One mystery solved

After a series of longish posts for the past few weeks, today I'm merely offering a short update about a matter I blogged on several months ago.  As you know if you read my post of January 17, and many people did, last year an agent with whom I worked closely and well on my Van Gogh novel stopped communicating with me at a crucial point in our relationship.  I had sent him what I thought would be the make or break version of Days on Fire.  I thought I would subsequently receive the final thumbs up or thumbs down.   Instead I received nothing, no word at all, for an embarrassing stretch of months.  Even after several gentle coaxes from me via email, the agent did not reply.  Finally, I could only assume he decided not to represent the book. My only question was why he refused to tell me that.

A couple weeks ago, a full year after I mailed him the last revision of the novel, what surprise do I receive in my email box but a message from the agent in question.  He apologized profusely for not keeping in touch.  He explained that his health had taken a turn for the worse (he is a decidedly older gentleman); also, more problematically, in February a longtime, crucial assistant of his passed away.   Due to that assistant's passing, he inherited a great deal of unexpected work.  He has decided, he said, that given the state of his health and the burdens he has inherited, that he cannot take on any more new clients.  For what it's worth, he seemed genuinely sorry that he could not represent Days on Fire, and I might as well take him at face value for that sentiment.  At least I did receive a final communication, to which I replied to thank him for his efforts and wish him good health.  I'm sure that everything he said in the email is true, but even so I have to wonder why I heard nothing between last June and February, when his office life became so much sadder and more complicated.    That part of the conundrum I'll probably never get an answer to, but at least the greater mystery has been dispelled.

Who is the real university?

When I wrote a two-part post a couple weeks ago, I thought that would be the last of my ranting for a while, at least on the subject of the business of college professorship.  But something happened the other day at my university that has me thinking, about both new issues and old.  Please pardon one more lengthy post on the subject of writers and other teachers who work in higher education.  The impetus for this post is the sudden resignation last Friday of a high ranking administrator at the University of Central Arkansas, the college where I work.  In a curt, out-of-the-blue email, the president of UCA notified the whole campus of this man's resignation and thanked him for his service.  As you might expect, faculty were curious and even buzzing.  Speculation began as to why the man would resign so suddenly.  We figured we would hear something soon as to the why, if not from the administration then from one a few prominent local reporters who have been dogging UCA for many months, covering every facet of its business (especially the unseemly kind).  Three days later, however, no explanaton has been released.   Newspaper articles appeared Saturday, but these offered no reason for the resignation or much information of any kind.  Then Sunday, the day when papers are their largest and fullest, no articles on the subject appeared at all.  Meanwhile, one can gather from commentary on the web sites affiliated with these newspapers that nobody in the know is talking--not the Board of Trustees, not the administration, not the man who resigned.

The only item of interest that was reported in Saturday's articles was that another administrator apparently emailed the university president to say that she feels sorry not just for the man who resigned but "for all of us."  All of us?  All of whom?  The entire university?  Or the tight coterie of administrators bunkered down in Wingo Hall?  And if there's reason to be sorry for "all of us" does this mean some new, previously unknown economic calamity is about to befall UCA, which has suffered through two economic calamities already due to lies, mismanagement, and--yes--even illegal behavior by recent former presidents?  Maybe not, but if so, doesn't the administration owe an explanation to its employees, who are always the ones to bear the cost of any economic downfall?  (Both mismanaging former presidents--even the one who committed the crime--received truly enormous buyouts and were sent merrily on their way, while faculty and staff were left to pick up the pieces and endure the financial consequences.)  And if the current resignation of this  high-ranking official has nothing whatsoever to do with finances, nothing that is going to affect the working lives of the hundreds of faculty and staff at UCA, shouldn't the administration say that at least, to put to rest useless but inevitable speculation?

