Okay, quick question: What is one characteristic of a really gripping, extremely well-crafted story?
Details. Would we believe that
Star Wars took place in a galaxy far, far away if Tatooine didn't have two suns? Would we appreciate the tale of David and Goliath as much if we didn't know that David gathered five stones from the riverbed or tried to wear King Saul's hopelessly-too-large armor? We wouldn't understand Maycomb County as well without knowing the little things Scout Finch takes for granted. The Arables' kitchen smells of "coffee, bacon, damp plaster and wood smoke from the stove", providing us an idea of exactly what Fern's family's house is like. That we learn J.C. Hogan's wife left him in 1978, because it's referenced by him and Mule Skinner as "the year the
Chicago Daily News went belly-up" and "the year the Cowboys beat the Broncos in the Super Bowl 27 to 10." (Further wonderful detail is that neither of these tidbits help Father Tim understand what year his friends are talking about in the least.)
Well, that's just
barely scratching the surface of what I mean here, only covering George Lucas, the Bible, Harper Lee and Jan Karon. This post is concerned with the brilliant detailing of the satirical abridgment of S. Morgenstern's satirical history of the Florinese royalty known as
The Princess Bride, written by William Goldman. First off, as the narrator highlights, the full title is
The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, he points out that you've
got to love somebody who calls his own book a classic before it's been published or anybody else has had a chance to read it. And you do, just for the audacity of the deed. Furthermore, the extensive, extremely dry and entirely fictitious prologue explaining how the book came to be abridged is a masterstroke of Sicilian-level genius. Anyway, there's
so many wonderful little details hidden all throughout the prologue and the book itself; creating an entirely plausible world that a lot of people would love to visit. I mean,
the very first sentence has a hook that fuels a ferocious desire to find out what happens next: "This is my favorite book in all the world; though I have never read it." (Jaw drops in admiration for his writing skill. Isn't that just a wonderful beginning?) I named
this blog after a passage from the sword-fight scene. So, much like the one about the little-noticed details of
"The Big Green", this post takes a look at the terrific details from
The Princess Bride(the book version.)
This sentence - the writer casting himself as the narrator describing his childhood - could have totally been written about my growing-up: "Basketball, baseball, marbles - I could never get enough. I wasn't even very good at them, but give me a football and an empty playground and I could invent last-second comebacks that would bring tears to your eyes." And he continues in the next paragraph with this: "I seemed busy, busy, busy, but I suppose, if pressed I would have admitted that, for all my frenzy, I was very much alone." And that's just on the first page!
That the narrator's radio is a Zenith; and it was a fall Friday in 1941 when he caught pneumonia, trying to catch the Northwestern-Notre Dame football game over the airwaves. And that his father was a Florinese immigrant whose English always stayed ridiculously immigranty; he worked all his life as the number-two-chair barber at the least popular barber shop in Highland Park, Illinois. His father died in that barber chair, and it took an hour for the number-one-chair barber to realize this because he thought the corpse was taking a nap.
S. Morgenstern had a head shaped like a giant balloon.
"Does it have any sports in it?" "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and pain and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truth. Passion. Miracles." "Sounds okay."
I've always read the prologue in the voice of
The Wonder Years's narrator. Only recently I just realized that's probably because Fred Savage plays the Grandson in the movie.
THE BOOK -
All these side notes about who the most beautiful woman in the world was and why she yielded that position...the first sentence of the actual book begins: "The year Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette." Can you get a much more fairy-tale opening than that, not using the whole "Once upon a time..." cliche?
Anyway, Annette worked in Paris for the Duke and Duchess de Guiche, and it's not long before the Duke discovers that someone extraordinary is polishing the pewter. The Duchess notices this, and begins studying Annette for some flaw in her character(or appearance would be close enough). Annette's Achilles heel is chocolate, which the Duchess plants in strategic places all throughout the castle, and Annette grows from delicate to whopping inside a season. That takes care of the whole "most beautiful woman in the world" thing. She marries the pastry chef afterwards and they both ate a lot until old age claimed them.
And when Buttercup was ten, the most beautiful woman was an Indian woman, the daughter of a Bengali tea merchant, with skin of such dusky perfection unseen for eighty years. Then smallpox came, and that took care of that.
And when Buttercup was fifteen, the most beautiful woman was Adela of Sussex-on-the-Thames, who had 104 suitors, and one night worried her perfect complexion away over the fact that she would not always be
young and beautiful.
