The Bulwer-Lyttons: It’s STILL a dark and stormy night
They’re back: the annual Bulwer-Lytton Awards, the cream of the crop of bad writing.
Except in this case it’s deliberately bad writing, short parody passages in emulation of the florid style of Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, PC, the 19th century British playwright, novelist and politician immortalized for his creation of the line “It was a dark and stormy night.”
The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, first perpetrated in 1982 by English professor Scott Rice of San Jose State University, is a veritable treasure chest of purple prose, a perverse celebration of overstatement and strangely linked ideas.
Find the 2009 winners here, and weep for joy.
This year’s grand prize winner is David McKenzie of Federal Way, Wash., for this dark and stormy sentence:
“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the Ellie May, a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish: for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”
Bulwer-Lytton was a man to be reckoned with. A quick cruise through the Web reveals that, while his style may be painfully out of fashion, he could turn a phrase. The great unwashed and pursuit of the almighty dollar are his, and in his 1839 play Richelieu he created the pen is mightier than the sword.
Take a look at that famous dark and stormy sentence in full, the opening of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford:
“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.”
OK, the man didn’t know where to stop. But the thing about Bulwer-Lytton is that he knew how to stick a phrase in your mind so it stays. Madeleine l’Engle, Wikipedia reminds us, used “It was a dark and stormy night” to begin her wonderful, Newbery Medal-winning children’s adventure A Wrinkle in Time, which she wrote in 1962, a full 20 years before the Bulwer-Lytton Awards began. If it’s a good enough beginning for Meg and Calvin and Charles Wallace as they whisk through space and time, it’s good enough for us.
Still, when it comes to a good parody, what’s fairness got to do with it? Thank you, Lord Bulwer-Lytton, for providing the fodder. Let us close this chapter of the Art Scatter annals with these words from the winner of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Vile Puns category, Greg Homer of Placerville, California:
“Using her flint knife to gut the two amphibians, Kreega the Neanderthal woman created the first pair of open-toad sandals.”
July 2nd, 2009 at 12:27 pm
It was the use of the passive voice which doomed Bulwer-Lytton’s opening line to ignominy; the sentence in its fulsomeness is quite eloquent—except at occasional intervals, when it is checked by violent gusts of punctuation and parenthetical asides (for it was written at a time when such digressions were the norm), rattling along at some length, and fiercely agitating the mind of the reader struggling to escape the density of the prose as if climbing from a primeval bog.
July 2nd, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Well played, MTC!
July 2nd, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Thank you Bob, though I hope that the talented wordsmiths will forgive my improper use of “fulsome.” My intended meaning was “copious,” not “offensive to the taste or sensibilities.” Had I meant the latter, I would have written, “… the sentence, despite its fulsomeness, is quite eloquent.” Come to think of it, that fits too.
July 2nd, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Well, you can fulsome of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t ful all of the people all of the time.
July 3rd, 2009 at 8:53 am
Is there a special emoticon to signify the act of groaning in response to a pun?
July 4th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Gentlepersons, as I keyboard this missive in the steaming atmosphere of my writer’s lair, firecrackers popping from time to time in anticipation of the rocket’s red glare, although I make haste to inform you that while I write not from Baghdad or Kabul, nor even Israel, although I am near to a different Mt. Tabor and attended a bar mitzvah this morning, I do wish to transmit the information that I once owned the complete–complete I say–works of Bulwer-Lytton, purchased as a housewarming present by the devoted son of Bernard deVoto, editor of the journals of Lewis & Clark and author of many works concerning the American West, because said son, Mark by name, a musicologist who taught years ago at Reed College, thought the bindings were elegant, surely more elegant than the prose that lurked within, and would look nice in our leaded-glass-doored bookcases, about which he was absolutely correct. Truth be told they looked so nice, we did not wish to disturb them, and thus they rested within until we ran out of shelf space and replaced them, in part, with Hogarth Press editions of the works of Virginia Woolf, who, you may remember, with the first money she earned writing purchased a Persian cat, name unknown.
Have a glorious and none too fulsome Fourth.
July 4th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Ah, the glories of the elegant-looking bookcase! A fitting role for Lord Bulwer-Lytton to play! Many years ago there was a semi-popular restaurant in Portland called, if I recall right, The Library. Or something like that. It was made up to feel like an Edwardian gentlemen’s club, although, it must be said, in a rather cut-rate fashion. The walls were lined with books. But you couldn’t pull one out and take a look. In an apparent move to keep anyone from actually walking out of the restaurant with a book tucked under her arms (or maybe it was just a cost-cutting decorative measure) the designers bought a bunch of second-hand books and CUT THEM IN HALF, so basically all you could see was the binding, then GLUED THEM TO THE WALLS.Not even Bulwer-Lytton should meet a fate like that, although there might be a few other candidates for the buzz saw …
July 4th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
I’d nail the works of Dan Brown to the wall any time Bob, starting with the Da Vinci Code. They don’t even have elegant bindings…
July 6th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
The novel Snoopy typed atop his oddly two-dimensional doghouse was the likewise two-dimensional line Bulwer-Lytton made famous: “It was a dark and stormy night.”
July 8th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Ah, yes, Snoopy’s never-ending novel! I admire his determination. And, frankly, I think “It was a dark and stormy night” has a certain gusto to it.
Another incarnation, also never-ending, is this one, from summer camps, which loops endlessly back on itself until someone wither shouts “Shaddup already!” or says, “Anyone want s’mores?”:
“It was a dark, stormy night.
We were all around the campfire bright
when someone said,
‘San Antonio, tell us a storio!’
And this is what he said:
It was a dark, stormy night.
We were all around the campfire bright
when someone said,
‘San Antonio, tell us a storio!’
And this is what he said:
It was a dark, …”
And so on, until you were ready to bop the offender on the bean.
July 9th, 2009 at 7:48 am
The laptop screen glowed bright.
I was surfing through the night.
Found a comment thread of note
And this is what I wrote:
The laptop screen glowed bright …
July 10th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Aha! The electronic campfire! The possibilities are … endless.