Somewhere or other I’d heard an ancient recording of the nineteenth-century poet Robert Browning. He was at some kind of celebration, it sounded like, and someone had brought along this new-fangled thing with a wax cylinder, and they wanted him to recite one of his poems into the horn. ‘I sprang to the saddle, and Joris and he; I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three.’ His voice was excited, light, uncertain, full of laughter. He sounded so astonishingly like us. He stumbled, stopped. He’d forgotten the rest. ‘I’m incredibly sorry,’ he called out, ‘but I can’t remember.’ He laughed, and that was it.
So you could hear—sort of—what Robert Browning sounded like. But who would have brought along a wax cylinder to some hovel in Bermondsey and got an illiterate lighterman to speak into it? Even if the wax cylinder had been invented?
I wanted to create convincing dialogue. If I were writing about polite middle-class parlours I’d have been all right— I could have extrapolated from Jane Austen. But trying to think how people would have spoken in Bermondsey in the late eighteenth century, all that came to mind were a few novels in which working people made brief appearances: books by Defoe, Fielding, Sterne. Dickens did the lower orders, of course, but he was a good half-century later.
I could guess the limitations of these sources. The language they put into their characters’ mouths was their version of how working people spoke. They’d have cleaned it up, perhaps unconsciously, to make it fit for their genteel, educated readership. Like Henry Humpherus, they might refer to ‘foul oaths’, but they never wrote the oaths down.
Writing those first drafts, and thinking of how to convey the harsh, uneducated quality of the characters, I’d made every second word of their dialogue ‘fucken’. It was all ‘fucken’ this and ‘fucken’ that.
It had done the job—it got that first draft written. But, even as I was writing, I knew I hadn’t got it right. I had made the dialogue sound coarse, but at the same time too modern and too monotonous.
The closest we were ever going to get to the wax cylinder of Robert Browning, I thought, was the transcripts of the Old Bailey trials. I went back to the Reading Room at the Mitchell Library and crouched over the microfilm reader, writing down phrases as they’d fallen from the lips of the criminal class two hundred years before.
I had a kick over the knee by a bullock
Damn my eyes
There is a man killed
Get off of it
You bugger
Give it them directly
Sixpenny worth
Damn you Jack
I was lucky enough to have some expert help researching eighteenth-century vernacular. On the matter of Dickens’ use of Cockney it seemed that scholars were divided. Some thought that he’d exaggerated its quaintness (that ‘werry’ for ‘very’ was thought by some to be invention), and Dickens too had drawn a veil over foul oaths. I stole a few things, though: ‘I gave him a souse across the chops’, ‘shut your bone-box’.
Cockney had changed radically since Wiseman’s day (in part because of all those Weissmanns who arrived in the nineteenth century), but just the same I made lists of words and phrases I thought I might be able to use:
He axed me
Arse about face
Had a bellyful of that
There ain’t nuffink like it
Gawdelpus
Wotcher (ie, what cheer)
Give us it
Dressed any old how
Some of these—‘dressed any old how’, for example—were things I’d heard Mum say, and they made me remember other things I’d heard from her, and from her father: ‘when all’s said and done’, ‘by and by’, ‘done us proud’, ‘my word’, ‘donkey’s years’, ‘I’ll do it directly’, ‘as plain as the nose on your face’.
Grandfather’s old-fashioned country phrases reminded me of kids I’d gone to school with. They’d said things like: ‘Are youse coming?’, ‘I never’ (meaning ‘I didn’t’), ‘I like her, but’ (meaning ‘I like her, though’), ‘You was dobbed’.
Thinking about Aboriginal speakers of English I’d heard, I realised that they used English in some subtly different ways. The word ‘gammon’ (meaning humbug or fooling) for instance—it sounded as if it could be a remnant of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century English preserved in Aboriginal idiom. In any case I used it.
Private letters and journals generally weren’t much use because they were written by people more educated than Thornhill. They’d have been cleaned up, too. But I looked through some and scavenged a few things. The letters of Mary Reiby, for example, gave me a few nice phrases—‘the necessaries’ (meaning ‘the toilet’), ‘I will watch every opportunity to get away in 2 years’, ‘I have near a hundred pounds about me’, ‘I am never without a box of tea in the house’.
Having gathered all these, of course I had to use them. Early drafts bristled with those colourful turns of phrase. Characters were forever threatening to give each other ‘a souse across the chops’ or were having ‘a bellyful’ of something or other.
It began to sound like a ye olde parody.
By the end of 2003 I was weeding out the most self-consciously picturesque idioms. Each phrase had to pass two tests. Did it scream smart-alec research? Was the meaning clear to a modern reader?
The ‘antique’ words I left in were those where the meaning was clear and which were reasonably familiar, if only from literature (‘physick’, ‘apothecary’, ‘britches’) or still used today, although unusual (‘rotgut’, ‘tucker’, ‘victuals’).
I also had to decide whether I wanted to spell words phonetically, as some of those lists had (‘Gawdelpus’, ‘nuffink’), to suggest how they were pronounced.
