I’ve described in these pages what I consider to be the finest prose written in English; it includes the beginning of The Raj Quartet, by Paul Scott; the ending of The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (but there’s also great stuff in Tender is the Night); much of Thomas Wolfe (especially “The Child by Tiger“, an excerpt from one of his novels); and James Joyce’s long story The Dead, which, especially in its ending, stands above them all.
But there’s one more, and I’ll put down a specimen here. I know I’ve put up a video of this scene from Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937) before, but I just reread much of the book and marveled at how wonderful it is—and sad, too. It is of course an autobiography of Blixen’s stint in Kenya, where she owned a coffee farm, and includes a hedged description of her life with her lover Denys Finch Hatton, a guide and big-game hunter who died in a plane crash while she still lived in Kenya.
She and Denys had picked out their graves, up in the Ngong Hills with a fantastic view of the plains as well as Mt. Kenya and Mt. Kilamanjaro. But she had to leave Africa when she lost her farm, and so buried Finch Hatton up in the hills before she left. This description of what happened to his grave always brings me to tears, no matter how often I read it. I just realized I put this up in a longer extract seven years ago, and you might want to read that part, too.
After I had left Africa, Gustav Mohr wrote to me of a strange thing that had happened by Denys’ grave, the like of which I have never heard. “The Masai,” he wrote, “have reported to the District Commissioner at Ngong, that many times, at sunrise and sunset, they have seen lions on Finch-Hatton’s grave in the Hills. A lion and a lioness have come there, and stood, or lain, on the grave for a long time. Some of the Indians who have passed the place in their lorries on the way to Kajado have also seen them. After you went away, the ground round the grave was levelled out, into a sort of big terrace, I suppose that the level place makes a good site for the lions, from there they can have a view over the plain, and the cattle and game on it.”
It was fit and decorous that the lions should come to Denys’s grave and make him an African monument. “And renowned be thy grave.” Lord Nelson himself, I have reflected, in Trafalgar Square, has his lions made only out of stone.
The last paragraph is one of the best I know in English, and the whole scenario is ineffably moving. It’s even more amazing when you realize that Blixen’s native language wasn’t English but Danish, and she wrote the book in English. (In this way she’s like Joseph Conrad.)
I know I’ve forgotten some of my favorite prose, but I’ll note more here if I remember. In the meantime, weigh in with your favorites below. Remember, this is not a selection of “best books” or “best stories” but simply “the best prose written in English”.
The lion clip is no longer on the Internet, but below a clip from the movie showing Blixen (played by Meryl Streep) giving a few words at Finch Hatton’s burial (he was played by Robert Redford). Just these few moments show what a great actor Meryl Streep is.
The film was shot on location in Kenya, and I do recommend it, even if the critics give it only a 63% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It did win the Best Picture Oscar.
An excerpt from George Dennison’s story Shawno, about life with his beloved dog.
[The writer has walked home at dawn, after a night of music and talk with friends, and his dog Shawno had been waiting all night for him.]
Abruptly I heard and saw him, and though no creature is more familiar to me, more likely to be taken for granted, I was thrilled to see him again, and gladdened, more than gladdened, filled for a moment with the complex happiness of our relationship, which is both less than human and utterly human. Certainly I was made happy by his show of love for me. But my admiration of his is undiminished, and I felt it again, as always. He is the handsomest of dogs, muscular and large, with tufted golden fur. The sound of his feet was audible on the hard-packed, pebble-strewn road. I leaned forward and called to him and clapped my hands, and he accelerated, arching his throat and running with more gusto. He ran with a powerful driving stride that was almost that of a greyhound, and as he neared me he drew back his lips, arched his throat still more and let out a volley of ecstatic little yips. This sound was so puppyish, and his ensuing behavior so utterly without dignity, so close to fawning slavishness, that one might have contemned him for it, except that it was extreme, so extreme that there was no hint of fawning, and certainly not of cringing, but the very opposite: great confidence and security, into which there rose up explosively an ecstasy he couldn’t contain and couldn’t express rapidly enough to diminish, so that for a while he seemed actually to be in pain. I had to help him, had to let him lick my face protractedly and press his paws into my shoulders. And, as sometimes happens in such early-morning solitudes, there came over me a sense of the briefness of life, and of my kinship with all these other creatures who would soon be dead, and I almost spoke aloud to my dog: how much it matters to be alive together! how marvelous and brief our lives are! and how good it is, dear one that you are, to have the wonderful strange passion of your spirit in my life!