Here's the nagging question behind my post today, and the real reason why I'm bothered by the lack of information forthcoming: Who and what, after all, is the real university?   Common sense should tell anyone that the thousands of students who pass through a university every year--and the hundreds of faculty who undertake the labor of teaching those students and advising those students and making sure all the paperwork is filled out so that they can finally graduate--and the scores of staff who assist these students and faculty in thousands of countless and crucial practical matters--are the real university.  It is for the sake of such people, to enable them to do their work better, that a university administration exists at all.  And yet increasingly I sense at UCA a deep, fundamental division of upper administration from faculty, students, and staff.  Increasingly, I sense an attitude from the administration that suggests it sees itself as the real university while everyone else on campus is meaningless, even contemptible.  Increasingly, I see a lack of concern for faculty needs, for faculty governance, for faculty opinions.  This despite the fact that our current president is supposed to represent a change of direction for UCA, a change of both style and substance from the homewreckers of recent memory.  I'm still waiting for proof of this new direction.

Two examples and then I'm done.  And please feel free--anyone who reads this--to tell me if similar conditions, or very different ones, exist at your schools.  If your conditions are different, please explain why.   First example: For nearly two years I served on a university task force assigned to develop a fair, clear, and consistent maternity leave policy for faculty across campus.  There was no such policy before and there still is none.  There are no standard practices from department to department, so the fate of any one person's situation depends on the relative generosity of one's chair and dean, and the relative collegiality of one's colleagues (who may be asked to cover another's classes without any additional pay).   In other words, one can't really count on anything.  Some faculty have received humane and sensible maternity leave; others have gotten none.  Others have gotten worse than none; they've actually been reprimanded for being pregnant.  It's an aburd situation, a lawsuit waiting to happen.  Well, after two years, and many many meetings, the task force came up with a very good, clear policy.  One that would apply across the board, would not exploit fellow faculty, and would not by any means bankrupt the university.   Everyone who worked on the task force--even the administrator who acted as our chair--was very excited about the proposal, even proud of it.  We couldn't wait to see it enacted.  So what happened to it?  As soon as the proposal hit the first administrative level it was rejected outright.  We like the current system better, was the word that came back; it will cost less money.  (Yes, and it will abuse many people, break many hearts, and leave the universty naked before a lawsuit.)  Supposedly, the task force was going to review our proposal in light of administrative complaints, but we were never called together as a body again.  The policy proposal was effectively dead in the water.  Two years of work--conscientious, painstaking work--was utterly wasted.  Because of one meeting of administrators.

Second example: As I mentioned in my earlier rant, faculty at UCA have received no pay adjustment for six out of the last seven years.  Moreover, there has been no indication that we should expect any pay adjustments for the foreseeable future.  Worse, there has not been the slightest indication from the administration that this represents a deep and abiding problem, one that needs to be resolved.   In my opinion, in any profession, pay adjustments for productive employees, even if that only means cost-of-living-adjustments (COLAs), should be regular and expected.  Rewarding employees is a normal and vital aspect of keeping any business running smoothly.  Thus a year in which employees receive no pay adjustment should be considered an aberration and an embarrassment, a situation for which employees are owed an apology and promises to do better by them in the future.  Again, this strikes me as common sense management: show the people who work for you that you care about them; you care about their economic conditions and you care about their morale.  At UCA, the exact reverse situation is in place.  A year in which faculty and staff receive COLAs is seen by the administration as an aberrant one; so if they actually deign to bestow upon us that lousy one or two percent increase we are supposed to bestow upon them slobbering gratitude.  And we certainly should not expect any additional COLAs anytime soon.  Years in which there is no COLA?  Well, that's just business as usual, and why should we ever expect one anyway?  Right now, there is no force driving the administration to grant COLAs to faculty and staff.  There is no meaningful pressure on them to do so, and no negative consequences if they don't.  Something like this requires presidential leadership, presidential involvement, presidential commitment.  None has been forthcoming.  UCA administrators en masse do not appear to be motivated by any sense of obligation toward or respect for faculty and staff, nor by any desire to reward and to hold on to hard-working employees.  If that were the case UCA faculty and staff would receive COLAs every year.  (I'm not even talking raises here.  That's pie in the sky; an impossible dream.) The administration's attitude appears to be: If we don't have to give faculty a pay adjustment, why should we?  We can spend that money on our own projects.  

