It Was a Stormy and Dark Night
It was a dark and windy night. You walked into the condo with two large bags full of groceries, just in time for us to do the evening exercises and then to sleep. I dreamed AI was scorning me for my inaccurate phrase, “a dark and windy night,” when I should have written dark and stormy night, popularized by Snoopy and his typewriter beginning on July 12, 1965, just after I graduated from high school, and before that by the translator—sorry, no time to get the name—of Les Trois Mousquetaires into English in 1846 and before that by Alexandre Dumas in 1844 in the stumbling French he was famous for, when he wrote “C’etait une nuit orageuse et sombre,” which the translator properly should have said, “It was a stormy and dark night”, although he probably thought Dumas was trying to avoid copyright court because he had heard across the channel about the phrase in the first line of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s English novel, Paul Clifford, published in 1830. I quieted AI by suggesting it wasn’t Dumas who cribbed, but his ghostwriter, Auguste Maquet. Apparently, AI doesn’t know anything about him, at least not yet. We’ve agreed to co-write a biography of Maquet entitled “The Trouble with Translation” and see where it gets us. Where did you come from, you lover of grocery stores and, oh yes, a gala luncheon before the Victorious Writers soiree, while I stayed home to get the flash fiction entitled? Not this one, another one. I’m going to be a character in the bio. I’ll be the enthusiast of The Three Musketeers, who, with Snoopy, was incorrectly sure that English translators had repeated Dumas’s weather report word for word. I remembered reading my copy talking about dark and stormy night. But when I took the book down from the shelf just a few days ago, I saw my copy in fact began Chapter 65 with stormy and dark. Word order disordered. Dumas vindicated or, perhaps, charged with plagiarism. I had no idea at the time about Bulwer-Lytton’s role in creating dark and stormy or the pages and pages Google Images has of the covers of Dumas’s book. It makes me wonder what happened to Bulwer-Lytton’s book covers. I’ll end with, “People still say ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’.” Have you heard of Mortimer J. Adler? He says, “Don’t judge a book until you’ve read it at least three times, or at least to the 65th chapter.” That’s where you’ll find Dumas’s stormy and dark night. And to think…all these years I trusted Snoopy and thought it was dark and stormy.
Theresa Moritz is a Toronto writer who has not yet published a book or a chapbook. Her stories and poems have appeared in magazines including Antigonish Review, Brick, Dalhousie Review, Dreamer’s Creative Writing, Capilano Review, Prism International, The Iowa Review, Queen’s Quarterly, The Prairie Journal, The Windsor Review, and others. Some of her stories have received a COPA (Canadian Online Publishing Awards) nomination, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and shortlisting for the 2022 Malahat Review novella contest.
