On not being Charlotte Brontë

The author and literary critic Erin Kelly has something to say about the use of the system of English tenses in fiction. Writing about submissions from debutante writers, she singles out for particular censure passages like:

I knelt at the foot of his grave: I’m crying so hard right now. The tears fell thick and fast. They splash on the newly-dug earth.

Even writing about this, says Kelly, is “making my eyes itch.”  It’s not that writing in more than one tense is forbidden; simply that it has to be done “clearly and purposefully.”  My difficulty is that I’m not altogether sure what she means by that. Indeed, the more you think about it, the less obvious things appear.
Let me play devil’s advocate a while. You remember what I A Richards did in  Practical Criticism? Students (Cambridge University students of English Literature, no less) were given poems to analyse without knowing the author. The degree to which “author attribution” assisted the fledgling critic was embarrassing. Look at that passage again. What if I tell you Kelly was pulling your leg and that the three sentences can be found in F Scott Fiztgerald’s Tender is the Night. In fact they are a quotation – direct speech. What if I tell you that Zelda’s deranged ramblings quoted here actually comprise a sophisticated literary joke?  (Fitzgerald borrowed money from his literary agent to keep himself while writing the book). Before you read on, please, go back – right now - and read the three sentences. What do you think of them now? Do your eyes itch? My guess is, perhaps less. Perhaps there was merit in it after all.

I hasten to confess I invented this story about Scott Fitzgerald. Not to frustrate you, but to point to a relatively insoluble problem. If you have been following these essays on writing, you know by now that I claim reading is not a simple matter of communication. It is not a case of encoding my thoughts and handing them to you for decoding: it is something far more mysterious. Indeed, as my juvenile prank illustrates, what you make of a piece of writing depends on what you know and believe about the author - and that includes what you believe about the writer’s intentions. In this context, assessing the merits of debutante writers becomes a pretty mournful task. Equally, teaching people to “write” may well prove to be a mug’s game. We’ll see. Meanwhile, let’s look at the insoluble problem.

Since you were thinking about Keats (no? you certainly should have been!), I’ll let him illustrate the problem. In his sonnet, On first looking into Chapman’s Homer, you find the famous lines:

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Arthur Ransome was very fond of this quotation. It is the opening epigraph in Swallows and Amazons; he even has Titty name the children’s lookout “Darien.” Alfred, Lord Tennyson was less impressed, adding a lofty footnote when editing the poem for Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury – “History requires here Balboa.” Well, what are we to make of this?

This poem was written for Charles Clarke, a friend of Keats. The two of them had sat up half the night drinking claret and quoting extracts from Chapman to each other. The sonnet was left on the table for Clarke to find when he woke up. He liked it, but was only the first to point out that it was, in fact, Vasco de Balboa, not Cortez, who discovered the Pacific. Keats made several changes to the poem (including the addition of the wonderfully appropriate “eagle eyes”). But note well: he didn’t change Cortez. Which brings us to the insoluble dilemma.

Keats felt under no obligation to correct anything, because the “error” was subtle and deliberate. Recall what this poem is about – Chapman’s Homer was not Homer’s Homer. It was not the original Greek - Keats could not read Greek and he regretted the fact. As the Critic Andrew McInnes points out, he came to Homer too late, as it were: somebody had got there before. And that is why we have Cortez, the late-comer. In other words, we should have trusted Keats and paid less attention to Tennyson’s point-scoring. The “error” was deliberate, greatly enriching the poem. We would have been wise to assume Keats knew exactly what he was up to. We know that now. Alas, the author of the sentences that so got up Erin Kelly’s nose came to us unattended by any equivalent reputation. Poor devil.

Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The Death of the Heart opens with the famous scene on the frosty bridge in Regent’s Park, Anna Quayne telling her novelist friend St Quentin that she has stumbled on young Portia’s diary and could not resist reading it. She blurts out:

As I read I thought, either this girl or I are mad...
 
Does that makes your eyes itch? What are we to make of this awful lapse? Should we reach for the red pencil? Bowen’s prose is complicated. Indeed, she is almost as fond of the subordinate clause as Proust. Sometimes you need to keep count of commas, simply to stay afloat. Like it or not, style is certainly Bowen’s forte, making the temptation to literary schadenfreude over this error almost irresistible. But resist we must: without doubt Elizabeth Bowen intended what she wrote. We must trust Ms Bowen, must believe she knew what she was doing and accept she is inviting us to do some work. If we take the character of Anna seriously we see that her error perfectly conveys her overwrought state of mind. She remains, nonetheless, a sophisticated woman and you can almost see St Quentin’s eyebrows rising along with her exasperated voice. Compared to Bowen we know nothing of the author of that graveside muddle up there. What was she trying to do? Shall we give her the benefit of the doubt and accept she might have been trying to do something? Like hell we will!
 