All these wonderful asides to the audience(but of course, this was before audiencial asides.) It confuses you so much as to when this story takes place, but at the same time adds to the heightened realism. (This was before ulcers. And before Voltaire. After mirrors, obviously. They had acres then, and arguments too. It was before Europe, but after Paris. And after taste, too, but only just. This was before glamour. It came after stew, but so does everything else; and long after spats. This was after taxes, but they were here even before stew. This was after blue jeans, which were invented considerably earlier than most people suppose. It was just after America, but long after fortunes. It was long, long after hairdressers. This was before trains, but well after carpenters. It was before emergency wards, but not before doctors, although in Turkey doctors hadn't started setting bones yet - that was the domain of the milkmen. Golf balls were around already, but this was before "The Lady or the Tiger", remember.) And the game of golf, as everyone knows, was invented by Brandobras Took, the only hobbit ever big enough to ride a horse, slicing off a goblin's head, which sailed through the air for a hundred yards before dropping into a rabbit hole. The game spread at some unknown time from the Shire to Scotland, and then to the rest of the world. (Okay, I went off-topic there and brought in some
Lord of the Rings elements....back to Goldman now.)
The parenthetical statistics given at every available opportunity: (There have only been eleven perfect complexions in India since accurate recording began; Adela Terrell had 104 suitors; Buttercup's parents were having their 33rd spat of the day when the Count and Countess drive up. Originally "jealousy" was a term solely relating to plants, which is how the term "green with jealousy" came to be, and Buttercup's current case was a close fourth on the all-time list. There have been five great kisses since its accidental invention in 1642 B.C., and while no one completely agrees on the exact formula, they all agreed that those five deserved perfect marks.) There are far more parenthetical statistics given throughout the rest of the novel, but as it's taken me a couple months to re-read it again for the sixth(ish? Possibly more) time, I forgot to keep a lookout for stats past this point.
The Countess settled permanently in Paris at some point to indulge her passion for fabrics and ran the only salon of international consequence, naturally.
Buttercup's parents did not exactly have what could be called a happy marriage; as all they ever dreamed about was leaving each other, but they died within a week apart. Her father is described as "a tiny mutt of a man, a terrible farmer, and not much of a husband either." Her mother was "a gnarled shrimp of a woman, a terrible cook and an even more limited housekeeper."
After the wonderfully odd cow-feeding scene, Buttercup spends almost three full pages thinking about the Countess and Westley and how
people don't look at each other that way because of their teeth. And then at dawn the next morning she tells him that she loves him, in one page-long paragraph, words rushing out incoherently in an onslaught of emotion, and then does the bravest thing she'd ever done; looking him straight into his eyes. And what is his response? "He closed the door in her face. Without a word. Without a word."
Buttercup's hair is the "color of autumn", which is a great way of expressing it - but I'm still having trouble seeing her as a redhead.
Another great hallmark of William Goldman's writing, specifically this book, but also in a couple of his others, is the use of repetition, and then snapping into an analogy that makes you pause and think a minute before going on to the next sentence. Prince Humperdinck was shaped like a barrel, with a big barrel chest and big barrel thighs, and he walked like a crab sideways so that if he'd wished to be a ballet dancer he would have been doomed to an endless life of miserable frustration.
Sixty-six pages have been edited out of Chapter Two, The Groom, because they were irrelevant history of the Florinese monarchy. The resulting chapter is about three and a half pages long.
Queen Bella was shaped like a gumdrop, colored like a raspberry and was easily the most beloved person in the kingdom; but as the only stepmothers Humperdinck had ever heard of were evil, he always called her "Evil Stepmother", or "E.S." for short.
The chapter names and lengths, all choppy and mixed up from the typical formula. Prologue: 26 pages, Chapter One, The Bride: 23 pages. Chapter Two, The Groom: Three pages. Chapter Four, The Courtship: Seven pages. Chapter Four, Preparations: Zero pages, as it was entirely deleted. Okay, well, technically it's one page long, because the narrator has to explain why he took it out. Chapter Five, The Announcement: 92 pages long. Chapter Six, The Festivities: 52 pages long. Chapter Seven, The Wedding: 33 pages. Chapter Eight, Honeymoon: 16 pages.
