{"id":1217,"date":"2014-06-23T16:19:54","date_gmt":"2014-06-23T16:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2014\/06\/23\/the-sense-of-an-ending\/"},"modified":"2024-03-04T20:20:33","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T20:20:33","slug":"the-sense-of-an-ending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2014\/06\/23\/the-sense-of-an-ending\/","title":{"rendered":"The sense of an ending"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n Whether you spell them \u201cledes\u201d or \u201cleads,\u201d opening lines get a lot of attention. And why wouldn\u2019t they? Sitting at the keyboard, with all the tedious and sometimes annoying reporting done, a writer is spoiled for choice, a world of possibilities at his or her disposal. To be sure, that seemingly limitless choice can be daunting, but once you get down to it, the freedom is empowering and more often than not results in a fairly awesome opener.

Then you have to write the piece. With each word, sentence, and paragraph, the world of possibilities is constricted, until you find yourself with one more bit to write. Even if you haven\u2019t painted yourself into an uncomfortable corner, you have to steer between being too obvious and too enigmatic. At the same time you feel you need to leave readers with something that will move them and stick with them, preferably for a long time.

The time-honored strategy is closing on a quote, and even if you end up having to cannibalize one from earlier in the piece and patch the hole that\u2019s left, this is a graceful and efficient exit strategy.

\"kickergif\"<\/a>But there are quotes and there are quotes. Joseph Mitchell<\/strong>\u2019s 1940 New Yorker <\/i>profile of a bearded circus performer, \u201cLady Olga<\/a>,\u201d starts off as a typical feature on an offbeat topic, with many odd and interesting facts about carnival life, but gradually changes into something more profound, with a subtle but insistent suggestion that we consider the circumstances under discussion insofar as they relate to the human condition \u2014 in this case, what it means to be a \u201cfreak.\u201d By the time we get to Olga\u2019s stunning last quotation (with its cascade of one-syllable words leading to a killer kicker), we have been prepared to accept it literally and unconditionally:
\u201cIf the truth was known, we\u2019re all freaks together,\u201d she says.<\/blockquote>
Where Mitchell fades in and out over the course of a piece, his friend and New Yorker <\/i>colleague A.J. Liebling<\/strong> is a personable, voluble, and frequently boisterous companion from start to finish. One of his series of 1959 pieces about the colorful Louisiana politician Earl Long (collected in The Earl of Louisiana<\/i>) ends with a simile that not many people other than Liebling could pull off. The reporter spies Long at the racetrack; the pol is happy because it appears that his election scheming has paid off, and because he has made a killing on the ponies. Liebling writes (and you need to know that Jimmie Noe was one of Long\u2019s cronies, and Hasan and Husain were, in Wikipedia\u2019s words, \u201cthe last descendants of Prophet Muhammad living during his lifetime and remaining after his death\u201d):
As he stuffed the bundle of money in his pocket, another stout, jolly, ruddy man, also a winner, strolled up to his box and leaned over the edge, and they had a good laugh together. It was Jimmie Noe, and the two Companions of the Prophet looked as happy and well attuned as Hasan and Husain the Beatified, looking down from Paradise upon a world in which other Arabs sweated.<\/blockquote>
Mitchell and Liebling represent the two basic strategies: minimalist and maximalist. Those in the former camp usually close with a brief quote or a terse but telling detail or two, the latter with something lyrical. To pull that off, you need the courage of your conviction, plus chops.

W.C. Heinz<\/strong> had both. One of his most famous pieces was a 960-word column that appeared in the New York Sun<\/i> in 1949. It was about, in the words of the title, \u201cDeath of a Racehorse<\/a>\u201d \u2014 the horse being Air Lift, who breaks his leg in the course of the sixth race at Jamaica. Heinz\u2019s meticulous tick-tock shows us what happens after that, including, unflinchingly and respectfully, the killing of the horse. Only in the final sentence does he turn up the rhetorical heat, with Biblical cadences, the pathetic fallacy<\/a>, and a searing final image:
Then the heavens opened, the rain pouring down, the lightning flashing, and they rushed for the cover of the stables, leaving alone on his side near the pile of bricks, the rain running off his hide, dead an hour and a quarter after his first start, Air Lift, son of Bold Venture, full brother of Assault.<\/blockquote>
A lot of good endings partake of what comedians refer to as a \u201ccallback\u201d\u2014an unexpected reference to a previous joke. In his 1957 New Yorker <\/i>article about Marlon Brando, \u201cThe Duke in His Domain<\/a>,\u201d Truman Capote<\/strong> basically invented the modern celebrity profile \u2014 in particular the way the writer appears as \u201cI\u201d and the piece is structured around his encounter (often in a hotel room, as in \u201cDuke\u201d) with the celeb. But Capote\u2019s leisurely pace and penchant for metaphor is anything but 21st century.

