Great White – "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" (1989)

I got there in the nick of time

Before he got his hands across your state line

One of the characters in the novel I’m currently reading (Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety) is “trying to get through Jules Romains’ Men of Good Will.” 

Men of Good Will – its title is Les Hommes de bonne volonté in the original French – consists of no fewer than 27 individual volumes totaling 7892.  It’s what the French call a roman-fleuve, or “river novel.”  

I don’t know if it’s more accurate to describe it as 27 related novels with overlapping plots and recurring characters, or as one humongous novel published in 27 parts.  

Volume 27 of Men of Good Will

But I do know that it is extremely unlikely that I will ever read it.

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A roman-flueve that I do hope to read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (or À la recherche du temps perdu).

Proust’s masterpiece is a mere seven volumes and 3031 pages – child’s play compared to Men of Good Will.

Given my advanced age, I probably should get started on In Search of Lost Time sooner rather than later.  After all, it took me about seven weeks to get through David Foster Wallace’s1104-page monstrosity, Infinite Jest, earlier this year.

It took me a lot less time to get through the late Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show and its four sequels – one of several “river novels” that the prolific McMurtry wrote before dying in March of this year.  Infinite Jest is slow going compared to McMurtry’s books, and I have a feeling Proust is going to be even harder to digest than Wallace was.

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 In Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond, Larry McMurtry writes that the books he chose to read while recovering from a 1991 heart attack and the quadruple-bypass surgery he underwent shortly thereafter were In Search of Lost Time and the five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries.  

But shortly after finishing those books, he underwent a radical personality transformation:

From being a living person with a distinct personality I began to feel more or less like an outline of that person – and then even the outline began to fade . . . . I became, to myself, more and more like a ghost, or a shadow. . . . [T]he self that I had once been had lost its life. . . .

I didn’t feel like my old self at all, and had no idea where my old self had gone. . . . I felt spectral – the personality that had been mine for 55 years was simply no longer there.

Larry McMurtry at age 77

The most unsettling aspect of this loss of personality was that McMurtry became incapable of reading for pleasure.  Reading had been “the stablest of all pleasures” for McMurtry – he had read every day of his life since he was a boy. 

In the third year after his surgery, McMurtry slowly began to enjoy reading again – and he read many books in the two-plus decades he lived after that.  But the Proust and Woolf works remained McMurtry’s favorites.

I love Larry McMurtry’s writing, and have great respect for his judgment when it comes to other authors.  His high opinion of In Search of Lost Time is reason enough for me to get serious about diving into it.  

But despite his praise of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, I’m not so sure I’ll be reading them.  I’ve tried to read Woolf in the past, and it didn’t turn out well.  (Once bitten, twice shy.)

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“Once Bitten, Twice Shy” was written by ex-Mott the Hoople frontman Ian Hunter, and released in 1975 on his eponymous debut album.

I’m featuring Great White’s 1989 cover of the song because the music video for the Great White version is simply too fabulous for words.  For one thing, it has mass quantities of oh-so-1989 bleached-blonde hair that’s teased to within an inch of its life – and I’m just talking about the guys in the band.

No hair band ever deserved the moniker more than Great White:

Click here to read my original post featuring this record, which was published on April 12, 2015.  It’s a very impressive effort, if I do say so myself.

Click here to watch the “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” video.

And click below to buy the record from Amazon.  (Come on . . . you know you want it!)