Well, in a non-union environment, and an environment in which administrators increasingly see themselves as the real university and everyone else as considerably less real, this situation will only continue year after year after year after year, through economic good times as well as bad.   After all, only in an environment in which faculty and staff--and even students too--are considered less real than upper administration would a university feel that it didn't owe the campus an explanation for why a high-ranking official resigned.  It's all more of the same from UCA administrators: circling the wagons, insisting on secrecy, evoking executive privilege, viewing themselves as a world apart.  As if that's worked in the past.  Ironically, what I've seen and what I know from my years in higher education is this: university presidents and officials come and go with shocking rapidity; while they're here they act like they are the thing, but all they do is award themselves gigantic salaries, initiate their own pet initiatives, ignore faculty cautions, and make a royal mess.  If you're lucky, they're chased off soon.  At best they do no damage.  Meanwhile, faculty, staff, and students endure: taking and teaching classes, imparting and improving knowledge, nuturing ideas and ambition, developing talents, caring for tender souls, shaping and changing lives.  Doing the real work of the university.

The violent imagination of Tom Franklin

It would be hard to find a more easygoing guy than Tom Franklin, who I had the pleasure to meet when he spoke at my campus this spring.  Beneath the care free, self-effacing, regular guy facade, however, is an extremely fertile, even lurid imagination for crime.  Violent crimes--that is, murders--feature prominently in all four of his major works: the novella Poachers (2000) and his novels Hell at the Breech (2003), Smonk (2007), and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (2010).  These are no mere crime fictions, mind you, but carefully crafted, literary books.  It's hard to think of a contemporary author who I read with more pleasure.

In Hell at the Breech, Franklin transports his violent imagination to the late 1890s to depict the rise and fall of an Alabama crime gang that calls itself "Hell-at-the-Breech."  As is often the case with historical novels, the starting point for the novel is factual.  An actual gang of this name murdered and robbed with near impunity for over a year in Clarke County, Alabama in the late nineteenth century.  But as Franklin explains in a short note preceding the start of the novel, he did not feel tied to the historical record when it came to plotting his novel, all the characters of which are inventions of his own imagination.  A stickler might call the book an alternative history, or even a historical fantasy, but I prefer to think of it as a vividly conceived and effectively rendered fiction set in an earlier time period.  We've had this discussion before in this space: how much freedom should a historical novelist allow himself when writing about true events and real people?  Different novelists would answer this question differently, and finally there's no one perfectly successful equation.  It's kind of like asking for a definition of "creative nonfiction."  (Well, maybe that one's even harder.)  So it is refreshing to see Franklin dismiss the problem altogether by saying, in essence, "No matter what the historical record says, this is my story and my characters."  Bravo, Tom.   Anyone looking for purely objective and established data on any historical events--be that Hell-at-the-Breech's rampages, the Irish campaigns of Elizabeth II, or anything in between--should know to turn to history books not novels.  One should turn to historical novels because one enjoys entering an earlier time period by means of a story.  And if you do enjoy such stories, don't deny the storyteller his most powerful tool: imaginative liberty.