Somewhere in the middle of the piece, Brando describes his sudden fame after appearing in A Streetcar Named Desire<\/i>: \u201cIt was like I\u2019d been asleep, and I woke up here sitting on a pile of candy.\u201d At the end of a long, rambling interview\/conversation, Capote finds himself wandering the streets of Tokyo at two in the morning, trying to find his way home. Finally he sees a familiar sight: \u201cSixty feet tall, with a head as huge as the greatest Buddha\u2019s, there he was, in comic-paper colors, on a sign above a theatre that advertised \u2018The Teahouse of the August Moon\u2019 [a Brando movie]. Rather Buddhalike, too, was his pose, for he was depicted in a squatting position, a serene smile on a face that glistened in the rain and the light of a street lamp.\u201d And then the callback:
\u201cA deity, yes; but, more than that, really, just a young man sitting on a pile of candy.\u201d<\/blockquote>
Joan Didion<\/strong>\u2019s \u201cSome Dreamers of the Golden Dream<\/a>,\u201d which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post<\/i> in 1966, is an extremely badass piece of writing, what with its bow to the \u201chot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the Eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves,\u201d its disapproving sighting of The Forty Winks Motel, and its overall stern and unforgivingly ironic moral gaze. Didion tells a story straight out of Raymond Chandler or James M. Cain, of a housewife who embarks on an affair with a lawyer named Arthwell Hayton and ultimately is convicted of the murder of her husband; the implication is that she is also responsible for the death under mysterious circumstances of Hayton\u2019s wife. Didion\u2019s closing lines suggest (as does much of the article) a narrative about the principals who refused to talk to her, and the killer details she nonetheless unearthed. Her digging earns her the barefaced symbolism of the stunning kicker, which otherwise might have been a bit over the top:
Some people around San Bernardino say that Arthwell Hayton suffered; others say that he did not suffer at all. Perhaps he did not, for time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew. In any case, on October 17, 1965, Arthwell Hayton married again, married his children\u2019s pretty governess, Wenche Berg, at a service in the Chapel of the Roses at a retirement village near Riverside. Later the newlyweds were feted at a reception for seventy-five in the dining room of Rose Garden Village. The bridegroom was in black tie, with a white carnation in his buttonhole. The bride wore a long white peau de soie<\/i> dress and carried a shower bouquet of sweetheart roses with stephanotis streamers. A coronet of seed pearls held her illusion veil.<\/blockquote>
Richard Ben Cramer<\/strong> was a digger too, and that plus his almost supernal charm got him to a great many restricted places, including intimate moments with presidential candidates recorded in his book What It Takes.<\/i> True to form, by the end of his 1986 Esquire <\/i>piece \u201cWhat Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?<\/a>,\u201d Cramer is actually sitting around the kitchen table with the former ballplayer, whose orneriness is on a par with and perhaps exceeds his ability to hit a fastball. Even in calmer moments, he bellows and roars IN CAPITAL LETTERS. The meal over, Williams embarks on a train of thought that leads him to a meltdown of indiscriminate rage. \u201cI feel I should leave the room,\u201d Cramer writes, \u201cbut too late.\u201d Eventually, the ballplayer\u2019s companion, Louise, talks him down and his attention returns to the reporter:
… he tries to sneer through his grin: \u201cWHEN ARE YOU LEAVING? HUH?

\u201c…JESUS. YOU’RE LIKE THE GODDAMN RUSSIAN SECRET POLICE!

