Developing a dinstinctive style in local writing - notes and speculations / edwin thumboo ( singapore)

  Thumboo, E. ". Developing a disctintive style  in local writing:
Notes ad Speculations  "in Developing Creative Writing
in Singapore, eds Nalla and Chandran Nair. Sing : 
Woodrose Publ. ,1997: 19-29.


                                                 Thumboo. E.
                             DEVELOPING A DISCTINTIVE STYLE
                             IN LOCAL WRITING :
                                            Notes and Speculations 


"Style" is among that fraternity of over active terms which includes 'tone', 'form', 'texture' and 'dicton'. The fraternity had grown with the shiff from a mainly historical, philological study of literature to the close scrunity of texts - especially intense verbal analysis - which marks contemporary criticism.  As critical procedures multiply and are elobarted the language of 'style' has split itself into a series of connected interests, each subsumed under terms of the kind listed above.  But 'style'  remains a word for all seasons, occasionally employed with precision but more usually in a loose and general way.  It is popular, occuring frequently in discussions of topics as diverses as art, architecture, cooking, foot ball, dance, fashion, that is, almost everything we do. The notion of style is very close to our everyday life. Whenever we apply the word, we disclose our expectations and proclaim our approval. When we recognise something as having 'style', we are making a comfortable judgement, feel absolved from supporting the oipinin with strenuous argument. 

'Syle' as applied to a literary work had its own history.  In ancient Greece, it belonged more to rhetoric than literarure, Rhetoric, the art of effective presentation, advocated clearly distingished methods each appropriate to the occasion disputation, ceremonial utterances, legal presentations and so forth, each with its own vocabulary, figures of speech, sequence of arguments, all opera ting under comprehensive rules prescribing how one set about a particular task.  Aristotie's Rhretoric, Quintilian's institute of Oratory are the chief of many treatises on the subject.  Many of these rules or prescriptions became incorporated into the prose and the poetry of the Middle Ages in Europe.  The weight and extent of their influence an be glimpsed from how Kyd ( 1557? -95?) in his play The Spanish Tragedy and Bacon
 (1561-1626) in his Essays, works very dissimilar, employ selected rhetorical devices, in a fashion that shows their abiding force.  But we note that by the time of Pope, and even before, these rules-what was retained of them - had a poetic rather than a rhetorical thrust. Each literary genre rested on an appropriate 'style' for which there existed ample classical precedence :

          Those Rules of old dicovered'd, not
                          devis' d
          Are Nature still, but Nature methodiz'd.

          Hear how learn'd Greece her useful rules
                           indites,
          When to repress, and when indulge our
                           fights:
          High on Parnasus' top her sons she
                           show'd,
          And pointed out those arduous paths
                           they trod,

          Held from  afar, alolf, the immortal prize,
          And urg'd the rest by equal steps to rise.
          Just precepts thus from great examples
                          giv'n.

          She drew from them what they deriv'd
                           from Heav'n.

                            POPE: 'AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM' : 1.86-89   

Style depended on external pre-determined considerations relating to the subject-matter and the genre.  Satire, for instance, was 'high' or 'low'. One spoke of 'Homeric','Senecan' 'Ciceronian','Virgilian', 'Baroque','Augustan' styles, of 'grand', 'middle' or 'low' styles it was in Romantic and Post- Romantic, writung that 'style' became firmly identified with the writer's personality, revealed by a language imtimately linked to inner processes, to the imagination.  The critical writings of Colerige (1772-1834), Shelley (1792- 1822) and the letters of Keats (1795-1821) are grounded in principles and practices assuming the importance of the indivual consciousness, the indivual vision.  The notion of organic form, amounts to a conviction that the theme of a work is closely bound up with its mode of expression - that its ingredients, its parts are cemented together by language - has gained wide currency up with its mode of expression - that its ingredients, its parts are cemented together by language - has gained wide currency since the time, of Coleridge.  While there lingered in the nineteenth century the view that each genre has a proper 'style', the boundaries of 'style' in this sense were beginning to dissolve.  We are predisposed to view a literary work as an organic unity and, while interested in the 'style', have ceased to insist in any fundamental way, on the lnguage-genre connection.  We accept without qualms prose, poetry and poetic-prose.  How would we classify Khali Gibran ?  Poet, philosopher, mystic, propagandist, essayist, escapist?  The question has less point than it used to.

'Style' is a matter of detail, the verbal details which, ultimately, give shape to a work and proclaim its character while concurrently charting the writer's characteristic treatment. It is nothing less than the writer considers his best words in the best order for the purpose in hand. He selects from the language, unconsciously - that is habitual preferences for certain words, constructions et cetera - and consciously, attentive to certain principles of composition, his working conception of the relationship between genre, subject and language, and his attitude to and designs upon his audience.  We see 'style' as being an essential part of meaning, of the way an experience has been made in ward by the writer and how this inwardness, the specific map of the writer's under standing, is externalised.

These brief comments stress in part the realtionship between the writer and society , assist us to identify the factors in his search for a style.  In noting that broad question of what additional issues confront a writer using a foreign or second language, will be considered subsequently, as a preface to the examination of examples drawn from Singapore writers.


These brief comments stress in part the relationship between thr writer nad society, assist us to identify the factors in his search for a style.  In noting that broad question of what additional issues confront a writer using a foreign or second language, will be consisdered subsequently, as a preface to the examination of examples drawn from Singapore writers .

A writer's style serves his preoccupations which in turn are decided by his temperament, the subjects he finds engaging, his beliefs and the pressures exerted upon him by his milieu.  Ech of these aspects represent an influence of differing importance.  Some are projected from the outside; others arise from his very being. The balance between them, the way his inclinations and skills mesh and merge are intrinsic to and both fashion nad regulate his creative centre.  This centre we recognise but cannot claim with confidence to understand either its mechanism or the source of its impulses.  An incident of remark seemingly casual of trivial to us can inspire others to a short-story of poem.  WE only know what enters this country of the mind, what emerges but not how it is treatment. 

Its is possible, indeed desirable to remember the diversity of overt influences working on the writer.  Those mentions earlier ought to be elaborated.  A vital one is dramatised by the situation of a poet in South Vietnam in the mid-Sixties

           I live in Saigon the year round without  a
                            warm coat

           Witnessing my people searching for food
           around the foreigner-operated rubbish 
                            dump
           I am standing pensively at the Bay Hien
                          Crossroads
           Watching kis growing on bread scattered
                          on the earth
           And the older boy presenting his brother
                         with a piece of chocolate picked up
                         from the roadside
           I cannot contain my anger ......

                            THE PHONG /   FROM' UNDER THE POET EYES'                          

Can he escape the bitterness and despair  Hardly, in Malaysia and Singapore, the pioneering writers similarly felt compelled to engage with social, political and cultural questions , almost inevitably, considering the historical phase in which they wrote.  A writer is very much caught up in the flux, the tensions, the expectations and disappointments of his society, Slolzhenitsyn,Naipaul, Patrick White, Mulk Raj Anand and Philip Roth all enforce their relevance through this connection, in as much as a writer chooses his subjects, the subject chooses him.

To a considerable degree, the choice of a subject implies certain constraints. Within the tragic mode - Sopholes' and Shakeaspear's are instances - the froth and the gaiety of comedy have no place.  What laughter does erupt is severely qualified, ironic, uncaring, pitched in language with an edge not habitual to it.  But the perimeters of tregedy are wide, with ample elbow-room to give resonance to vision as the writer searches the language for the best way to gain effects, to arrive at the fertile sublimity of tragedy.  Yet whatever he comes up with must not jar or disturb his tragic vision for when his judgement falters tragedy turns to bathos, the sublime collapses into the ridiculous.

Broadly spaeking, what the writer can or cannot do is pre-empted by the genre he chooses. Tile poet has the greatest scope for manipulation and manoeuvre. He wrires as he pleases, craeting, establishing his aptness, his persuasiveness out of his own insights and verbal gifts.  The verbal means vary from the highly allusive, symbolic, interrogatory mode of Blake's 'Tigers' to the direct simplicity of Robert Frost. At the other extreme, the dramatist is by and large confined to the world of his characters.  That may prove extensive but is governed by dramatic conventions.  Whether he writes of saints or sinners, or both, he must equip each with a suitable history, language and personality. If he locates his play in the slums of Chinatown or Serangoon Road set, say, in 1955, the linguistic range with he can work up his characters has obvious limitations.

Choosing subject and theme is less complicated than acquiring and developing the necessary verbal and structural resources.  These range from lexical and a minitiae to the distinctive advantges and limitations of various genres. Our of his own experience of literature, he would gather an understanding and a version of what has been achieved, and what, in his view remains to be done.

