The only thing better than encountering great prose is encountering great prose unexpectedly. Last night I went to the movies and saw His Girl Friday, a 1940 comedy about a newspaperman preventing his coworker-cum-ex-wife from quitting her job and marrying an insurance salesman. The film’s writing is superb. I normally wouldn’t quote it here, since it’s all dialogue. Well, almost all dialogue.
In one scene, the newspaperman (Cary Grant, left in the picture above above) reads aloud a story-in-progress written by his ex-wife (Rosalind Russell, right). It concerns a murderer named Earl Williams and his confidant, Mollie Malloy:
And so, into this little tortured mind came the idea that that gun had been produced for use. And use it he did. But the state has a ‘production-for-use’ plan too. It has a gallows. And at seven a.m. unless a miracle occurs, that gallows will be used to separate the soul of Earl Williams from his body. And out of Mollie Malloy’s life will go the one kindly soul she ever knew.
This prose is the epitome of quick-witted journalism, the sort that perhaps can be composed only on a heavy typewriter while smoking unfiltered cigarettes in rapid succession. Each sentence kindles the next. Watch how produced for use in the first sentence lights up the next two sentences (use it he did, ‘production-for-use’ plan), which in turn provide the spark for the gallows, and then we get a sentence, lit in the middle, that burns both forwards and backwards (“that gallows will be used”), whose ends fortuitously meet at the end of the passage (“the one kindly soul she ever knew” is both the soul of Earl Williams and yes, a sort of miracle). These fissioning, dancing embers of prose, I must confess, left me with a pretty good secondhand buzz.
Further watching: His Girl Friday (written by Charles Lederer)
August 2nd, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Not knowing the full context I can’t say whether the last sentence contains completely new information. If it does, it is a move that I enjoy at times: the sudden shift in gravity in an already-grave moment. We thought the beheading was the last word, the worst part. “And at seven a.m. unless a miracle occurs, that gallows will be used to separate the soul of Earl Williams from his body” could have been the last sentence of the scene. Instead, that beginning “And” puts it in parallel with the next, the two “And”s both speeding the passage along and reinforcing the sense of necessary connection, as you noted.
We didn’t expect the wife, but all in a moment our attention is shifted to her, and we are hit with the full weight of the event’s significance to her. So long as it does not seem unreasonable, hackneyed, it is always fun when the dramatic payoff comes from an unexpected source.
I am going to guess that the excerpt either ends right there, or the subject of Mollie’s friendless life is, at least, not fleshed out in the rest. It would take more turns, executed in efficient sentences, to avoid anticlimax.