\u201c…OKAY, BYE! YEAH, SURE, GOODBYE!\u201d<\/blockquote>
Williams walks Cramer out to the driveway and the reporter starts to drive away. In his kicker he avails himself of a puppy. Normally this would be slightly cheesy, but, similar to the Didion, the unflinching view of Williams\u2019 demons earns him, and Cramer, a Kodachrome moment:
Ted is bent at his belly, grabbing their new dalmatian puppy, tickling it with his big hands while the dog rolls and paws the air. And as I ease the car into gear, I hear Ted’s voice behind, cooing, very quiet now: “Do I love this little dog, huh?….Yes, this little shittin’ dog….Yes, yes I love you….Yes, I do.”<\/blockquote>
\u201cTennis, trigonometry, tornadoes: A Midwestern boyhood<\/a>,\u201d by David Foster Wallace<\/strong><\/a>, is a meditation about how \u201cBetween the ages of twelve and fifteen I was a near-great junior tennis player,\u201d and how both geometry and the wind of Wallace\u2019s native Illinois pertained to his life in the sport. Wallace was a master of changing speeds, and I don\u2019t mean on the tennis court. The most noticeable thing was the way he\u2019d go in an instant from highfalutin diction and metaphors to the most demotic shortcuts and slang; but he was also constantly wrong-footing the reader in lots of ways, including alternating short sentences and paragraphs with really long ones.

He closes this essay with a 1,136-word graf, about the time when he and his longtime practice partner and foe, Gil Antitoi, had their hitting session interrupted by a tornado. The penultimate sentence is 299 words its own self:
This all happened very fast but in serial progression: field, trees, swings, grass, then the feel like the lift of the world’s biggest mitt, the nets suddenly and sexually up and out straight, and I seem to remember whacking a ball out of my hand at Antitoi to watch its radical west-east curve, and for some reason trying to run after this ball I’d just hit, but I couldn’t have tried to run after a ball I had hit, but I remember the heavy gentle lift at my thighs and the ball curving back closer and my passing the ball and beating the ball in flight over the horizontal net, my feet not once touching the ground over fifty-odd feet, a cartoon, and then there was chaff and crud in the air all over and both Antitoi and I either flew or were blown pinwheeling for I swear it must have been fifty feet to the fence one court over, the easternmost fence, we hit the fence so hard we knocked it halfway down, and it stuck at degrees \u2014 Antitoi detached a retina and had to wear those funky Jabbar retina goggles for the rest of the summer, and the fence had two body-shaped indentations like in cartoons where the guy’s face makes a cast in the skillet that hit him, two catcher’s masks of fence, we both got deep quadrangular lines impressed on our faces, torsos, legs’ fronts, from the fence, my sister said we looked like waffles, but neither of us got badly hurt, and no homes got whacked \u2014 either the thing just ascended again for no reason right after, they do that, obey no rule, follow no line, hop up and down at something that might as well be will, or else it wasn’t a real one.<\/blockquote>
Wallace\u2019s final sentence would have worked anyway, but by making the genius move of affixing it to the end of that mammoth sentence, rather than doing the expected thing of giving it a new paragraph, he makes your heart skip a beat:
Antitoi’s tennis continued to improve after that, but mine didn’t.<\/blockquote>
Here\u2019s the thing. An opening line can be tricky or gimmicky or off-the-wall, or pretty much anything. Like I said, limitless possibilities. All you have to do is sort of follow where it goes, track it down, and lead it back to the narrative you want to tell. But a great ending isn\u2019t about eccentricity or quirkiness or fancy. It can be plain as Wallace\u2019s closer, as long as it follows from and is earned by what came before.

John Jeremiah Sullivan<\/strong><\/a> is something of a next-generation David Foster Wallace: The writing of both shares that loosey-goosey go-anywhere quality, a shrewd deployment of the first person, and a Federeresque command of many different sorts of moves. \u201cUpon This Rock<\/a>,\u201d Sullivan\u2019s 2004 GQ <\/i>piece about a Christian-rock festival called Creation, covers a lot of ground (some of it muddy) in its 11,000 words, and contains some estimable sentences before the end, including: