No place for the muffins

I've been thinking about acknowledgements, and now I'm going to sound like an aged granny shaking her head about how you used to be able to buy penny buns for a penny, nobody needed GPS and boots to take a country stroll, and you were lucky if... no, let's not go there. Anyway, when I first remember noticing books, 'Onlie begetters' had been left behind in the grave along with Mr W.H., and fancy engraved humble supplications were erased just as republican Beethoven did his dedication to Napoleon. In the books I read there was sometimes a brief dedication, often mysterious - 'For T.C.' - and the acknowledgements were a little list of standardly-phrased gratitude for permission to quote copyright material. In non-fiction that list might be a lot longer, and include less formal acknowledgements of 'long conversations' and 'correcting numerous small errors': the number of long-suffering, typing wives is salutary. That's part of the academic project, after all, a representation of the essential, wonderful network of scholarly knowledge and help and, of course, of the wives that made it all possible.

So when did the acknowledgements in novels become a piece of creative life writing in themselves? Agents, editors, spouses, family... Family, ouch! Who do you include, who do you not? Even the ones who never helped, just asked you over Christmas drinks when you were planning to get a proper job? Neighbours, vets, pets...

Sometimes it sounds faux-humble - little naive me, and look, all these grand people wanted to help! It can even spoil the book for the reader. In the UK paperback of Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda the acknowledgements are at the front, and I read them first. So I knew that Oscar's father was based on Philip Gosse, and since I know a little about him I found it impossible not to read with half my mind on the possible facts, instead of the beautifully-written fiction. In the end I gave up on the book, and when I go back to it - which I will, it's too good not to - I'll be skipping that beginning.

Oscar-winners do it, but must we novelists? Call me inconsistent (I'm always going on about how the world needs to be shown that writing novels takes graft and craft and good childcare), call me curmudgeonly, but I think lavish acknowledgements in print, as opposed to lavish and richly-deserved thanks in person, are missing the point. I don't put bibliographies in my books, though if I wrote scholarly non-fiction they'd be very long, because the endeavour of fiction is the opposite of the scholarly endeavour. Scholars must show their working. At any point the reader should be able to track back and check the evidence that's used to support what's being said: the seams, the reinforcing of the buttonholes, the composition of the fabric. But novelists hide their working: what I'm making is a whole outfit, on a person, swishing along a catwalk or striding up a hill. Even to another writer the experience isn't about how it's hemmed, how you wash it, where the fastenings are. Later, if you choose, you can re-read for that, flip through the PS section at the end of the Morrow/Perennial paperback of TMoL, come and hear me talk at a festival, look up my website: it'll be nice to see you there. But that's after the book, and separate, and only people who want to know something about its origins in mine and others' lives, need to go there.

My mother once had a very clever but notably reserved and self-contained student, who wrote in an A Level essay, 'For once, the poet does not bother us with his private life.' You can hear the sigh of relief. When I read a book that doesn't have a couple of pages of thanking the neighbour's dog for bringing much-needed comic relief (and possibly a basket of muffins) to the writing of this novel, I feel the same.

Comments

[Emma]

Found myself saying this, on a private forum, which nails the question a little more firmly. Someone said they enjoyed the glimpse of the intimate that fulsome acknowledgements give, and I said,

The intimacy is my problem with this stuff. The more we go on about the private side of the writing of a book in public, the more the darned public thinks that the books are about us, that we just changed the names a bit, that it's easy. It's like the people who assume the actors in a film must really have been in love. It's called acting, dammit! "If you think what it takes to write a novel is having a wonderful church group," I feel like shouting at the page, "Be my guest..."

[The Mock Duckling]

Now I don't know which blog to reply on!!!

Fair dos for your comment Emma. I do see what you are saying about helping people who don't know. And I wasn't really criticising the dos and don'ts on forums (just a bit, a little bit, but I did acknowledge the need too, didn't i?). But on this issue - there should be freedom and it's just a personal choice thing for the writer. That's what I was saying.

I understand it's not right for you or your work but I did read this post as complaining about the general trend rather than the specific here...

Although I also understand your point about things becoming norms. It's a bit like when you are a shy person (me at art college)in the midst of loads of people who insist on kissing each other all the time (I used to struggle with this). However, I also have to say that my art college kissy-wissy friends are a lot less uptight than my computer nerd friends and however uncomfortable it makes me, it's probably a Good Thing all-in-all and forces me to be less uptight, so...Can't really complain.

[Emma]

No, I'm only complaining about the general trend if it becomes so much the norm that people are going to be offended those of us who don't feel it's right for their (our? I never know) books.

I know what you mean about the kissy thing, though I have to say that it's very good training for when you start being involved in the book trade, which is very kissy.

[The Mock Duckling]

LOL! Well that's something anyway!

Though I've never got used to the people who insist on kissing on the mouth...

[Vanessa Gebbie]

Interesting.

Having just done my first ever (and maybe last ever) acknowledgement page ... and it has now gone for typesetting, I have to say I found it incredibly hard.

In drafts, I was aware that it was sounding like a bad Oscar acceptance speech...(I blogged about it... 'Id like to thank my granny, the grocer, the bus conductor, etc...)

But joking apart... I know that, since turning into something called a writer, I have been very hard to live with, and also hard on my friends -non writing friends - and I wanted to express my thanks to those who matter for their steadfastness, really.

It seemed a better thing to do to put it in writing, a public statement of thanks, rather then a verbal or privately written one, which felt like a cop out.

Maybe it'll be taken the wrong way by some readers, as you illustrate above. But I reckon that, so long as those who matter see it and are pleased, that's all that matters.

[Emma]

TMoL is dedicated to my children, the subtext being that they've put up with my writing habit for longer than anyone else. But only the subtext.

I think it's very much something for each writer to decide about themself: one thing I think Mock Duck is quite right about is that sincerity does show, and insincerity too. But I'm interested that I seem to be in a curmudgeonly minority on this, at least of blog-reading forum-posting writers!

[Rachael King]

I don't so much mind a few lines about family and friends, but one of my favourite gripes is the novelist who puts pages and pages of acknowlegements and notes about their research, as if to say 'See? I can't possibly have made it up, look at what authority I have to tell this story.' Daniel Mason's The Piano Tuner is the worst example. He had something like 5 pages of notes and acknowledgements at the back, when at the front, it already said that he'd spent a year on the Myanmar border - wasn't that enough of a skite?

I don't know, why can't we just trust that novelists are telling us a story without having to prove anything? I deliberately left off a bibliography for that reason.

[Emma]

Oh, Rachel, I do agree. I do wonder if novelists who put huge bibliographies in are trying to claim intellectual respectability, without realising that it's at the cost of their creative/aesthetic respectability. It'll be references, next.

As far as I'm concerned, if my readers want history, they should go and find a history book. I am thinking of putting some 'further reading' on my website, because I do understand the desire to find out more about something that's caught your interest in a novel. But there won't be anything direct about my sources. Apart from anything else, I can't remember half of them...

[FictionBitch]

Now I'm cringeing! But as I blogged recently, an acknowlegements page can be a political statement about the fact that it's actually quite hard to be writer without the support of others in a world where publishers don't read their slush piles and writers don't get paid.

[Leila]

I dedicated my first book to Writewords because they really did help with editing it more than anyone else, and only afterwards when it was too late thought, "Oh nooo... my parents are going to be upset now..." Not that they have ever protested! :)