But for those who writes in a language belonging through a long history of association to their society and who there using a second tongue, there exists another set of challenges.  The acquisition of more arduous, the period of experimentation  nad tentativeness longer before feeling at home in the language.  Each language has its distinctive character acquired over to meet the particular demands of a certain life-style in a certian society.  Those up within it are therefore familiar with the genre of the language, its history and contemporary relevance, the cumulative and the celebrations of that society that have left their mark on the language.  There is therefore a powerful community  between the language, its literary evolution, its moves, its social, religious and other inheritances and those who are born into and brought up in it.  The alliance is rich and complex. Nor does the complexity stand still.  Changes in life lead to changes in the language, maintaining without interruption symbolic intimacy.  Out of this matrix the writer draws his language.  Because those he addresses share the same linguistic inheritance, his principal task is how to write well about what he feels is important.  But those who live an a multi-racial society, whose sensibilities and pysches have been formed initially in other cultures and other languages and who then come to a language like English, the position is radically different.

First the mastery of his denotative life; then the connotative. To create in language you ought to know its larger life, the permutations of word, image, symbol.  But in amassing this connotative grasp there is necessity for constitutional adjustment, inherent values and attitudes in the language need modifying readjustment even. It it is 105 degree F in the shade, you ought to give your friend a cool, not warm welcome. The Negro has to assert that black is beautiful top overcome the immemorial implication of black being associated with evil. The equation accounts for the power of the night-evil leitmotiv in Macbeth for instance.  Configurations formed by other equations of words exist. They do not always fit a second culture, a second environment.  Where necessary, symbols, metaphors need to be discarded or 
re-aligned.

On the positive side we ought to put into English, into the adopted language, the metaphorical richness relevant to the facts of local life.  It is not enough to elude Uncomfortable associations; it has to be topped-up.  Elements grafted range from images, metaphors having local colour, to translations of idioms from other languages.  Chinua Achebe's novel offer ample evidence of how igbo proverbs in English broaden and re-define in specific instances the metaphorical reach and diversity of the language . R.K. Narayan sharewdly dresses English in Indian clothes, and makes it move with the detectable South Indian rhythm.

Literary beginnings in a second language are invariably and uncertain.  In retrospect, what actually for written looks disproportionate to the energies put in mainly because the problems - including non literary ones - which pionnering writers faced cannot be readly gauged.  They achieved little durable work.  But this work has an historical interest, mainly related to the search for a viable medium.  Our writing in English consists more of poetry than prose, more prose than drama.  The imbalance is being corrected, a healthy development, in the meantime poetry remains the most solid body of writing and best documents the search for style.

Gog Sin Tubs' poems, written in late Forties and early Fifties, employ language calculated to shock his readers out of their complacency.  The complacency was fostered by the view that the proper style was 'poetic', soft, flowery, informed by regular rhythms, delivered in regular stanzas.  A subject like love which lends itself so easily to sentimentality, is handled as follows:

            With how sad steps. O moon
            But beware,
            The moon-beams ooze
            Like ulcer-pus along the grooves
            Of lovers' brains

            Maggot breed
            Eat

            And weave silk-webs
            Till the brain is none.
            He felt the decay
            Snatched up sword
            And cut off his head.
                            ''THIRD MOON'

The language seeks to dislodge habitual responses.  The poem is about the delirium of love, how it can distort our judgement.  He succeeds but one wonders if 'ulcer-pus', 'Maggot breed' nad the abrupt, dramatic conclusion are not over-done.  Whta we wish for is that fact, that balnace which ensures newness of the language is in fact appropriate.

Shin Tub and his contemporaried were the pionners. Their poems made those who followed conscious of the importance to discover for themselves a language that mediated between what they sought to express and how it was best expressed.  Oliver Seet's poetry, which I believe has yet to be fully appreciated, is valuable both for the general issues he raised and his attention to this problem. His mid-Fifties  poems force fully project an impression of intense personal wrestle with words to uncover and pattern his  reflections on fundamental issues.  For Oliver, meaning and sgnificance reside in image and metaphor, the phrase that is compact. Hence the directions of his search for a style. And the instruction comes mainly from the study of the classics and modern English poets.  Imitation and other forms of indebtedness are shed as confidence grows.  Oliver's 'In the Beginning' has verbal and rythmic echoes of Eliot and Shakespear

         Here am I
         sophomore in a lion city
         in a sothic year
         plagued by wet dreams of summer
         frothing at the basis
         with suds of ecstasy, immortal longings bottled
         - counting sheep in a sorite
         built upon a hair
                       
These echoes - the one from Antony and Cleopatra carries an additional load of meaning - are there partly because at that stage Oliver was perhaps unable to muster from his own resources a rythm and phrasing superior to those he borrowed.  The opening of Eliot's 'Generation' reads as follows :

        Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
        Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain,
        I was neither at the got gates
        Nor fought in the warm rain......

The rhytmic patterns are simliar and recall to the reader the situation in Eliot's poem, setting up valuable contrasts and comparisons, part of a verbal arrangement depicting how. In Oliver's poetry we find such attempts to fix immediate problems and themes in the context of their background.  The danger of questionable politics, of new ideologies, is sounded in ' He who lives by the Hammer'.  What he means by 'hammer' and 'sickle', we identify without difficulty.  The collation of signficances through a verbal pattern is deliberate: 'Keenness' . ' sickle', 'retribution', 'dark alley', 'long knives' and 'red nirvana' reveal the insistence with which he exploits the potency of existing symbols.  Another instance is 'Because belief like yours is insular', where  we find 'kris' used with a current as well as a historical range of reference.

       The shadow of a kris lurks at the corner-
                             stone
       waiting the deadly slither of the flaw.

       Hang Jebat learned too late
       the kris was double-edged.

Complementing this method of tapping meaning in existing symbols is the us adjectives: 'soulless rosaries of rout 'landlord king', 'unfeeling patrons of sky', measureless mirrors', 'musselled shores '.  Their modifying subtiety of vigour; as the case may be is characteristic of Oliver's writing; they are chosen to supply thrust, to assemble the shades of meanings he seeks.   Though some of his formulations do not get across as rapidly as we wish, they are none the less intrinsic to his search for an individual voice.

A poet's view of his vocation has a beating in how he sets about his task. The writer's conception of hid rol, notably his relations with readers, are matters which exert considerable influence.  Ronert G said somr thirty years ago  that he wrote poems for poets, that to do otherwise is wasteful.  He is an exception, poet assume that the prime purpose is to communicate and, within limits, oitch their writing on a level accessible to the general reader in his preface to the L:iberation of Lim Thean Soo suggests loosening the language of poetry a step to aid readers.  Much can be said on behalf of this view, though serious reservations exist  because it affects the whole mode of expression, th very procedures of a poem.  The poem as intensely knit verbal organisation makes large demands on the reader, perhaps outs him off because he is unable to enter sufficiently.  The poetry nad criticism of the last fifty years emphasises the density of meaning - in the full sense - as paramount.  There are grounds for modifying the view in a multi-tingal context, to a proper place for the poetry of statement, providd the emphasis is on the poetry and not the statment.  Th style in Robert Yeo's 'Coming Home Baby' is conversational, relaxed, shor through with ruminuation, with wry-humour, 

         I have come back / I have not returned.
                  Mac Arthur returns
                  The prodigal son returns
                  Alan Yeo returned
         but being just, me,
                  well
                  I only come back.
                  Only the first son
         of a middle-class insurance clerk who depended on his salary:
         his only source of income.
                  in any case, I had to come back.
         Bonded to the Govt. what. Also
         I want to - come back, I mean .

The poetry of statement, direct in its address, ensures that we rapidly grasp what is being said.  The poet secures our deeper attention through gradual accretion of mean big and signifiance.  Distinctions are made - 'come back/not returned', historical allusion rapidly enlisted, all with a tightly controlled porpotion. His return to Singapore is depicted an a context that enables him to move into and across history, autobiography, people, places and accompanied by comment, low-keyed but all the more pungent for that.  As we move into the poem, what appears on the surface relaxed, ligh hearted, conversational and confidential, returns again and again to fudamental states of feeling about  our - Singapore's - past and present.

I have picked these examples, but they are sufficient to indicate the contrast in style between Goh Sin Tub, Oliver Sect, and Robert Yeo.  They show each poet setting about discovering, evolving for himself a characteristic mode of utterance.  The same impulses can be seen at work in Arthur Yap, Chandran Nair, Wong May, Lee Tzu Pheng, Sng Boh Khhim, Yeo Bock Cheng, Geraldine Hong and the crop of young poets now making the scene.  Those familiar with their poems will recall the range of styles which will be looked at during the workshops.  But because of this range it is difficult at the present time to chart one that is distinctly Singaporean.  Moreover, the poet are constantly experimenting and extending their own resources and we can expect distinctive body of work and we are able to recognise confidently that this is by Arthur Yap, this by Chung Yee Chong and so on , the sense of Singapore style is likely to prove elusive.  Unless idiom has extensive local colour and draw on a strong and pervasive local dialect of English - a tendency we should resist - the poetry would turn increasingly international in flavour.  Contemporary poetry in English has entered a phase where the style, the vocabulary, the urban preoccupations are international.