Florin and Guilder have mainly stayed alive by warring near-constantly on each other. There's been the Olive War, the Tuna Fish Discrepancy(which nearly sent both nations into bankruptcy), the Roman Rift(which did send them into insolvency) and the Discord of the Emeralds, where they both got rich again by banding together and robbing everyone else within sailing distance.
Chapter Three, The Courtship, is possibly one of the best places in the book. The abridger slashed out 56 1/2 pages of packing, and leaves in these brilliant two paragraphs: "At 8:23 there seemed to be every chance of a lasting alliance forming between Florin and Guilder. At 8:24 the two countries were very close to war." Which is followed by three pages describing exactly what happened in those sixty seconds and the aftermath, and then by far the best courtship passage ever written in all literature.
From a narrative point of view, in all 105 pages of Chapter Four, Preparations,
nothing happens. So it can basically be summed up by the sentence, "What with one thing and another, three years passed." (Buttercup is made Princess of Hammersmith, since Humperdinck can't possibly marry a commoner, and is trained in the art of being a princess. Also, both her parents die during this time.)
Vizzini is described as "dark". Sorry, but that just doesn't work....not complexion-wise, at least. Maybe he meant that as far as character goes? Also, he has the gentlest face, almost angelic.
The Cliffs of Insanity were not actually impossible to scale; two men had been known to climb them in the last century alone.
Inigo was raised by his father Domingo in the small village of Arabella in the mountains of Central Spain high above the city of Toledo, and he learned to cook from the age of six.
Yeste the swordmaker's fame grows so great that though he raises his price by twelve times there's still a line of royalty waiting for three years to obtain one of his weapons. He is
very heavy; he has the only fat thumbs in Madrid.
Inigo searches for the six-fingered man all over Spain and Portugal; France, Italy, Germany, the whole of Switzerland, all of the Balkans, most of Scandinavia, he'd visited the Florinese and the natives of Guilder, gone into Russia and down step by step throughout the entire Mediterranean.
Perhaps thirty men in all the world were the equal of Inigo when he fought left-handed; perhaps as many as fifty, perhaps as few as ten.
Turkish hospital records list a total of eleven children who weighed over twenty pounds at birth, and ninety-five more between fifteen and twenty.
In the book, the Battle of Wits takes place at night. Vizzini always carries a knapsack around with him, and out of this he takes out a small handkerchief on which he then places two goblets of wine, along with some cheese and some apples.
And this exchange: "I cannot compete with you physically, and you are no match for my brains." "You are that smart?" "There are no words to contain all my wisdom. I am so cunning, so crafty and clever, so filled with deceit, guile and chicanery, such a knave, so shrewd, cagey as well as calculating, as diabolical as I am vulpine, as tricky as I am untrustworthy....well, I have told you that there have not been words invented yet to explain how great my brain is, but let me put it this way: the world is several million years old and several billion people have at one point or another trod upon it, but I, Vizzini the Sicilian, am, speaking with pure candor and modesty, the slickest, sleekest, sliest and wiliest man who has yet come down the pike."
Humperdinck's four whites were snowy, tireless giants, twenty hands high. He rode them all four at a time, bareback, leading the other three at full gallop, leaping from one to another at mid-stride so that none of them would have to bear his great bulk past the tiring point. Very clever, really.
"You think this is a trap, then?" the Count asked. "I always think everything is a trap until proven otherwise," the Prince answered. "Which is why I'm still alive."
The way the narrator slices into Morgenstern's criticism of his wife's criticism about deleting the reunion scene.
The largest known fire swamp in the world is, of course, a day's drive from Perth. It's over twenty-five miles square and completely impenetrable. The Florin-Guilder Fire Swamp is barely a third of that size, and nobody knows whether it's impenetrable or not.
Buttercup is 18 when this story begins, when the Count and Countess visit and she realizes she loves Westley and he sails for America, etc. What with one thing and another, three years pass, so she's 21 now. Based on their conversation about nightmares heading into the Fire Swamp, Westley is somewhere between 21 and 23 years old.
Nobody had ever explained to the cook of the
Revenge the difference between table salt and cayenne pepper until Westley took the trouble, much to the Dread Pirate Roberts' relief.
Of course,
he wasn't really the Dread Pirate Roberts; no, his full name was Felix Raymond Ryan, who inherited the ship from Cummerbund, who inherited it from Clooney, who was first mate to the original Dread Pirate Roberts, who had been retired somewhere between fifteen and twenty years by then and was living like a king in Patagonia.