That said, Franklin recreates both the period and the place expertly in Hell at the Breech.  Franklin is Alabama born and bred; and no other writer I know is as centered in the landscape and temperature and languid rhythms and social currents of his home state than Tom Franklin.  A knowledge so sure it extends backwards to the 1890s as easily as if he just time traveled from there.  The props and the setting and the weaponry (always important in a Tom Franklin novel) are note perfect.  His characters, meanwhile--those inventions of his imagination--are difficult, unnerving, and remarkable, fundamentally a challenge.  None of them, even the seemingly virtuous, the ones with whom our sympathies reside, finally act with a great deal of virtue.  Each and every one of them exhibits wide glaring holes of selfishness and simple weakness that engender the violent events depicted and then make them worse.   Franklin rotates the book's point-of-view so that you are not merely reading along with the "good guys."  That would be too easy as well as dishonest.  Indeed, what becomes uncomfortably clear is that the "bad guys," while certainly unlikeable and even monstrous, are not without righteous cause--at least from their point-of-view--and some of the "good guys" (even the one the reader has the least reason to suspect) turn out to be compicit with the evil of the muders.  In the end the "good guys" end up killing as much as anybody else in this novel.  The knotted social situation of haves and have-nots, years of pent-up social seething, and the accumulation of a myriad petty jelousies, releases itself in a war that can come to no good end, even if it does come to an end.  Trust me, Franklin knows how to tell a story, and this is one story you'll want to plow through to find out just what is that end, unsightly though it may be.  Then you'll wish the book wasn't over.

                                                           *     *     *


A morning lagniappe: I thought I should pass along a bit of publishing news.  A short story of mine--not a historical story--has just been published in the online magazine Literary Mama.  No, I'm not a mama, but I am a daddy, and the story is part of LM's effort--because it's Father's Day time of year in the USA--to publish creative work in which adult speakers look back upon the fathers they knew as children.  The story is titled "My Word."  You can read it here.

The Business of Professorship, Part 2

I started writing last time about certain abiding misperceptions about what college and university professors actually do with their time, misperceptions that allow the governor of Arkansas to fear no political fallout when he forbids public universities from giving pay raises or bonuses to their faculties.  These misperceptions are hardly unique to the state of Arkansas, and they are hardly new.  As I mentioned in my last post, essays have been written detailing the cliched ideas about college professors that have been fostered over the decades, and keep getting fostered, by American cinema.  [One such essay is "Box Office Poison: The Influence of Writers in Films on Writers" by Wendy Bishop, which is included in the edited collection Can It Really Be Taught? (Boynton/Cook, 2007).]  I encountered the misperception just a couple years ago when I visited my brother in Houston for his daughter's wedding.  At a day-after get together at my brother's house, his brother-in-law felt so convinced of the misperception that he freely opined, in my presence, that it must be awfully nice to be a professor at a university and thus not have to work very hard!  The crazy thing is that the man actually did not mean to insult me but to state what he clearly thought was an objectively understood fact.  I think, according to his own skewed perception, my brother's brother-in-law actually thought he was offering me a compliment.  To his eternal credit, my brother stepped in and told his brother-in-law he was wrong, but I doubt the man went away much convinced.  After all, the myth is just so strong.

One hears all the time about how in this or that American industry, workers are constantly expected to work more than 40 hours per week.  More than 50 even.  More than 60.  I have no doubt this is true.  American workers, on average, work longer than workers in any other country in the industrial world.  But here's the thing: Please include college professors in that reckoning.  College professors routinely work 50 and 60 hours a week--and for no extra pay.  Extra pay isn't even considered. (Trust me when I say that any college professor who asked for overtime pay would get laughed out of any administrator's office.)  Not only are we expected to work 50, 60, and sometimes more hours per work, but we are also asked--and I mean constantly--to also serve on this or that panel, on this or that commitee, on this or that task force, on this or that board; to write this or that report, to write this or that grant, to write this or that policy statement; to show up at this or that important university event; to host and introduce this or that visiting artist; to pay for this writer's meal; to be interviewed on this campus news show or by this newspaper reporter.  For no extra pay or teaching release time.  And understand this is in addition to all of our usual teaching, advising, and committee work.  (Just yesterday at my church, I barely escaped from a guy who was angling to get me to read and critique his short stories for him.  For nothing, of course.  We get these requests all the time too, but that's another subject.)