This conclusion is constantly reinforced by what we read in poetry journals.  This is perhaps why we do not have contemporary poets comparable in status to either Yeats or Eliot.  It is not easy to say whether a poet is Australian, West Indian, British, Filipino, African or Indian.  Poets tend to etablish an individual rather than a national identity.  Poems in Wong May's  second collection, Report, are difficult to place on purely stylistic grounds.  And the difficulty will always be there, unless there are specific elements that give it a local habitation and a name.

The position is obviously different with drama and fiction: there are characters and settings to identify time and place with a certainty that even the most symbolic and abstract works in either genre cannot fully transcend.

But drama - and fiction -  in Singapore faces special problems because it draws substance from not only a complex society but one undergoing rapid and tremendous change.  This is perhaps why so little of it gets written.  Jim Chor Pee and Robert Yeo have written and produced plays, but I take Goh Poh Seng's because he is also poet and novelist, a fact that makes his work a useful example.  Poh Seng's third play, When Smiles Are Done (1965) is his most successful, its multi-racial and theme will give some idea of the dramatic situation Poh Seng creates.  Wong Chong Kit has an Indian friend Raju who is in Jove with Jenny, Chong Kit's sister.  They wish to marry. Mrs Wong, their mother, objects.  Chong Kit himself is having an affair with Mary, a bargirl.  A challenging undertaking whose main difficulty is how to handle a sensitive subject in an acceptable and credible fashion.  That Poh Seng succeeds to the extent he does is because of a bold honesty : his characters confront the issues they face squarely and are direct in the way they cope with their thoughts and feelings, But how the characters develop and shape themselves in our minds, as they interrelate, depend on their language.  They differ in background, in expectation, social status. The English each speaks is non-standard.

Variations in English arising from differences in levels of education and social background and first language interference becomes pertinent at this point where the dramatist's  language meets his audience.  These variations tend to be associated with types within our society.  For instance, in homes where English is not spoken as the first language, parents speak a version of the language more imperfect than that managed by their children who are likely to have received formal instruction in it.  Moreover, in a setting of changing values, social expectations and behaviour, in which the sense of communal indentity is beginning to erode, there is further seperation between the old and young.  The kind of conflict is best exemplified in
 Mrs Wong's disspproval of the relationship between Jenny and Raju. In such circums-
tances even before he decides how his characters will speak, the playwright has to sort out his characters, decide how they will conduct themselves, be deployed and brought into relationships.  These are matters not only for the dramatists, novelists, short story writers; anyone who deals with characters must contend with them.  Where society is caught up in rapid change, a kind of pre-thinking to shape material seems unavoidable.  For a society and its culture is defined by the types we come to recognise in them. These types can range from king to pauper; they are essential even in egalitarian societies if we are to have ways of identifying the full stretch of that society.  What I have in mind here are figures less elaborate, more tentative and greater in number Jung's Pschylogical Types or Vance Palmer's twenty-five Australians in National Portraits.  And the types ought  not to belong solely to the upper levels of society.  Witness Hogarth's revealing panorama of vigorous - at times questionable - life in eighteenth  century London.  Types, refined and eloborated, sum up a society, Chaucers's pilgrims are a case in point.

The situation in Singapore, given linguistic, ethnic, cultural and social profile already complicated enough, is further acerbated by rapid change.  Possible permutations and combinations are endless.  In the course of time there will emerge types, subtle, refined, overlapping but each distinctive enough to justify a seperate classification. The process has its own dynamics, its own pace, but can be added.  One source of aid is literature, especially the attemps to deal with these types, to examine them as individual characters in plays and novels, undertaking is not easy; writing of them in English poses unusual stylistic problems.  For the diversity of characters implies a diversity of language, and the diversity is further complicated by drawing characters from different communal background.  These characters and types when speaking English, use it in a way distinctive to themselves.  This is noticeable in the following passgae from the play.

        MRS WONG :  What time is it, what  time is it.  What a question ! Long time to get up, that's what time it is.  Come get up . You want to lie down all day ?   I got a lot to do also I can't make the bed.  What if people come ?

        CHONG KIT : So what ?  Let them come.  Why make big fuss ?  If they friend, they no mind anything. If they no friend, they enenmy what we care for ?

       MRS WONG  :  What we care.  We got to make appearance, good appearance.    Of course  no care.  You are going, you no care.  You got no responsibility.  You no care about show. You are young.

    CHONG KIT  :     That's right.  I dont' respectability.

Mrs Wrong is the bothered, grumbling mother some of us would recognise.  Chong Kit's abruptness and lack of respect for elders, is symptomatic of social  change : he sounds like the boy next door, perhaps an earlier version of ourselves.  But his language is at times fractured, at others tidy, standard. Here is the crux of what the dramatist has to do.  Not only must he allot and season each character with a suitable language, he has to seek consistency.  The difficulty Poh Seng faces is connected with the fact that despite claims by those who have looked at so-called Singapore English we do not have one.  Ray Tongue collected examples and sorted them in his Singapore Malaysian English. These departure from standard forms are consequences
of poor grammar et cetera.  While they sort into categories they are neither extensive nor predictable.

In If We Dreams Too Long, Poh Seng attempted to capture the speed, rythms, the vocabulary, the syntex of an English sopken here.  What he gives in the novel is plausible.

The next morning, Kwang Meng woke up with a hangover.The daylight, the household stiring outside his bedroom, seemed unreal.  He had to make big effort to get up.  At breakfast, his mother scolded him.You better stop wasting yourself, and your money, on drink.  What for you want to drink so much ?  You want to end up
 a drunkard?' He did not reply, being in no mood to argue.  He did not touch his breakfast. Just drank the black coffee. 'You better pull yourself together, Meng'.
 He nodded and left.

In the above passage, the sentence 'What for you want to drink so much'  is but one form; others equaly plausible, include: 'Why you drink so much? / Why you drink
 much ? / What for drink so much ? / Whay for you drink so much ? Why you must drink so much ?

The ear is turned to one more versions, but not to all. What the writer takes to be representative may not be the one his reader thinks is 'current'.  Our discomfort is strengthened, not subdued by the mother's opening sentence which reads smoothly.  It is on this level of detail that the problem exists and whereit has to be tackled.

The linguistic faced by the writer, by the characters he creates is sum med up in the episode from Lim Thean Soo's Destination Singapore:  

 The fishermen glared at him with hostile suspicion, as if he were a harbinger
  of trouble . They were not pleased to be interrupted in their conservation. The man hailed them with an uplifted hand but they did not respond.  Instead they reacted with stony silence and gross indifference.  This made the man  more agitated.  He adressed them in several dialects and in Mandarin.  No reply each time.  He asked them whether they had come across a sailing junk called the Sea Plough. 'Look', he pleaded.  I'll reward you well.  I beg you to tell me.  Please ! 'One if the squatting figures spoke in unpolished Mandarin, 'Are you crazy?  Didn't you hear about the commotion in the city ?  Don't   attract the Japs to our hamlet.  If they don't slaughter us, we'll kill you first  instead.  Get lost.  Leave us in peace!'

At least three basic, interrelated considerations exist : the languistic relationship
between the writer and his work, the characters in a work, the work and its readers. In such circumstances, the search for a style ready is a search for effective means of communication.  The kind of refinements we find in poetry occur occasionally in the pages of a novel.  Here is a passage from Poh Seng's work in progress :

Sometimes Kian Teck used to drive by of an evening, and saw through the window of his car, unintentionally and not for long, the weathered headstone  arranged like tableau in a dream, suprimposed for a moment upon the hubbub  of his life.  Pale whitenesses amongst the tall grass, motionless against the  shifting hours. They are proffered to his eye and mind, almost a secret  imposition, done in all quietness, entering like water, and its incoming renders,  unsought, the tangle of time.  They stood, idioms beyond his knowledge.

In this handling of character had gradually moved to a stage where the description moves so that what the novelist describes amounts to nothing less than a process in his charcters' mind.  Description becomes the means to externalise mood, state of mind and possesses a resonance crucial to our understanding of the character.  Poh Seng is poet as well as novelist and the richness of his idiom has much to do with denotative energies of his language.  The pennultimate sentence of the question of his sentences provides an examples.

Here it seems worthwhile entering a minor defence on behalf of those attempting to write novels in English. Somerset Maugham  is reputed to have said in 1948 to Malcolm MacDonald that he wished he was revisiting Southest Asia because it offered a wreath of material.  The material obviously available to Maugham would be drawn tinto the orbit of his style, seen from his point of view which is essentially by the outsider' s.  For someone writing within a society there is a much more immense area, a galaxy of characters, of issues, of types to contend with.  In such circumstances, apart from the acquisition of techinque and the capacity to structure,
there is this larger question of what language one has to evolve to suit the range of novelistic needs.

