The pesky pluperfect

In many foreign languages, the endings of verbs are changed – ‘inflected’ – to tell the reader what tense is being used. In English, inflection is relatively sparse and we rely on auxiliary verbs to do much of the work. This is an extract from the dictionary on my computer under ‘have’:

used with a past participle to form the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect tenses, and the conditional mood: I have finished | he had asked her | she will have left by now | I could have helped, had I known | ‘Have you seen him?’ ‘Yes, I have.’. 

 ‘Had’ is of course also an inflection of the verb ‘to have’ in various senses, like ‘possess’ or ‘receive’.

When writing fiction I try to make the words on the page become ‘transparent’, so that the reader will respond only to the meaning and hence visualise the story. Disruption of the visualised can be caused by many things, such as a misspelling, an error in research, a word wrongly used or unfamiliar to the reader, etc. Repetition of the same word in close proximity can also disrupt, because it momentarily jars, reminding the reader that he is, in fact, reading a story and not watching a film.

Style guides deprecate what Fowler calls ‘elegant variation’, the obvious use of synonyms to avoid this repetition, and they are usually right: it is usually better to be straightforward and to repeat, provided the repeated word carries exactly the meaning you intend.

However, these auxiliary verbs can be a pest, especially in the pluperfect tense (e.g. ‘I had caught the bus’). Consider this fragment from the book I am writing now:

What she had described was truly vile. He could not conceive of a more systematic and comprehensive betrayal: a little girl of eight uprooted and taken overseas to be left at the mercy of a self-centred mother. For the next seven or eight long, child’s years, that mercy had been abused and abused until finally things got so bad that the roles had inverted. And how had Phoebe reacted? With filial duty, unreciprocated and profaned.

[The reader already knows that her mother has become an irascible and foul-mouthed invalid.]

The original draft is this:

What she had described was truly vile. He could not conceive of a more systematic and comprehensive betrayal. A little girl of eight had been uprooted and taken overseas to be left at the mercy of a self-centred mother. For the next seven or eight long, child’s years, that mercy had been abused and abused until finally things had got so bad that the roles had inverted. And how had Phoebe reacted? With filial duty, unreciprocated and profaned.

Recasting and combining sentences 2 and 3 got rid of one ‘had’. The rest of the original is grammatically correct but lumpy at ‘things had got so bad’, especially considering the echoic ‘bad’. It is so lumpy that the flow is interrupted. I removed the ‘had’ from ‘things had got so bad’ in the hope that the reader won’t notice. The unusual construction of ‘long, child’s years’ (implying that time seems to pass more slowly when one is very young) creates a brief hiatus before we plunge ahead. Having plunged, we encounter the unorthodox and actually nonsensical repetition of ‘mercy’. The repetition serves as an intensive, accelerated, by the second intensive repetition in ‘abused and abused’, to a speed where the missing ‘had’ is overlooked. At least that was my thinking when I took it out. The character thinking about the child’s betrayal is becoming increasingly angry, and that too adds to the speed.

This may all seem pettifogging, but it is the sort of decision that writers must make if their work is to be enjoyed.

A commoner problem with the pluperfect comes when one needs to insert a substantial amount of historical information in a passage that otherwise uses the imperfect, perfect, or continuous past (the common convention when writing fiction). Thus ‘X remembered [imperfect] that as a boy he had [pluperfect] done Y and his father had tried help him, while his uncle had done everything to make his life difficult’, etc. The pluperfect hads soon add up and clog the passage. The trick is to begin with one or two hads, then slip back into the earlier tense, continue with that for as long as necessary, and finally resume the pluperfect before returning. So, to begin:

X remembered that as a boy he had done Y and his father had tried help him, while his uncle, who disliked him, did everything he could to make his life difficult.

The subordinate phrase (‘who disliked him’) is correctly cast in the imperfect, but the sneaky ‘did’ is not. But it has got us into the imperfect again and we can continue unencumbered. Some sentences later we begin to conclude our account of poor X’s travails:

Finally he decided [imperfect] to have it out with him. And that, really, had been [pluperfect] the start of their lifelong feud. He regretted [imperfect] that, but it was too late now.

The ‘really’ is sleight of grammar, bridging the gap. Such are the underhand tricks of the trade. Writing is a technical process as well as a creative one: no wonder it is so difficult.