All that most people see of college professors is the few hours we spend on a given class per week in the classroom.  What goes unseen and unrecognized are the many hours spent preparing for that classroom time and the many more hours spent reading and responding to student writing.  Any good college student knows that the time spent in the classroom is only a fraction of the actual total time taking a class demands.  The standard rule of thumb for students is three hours outside the classroom for every hour in it.  Well, if that's true for the student, imagine how it is for the professor.  Try doubling
or--in some weeks--tripling that equation.  (Teaching writing is extremely labor intensive.  No multiple choice tests, I'm afraid.)  And realize that at schools like UCA, four classes per semester is the standard teaching load.   Realize too that working for our classes is at most only half of the work of the college professor.  The other half is serving on a variety of committees: some on the behalf of one's department, some on the behalf of one's college, and some on behalf of the entire university.  Realize that committee work is not optional.  You don't get not to do it.  And realize that in some departments--my own included--the number of hours demanded by committee work exceeds that demanded by one's teaching.  For some reason, my department--as busy as we all are--is mad about committee meetings.  More and more and more meetings, we cry.  We always have important business to figure out and policies to nail down, forgetting that we already have very important and pressing business: teaching our classes.   Finally, realize too that a college professor--at least a tenured or tenure-track one--has a "third half" to his job description as well.   And that's carrying out research and/or creative activity.  Even at a school like UCA, where four courses per semester is the norm, tenured and tenure-track professors are expected to keep up in their disciplines, to attend professional conferences, to remain active in their chosen creative fields, and/or publish articles and books on a regular basis.  No surprise, this takes a great deal of time to do successfully.

So how does one work 3/2 of a job each week?  Easy--by barely ever resting.  Contrary to the notion of the lazy college professor, most people I know in the profession have hardly a minute to breathe.  Forget down time.  Forget leisurely hours spent mentoring students in our offices.  Parents, I regret to say that no such time exists at the University of Central Arkansas.  Forget even going out to lunch.  I eat a brown bag lunch literally every single day in my office.  Put aside the fact that, on a fixed income (see my last post), I can't afford to go out to lunch, what I really can't afford is the time away from my office.  Once classroom time is over there is simply too much other pressing business that needs to get down: papers to grade, emails to answer, articles to submit to magazines, committee reports to write, grant applications to finalize, prep work to review for my next class, student advisees to meet, etc.  It is literally never ending.  I leave work everyday feeling lucky if I have managed to stay on top of the wave.

So what does my day look like when the semester is on?  Here's a characteristic snapshot: 4:45--rise; 4:45-5:30--read professional material; 5:30-7:00--write at my desk; 7:00-8:00--wake my sons, give them breakfast, walk the dog, get showered and dressed, take one of my sons to school; 8:30-3:00--teach, attend commitee meetings, meet with students, work in the office; 3:15--pick up one of my sons; 3:30--walk dog; 4:00--check email and/or read professional material; 5:30--prepare dinner; 6:15--eat dinner; 7:00--help my wife clean-up dinner; 7:30--supervise my son's musical practice and help with his homework (or attend a required evening event at the univeristy); 9:00--read in bed and fall asleep.  For the record, most days, by 3:00 in the afternoon I've already worked a 10 hour work day and usually have additional professional work ahead.  And of course that work carries over into the weekends as well.  The blue collar work ethic?  Don't tell me about the blue collar work ethic.  What I witness, day in and day out, is the white collar work ethic.  And, trust me, I am no unusual case.

What about summers, you say?   Don't you profs all have the long, lazy summer to enjoy?  Well, actually, given how poorly we are paid (see my last post), many of us teach in the summer too.   Those of us who don't--well, they don't.  But as my friend and fellow writing teacher Tony Gifford likes to say: "I don't have the summers off: I have my weekends all squished together."  Far from being lazy and unproductive hippies, your average writing professional who is also a college teacher--and that's many of us--is among the hardest working human beings on the planet.  I don't expect everyone to get this.  I just wish the governor of Arkansas did.