Poh Seng's If We Dream Too Long is the first Singapore novel.  It is remarkable achievement in the circumstances.  Since its appearances we have has more prose.  Francis Thomas' Memoirs of a Migrant ( 1972), Tan Kok Seng's Son of Singapore 
( 1972), Michel Soh's Son of a Mother ( 1973), N.I. Low's Chinese Jetsam on Tropic Shore ( 1974), The Patriarch ( 1975) by Yeap Joo Kim and Ruth Ho's Rainbow Round my Shoulder ( 1975).  Each contributes in its own way to the growth of local prose tradition.  Apart from Tan Kok Seng's the English is fairly orthodox though the range varies from Francis Thomas' standard English to the curiousity mixed but suggestive style of N.I.Low.

I would like to look at passages from Chinese Jetsam on a Tropic Shore and Tan Kok Seng's Son of Singapore to show the kind of linguistic variations which arises from the writer 's background and which in turn influences the way he handles his material.

N.I.Low is equally at home with both Chinese and English.  His Chinese appear to be a mixture of mandarin and the vernacular. Its influence on him - and in him - is manifest both in the way he perceives things and how the perception gets expressed.  His English inheritance is derived from the formal study of the language and its literature; its domination is apparent from quotations from various English classics and, behind them, a sense of the European tradition.  These two streams meet in in the writing so that within the fairly short time in the passage we find them rubbing shoulders .

   This was not the only time when I resented other using my mother as beast of             burden. She was no fool.  She must have known that she was taken advantage           of.  But she never showed any resentment.  She digested it in her own sad heart.
  My father had the pride of a hidalgo of the bluest blood. He was a giver, not a           taker and grasper.  He made friends easily.  He was a man's man .Whenever my father's scheme misfired, as they so often did, it was always my  mother who had to pay the piper.   Patiently, doggedly, she would set about picking up the broken places of our fortunes. Never, never once, sid she  complain to me, who was closed to her,  about my father,  She suffered in silence.  I have every reason to be proud of my ugly mother, who never had a  day's respite from crushing, grinding poverty.  She remained uncrushed, unbroken, going about her duties, mild and serene.  At this late day, when I am   wice as old as she when she died.  I salute her shade. I hail her as 'a grand dame of nature's wide empire', a woman constant in adversity.

Tan Kok Sengs's English is self taught. Its chief virtue is that it conveys the roots of his feelings.  In his trilogy the English has been tidied up but still reflects the flavour of his personality. The point I want to make is that we occasionally detect behind his English the strong presence of his vernacular, Teochew, and it is this that contributes disctintively to his style,  for instance .

        'Lucky they didn't understand what you said, 'he roared. 'If they had, your father   and mother would have been killed.' He was terribly angry as he said this. Ah  Nam's mother went up to the father. 'He' s only a little boy,'she said. 'He know   nothing.'  And turning to Ah Nam himself, she said,'Remember next time, little            boy, have ears, but have no mouth. And don't show heavently courage.  Under          stand?'. in any ordinary day Ah Nam got slapped by his father and berated by his      mother, and every time he cried. This time he didn't  cry.  Silent, he gripped his        mother' s thigh in terror. 

That little boys have ears but no mouth is a literal translation from the Teochew.  What Kok Seng has done - and this he dones fairly consistently - is domesticate the Teochew adage in English, confident that the literal carries its own force, allowing the reader to work out its implications rapidly.

Discussion of style in drama and fiction can proceed through a literary examination of a comprehensive selection of indivual usages, instances of which are noted above.  A complementary approach would be the analusis of grammatical features.  Either way describes the writer's style.  But when we conic to judge it, to note strengths and deficiencies, we face that large problem posed by the complexity of material, the sum total of permutations and combinations of characters, values, social and other encounters to he expected in a multi-racial society.

English as la lnguage cuts  across cultures.  Those who writes in it come from all cultural streams.  Asa creative medium, it is the most multi-racial, multi- cultural.

A very heavy burden is therefore placed on those who use it.  For, while it leads to perspectives that take in material that cut across communal boundaries, the writer using English perhaps faces more problems than those using any of the other languages.  We are constantly reminded of the richness of the materials available !  What ought to he mentioned is that this very richness proves taxing at the beginnings of a local creative tradition.  Let us illustrate the problem. A novel in Tamil of Malay will have as its characters indians or Malaya and possesses a dominating homogeneity. The focus on issues, the aesthetic assumptions, the traditions of feeling all have a tecture and consistency in accord with the background of the characters and the assumptions and outlook of the novelist, be he indian or Malay.  There is an organising focus.

The novelist using English is not' - as yet - in such  a fortunate position.  There are securities for him.  Even if he deals with a slice of life as Goh Poh Seng does in If We Dream Too Long, the characters are people who have in varying degrees been displaced into a language and displaced so differently that we cannot immediately accept a particular instance as being general.  We feel that there are alternatives and  therefore feel less than comfortable.  For such richness involves not merely questions of how to cope with it but the careful and intelligent application of literary structure.  Technicalities remain important: they do not help sort out, sift and prepare material for translation into the forms of art, into characters who are individual - yet of a type.  It is here that the problems remain massive.  What is involved can he suggested by questions such as how does one set about drawing up the characters in a novel or play, who to include, who to exclude?  For the characters have a dual status.  Apart from being individuals they are also members of a community and when you bring them into relationship across cultures you can the challenges they pose in order to an acceptable balance that is both as well as society and culturally acceptable.

The stylistic and structural answer to the problems outlined , is more and more writing. The discoveries of individual writers on how to cope with this or that will add to the general fund of insight.  Succeeding writers will start with that much additional advantage, and make their contributions.  In time the writing will have enough sinews, nerve and muscle to allow a system inspection of its style .

    edwin thumboo

       --------
      Copyright 2002 ( updated 11. 7. 2005 Edwin Thumboo

   ABOUT THE AUTHOR

     EDWIN THUMBOO B.B.M. (  born 22 November 1933) is an award-winning Singaporean poet and academic who is regarded as one of the pioneers of English literature in Singapore.
       (...)
    Thumboo's poetrty is inspired by myth and history, anf he often dubbed Singapore's unofficial poet laureate because of his poems with nationalistic themes.  A pioneer of local English literature, he complied and edited some of the first anthologies of English poetry and fiction from Singapore and Maylaysia.  His own collection of poetry include ' Rib of Earth' ( 1956), 'God Can Do' ( 1977), 'Ulysse by the Merlion' ( 1979) an '  A Third Map'( 1993).  His latest anthology' Still Travelling', consisting of almost 50 poems, was published in 2008.  Thumboo has won the National Book Development Council Book Awards for Poetry three times, in 1978, 1980 and 1991.  He has also received the inaugural S.E.A. Writer Award 
( 1979), the first Cultural Medaillon for Literature ( 1979), and the Reja Rao Award ( 2002).  he was conferred a Bintang Bakti Masyarakat  (Public Service Star) in 1981 with an additional Bar in 1991, and the Pingat Jaza Gemilang ( Meritorious Service Medal ) in 2006.        WIKIPEDIA 


             
         
               
             


          

proclamation of the commitee to promote the founding of the league of independent vietnamese writer / writer nguyên ngọc ( vietnam )

                                   

                         -------------------------------------------------------------- ---                 
           PROCLAMATION OF THE COMMITEE TO PROMOTE
              THE FOUNDING OF THE LEAGUE OF
               INDEPENDENT VIETNAMESE WRITERS
          ----------------------------------------


      After 1975, the end of a hundred-year history of war, our country was in need of a substantial cultural renaissance .  Un-
luckily, this grave and urgent rebirth did not happen as expected. On the country, Vietnamese culture had envolved from bad to worse, and appears to be in danger of losing the most basic humanistic value. This shortcoming threatens the survival of the nation.

     Vietnamese writers most admit that they are partly responsible for this state of affairs.  Among literature' s many important functions is to awaken the conscience and to raise the morale of the nation.  At this great turning point of history, Vietnmamese literature is not realising its true role.

     The weakening of Vietnamese literature is rooted in the indifference of its writing to their social responsibilities, their insensitivity concerning daily events, and, most importantly, their lack of independent thinking, which has also limited their creative capabilities.

     In a society like ours, where basis freedoms have been severely limited, it is difficult for writers to speak clearly and forcefully about the conditions of life in society.  This imitation blurs and confine expressions, ultimately, it extinguishes and entirely.  The freedom to create and publish literary works is a life-or-death necessity, not only for writers as individuals but also for the health of Vietnmaese literature.  Without minimal rights to free expression, our literary lives will never br edequate.

