by Jochen Markhorst
I It was a dark and stormy night
‘Twas a dark day in Dallas – November ‘63
The day that will live on in infamy
President Kennedy was riding high
A good day to be living and a good day to die
In 2015, David Laatsch from Baton Rouge was the winner in the “Adventure” category with his spot-on entry “After weeks at sea, Captain Fetherstonhaugh and his hardy crew had at last crossed the halfway point, and he mused that the closest dry land now lay in the Americas, assuming of course that it was not raining there.”
In 1983, Professor Scott E. Rice of the English Department at San José State University launches a tongue-in-cheek competition: the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The aim of the competition was “to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels” – to devise the most dreadful opening sentence possible for a non-existent novel. The joke gets a little out of hand; the professor soon receives tens of thousands of entries, but he perseveres. The competition is refined. He creates thirteen sub-categories alongside the Grand Prize, such as “Western”, “Fantasy & Horror” and “Crime & Detective”; in addition to the various winners, he also selects “Dishonourable Mentions” and then publishes the list of honourees annually – attracting a great deal of interest (from, amongst others, the New York Times, The Guardian and the Washington Post).
The last election will be held in 2025 – by then, the professor has already retired, and bids a graceful farewell: “It is with deep regrets that I announce the conclusion of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Being a year and a half older than Joseph Biden, I find the BLFC becoming increasingly burdensome and would like to put myself out to pasture while I still have some vim and vigor” (www.bulwer-lytton.com, juli 2025). The last Grand Prize winner is Lawrence Person from Austin, with “She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck,” but perhaps even more memorable is the last winner in the “Dark & Stormy” category, the Canadian Owen Roherty from Colborne: “It was a dark and stormy night, or more specifically, a Tuesday afternoon in Ireland.”
That category, “Dark & Stormy”, refers to the contest’s namesake and the inspiration behind it. The nineteenth-century poet and former Secretary of State for the Colonies of the United Kingdom, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), was a gifted and intelligent baron of considerable standing, both socially and in literary circles, the author of works popular in his day, and the man who enriched our vocabulary with evergreens such as the pursuit of the almighty dollar and the pen is mightier than the sword. Unfortunately, however, his spotless reputation has been posthumously overshadowed by his having been elevated to the status of author of the worst opening line of all time:
“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.”
… the opening line of his novel Paul Clifford (1830, the novel which, incidentally, also coined the evergreen phrase ‘the Great Unwashed’). And which was immortalised in August 1969 when Snoopy plagiarised the first seven words for his own Great American Novel.
Fifty years later, the Grandmaster of the Opening Line examines Snoopy’s opening It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly a shot rang out, recognising its dramatic power, correcting the pleonastic horror of dark night and injecting poetic vagueness: “‘Twas a dark day in Dallas – November ’63 / The day that will live on in infamy.” Poetic vagueness, yet simple beauty; a dark day carries weight, in contrast to the empty dark night, “Dallas” + “November ’63” is enough to make it clear to everyone which day it is and what the infamy is that made that day a dark day – Snoopy’s suddenly a shot rang out is almost as pleonastic as “dark day”; after “Dallas November ’63”, we all already know that a shot will suddenly ring out.
Following that opening and the camera focusing on President Kennedy, the scene shifts to the poet who creates mosaics and weaves tapestries: A good day to be living and a good day to die is a charged, multicoloured voice-over. We associate “A good day to die” – rightly or wrongly – with Native American culture; it is attributed as a battle cry to Sitting Bull, Low Dog and Crazy Horse, and is documented as a statement by the Methodist minister Wilbur Fisk, one of the main fundraisers for a translation of the Bible into the Mohawk language. Twelve days before his death (in 1839), Fisk asked his wife what day it was. “Sunday 10 February,” said Ruth. “This would be a good day to die,” said Wilbur (J. Holdich, The Life of Wilbur Fisk, 1842). Not a dark and stormy day, incidentally; “It was a day of uncommon interest and solemnity,” his biographer notes.
That cultural-historical connotation is, presumably, a side effect. The religious undertone is more pervasive, particularly given the subsequent reference to sacrificial lamb; it surely did not escape Dylan’s notice that 22 November 1963 was a Friday – and so, with the triplet day of death – Good Friday – sacrificial lamb, almost imposes itself: a good day to die.
As an aside: history has perhaps been a little too harsh on Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Later literary scholars have found It was a dark and stormy night in works dating from well before 1830, before Paul Clifford. In a satirical work from 1809 (A History of New York) and in a ship’s log from 1757, for example. And even the bully himself, Professor Scott E. Rice, later acknowledges “that the line had been around for donkey’s years before Lytton decided to have fun with it” – but by then the damage is already done, and Bulwer-Lytton, who was more popular than Charles Dickens in his day, has become synonymous with “bad writing” – a name that will live on in infamy.
To be continued. Next up Murder Most Foul part 2: Wait a minute, boys!
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon in both paperback and on Kindle:
- *Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue*
- Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
- Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
- Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
- Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
- Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
- Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
- John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
- Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s looking for the fuse
- Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
- Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s second Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rise of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s late-career classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other kind of music
- Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British masterpiece
- I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
- Bob Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways – Side B
- Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
- Bob Dylan’s 1971
- Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door
- It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylan’s melancholic blues
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side A
- Bob Dylan takes Highway 61 – Seven mercurial songs
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side C