The Business of Professorship, Part 1

I'm stepping aside from the usual theme today to discuss a subject close to the heart of any writer who works in the academy--and that's many of us, including those of us who love to read and write historical fiction.  So maybe it's not off subject at all.  My subject today: the actual business of professorship.  Why write about this now?  Well, the immediate cause is three news items that appeared in recent weeks on the front page of our local newspaper, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.  But the truer, abiding cause is a long held frustration at certain notions about my job that are as deeply seated in the American consciousness as they are fallacious.  It's commonly expressed among professionals who work in higher education, especially professionals who teach writing, that no one understands what we do.  Certainly, no one gets how hard work it is.  There's the age old cliche of the college professor: the bearded, avuncular man in the tweed coat with elbow patches who smokes his fragrant pipe while whiling away lazy hours talking philosophy and encouragement to his circle of dewy-eyed young charges.  Essays have been written about how this cliche has been fostered--and is still incredibly maintained--by a host of mostly bad and even occasionally decent movies.  Whatever the motivations of those who invented and insist on still fostering this cliche--and I suspect it was derived from a certain fond nostalgia toward old professors they admired but never actually knew--I'm afraid that the impression that finally lingers in the minds of generation of viewers isn't Oh, how valuable and influential is this professor, but Man, this guy doesn't really work, does he?


Back to the newspaper articles.  The first article was a report from my own university, The University of Central Arkansas, where for the sixth year out of the last seven, our board of trustees has voted for no pay adjustment for faculty even while giving the president of the university a raise.  By "no pay adjustment," I mean exactly that: no change in pay whatsoever.  Not even a cost of living adjustment.  For the record, UCA faculty would have been ecstatic to get a cost of living adjustment.  All we actually asked for was a 1.5% increase, which doesn't even keep up with the cost of living but would put us not quite so far behind come fall, when the increase would have gone into effect.  Oh, and that one year when we did receive a pay increase?  Well, that was a big whopping 2.5%.   Long story short, to work at the University of Central Arkansas is to live on a fixed income, with all the problems that entails.  And keep in mind that employees at universities are not senior citizens whose birds have all left the nest, but are often young parents trying to support growing families with expanding needs.   And one more thing: Public school teachers--along with every other employee of the state--receive regular COLAs and pay increases, by law.   Why not faculty in higher education, you say?  I'm curious about that too.

The other two news items were as follows: a notice that the governor of Arkansas--who I actually once voted for (but only once)--forbade public universities across the state from giving one-time pay bonuses to their faculties.  Even if the boards that control those universities decided bonuses were deserved and economically feasible, they were forbidden from giving them by governmental decree.  Can you imagine if the company you worked for decided it wanted to give you a raise--and could afford to give you a raise--but then at the last minute the governor of your state stepped in and said, Whoa, not so fast there.  Nothing doing.  A little frustrating, huh?  Now add to this scenario the background situation of no pay adjustment for six out of the past seven years.  A tad more frustrating, isn't it?  Now add a few more background facts: Your region ranks last in the United States in pay for public university faculty.  Your state ranks last in its region.  Your university ranks last in your state.  And your college--the College of Fine Arts and Communication (CFAC)--ranks last at your university.  So as UCA CFAC faculty you are the lowest paid public university faculty in the entire country.  The other relevant news item described pay raises to be enacted at the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville come fall.  The raises aren't that big, and that's not really the news.  The news is that UAF faculty, like UCA's, went so long without one.  So long the school was losing good faculty and having a hard time attracting good new faculty.  (I'm quite familiar with this phenomenon.)  The crux of the matter to me is: Why is this allowed to go on year after year, even at the state's flagship university?