     Literary institutions ruled bureaucraty and mendacity suffocate the literarure they presume to support.  They also suppress healthy communicates between writers and their ability of offer mutual assistance, both in their private lines and their artistic production.

     In response to this longstanding but urgent situation, we, the undersigned writers, resolve to organise a committee for the founder of an independent institution of Vietnamese writers, both inside and outside the country.  To be called The League of nIndependent Vietnamese Writers, this new institution seeks to promote a true, humanistic, and democratic literature, modern and responsive to globalisation.  As demanded by history, we must act as pioneers in the creation of a national culture renaissance.

     Activities of The League of Independent Vietnamese Writers with focus on following :

     - to improve solidarity and assistance among writers inside and outside the country.

     - to bring forth condition for professional amelioration, to advance and promote individual creative, and to encourage in creative writing as well as literary criticism and linguistic studies.

     - to defend all legitimate materialistic and spiritual interests of its members, especially the freedom to write and publish, as well as the promotion of easy and complete access to literature by the reading public.

    - The League of Independent Vietnamese Writers is an organistion belonging to civil society.  Dedicated to professional solidarity, it is completely independent of any other organisation existing inside and outside the country.

     The detailed status and programme of the League will be set up and made public in the process of establishing of the league. 

     Our email is <nhavandoclap@gmail.com>


     Hànội, March 3rd, 2014
     ON BEHALF OF THE PROMOTION COMITTEE



     Writer NGUYÊN NGỌC
    ( signed + 61 undersigned writers ) 

     ----

        < viet-studies >

           



























                                     
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Thephong by Thephong:; the writer, the work & the life - autobiography by Thephong - 7

Thephong by Thephong .. - 7 -  autobiography

Dai Nam Van Hien Books, Saigon 1973

           Thephong by Thephong ; : the writer, the work & the life

                              autobiography by Thephong

    At Christmas of 1962, I journeyed to Dalat.  My poetry book Under the Poet' s Eyes reflects my state of mind then, and expresses my grateful love to the beauteous highland I set foot in for the first time.  I almost the days around Bảy Hiền crossroads where people fought against one another for rubbish from American residences.  They beat, they quarelled and even let Americans sleep with their girls to get dollars which, in turn, brought them what they wanted : rice, clothes ... . Since Mr Phạm quang Huyến' s family moved  to this zone they had to work hard to earn their daily bread and to deal with bitter foes, among them the airman who was the authorized rubbish -receiver, and the neighbour who wanted their house.  When he was still in Chí linh Refugees' Hamlet settlement, one day he invited me to come and have tea with him.  While talking, he disclosed that we could work with a lighter heart once we did not have to worry about an apartment.  But grown to manhood, I no longer believed in any easy way of earning money.  I wrote about these things in the short story entitled The Rubbish Tip outside the City.

     Dirty things - quarrels, thefts, immoral parctices - wre daily happenings.  And we just could not ignore them.  Ironically, the so-called rubbish also comprised valuable things such as a new table, a wardrobe, and a chair.  Sometimes i found a carboard whose market price amounted to two or three hundreds piasters.  I felt extremely sad every time I saw the pile of rockets in front of my house . The higher it rose, the more casualities my nation 
suffered .  Among innocent victims were peasants and youths.  Coca-cola was served every time the American truck driver came.  More than that, the airman even used his wife as a seductive bait for rubbish .  I discovered that his wife was an ex-prostitute, and this partly accounted for it.  The conflict between Mr Phạm quang Huyến and the airman over, the latter had to move while we stayed.  One day, I heard a colleague of the airman saying that he exploited his wife again.   An American sergeant was free to make love with the

 airman' s wife during working house.  The sergeant gave him a Harley in exchange.

     Then I wrote astired poem which want :

       ... On the farther side of the road 

           A curious news is being spread - a reliable one, alas ! 

           Concerning a seventy-thousand- piaster worth 

                                                         American motor-cycle 

          A two- cylinder Harley which can ride fast on the mute road

          And the Vietnamese motor-cycle whose price is unknown -   

          A talkative woman-motor-cycle who only moves in bed

         The two crasy men exchanged the aforesaid things, 

                                                                      as in a fairy tale

          A lover of good living, the airmanz preferred the moto-cycle

                                                                              to his wife

         So he was in treaty with the American sergeant for ... her 

         In working-hours, the American and the woman-motor-cycle

                                                       are free to rock in their bed 

         And the Vietnamese man can ride the Harley on the road 

         We rightly guess he would evade the questioning on its price

         Such is the story of the woman with two husbands

        The story which makes an eighteen-year-old girl burst out

                                                            laughing hysterically ...' 

                                                   ( UPLIFTING POEMS ) 

     This volume was written prior to the 1963 coup d' état.  It contains my reflections on our wretched society .  My fear of policemen is one among them.  All my friends, living near or far, had been arrested.  Captain Đinh thạch Bích, whose machine I used  to type the  mss of Post War Writers second edition - and who gave a number of stencils, invited me to drink fin and tonic.  I refused.  Then, he replied, ' I guess you prefer $ 150 for five reams of paper'.

    Journalist Uyên Thao and Thắng were detained at The Directorate General of Police,  writer Nguyễn đức Quỳnh was reported lost after he got a haircut.  When I came to the crossroads to buy cigarettes, I met an apprentice-writer-policeman who rode a yellow Mobylette. He told me news about journalist Uyên Thao and Thắng, then advised me to seek asylum  as I being hunted.  He and I went to a coffeshop.  I a joking voice, the shopkeeper Thăng Long said, ' You still here, you cowboy writer ? '.  This unduced me to tell the agent to arrest me if he wanted to.  He shook his head .

                                                ***

     My dog Lili followed me as a shadow.  She entered my life after I returned from my first trip to Dalat.  As we passed Hàm Nghi St. , she licked my hand, and I touched her ash-gray coat.  I let loose her leash, lead her to the coffee- shop.  I gave her a bowl of sugar to eat.  The sudents accompanying me burst out laughing.  I would not keep a she-dog, a student said.  The prejudice against females made no impression on me.

     She followed me every time I went to the rubber forest near my house, as white Lulu. We were both happy.  I climbed a tree, and lay on an arched branch, reading a book defining the way of Great Society should go.  She was my real guard in this moment.  I caressed her and felt pity for her; she would have died some days before.  She used to run out to the crossroads for food and amorous adventures.  I called her back and beat her with a stick.  She was so badly hurt her foetus was expulsed.  I thought I had to dig the ground to bury her.  I hurt me to see her thin body and bleary eyes.  She was so weak she could not walk through the doorstep as before.  There was nothing I could do as I had no mney.  Unable to eat cooked rice, she only sipped the cup of milk I gave her every day.  But she recovered slowly and now she was definitely well .  I was glad that she was no longer fond of getting out the crossroads.  I said to myself. ' In this mad , monstruos world, lfe has become so hard I am not able to feel myself and a female dog '. 

     I drew inspiration from my life with Lili to write this poem :

          ... A strange dog came to see me off for the lowland 
              I was about to go away, leaving behind me Dalat forests 
             She was fond of me and felt pity for my lonely life 
             She lay at my feet and made me sad 
             I wrote poetry depicting life in this mad country
             Though badly hurt by dishonest and base people 
             I gave my dog the name of  a ' new wave'  singer, Lili 
             I caressed her gray fur as if it was my departing sweeheart's
                                                                                           hair 
             I mounted the hill, accompanied by my precious
                                                                           four-legged friend  
             I longed to be a farmer free to till his land 
             While she helped me to find out my real enemies 
             I had been betrayed many times, so I loved dogs deeply 
             Being wise, I could not be cheated by the bourgeois 
             Being energetic, I love Youth 
             The soul of our Fatherland seemed to hover on the pine-forest
             You young people, foster patriotism along with
                                                                     the vigilance of dogs 
             Raise your heads to see the sky high up and be careful
                                                                          not to  fall down ...
                                                                                                (UNDER THE POET' S EYES)

    I often told my friends the story of Lili.  Some held that I showed contempt to the whole human race.  I had no definite defence to offer but I reaffirmed that animals were loyal and my Lili was a perfect friend.  She did not stop loving me though I had beaten her.  Mind you, it was not because she forget that; even now, when I called her back from the crossroads, she always tried to hide herself and did not run back instantly, and when she heard my threatening voice, she managed to lie down in a quiet corner.  But she loved me. Well, I also loved Lili my dog because she knew how to behave.  I had written a short story The Respectful Dog *. I just  could not help putting it down as the human species behavbed this way :
----
*  In  'The Rubbish Tip Outside the City' . (TR)

   ... My friend, the bourgeois dressed smartly in European clothes 
       Nothing is lacking for them who are so gracious and beautiful
       But they want to sell out our fatherland, mocking at our sorrows
       They want to sell out our fatherland along with our colors
                                                          as they did chemical sugar
       And they fly abroad, leaving us behind 
      And what can we do when they are already in the air ?