This excerpt made me cry.
I’ve always loved passages from Alan Paton’s “Cry, the Beloved Country”. From the end of chapter 12:
“Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.”
From the chapter that’s a montage of reported speech, news reports, and commentary:
“In the meantime the strike is over, with a remarkably low loss of life. All is quiet, they report, all is quiet.
In the deserted harbour there is yet water that laps against the quays. In the dark silent forest there is a leaf that falls. Behind the polished panelling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools.”
And the final paragraph of the book, after Kumalo has spent the night on the mountain and sees the dawn arrive:
“Yes, it is the dawn that has come. The titihoya wakes from sleep, and goes about its work of forlorn crying. The sun tips with light the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand. The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there. Ndotsheni is still in darkness, but the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.”
Maybe I am a cretin and romantic; but I don’t care. I love that movie. One of my all-time favorites*. Sydney Pollack (RIP) did a great job directing it.
It is also one of the very few movie/book pairs where I prefer the movie**. Though Out of Africa the book has excellent prose, as Jerry shows in this posting, and I love that, the story isn’t nearly as compelling as the story in the film, which was written mostly based on her diaries.
(* We were watching it when my wife went into labor with our son, Jamie.)
(** The others that pop to mind are: Doctor Zhivago and The English Patient)
(** I watched the original B&W The Manchurian Candidate on TV at an impressionable age, and then decades later on the big screen. After which I found the book disappointing.)
Same here!
All three movies are excellent.
Finest English prose? Try Edmund Wilson. Virginia Woolf.
Charles Dickens. Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita). Robert Hughes.
Edmund Wilson is an interesting call, since his excellence resides in the precision of his language rather than any felicity of phrasing. But to me the most moving English prose is found in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, again especially at the end. That and some passages in the King James Bible.
I absolutely adore the opening paragraph of Ron Rash’s novel, “The Risen”:
She is waiting. Each spring the hard rains come and the creek rises and quickens, and more of the bank peels off, silting the water brown and bringing to light another layer of dark earth. Decades pass. She is patient, shelled inside the blue tarp. Each spring the water laps closer, paling roots, loosening stones, scuffing and smoothing. She is waiting and one day a bit of blue appears in the bank and then more blue. The rain pauses and the sun appears but she is ready now and the bank trembles a moment and heaves and the strands of tarp unfurl and she spills into the stream and is free. Bits of bone gather in an eddy, form a brief necklace. The current moves on toward the sea.
The examples given are very good, of course. Though I haven’t read much of it recently, I remain a fan of science fiction. (I’m currently enjoying the “brainy” 8-part “3 Body Problem” on Netflix.)
I think one of the most moving spoken lines in English science fiction comes from “Blade Runner” (1982). At the end of the movie is a surprising “death soliloquy” — a testament to both humanity and to inhumanity — in which a short-lived “replicant” android comes to terms with his mortality.
The actor who utters the 42-word monologue is Rutger Hauer, who made changes to the script without the knowledge of director Ridley Scott.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_rain_monologue
Final scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoAzpa1x7jU
(Sorry if there’s an ad.)
I also like that death scene, and consider Blade Runner to be one of the best SF Movies.
Yes, it’s certainly one of the best — except that it’s so dystopian. I actually prefer more “positive” scenarios. But Blade Runner has wonderful “atmosphere,” fine character development, and an unusual but plausible premise that’s presented in a believable way. And that great ending.
The first paragraph of W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk” guts me every time I read it:
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
I remember your last post on this Jerry. I agree that the prose and story were lovely.