The answer can be found in my first paragraph.  The public does not believe that university faculty actually work, a fallacy and a prejudice that appears to be shared by many legislators and even the governor of my state.  It's a shameful fact that only a minority of the population of Arkansas has earned a college degree.  What that unfortunately translates to in the running of the state's business is a lack of respect for higher education and a lack of understanding for what it can do, for how vital it can be to one's improvement, to remaking and resetting one's life.  Too, unfortunately, it translates into a lack of respect for, and a lack of understanding of, the work done day in and day out by faculty at colleges and universities.  Clearly, the governor believes there is no political fallout coming to him by denying the bonuses.  (And he's a Democrat!)  Indeed, I have to think the governor believes it is a popular political play to deny bonuses to supposedly pampered, supposedly whiny university faculty.  (This is not the first time, by the way, our governor has gotten in the way of pay adjustments for public university faculty.)  Otherwise, why would the governor of Arkansas--a completely political animal--do it?

Finally, the matter should and must come down to this: If the above image of university faculty is fallacious, what's the reality that's suffering beneath the lie?  This post has gone on too long already, so that's a question I'll have to answer next time.

Attack contractions?--not so fast! (Part Two)

As I described in my last post, I've been thinking about contractions in nineteenth century speech recently, out of concern that the characters in a series of historical stories I've written not sound too "contemporary."  Is it really true that our 21st century speech is so much less formal than the speech of two or three centuries ago?  Are contractions really a characteristically modern habit?  After all, isn't it a timeless human instinct to try to do anything as quickly as possible, including constructing words and phrases? And don't other languages--French, for instance--have contractions built into the formal fabric of their tongues? (Yes, they do.)  I figured--just two days ago, in fact--that instead of guessing around, I ought to do a little actual research on this subject.  And what better way to determine if contractions are right for my nineteenth century fictional characters than to look at nineteenth century fiction?  Thus I turned to one of my favorite nineteenth century authors, Nathaniel Hawthorne.  I grabbed The Marble Faun off my bookshelf, pulled it open and skimmed Hawthorne's characters' conversations.  (I didn't select the more famous Scarlet Letter because Hawthorne consciously set that novel in a much earlier time period.)  A page or two--twenty pages--a third of the book.   Nothing doing.  No contractions.  Okay, I thought, so maybe there's something to this anti-contraction bias.

But not so fast.  In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne's characters are Italians and Americans travelling in Italy.  Might they not speak a more formalized English as a result?  Perhaps.  So I tried another book.  The House of the Seven Gables, a Penguin Classics edition printed in the mid-80s.  A page or two--twenty pages--thirty--Shoot, I might as well give--Wait!  There it is! On p. 103! Phebe is speaking to Hepzibah, and she uses the word "don't"!  Eureka!  Then I started noticing other "don't"s scattered throughout the book.  But, wait a minute, I saw only "don't"s.  I didn't see an "I've" or an "I'm" anywhere.  I started to develop an elaborate private theory that "don't" entered American speech habits earlier than any other contraction.  But no!  I found it!  On p. 82!  Uncle Venner speaking to Hepzibah.  Not only does he use "I'm," but "I've" and "Here's."   Proof!  Proof I say to ye!  Americans have long spoken in contractions!  (In fact, printed texts, because of their inherently more formal nature, are flawed as a means to detect spoken speech patterns, anyway.  In other words, if Hawthorne could deign to use contractions in The House of the Seven Gables, the American speech used on the streets outside that house was probably rife with contractions--and a whole lot else.)