      Oh ! They are never to be trusted, the henchman of the foreigners !
      Not one of them have ever cared for us ...
                                                    (UPLIPTING POEMS)

    A great number of writers and poets in the East and West have never ceased attacking human injustice and it still exists.   This is why I want to defend the poor, the oppressed although I fully realised the futility of my task.  I wrote in the introduction to my Vietnamese translation of 
Yevtshenko' s autobiography :

     ' ... Yevtushenko held that there were no such things as nationalists and communism.  There ere but good people and mean people and he always tried to be on the side of the good people to work for the world of tomorrow so that the number of the good continued to increase day by day.  But I believed there would still be bad people in thirty thousand more years. I was not disheartened by this.  And I decided to fight on. The final victory would be achieved by the good ...'  *
----
*   Yevgeny Yestushenko, Autobiography précoce, translated from French into Vietnamese , Hồi ký văn chương viết sớm , Saigon,1963. (TR) 

    I raise my voice to bring dogs to writers ' attention and am sure they would love and honour dogs.  Dogs are more than a source of inspiration. They are worthy of our warmest praises because they could help build a great society.  The stories of dogs in war time, dogs being faithful to men always moved me deeply.  Here is one.  Once, a man had a dog. The dog accompanied the man to the bus stop twice a day.  And then he ran home.  He ran to the office when the day' s work was over.  The war broke out.  The man was killed by a bomb.  The dog was always on the usual spot to wait for the man.  Day after day passed.  Year after year passed but he would never see his master again.  His eyes became blear, he had been worry sick a a heavy cold that did not leave him and died on the waiting place.

      Unfaithful widow always hate dogs because the latter nevr forget their masters .


                                                 *** 

    Our home faces the key street linking  Bảy Hiền Crossroads, Tân sơn Nhất Air Port, Cộng Hòa Military Hospital, and Saigon itself to the East and West of the country.  Seeing the funeral processions of the youths who died in the civil war, I wrote :

     Beside our dwelling was a house crammed with many beds that there was                                                                         apparently no way out
    The soldiers' wives renting the house could do nothing but sleep,
    Their husbands at war had not come back
    We read in newspapers that thousands of youth had been killed, their             bodies left unburied
    A silent sea of faces blurred in tars
    Every month one thousand Vietnamese soldiers lost their lives while the         enemy casualties were four times as numerous
    Let's hang these papers as talismans on our beds

... We could hear the funeral march beating
    As coffins passed through the road
    Through day and night without crape-weiled women following the coffin
    Who had died ? How did he live ? Could life be so short and sad ?
    Well, I knew you were those who paid the price of patriotism seeing your                                                                             flag-wrapped coffins

... Alas it breaks my heart that those wives forget you, not long after that
    I know you they want to get married, leaving your sons uncared for 
    I know why they hate dogs like hell ...   
           (UPLIPTING POEMS)

    I wrote this poem in anger.  Not only did the fire and flood of fratricide broke years of building up, it also destroyed our souls...


                                            ***

     Writer Nhất Linh committed suicide on July 7, 1963. I  was extremely distressed, but I found he died at the right moment.  I wrote a poem on the 49 th day after his death.  Men of letters wrote articles and poems on his life, but the majority of them dared not attend his funeral for fear of secret agents.  Meeting lawyer Nguyễn tường Bá at Thanh Thế Restaurant, I promised to come on the 49 th day after his death. The Diệm government failed in the attempt to foil the commeration ceremony.  Here is the poem :

    ... Then came one afternoon... Dressed in smart clothes
        I took a seat and ordered a morning cup of coffee
        Angry with myself turned a bourgeois who knew how to spend money
        I looked or a daily, stared dismally into space and indulged in day-                                                                                                     dreams
        Hearing the sweet sounds of music by these who crossed the Pacific                                                                                      Ocean years ago
        What do Asians think of, surrounded by waste land ?
        Suddenly something strucks at my head, cool as a needle
        Writer Nhất Linh committed suicide, swallowing poison on the seventh                                                        day of the seventh month of the year
        Reading his biography on newspers
        I had to frown at distortions, yes, cruel distortions
        Aimed at him and Asian literature as well
        I must put down the cup of coffee on the table
        Thinking of you who had left this world for ever and for ever
        I decide this volume of poetry should contain only uplipting poems
        And scred numbers  Let us remember
                        the 7 th day of the 7 th month ín 963
                        the 40 th day after his death
                        He who lies in the grave has the power on the destiny
                                                                                  of the living
                             (UPLIPTING POEMS)

   Poet Đông Hồ wrote a poem on Nhất Linh in Bách khoa Magazine, poet Vũ hoàng Chương in another one. I did not think he was sincere as he had lately published a volume of poetry entitled The Flowered Lantern * as a token of his loyalty to the Diệm' s régime.  He was sent abroad to attend literary meetings and subsequently awarded a big sum of money.  Then he spread the rumor he had gained a million in lottery.  We must know no anti-conformist writer was sent abroad in Diệm' s  era.  Now you can have an idea of what 
PEN VIETNAM was.  As early s 1962, I wrote, ' PEN VIETNAM are just fine words coined by journalists Phạm việt Tuyền and Thanh Lãng.  Most famous writers refused to join it ...' **. When poet Vũ hoàng Chương wrote a poem in praise of the death of Venerable Thích quảng Đức, later mimeographed in the Xá Lợi Pagoda and distributed free, I did not believe he was sincere at all, as I knew the clan of journalist Phạm việt Tuyền and poet Vũ hoàng Chương too well.  When régime was still strong, they were quoted as saying that President Ngô đình Diệm was irreplacable although he had done many wrongs. But when his power was starting to slip quickly, they began condemning him and even attempted to stage a general strike of Saigon journalists in order to review their tarnished images.   I never approved of their opportunistic way   But I admitted that journalist Phạm việt Tuyền was by far better than a politician, as he also a poet, author of Breaking in Chains ***.  I had always loved poets, because they were at least morally good. 

      On August 25, 1963, I was deeply moved by the dead of a Pharmacy girl student  in a march of protest at  Bến Thành Square.  The victim was later identified as a secondary school gil named Quách thị Trang.  After a fortnight I composed the poem What did I see ... to voice my indignation :

    Her frail body in clothes whiter than witeness fell on the asphalted road
  Have you died, my sister aged only eighteen who has not known love,
  Who will write two words Vietnam on the gloomy sky of to day ?

    I also admired Lê văn Duyệt High School girls who made banderoles out of their white áo dài :

       What  did see, alas my short sighted eyes could not see far
       What  did I see, they killed people in the roundup last night
       What  did I see, my barefooted people with mourning bands on their                                                       loose and dreary hair bursting into tears
       What did I see, many newborn children refusing to live in this 
                                                                                  monstrous world
       What did I see, sisters and mothers awaiting their lost brothers and sons
       The sight of schoolgirls tearing their coats to make banderoles
                                                                                         haunted me
       I shouted out to exhort others to rebellion ...' 
                 (UPLIPTING POEMS )

--------
*      Hoa đăng / thơ Vũ hoàng Chương.
**     The Current Situation of South Vietnamese Literature from 1957 to 1961/ 
         Hiện tình  văn nghệ miền Nam : 1957- 1961  , Saigon 1962 .
***   Phá lao lung / thơ Thanh Tuyền ( Phạm việt Tuyền).
                 (TR).

    Once again. I had to leave the city.  For the moment, I brought some old  books to a shop at the corner of Lê văn Duyệt and Trần quý Cáp Sts. The shopowner, Phạm  minh Đỗng, was very kind to me and he knew to value rare, old books. So, when there was no rice left I would come ro see him and was rarely dissapointed.  Some of my close friends asked me whether I wanted to sell books on politics  at reduced prices to have more readers.  They did not believe me when I said I did so merely because I was broke. Then I had to make clear that I was not in the mood of kidding. In fact, they were somewhat cheated by my appearance.  Saigon was a phony city like Paris.  Owing to Mr Phạm minh Đỗng I could afford to buy stencils.
   
    In 1963, we published two books each month.  I went to the premises of Vietnamese Association for Asian Culture Relations and typed there. Alas, to have a typewriter of my own had been a long-cherished hope of mine. I felt a deep compassion for myself every time I saw in my mind' s eye a typewriter, along with reference books on a wordesk and a case full of precious mss.  When I was still living on Trương minh Giảng St., I once borrowed a type writer and was stopped at the Trương minh Giảng bridgehead and brought to the branch of police station inside the City Housing Estate for not having the invoice of the machine.  Those days secret agents and policemen swarmed the streets to check suspected passengers, especially those bringing books with themselves.  At dusk I was ordered to carry rice to the police chief' s house at Hai bà Trưng St. At midnight they brought me in a car to my friend who lent the typerwriter.  In the afternoon we came but my friend was not at home and his sister did not recognize me; so, they threatened to beat me.  If the same thing happened this time I would be thrown into prison.  They let me ring the bell while pressing the revolver against my back.  I only felt safe when seeing my friend coming towards me.


