Stormy

  

Photograph: The Rossetti family at home in Chelsea, London, taken by Lewis Carroll on the 7^th October, 1863. Left to right: Dante Gabriel, Christina, Frances Polidori (their mother), and William Michael. Photograph held at the V&A.

 It was a dark and stormy night, a month’s rain in 24 hours, not quite a once-in-one-hundred-year event, but relief for the garden and the overwarmed brains of heatwave survivors. “It was a dark and stormy night,” wrote 12-year-old Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1840), “in the month of December when a figure closely wrapped in the sable folds of his cloak, and mounted on a jaded steed, was seen hurrying across a bleak common towards a stately castle in the distance, whose lofty towers and time-worn battlements frowned over the wide expanse beneath.” It was a dark and stormy night is a perfectly marvellous and effective opening to a story, in truth. It was a dark and stormy night is not a sinning but a winning formula. It was a dark and Stormy night for the former president when the penny dropped that accumulating hush money and legal fees made his transaction with the adult film star the costliest transaction that day. It was a dark and stormy night, the ideal night to open a bright fresh document and begin your entry on that square of light for the worst opening sentence to a novel. It was a dark and stormy night, as meteoric meteorologist Jane Bunn would say, more eloquently than you or I. “It was a dark and stormy night,” wrote Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1830), not anticipating that within a decade Dante Gabriel Rossetti would be lifting the line to open his own romantic, some say melodramatic, story. It was a dark and stormy night inside Vincent Van Gogh’s head, sorting thunder from lightning trees, swirling black from too brief jagged cerulean. It was a dark and stormy night across the Bellarine Peninsula, the Geelong road awash, power failures in Werribee and other parts, awesome as a Sir David Attenborough docuseries only with no comforting voiceovers and very wet. It was a dark and stormy night or, as Alexandre Dumas would say “C’était une nuit orageuse et sombre, de gros nuages couraient au ciel, voilant la clarté des étoiles; la lune ne devait se lever qu’à minuit” (1844), doubtless setting the scene for the next entrance of dashing D’Artagnan. It was a dark and story night for fiction writers in every language, seated beneath the lamplight wondering which way the plot was going to go next, does it work or is it a dark and stormy mess. It was a dark and stormy night, a phrase used by Washington Irving in 1809, the origin of which is it seems obscure, lost in some dark and stormy night of literature. It was a dark and stormy night when Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton found himself more sinned against than sinning, sitting in his sitting room a sitting duck, out of luck, with zero stars out of five. It was a dark and stormy night, pouring, when Snoopy’s typewriter keys jammed from a day’s solid pawing (1971), ending his flow just as he was nearing The End.