As a younger person, I could not see why everyone was so crazy about the movie or book. I was too young to know what it was like to long for the past. But now, as my time away doing fieldwork on an Andean hacienda has ended, and many relationships have come and gone, and my life has gone through many chapters that can’t be revisited, both the book or the movie have me tearing up at “I once had a farm in Africa”.
Every few years I tell my mother “It’s time for a bottle of wine and OoA.”
Thanks for the reminder…. Maybe it is time for a bottle of wine and OoA.
“When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake — not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over. The sow had it by the neck, and the shoat had the tail.
“You pigs git,” Augustus said, kicking the shoat. “Head on down to the creek if you want to eat that snake.” It was the porch he begrudged them, not the snake. Pigs on the porch just made things hotter, and things were already hot enough. He stepped down into the dusty yard and walked around to the springhouse to get his jug. The sun was still high, sulled in the sky like a mule, but Augustus had a keen eye for sun, and to his eye the long light from the west had taken on an encouraging slant.
Evening took a long time getting to Lonesome Dove, but when it came it was a comfort. For most of the hours of the day — and most of the months of the year — the sun had the town trapped deep in dust, far out in the chaparral flats, a heaven for snakes and horned toads, roadrunners and stinging lizards, but a hell for pigs and Tennesseans. There was not even a respectable shade tree within twenty or thirty miles; in fact, the actual location of the nearest decent shade was a matter of vigorous debate in the offices — if you wanted to call a roofless barn and a couple of patched-up corrals offices — of the Hat Creek Cattle Company, half of which Augustus owned.”
The opening of “Lonesome Dove,” in my estimation the greatest American novel of all time.
Adore so much of OoA, so much to tug your heartstrings. This one is not a novel or even a movie, but rather “The Streets of Heaven” speech from The West Wing. It always makes me wonder why we never hear a real president or senator with similar powers of oratory.
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechwestwingstreetsofheaven.htm
This bit from Thomas Pynchon’s “Crying of Lot 49,” when Oedipa Maas finds an old sailor who seems to know the secret of the WASTE mail system, and the writing itself seems to go crazy…
“Cammed each night out of that safe furrow the bulk of this city’s waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing, what rich soils had he turned, what concentric planets uncovered? What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper’s stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost?”
Pynchon deploys this (unusual?) technique in “Bleeding Edge” and elsewhere when, for example, the main characters get close to an existential villain, or the plot approaches a critical turn, the language itself just goes nuts — I love it.
I’m a big Pynchon fan, my favorite book being “Mason & Dixon”, from which this:
“..Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,— who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish’d, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government…”
Blixen’s other books, under her pseudonym of Isak Dinesen, overflow with marvelous writing.
For Africa of that period, read Elspeth Huxley’s “The flame trees of Thika”. She talks some about Blixen and her husband.
One of my favourite pieces from a modern author, Thomas Harris and his second book, 1999 “Hannibal”
“The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver.
Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.”
And, the ending of this book is so much better than the movie which overall really in my opinion did not represent the nature of the story and the relationship between Clarice Starling and Dr Hannibal Lecter.
Hard not to choose one of Hardy’s nature descriptions. This, the opening paragraph of Under the Greenwood Tree:
“To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality.”
And I can’t resist adding a passage from that great master of English prose, Edward Gibbon — in chapter 42 of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he describes Belisarius, the general who led the reconquest of Italy during Justinian’s reign:
“The character of Belisarius may be deservedly placed above the heroes of the ancient republics. His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times; his virtues were his own, the free gift of nature or reflection; he raised himself without a master or a rival; and so inadequate were the arms committed to his hand that his sole advantage was derived from the pride and presumption of his adversaries. Under his command, the subjects of Justinian often deserved to be called Romans; but the unwarlike appellation of Greeks was imposed as a term of reproach by the haughty Goths, who affected to blush that they must dispute the kingdom of Italy with a nation of tragedians, pantomimes, and pirates.”