LETTERS: 1994: 60
60.
September 3,
1994
Dear Friend R.K. Singh,
I’m calling for
help. After completing Book I of
“WICKED…and Spotless as the Lamb,” I learn from my friend Arthur Efron (who
agreed to read the whole manuscript) that after about 20 of the 40 chapters, my
device of using first tense for immediacy of impression becomes dreamy and
cloudy as if I have wandered into a sort of temporal void. Something to do with the reader’s feeing he’s
being coerced into accepting the fiction that the viewpoint of the author and
the viewpoint of the younger person involved in the experience are one and the
same whereas certain giveaways in the incidents proclaim that the overview of
the author cannot successfully be ruled out.
This may be why the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly at a recent
meeting of League of Vermont Writers advised writers to steer clear of present
tense for autobiography. The Atlantic,
he said, no longer reads such a manuscript, but stuffs it into the enclosed
SASE with a printed rejection. However,
Arthur also said that Dostoyevsky’s original Russian text of Crime and
Punishment shifts back and forth from past to present.
This reminded me that
in writing my first chapter, in my first draft of the first incident I began
with past tense in the first sentence and in the second shifted to present, as
if trying to combine omniscient past and relative present: “I was sitting in the kitchen in Grampa
Briggs’slap, being rocked in his rocker.
Uncle Forrest is a big boy. He goes to the woodshed. He is rummaging a
barrel. He brought me back an animal cracker. Uncle Forrest says, ‘Eat.’…” I
thought I had to change it all into either past or present to create the
illusion of moving through a unified world.
At the same time, I
have long thought content and form ought to reflect each other, so why
not—in a book with a dense texture of
ambiguity in political and social climate—try to reflect such density by using
a shifting tense, creating the illusion of the past, yet shifting to the
present when the interior monologue becomes urgent?
I enclose one chapter
of my book, where the child is being confronted with a complex value system in
his social life, learn some values he will have to unlearn, and being so
disturbed by this that in later life he will not be able to erase the memory of
these experiences but carry them with him through life.
If you can spare the
time, will you read this excerpt, and jot down your reaction whether or not the
combination of past tense and present tense works for you. In other words, if I hadn’t drawn your
attention to it, would you be able to read this chapter almost without noticing
the shift in tense?
I am writing a sort of
family saga, supposedly reflecting attitudes toward social behavior that will
build the child’s character while some times disturbing him enough for him to
have to abandon them in later life.
Yours
in deep friendship,
Lyle
Glazier
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