Day 7
I mentioned social class and names the other day and there is another issue presenting itself. I don't like stories where I don't know how a character is making his or her living. If they are on state benefit or they are a media tycoon I need to know that, if only because I know that someone somewhere had to work to put food, clothing, shelter and warmth into my character's life. That means I have to give my characters a job (or specifically no job). The job will shape their days and, very often, their picture and apprehension of the world.
The job will also very likely reveal the level of education they have experienced, or at least the kind of education they have had, and both those things in turn will shape the language they use. This is felt most acutely when you use first-person narrative.
The problems start when you want a working-class person to exhibit a use of language and levels of perception that some people might regard as beyond their range. It's a great source of irritation to me that, predicting this lazy response, I have to make sure there is a line in there somewhere to suggest that my character is an autodidact or some such rationalisation of the fact that they might use or understand a couple of words of more than two syllables. A reviewer took me to task in the Times Literary Supplement for crediting my working class character with too high a command of her language. This was galling because the character was both visionary (Fern in The Limits Of Enchantment), poetic and self-educated. I know she was all these things cos I made her that way and I even put a line in to the effect that she had read a lot of books. The reviewer of course wanted her to mumble like a bumpkin, with a straw in her mouth, things like Oi, the red cow dint doi by accident tha' knows. And all that.
I've meet hundreds of people who could have gone to university - and who are certainly brighter than many who did - but who didn't because of their background and/or parental expectation. The electrician who came to deal with a fault in my house noticed all my books and instantly wanted a literary discussion, but if I put him in a novel the only thing I'm supposed to let him say, according to the
Anyway (which is what I say here when I want to change the subject) I want a farrier in my book. He has to be a farrier for reasons that will become clear. But I'll cuss like a sonofabitch if I have to say again that he's read lots of books.
Then I met a plumber at a party. He'd got a degree in graphic design but had re-trained as a plumber because he could make more money.
You beauty. I think I'll give my farrier a first in Politics Philosophy and Economics. And a straw in his mouth.
Today the slide-rule offers a jaunty 2259.
