks, as they bore me. Instead, I sat and thought about the endings that left me sleepless, agitated and wanting to write myself to the other side. I shy away from calling these endings inspirational, as they aren’t that kind of inspirational. In fact, they’re more like a shot of whiskey amidst trauma, bracing and somehow sobering, yet still the stuff of restless sleep and certainly fever dreams.

The first of the three McCarthy endings is No Country for Old Men. This ending was realized both on the page and in film, but both versions remind us the mind of the reader/viewer is the most potent element of any haunting.

Sometime narrator Sheriff Ed Tom Bell leaves the reader and the viewer (in the film played by Tommy Lee Jones) with the same two dreams of his dead father. The first is a simple one, of meeting his father in town and receiving some money from him that Bell somehow lost, he thinks, but admits he doesn’t remember “all that well.” The second is equally simple, yet elegant, and not at all easily forgotten:

“[….] It was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.”

As this ending is as easily found as a click and tap on Netflix—and because it’s all the narrated, bedeviled hunting and history leading up to it that makes it so powerful—I’ll discuss it here verbatim without worries of so-called spoilers.

Again, it’s worth noting that filmmakers as accomplished and imaginative as the Coen brothers decided to let this brief narrative suffice, unmitigated by enactment of its images, as the stark ending for their adaptation of the novel. And this from the brothers who brought you “Barton Fink” and its hellfire induced ending and battle cry, “I’ll show you the life of the mind! I WILL SHOW you the life of the mind!” McCarthy’s spare prose captures the ending in eight sentences. Deftly separating story-maker from story-digester, this brief passage does all the craft work necessary while leaving him or her to stare the syllables down as well as their bedeviled speaker.

Next is McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Normally, I don’t shy away from hearing or telling the endings of novels, but in this case I will only hint. Because Blood Meridian is an utterly unique experience, and one that will test even the most seasoned of novel hounds, I will say only this, “He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.” Anyone who’s done the work of digesting this glorious nightmare-inspiring novel will shudder at mere mention of the judge’s dance.

Last among McCarthy’s endings, though it is first on my list of all endings, is Suttree. Despite the very deserved praise of the Border Trilogy, Suttree remains McCarthy’s masterpiece. After all, it is the bridge between his earlier and later novels, and he devoted 20 years to its careful crafting. In an age of too many gimmick and genre endings, Suttree refreshes our sense of the epic in a fusion that is Faulkner-, Steinbeck- and Homer-esque, yet all the trickster shaman that is McCarthy. This ending is worthy of conversations, as is this novel, but those conversations are hard-won as it is hard to find readers passionate and devoted enough to sit with this magnificent book, sad as that is. However, for those of you who have read it, I again will leave you with only one clue as nod and knowing wink: “waterbearer.”

Finally, as this column is intended to be repast rather than nightcap, I offer a somewhat curious duo for your consideration: Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Edgar Allan Poe’s Cask of Amontillado. Wallace Stevens wrote that death is the mother of beauty. In itself, this observation and its author will sufficiently agitate, inspire an intelligent reader into hours of page tending of the ink-stained variety. With that in mind, this last bit is dessert-to-go.

Waugh and Poe both offer us a keen look into the revenge ending, though of differing violence. Poe leaves the drunken yet slowly sobering receiver of violent revenge to his revelations, brick by brick, to ponder that great motto of the Order of the Thistle: “Nemo me impune lacessit” (No man attacks me unpunished.). This ultimate revenge ending is given twist by Waugh in his Handful, as Mr. Todd’s host recounts a similarly haunting tale to his sobering guest. A tale of visitors who came while Todd slept. He is on the hunt for his missing watch, and his helpful host imparts how he gifted the watch to the visitors (aka search & rescue party) who had arrived while Todd slept the narcotic sleep induced by the host’s mickey:

“I gave it as a memento to the men who came looking for you. They were most grateful and they enjoyed the small cross I erected to commemorate your arrival… Tonight, now that you’re feeling better, we should resume the Dickens…”

Like Sartre’s twisting dagger of a last line in No Exit “Hell is other people,” Waugh reminds us of a fate worse than death. Having to read Dickens aloud. Endlessly. And yet, upon learning of Mr. Todd’s fate, it’s virtually impossible to suppress laughter. As Oscar Wilde observed, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” And that, bound in a nutshell of infinite space strangely shaped like a filbert, is the difference between pity and terror.

And with that, friends, return to work. Much ink to be spilled. Dessert awaits those who finish the night’s work well.

- MRM