I followed up with some quick internet researching and discovered that indeed the anti-contraction notion might be nothing more than a modern nostalgic fantasy.   Some commentators have noted that in the Coen brothers 2010 remake of True Grit, the tough western characters speak very formally.  The Coen brothers were apparently told that such speech habits were indeed characteristic of the old west.  You're right in thinking this is rather counterintuitive.  You're also right if you suspect that the Coens got it wrong.  It's true that Charles Portis's 1968 novel does evidence uncontracted speech, but it also evidences contracted speech.  Commentator Mark Liberman considers the case of Portis's novel on his blog Language Log and argues that when Portis uses uncontracted speech he probably uses it not for historical verisimilitude but to convey character.  Meanwhile, Liberman reports, the use of contractions in Modern English can be witnessed almost from its beginning.  Even Old English evidences contractions!  Liberman goes on to quote from a 1989 article by linguist Barron Brainerd, who charts contractions of the word not "from its first explicit appearance at the beginning of the seventeenth century in monosyllabic forms through its linguistically productive phase in the eighteenth to its general acceptance in the nineteenth."  Accepted in the nineteenth!  Ah hah!  I know I sound like I'm gloating, dear reader, but it's nice to find yourself validated.  (By the way, Liberman also compares Twain's 1876 Tom Sawyer with James Lee Burke's 2008 Swan Peak and finds a higher frequency of contraction in the former work.) Most of all, it's nice to know that I don't need to savage my historical fictions by rooting out all contractions.  Some maybe.  Some.  But in deciding when and when not to remove contractions, the question of characerization can indeed take precedence over anything else.  And that's exactly how it should be.  
 

Attack contractions?--not so fast! (Part One)

As I've mentioned once or twice on this blog, over the past nine months or so, along with several other writing projects, I've been working on a series of historical fictions set in Nantucket, Massachusetts.  I've been sending them out for a few months now, and in response to one of these stories I received what might be the most impressive, conscientious rejection email ever.  Though the editor only got the story a day or two before, she wrote a three paragraph response outlining the strengths and weaknesses of the piece--a far cry from the customary anonymous form email that typically arrives several months after you submit.  One hesitation of hers was that she felt the narrator's voice, both interior and exterior, was a bit too contemporary.  (The narrator is a twelve year old living in 1823.)  She pointed to a couple examples: the phrase "they blew it," for instance, and the fact that the narrator compares another character's eyes to the color of chocolate (which would not have been a common food product in 1823).  Beyond that, the editor did not really elaborate on why, for her, the boy's voice felt too contemporary.

I read over the story, of course, and while I caught a couple other phrases that perhaps warranted editing or deleting, mostly I noticed that I did not hold back in using contractions when this boy--and his even younger friend--spoke.  I suspect that perhaps it is these contractions that struck the editor as "contemporary."  And this didn't really surprise me.  When I composed the story, as well as the others, I consciously avoided trying to ape a 19th century style of speaking.  Some--perhaps even many--writers of historical fiction would disagree with me about this, but I feel that if I try too hard to make my characters sound dated, the reader won't see the character but the speech.  Besides, you can't have all your characters talking formally.  A writer needs a way to indicate that a character is younger or less refined or simply more jaunty than another character.  Using contractions--and slang--is a means to do this.

That said, considering the editor's reaction, I starting culling back on the number of contractions my narrator used.  I didn't eliminate them.  To do that would make my character sound more adult and more educated than in fact he is.  It would be a violation of his personality.  It would also, I fear, make him seem stiff and mannequin-like, make him less a person than a collection of strained mannerisms.  But I did certainly cut a number of contractions along with reworking certain problematic turns of phrase.  To be honest, I didn't feel like I had a choice.  If the narrator is simply not believable as an early 19th person then that will persist to be problem with other editors and perhaps result in the story never seeing the light of published day.  I then proceeded to review all five of my Nantucket historical fictions with the same concern in mind.  I began editing out contractions, especially in the stories with the earliest dates.  The last story is set in 1920, so I saw no reason to remove the contractions at all.  Leaving them all in, I figure, is one way--an implicit way--to signal to the reader the passage of time, along with explicit (and relevant) references to the Great War, to the defunct Nantucket Railroad, and to the Volstead Act.

I think this latest round of editing has strengthened the stories, but it also made me think seriously about this issue of contractions.  Is it really true that Americans in the 19th century used no contractions?  Or did they use some but not as many as we do?  So far I'd been proceeding only on instinct and general impression.  It was time--before these stories got set in stone--to do some actual researching.  What did I discover about contractions in the nineteenth century speech?  Tune in tomorrow to find out!