It took them seven hours to walk through and get out of the Fire Swamp, and that first hour was by far the easiest. However, those following six hours are irrelevant to this story, so they're passed over in a sentence. WHAT. A. DAY. Whew....
Chapter Six, The Festivities is pretty much about just that; going on for 44 (deleted) pages as Humperdinck grows more interested and mannerly towards Buttercup. Then in a handful of quick flashbacks Morgenstern gets back to the real story. Inigo hates the Thieves Quarter; everyone is so big and dangerous and muscular; and he looked like a skinny Spanish guy it might be fun to rob. We also miss a six-page soliloquy from Inigo about fleeting glory.
A full page of elaboration on a three-word sentence(those seem to be the most mysterious and powerful of all sentence structures, don't they?) Anyway, the three-word sentence is this:
Life isn't fair.
Buttercup's nightmares in Chapter Six are horrifying. Just....terrifying and awful.
Count Rugen has spent eleven years constructing The Machine, which appears to be an great conglomeration of soft-rimmed cups of infinitely varied sizes, together with some glue and a dial and a lever.
The average Florinese male lives to about 65, and the Count sucked away ten years of Westley's life during the week that Yellin was assembling his Brute Squad.
The narrator's retelling of the moment he learned that Westley died while Humperdinck lived. "I buried my head into the pillow and never cried like that again, not once to this day. I could almost feel my heart emptying onto my pillow. I guess the most amazing thing about crying is that when you're in it, you think it'll go on forever, but it never really lasts as long as you think. Not in terms of real time. In terms of real emotions, it's worse than you think, but not by the clock."
Max had married Valerie eighty years ago when they were both at Miracle School, she was a potion ladler, not a witch; but at that time every miracle man had to have a witch, so he called her one in public since she didn't mind, and she had learned enough of the witch trade over the years to pass herself off as authentic under pressure. In the old days, before Max was fired, the hut was where they tried experiments...and now it was their home. When Inigo and Fezzik bring Westley in, it's almost midnight, and Max was in the middle of reading a very-well-written article on eagle's claws. Valerie is described in the "Humperdinck! Humperdinck! Humperdinck!" speech as "an ancient tiny fury". (Isn't that just a wonderful description?)
The narrator clips about twenty pages and thirteen hours' worth of unnecessary action while Max and Valerie are concocting the miracle pill, as it was all too "Wizard of Oz"-like, apparently.
Switching swiftly back and forth minute-by-minute describing what action is taking place simultaneously all throughout the castle in Chapter Eight, The Honeymoon.
In the book, the wedding is performed by the Archdean(as opposed to the movie's Impressive Clergyman). His full amount of speaking lines: "Mawidge. Mawidge-" (Interrupted by Humperdinck) "Mawidge is a dweam wiffin a dweam...the dweam of wuv wapped wiffin the gweater dweam of everwasting west. Eternity is our fwiend, wemember that, and wuv wiw fowwow you fowever. (Interrupted again) I'm not there yet. (Interrupted by a now-furious Prince) Man and wife. You're man and wife."
This is the narrator's ending: "That's Morgenstern's ending, a "Lady or the Tiger" type of effect(this was before "The Lady or the Tiger", remember). Now, he was a satirist, so he left it that way, and my father, I guess I realized too late, was a romantic, so he ended it another way. Well, I'm an abridger, so I'm entitled to a couple ideas of my own. Did they make it? Was the pirate ship there? You can answer it for yourself, but for me, I say yes it was. And yes, they got away. And they got their strength back and had their share of adventures and more than their share of laughs. But that doesn't mean I think they had a happy ending, either. Because, in my opinion anyway, they squabbled a lot, and Buttercup lost her looks eventually, and one day Fezzik lost a fight and some hot-shot kid whipped Inigo with a sword and Westley was never able to really sleep sound because of Humperdinck maybe being on the trail. I'm not trying to make this a downer, understand. I really do believe that true love is the greatest thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpy-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all."
This is how I spend my weekends when snowbound by sleet, snow and negative wind chill. It was a fun project that took quite a while, recording all these little bits....I wonder if I could make an essay or speech based off it somehow? It worked for
fairy tales...
If you've never READ the book before...well, hopefully this didn't spoil it too much. But you really should, you'd enjoy it. But as LaVar Burton always used to say, "Hey, don't take
my word for it..."
