She was a friend of Mary Gray Hughes, who in the mid 1970s sent me a rare edition of Olsen’s Tell Me A Riddle. She did not tell me it was a rare edition. This collection of only four stories has had an impact on contemporary English-language literature, not only in the U.S.A. Her work offered a different way of seeing for myself, finding ways to hijack third-person narrative from the voice of imperial authority.
Prose fiction was exciting at this level. Somebody was punching fuck out ye but ye went away and attended the cuts, had a shower, and came back with Daddy’s axe. Tillie’s work was a weapon. The true function of grammar. Make yer point. Writers need to learn these lessons. If you do not then you will not tell the story. You might tell other stories but not the one you could be telling. These bastards think they own the language. They already own the courts. They own everything. They want to block your stories, and they will, if you let them. So go and do your work properly. Ye will need every weapon.
In my short-story collections, many stories began life as part of a longer narrative I hoped would become a novel. The problem becomes formal, particularly in ‘I-voice’ narratives. When there is no continuity in the writing the perspective of the central character shifts. It starts to feel like a different person. Even a slight variation can be too much. Eventually I gave up, transformed and finalised these sections. They became short stories in their own right.
Shifting the narrative voice back and forward, from first person to third, from third back to first, helped the process. This can resolve dramatic problems writers experience in ‘I-voice’ yarns. I wanted the central character active in a present adventure, not recounting the one about a mysterious stranger he once chanced to meet aboard a cargo ship to Borneo. I tried and rejected the present tense; locked into one dimension, behaviourist, static, lacking mystery, deterministic, non-existential. Just fucking philosophically naïve, like science fiction or world-weary detectives trudging the mean streets humming a piece of Mozart, to a backdrop of the theme from Johnny Staccato: the mental masturbation of the bourgeoisie, that was how I felt about the ‘I-voice’ present tense. Avoid it at all costs. Go for richness, sophistication, infinite possibility: use the past tense properly, discover its subtlety. Learn yer fucking grammar! Do not be lazy! How does the verb operate in other language cultures?
There was a crucial factor that I liked about the shift from first to third party: you were left with a thought process; the central character had an inner life that seemed authentic. I just kept developing that third-party narrative, finding ways to embed the thought processes. This culminated in moves I made in The Busconductor Hines. There was something Joyce was doing, trying to be doing, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, Finnegan’s Wake, it was just there how something, and it was just like eh, it was just fucking obvious man just how I could not quite say.
Alasdair Gray and I were having a pint together many years back and had a laugh about that. He knew exactly what I was talking about but could not quite get to what it was, that thing that we were talking about, maybe it was not a thing, maybe it was just a verb. It was certainly not the ineffable man that was a certainty, the ineffable is a fucking noun. That was 30 years ago, unless I have invented it all, probably I have.
The other novel from the early period was A Chancer which could only have been written prior to The Busconductor Hines otherwise it would have been very difficult, if not impossible. Yet I had to complete The Busconductor Hines before I could complete A Chancer.
Even to this day I get wistful about that other one, the unfinished third novel. I should have fucking finished it. I was just beat. If I had had the time, the space, if I could have found a way in. It needed all of that. The first, last or central section would have been the title story from my Not Not While the Giro collection.
There was even a fourth novel, about a private detective with a fondness for Russian literature. This guy is a black belt at every martial art, yet adored by women for his sensitive touch. He is at home in every situation, able to cope with life on the street, degenerates of every profession, smiled at by prostitutes, respected by pimps and dealers, always at the ready to flummox university professors by quoting casually one of Pindar’s lesser-known odes.
I wrote about 30 or 40 pages during that 1971–3 period.
When the bills pile up I trot it out and stride purposefully about the room. This one will be a movie! Hey Marie! Marie! Then I trip over the cat, try to kick him and fall on my chin. Where am I? Where is the computer? This damn novel will enter manifold translations. It will set us free forever!
Then I glance over the manuscript for ten minutes, yawn and make another cup of tea. Nothing against worldly private eyes, except how fucking boring they are. Imagine having to write such shite. It doesn’t even warrant an exclamation mark. The ghostly appearance of one returned via Jeremiah Brown in You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free.
Mary Gray Hughes was not so keen on my story ‘Not Not While the Giro’. It was a bit too flashy, she thought. But I liked it. It was necessary, I had to work a way through the dimensions and that section was fundamental. If I had found the way through it, in it, and out it, then who knows. I should have explained to Mary Gray that originally it was a central section of an unfinished novel. But I always resisted explanations, as a rule of thumb. If you enter into one it usually means yer story has failed.