                                               ***

    It took me nearly an hour to bicycle from my house to the premises of the Association.  I typed until noon, went home for lunch and came back in early afternoon.  Downstairs was The Refugees Affairs Special Commisariat.  Fortunately the guards did not keep an eye on my activities.  One day, scholar Nguyễn đăng Thục, Chairman of the Asscociation and editor of the magazine, asked me, ' You're still free, boy ?' . I became more cautious than ever, not knowing what he really meant.   I then explained to him that my recent book were translation, sharing his view that our men of letters were still not mature enough for creative writing. When I showed him my translation of the history book by Louis Roubaud, he was much pleased and stopped suspecting me of stenciling leaflets.  To tell the truth much stories as The Respectful Dog exhorted rebellion against the phony society just as leaflets did.  I did not worry about the guard, Mr Khiêm, as he was dedicated Buddhist. He sometimes handed me press releases from Xá lợi Pagoda, and the notorious poem by Vũ hoàng  Chương.

     Besides the tiring job of writing books, running the duplicator and collecting money brought me unspeakable pains.  I had to borrow money of jackets, stencils, and finally, I myself bound the copies.  It was not true that my only concern was to manage to propagate the so-called rebellious literature.

    Deciding to stop displaying books in public, Writer Thế Nguyên and I wrote to some fifty people including fellow writers and dedicated readers requesting them to pay fifty piasters for each copy, and intellectuals were keen on foreign books only  - a sad reality of a developing country.  In urging them to pay for what they peviously received free, we irritated them a lot.  But to read our publications had become a must to many of them.  We mimeographed books to carry our sruggle, to reveal the real circumstances of an economically and politically unstable society, and to enable ourselves to continue writing without being influenced by petty fashions.  I expressed these opinions in the article On Mimeographing Books and Its Problems *.  When  poet Hoàng Trinh alias Phạm xuân Ninh held that we had better means at our disposal than mimeographing, he adopted the point of view of a high official-director of the National Broadcasting Commission.  When still an independent and free man, Hoàng Trinh liked Constant Virgil Gheotghiu and he himself had translated part of The 25 th Hour.  When a director he did not appreciate my Vietnamese version of it.  I was rather annoyed, by this failure to understand that, the book was meant as a blame of Vietnamese Phanariot in power **. My consolation was that he was a regular subscriber to our books in two consecutive years.  Unfortunately, it took us many times for collect money from him as he had to visit him in hours he was likely at home; namely, sleeping, eating, and waking hours.  Some of our readers did not pay us in two long years and we often load patience with them and gave up. Writer Triều Đẩu reminded some of them that we were not beggars and we only collected money for books sold.  But the situation did not change much hereafter. Lawyer Triệu bá Thiệp only paid us on the fourth encounter. Enginner Đỗ đình Chinh failed to pay us after many visits in the span of two years.   The mother of Lộc, one of my friends, frowned at our man after the latter bicycled in one hour from Bảy Hiền crossroads to 797 Trần hưng Đạo St.  We also mailed books to painter Đinh Cường in Huế.  When he came in Saigon, and he did not acknowledge the receipt of books.  We knew he was a liar, but he could do nothing as we did not register parcels. Later when I came to get the jackets for poet Ninh Chữ, painter Đinh Cường was not home. 
 I suddenly saw on his wordesk our publication The Curfew Bell ***.  I did not let him know this, but I never expected to see him again.
-----
*      Life Magazine / nguyệt san Sống / Ngô trọng Hiếu , Saigon 1960.
**      The Whip / Chiếc roi ngựa / a novel by Virgil Constant Gheorghiu .
***    Hồi chuông tắt lửa/ Thế Nguyên, Saigon 1963. 

                         
                                            ***

     The Curfew  Bell, written by Thế Nguyên, condemns a Catholic priest who exploited his followers and took a wife.  I received a letter form Professor Nguyễn văn Trung, Saigon Faculty of Arts, ordering a copy of the novel and expressing his wish to meet the author.  It was a happy surprise for me to hear from the man who had denounced me as a saboteur of cultural activities in South Vietnam and who now became our reader.  I dispatched a man to bring him the book and get money for it. My man did not met him.  I urged my man to come again and again, because I had made it clear from the outset that an intellectual should pay for what he got.  I did not know for sure whether writer Thế Nguyên reminded Professor Nguyễn văn Trung of that in their encounter.  This made me think of Negro poet L. Hughes and Haward  Professor Alain Locke.  At first, Hughes hesistated to meet a college professor, but later in Paris, he was much satisfied with the fruitful, happy encounter.  As for me, I understood Professor Nguyễn văn Trung better; He did not hate me as before.

    Having lived through so many tortures and himiliation, I even felt myself to be in a position to realistically help those who used to complain about their hardships in life.  But I never imagined to receive the following letter from Director General of Information Phan văn Tạo:

REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM                                     25 th  July, 1963 DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF INFORMATION                    ref. 4044 CDV/TT/HDKD
79- 81 PHAN DINH PHUNG ST. 
     SAIGON


Mr Thế Phong
Director
Dai Nam Van Hien Pubblishing House
201 / 11 Nguyễn  Huệ St, Phú Nhuận


Dear Mr Phong,

     Thank you for sending me your translation of Constant Virgil
 Gheorghiu' s  The Whip.

     I would like to draw your attention to the press law requiring you to submit all copies for censorship prior to publication.

     May I remind you that immediately after I received your 
'Open Letter addressed to Writers, Poets and Readers'.  I sent you an official note, ref. 349/TT/HDKD on the 2nd of July urging you not to violate the regualtion.

    In my capacity as Director General of Information, I am sorry to refuse your gift.  I am returning it to you.

    I also take liberty to act upon Articles 6 and 7 of the decret-law 275/PTT/TTK of April 5, 1954 establishing the regualtions concerning domestic publications .

     Thank you your due consideration.

                                                                                                         Sincerely yours,
                                                                                                                                     PHAN VĂN TẠO
                                                                                                                                (signed and sealed)


   Enclosed were two copies for Mr Phan văn Tạo and Chiarman of the Councill of Censors Phạm xuân Thái,  reading the letter, I thought of a phone all from the Directorate General of Police.  In fact the address of the publishing house was that poet Diễm Châu alias Phạm văn Rao.  He and his wife were watched by plain- clothes agents because of me.  Phạm văn Rao also receive my visitors  students- students  and military men.  He would tell those worthy of confidence my real address. Ywo youths named Hoàng văn Giang and Trần như Huỳnh lived next to my door without knowing it. Fearing I would receive them, they wrote to me they would like very much to meet me to express their ideas  about some good points in my autobiographical novel Looking Back at Midway of Life *, which they appreciated immensily.  Writing was only amusement then. On the other hand, my life was freed from entanglements, but I found it rather hollow and wanted to love and be loved.  In my trip to Dalat in October 1963 to search for holy water on Lang Bian Highland, I met Lê thị Kim Dung in the same party.  I loved her at first sight as she looked like my mother.  The trip in search of holy water ** was a long prose poem recording this 
event .
----
*     Nửa đường đi xuống/ Thế Phong, Saigon 1963, 1969.
**    Chàng ơi đừng quên em / Cho thuê bản thân / Thế Phong, Saigon 1963.
         (TR)

     I later though I could avoid her, but I saw her again at the corner of Lê văn Duyệt and Hồng thập tự Sts. one morning and I let her know I was not a soldier as I told her before.   I dispateched my nephew to bring The Phong, 
  A Selection from his Writings *  to her residence.  Only then I realised she was the daughter of a colonel- judge .

    I dedicated to her the first pages of Uplipting Poems **I still receive her letters from a bleak part of the world *** inquiring about my life and work as a writer.  Dear readers, don' t think I wrote poetry  to win a girl' s affections. My poetry is imply the history of my life.
----
*    Tuyển truyện Thế Phong, Saigon 1961.
**  Thơ làm lớn dậy con người/ Thế Phong. (TR)
***   Canada

    I admitted all my wrongdoings and tried to mend my ways. I wrote Reaaaraisal f writer Nguyễn đức Quỳnh * as a reminder and warning to youth about the gruesome consequence of bad faith, but I never meant him any harm.
----
*   Nhận diện vóc dáng Nguyễn đức Quỳnh/ Thế Phong, Saigon 1962, 1964.(TR)

    In this period I worked from7 a.m till noon.  After lunch I continued untill dusk, and after dinner, to midnight.  I sometimes thought of giving up, being too tired, but I always insisted in complaining the work. After the work was finished, I began to worry naf wondered what could become of me if there was nothing more for me to do.  So I carried out project after project.