When I tried this it made the speaker into a member of some quaint group whose language had laboriously to be spelled out. It implied that the writer (and reader) were the standard from which these other speakers deviated.
You couldn’t really take a character seriously—in the sense of identifying with them and sharing their feelings—if you had to mouth out some oddly spelled version of how they were talking.
Of course, if the whole book was written in some kind of ‘dialect’—like A Clockwork Orange or Huckleberry Finn—it became the standard language rather than a peculiarity, and the reader soon adjusted.
I was wrestling with all this when I happened to hear E. Annie Proulx talking on the radio. She said that she tried to make the order of the words convey the ‘accent’ or cadence, rather than spelling it all out phonetically. She used turns of speech and vocabulary that were distinctive to the characters, but sparingly. Sometimes she did use phonetic spellings, but only when it was a word we’d got used to seeing spelled that way—like ‘git’ for ‘get’. A scattering of phonetic spellings and a lot of work on the rhythm of the sentence would give you an accent more seamlessly, she thought, than all that tedious stuff with apostrophes.
Thank you, Annie Proulx.
With relief I got rid of ‘fucken’ and almost all of the other phonetic spellings, leaving only a few common ones such as ‘ain’t’. At last I decided that my job as a novelist wasn’t to reconstruct the authentic sound of nineteenth-century vernacular. My job was to produce something that sounded authentic. No Thames waterman was going to rise up from between the lines and accuse me of getting it wrong.
And if he did, I’d be taking notes.
Around November 2003, I read all the dialogue aloud. If anything hit a false note, it was obvious straight away. This was a bad one, for example: ‘That bit of land, he said. Remember I told you. We’ll lose it if we don’t move soon.’
This sounded terribly drawing-room. I muddied it up: ‘That bit of land, he said. Remember I telled you. We’ll miss out if we don’t grab it.’
I deleted yards and yards of dialogue. This scene, for example, had made heavy weather of its speeches:
There was a meeting, Mrs Devine said. Oh my very word yes. A meeting and that. Just down here a piece, on the boat, he come up on the boat. They all got on, all the blacks, got on the boat and met the Governor, see.
She was knitting fast and faster, not looking at him, watching the wool fly between her fingers, the needles four pieces of nail-wire, waxed and gleaming from the grease in the wool. And not long enough, so she had to keep her eyes on what she was doing so the stitches would not fall off the end. There was one of the blacks, had a splattering of English, she said, and stopped knitting to count the stitches. Anyway the upshot was, the Governor promised them, no more farms down the river, no more down from Green’s or Grono’s, round about there.
No more? No more farms on the river? All that good land?
He did not believe.
You don’t believe me, she said tartly, you ask my Da.
Why, he said. Why your Da.
He were there on the boat, weren’t he? she shot back. He were a lumper on the Liberty and he were coiling a rope, he sez, and listening.
She looked up at him and laughed so he saw the two yellow teeth stuck in her bottom jaw like nails round a hogshead from which the top had been levered.
No one sees a lumper, that’s what he sez. She shook her head.
No one sees a lumper, nor yet an old chook of an old woman.
At half the length it had some hope of working, although I was sad to lose those nail-wire knitting needles.
Blackwood, not taking his eyes off the cliffs, rode over Sagitty as if he had not spoken. There was a meeting, he said. Governor come up on the Porpoise, anchored off the point there. His head jerked to indicate the place. There was one of the blacks had a bit of English. His thick fingers were carefully rewinding the whipping on a bit of rope and he seemed to be talking to the cord rather than the people around him. Upshot of it was, Governor said there’d be no more white fellers downstream of the Second Branch.
You’re lying, Tom Blackwood, Sagitty shouted, but Blackwood calmly knotted up the whipping and snipped it off with his teeth. Shook hands, the lot, he said. That’s how it was.
As a kid, I had some decided ideas about how books should be written. I thought, for example, they should have toilets in them. People in real life went to the toilet, so how come people in books never did? And I thought that when people talked in books it shouldn’t be on a new line, indented, between quotation marks. Real life didn’t stop dead while people talked, so why should it in books?
In other novels I’d tried different devices to let dialogue be part of the flow of the moment, rather than quarantined from it. I’d tried starting a new line, and I’d tried introducing dialogue with a dash. I’d tried using single quotation marks and no new line. I’d also tried italics.
In the first eight or ten drafts of The Secret River I did nothing more than make sure the dialogue was attached to a ‘he said’ or ‘she said’. But there was always the danger that a reader mightn’t immediately know whether something was dialogue or narrative. It also meant that dialogue could never be more than one sentence long.
Some time in the beginning of 2004, the dialogue went into italics. It solved some problems, but created others. More than a line or so of italics is irritatingly hard to read, so my dialogue had to stay short. And I couldn’t use italics for anything else. This made difficulties if something that was normally italicised—the name of a boat, for instance—occurred in the dialogue.
After having wrestled with the voices of my characters for several years, another truth about writing was beginning to make itself known to me. Not only should you never have a blank page, and not only could you encourage yourself with the reminder that you could fix it up later. You also had to accept that the solution to every problem creates another.