Which brings me back to mixed tenses. In the book How Novels Work John Mullen discusses a passage in John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener, a passage where past and present tenses become tangled:
 
He reached the middle of the room and stopped, arrested by the power of memory. “I thought the best thing I could do was call by,” he begins sternly. Woodrow can't see the smile because she is backlit. But he can hear it in her voice.
 
Well, are your eyes itching? Mullen says they shouldn’t itch at all because what Le Carré is doing is quite deliberate, perfectly controlled, and cleverly counterintuitive. In this novel it is the past tense that spells out the immediate action – what is going on. It does this in the way the French use the passé composé. In contrast, the present tense is used to describe what is going on in memory (which is, by definition, in the past). Go back. Can you make those graveside tears splash to the same effect? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The question is idle in any case because we are not even tempted to try. The point is, we know we’re in safe hands with Le Carré. We know nothing at all of the hands of our anonymous debutante. Poor devil.
 
Le Carré did not invent this literary sleight of hand. I’m not sure who did, but it was widely used in the nineteenth century - the golden age of the novel – perhaps most famously by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre. You will recall that novel was written in the first person: as Jane’s record of events recounted some considerable time afterwards. The first person narrative style is back in fashion and has obvious advantages for writers wishing to appear confessional and courageous. Unfortunately, it brings with it considerable disadvantages for the reader. For example, however great the peril the narrator faces, the reader knows she must have survived, because here she is telling us the tale – all rather deflating. Everything Jane Eyre narrates must have already happened: you know about it because she’s telling us and to do this she is obliged to use the past tense. The present tense in a first-person narrative should make your eyes itch. But does it?
 
Consider this:
 
I walked a while on the pavement; but a subtle, well-known scent - that of a cigar - stole from some window ... this new scent is neither of shrub nor flower: it is - I know it well - it is Mr Rochester's cigar. I look round and listen.
 
Jane moves from telling us directly about the scent - just about getting away with that first is - to produce what is, on any account, a gross conflict of tenses. We know perfectly well she can’t say know, she should say knew; and look doesn’t work either, it should have been looked. Such a startling mixture of tenses simply shouldn’t be there. And yet, and yet, it would be a brave tense monitor who called the passage to task because it achieves something miraculous. For a few seconds we stop listening and actually become Jane Eyre, sharing the experience of a woman who does not yet quite realise that she is falling in love.
 
Or take this passage: Jane arriving at Thornfield for the first time:
 
I asked a waiter if anyone had been to inquire after a Miss Eyre, I was answered in the negative: so I had no resource but to request to be shown into a private room: and here I am waiting, while all sorts of doubts and fears are troubling my thoughts.
 
Red pencil anyone? Would you really prefer, And there I was waiting, while all sorts of doubts and fears were troubling my thoughts? I thought not.
 
To come to the point, and to borrow Mullen’s splendid phrase, we trust the “audaciously disobedient” Charlotte Brontë because we know it is she. We know her work. We have long since concluded she knows what she is doing. Long since conceded her the right to commit whatever “errors” she pleases.
 
Let me end by grasping the other end of this stick. My novel, A Time to Tell Lies opens with a description of Justine asking a boy named Rémy to deliver a message. Later in the novel, and unknown to Justine, bad things are going happen to someone who might possibly have been Rémy. Still later, someone reminds Justine of her “runner boy.” She only half remembers him and gets his name wrong, calling him René.
 
Here’s the bit of dialogue I wrote:
 
 “I’ll tell you what came out of the meeting this morning. Not much really. One thing though: your runner boy was arrested. Picked up on the Friday night.”
“Who told you that?”
“Who? Why d’you ask? I don’t remember.”
“Poor little René.”
 
Could I get away with that?
 
And the answer is no, I could not. Because - not being Ms Brontë - I must confront the insoluble problem. Enter the first editor to read the draft; enter the first instance of, “You’ve got the name wrong here.” Pointless to reply, “No, Justine got the name wrong, not me.” It was easily fixed, of course – the crucial sentence now reads:
 
René? I think that was his name. Poor little René.  
 
But how I wished I need not have written that.