    In difficult times we can distinguish good friends from bad ones.  This is particularly true of artists and writers.  Flight lieutenant Nguyễn cao Nguyên bought our books but he never came to pay, requiring I would come to him personally.  I found out he was afraid as our books had not been censored.  Poet Bùi khải Nguyên refused to buy our books and even failed to come to the Post Office to mail me $ 500 at my request.

    One noon Nguyễn mạnh Cường came to see me on a Solex.  After I brought him to the rubber forest near my house for reasons of security he invited me to join The Commitee for the Defence of Human Rights, headed by Lawyer Triệu bá Thiệp.  I refused on the ground that I disbelieved his comrades and held that they were also good at exploiting others when they rose to power and far as I was concerned I only fought for a true revolution.  Nguyễn mạnh Cường left me, looking very sad.  I later heard that he had been detained.

    Another noon, poet Bùi khải Nguyên returned and urged me to join in the full-fleged protest against the government' s repressive measures.  As for me, I condemned him as a coward through his attitude to my publishing house and I had no idea about The Buddhist affair to offer *.  He then said I was a hedgehog but I did not feel the need to defend myself.  Nobody could incite me now, only sincerity moved  me.  Every time a book was mimeographed we had to find out the safest way to deliver copies to readers and to mail them to those living outside the capital.  I thought the security measures were not so tight as I read Dr Nguyễn- trần Huân resident in Paris acknowledging the receipt of books.   A distinguished scholar and translator, he was the senior lecturer at Sorbonne Univeristy.  After the mimeographed translation of The Whip reached him, he wrote to me that he knew Dr Métianu to whom the book was dedicated.  I regret not having asked him about the author's impressions on being translated, and about Dr Métianu on my Vietnamese spelling of his name.  I felt a deep compassion for the Rumanian people who suffered like my people.  I was ready to be jailed after a book was released. Every time I went to the Censorship Office, Phạm quang Huyến' s son, Cừ, accompanied me so that he might report a likely kidnapping to the family as the authorities often refused to let civilians know of arrest.  Nobody was aware of my secret intention except Nguyễn cao Đàm, internationally known artist photographer and Ministry of Information official.  As the Ministry did not approved of our publication.  Well, he simply wanted to get his pay regularly nad I was never chagrined.  I was not afraid of sorrows, worries nad even betrayals.  This had place in my acerbic opinions expressed in my poems. 'Life would be dull if there was no evil whatever about it', O once wrote.  I used to sleep with a prostitute following a sad incident.  Every time I had venereal disease I felt much pity for prostitutes who never compalined about diseases.
----
* The author had serious misgivings of the so-called Buddhist revolt in 1963 . (TR)

    Nowhere else in the world could you have a good fuck with fifty piasters *. A well-known poet agree with this.  The good nad the bad exist together eveywhere in the world, and happiness must be paired with sorrow.  The matter-of-fact acceptance of the human condition enable us to live with lighter hearts.
----
*  US 0,50  ( Translator's note)

     In my stay in Dalat at Christmas time 1964, a young student from the Saigon faculty of Letters expressed this opinion about me after living with me for two weeks :

    '... When I came back in saigon I will tell Professor Lê thành Trị that I did learn much logic from you ...'

    These words deeply moved us.  I intended to tell my young friend more about my past experiences, but he had to return to Saigon sooner than as scheduled.

    When I was twenty I told my beloved all my fantasies. At thirty I was reticent and could not win the hearts of women.  Life had been unfair to me and literature failed to make wounds more bearable.  During the last twelve months I had not written one word.  After a hugely successful career, William Faulner admitted in his last days that to pursue literature was not so interesting as to go hunting.  I am still not old but I feel tired after more than ten years of writing.  I now like stories like the following better than serious pieces of writing. The story runs like this; A former dancing girl named HUỲNH THỊ THU THỦY got the permission from her husband to go with me to Dalat as only a atmosphere there could bring her to life again.  The days who planned to return to Saigon she got up very early . Perhaps whe was the first riser in all Dalat Hotel. Four o' clock . It was rather cold. We slept in the same room, on two beds.  The bellboy knocked the door before entering, which he never did when I was alone.  I recalled the first day in the hotel , Thu Thủy met Kim Cji, another dancing girl in the corridor. Looking at me, she said, 'Where is your husband ?'  Thu Thủy shook her head and introduced me as her 
husband' s friend. We also met poet Tuệ Giác who exclaimed, 'How nice she 
is !' and wrinkled his eyes. I replied, ' We are just friends.'  Then I told him to ask Thu Thủy for confirmation.  He did and Thu Thủy smiled radiantly and the cold atmosphere suddenly warmed up.  After getting up, she awoke me did her make up.  I looked at the window.  In the mist lighted lamps moved. I rubbed my eyes and found out the moving lamps were those cars flitting past.

    Thu Thủy pushed me back when I descended the slope too fast.  We played like a newly wed couple in the honeymoon.  Her old friends applauded her when we entered Maxim's Night Club.  I told her she had rendered me famous and she praised me for my elegant manners, from the way of holding conversation to manipulating the coffee spoon.  I asked whether or not she had stopped being afraid of me.  In our first night at the hotel I told her I would sleep elsewhere and be back in the morning, but I later found it unnecessary as I could submit to restraint, Thu Thủy later said, laughing,
' What do you think my reactions whoud have been had you touched me when I got out of the bathroom?'.  We joined hands and went plucking flowers.
 I told her that I also liked the red and the black as she, and we would have been bitter rivals and she been a man.  We spent magical days and nights together.  I still remember her last words to me in Dalat, ' In our society  woman does not have the right to choose her husbands. You have that right. When you have a wife I hope you' ll know how too treat her and she' ll be certaintly most happy .'

     Thank you, Thu Thủy.  Thank you again.


    We were back in Saigon. One night I brought Thu Thủy to a fortune-teller in Calmette St.  Then we went to a coffee shop where a group of teddy boys harassed us. Thu Thủy calmed me, ' Please don' t bother.  Only a woman knows how to deal with them properly'. Seeing her sweeping I said, ' I really on't want to cause trouble.  Do you think it's guilty to go out with a friend' s wife'. 

     Journalist Nguyễn thu Minh, and his wife, Phương Duyên also knew our story in spite of your discretion.  I was forced to say to her husband Nguyễn mạnh Cường, ' When I love your wife with all the fire of my soul, I' ll hand you a revolver and in case you refrain from killing me, you' ll lose her '.   I did not believe he was convinced but I felt assured nothing had change since our night in Dalat Hotel.  I hoped to write a novel on THU THỦY, the woman whoo appreciated Uplifting Poems and the novel The Adulteress.  The novel  delighted her during a whole night and caused lots of laughter.  Once she showed me her favorite stanza of poetry, looking in the faces  of her cute son and me :

            'I want to follow my love  
                   Who has never pressed about marriage 
                       As far as Dalat to pass the night together 
                             We will be warm, we will be cold 
                                                   And forget all, all, all ...'

    Oh my HUỲNH THỊ THU THỦY, My wishes were so simple you could not believe them :

         ' This century
                  rugged land exceeds fertile part
           I grew up in difficult times; 
                 I refuse to hear soothing words. 
          Life is stripped of liberty; 
                Every line of poetry should be a bullet 
          To bring down walls of calumny and hypcorisy
          Look! 
               We grow Europe-imported grass in public gardens
          I feel estranged in my country
                     and turn a foreign visitor 
          Let me be like a heroic mockingbird flitting in the setting sun 
          Let me evade the world I never made 
                even in the brief moment
          When I cast a glance at the desolate expanse ...'

    As we like pine forest, cold evening sunshine, I' ll never forget one rainy afternoon Thu Thủy was alone on the misty hill when a soldier of my age rushed to console her as he thought she was about to commit suicide. On seeing me he said he had been rather shocked.  Thu Thủy lost a sun glasses and I a pair it Hitkok wrisbands . She later told me these shoud be considered as love-tokens to the darling city.  I still see on my mind' s eye  the light flickering on the tree tops on misty nights there.  But she is gone now !  
The enthralling atmosphere of the moss-covered hotel Au Sans Souci in the pine forest haunts me. On gloden afernoon I sat looking out in front of a piece of paper whcih had remained blank for a fortnight.  I was forced to come back to Saigon. I have always liked this poem, sincere as genuine and lasting friendship which is the same yesterday and today and forever.  

     Like Nicolas Gogol, I hope my people and I  will be happier than today. I plan to get married as soon as I come back, and my wife will be as happy as Thu Thủy predicted.  My wife and I will come to say thank you to her. We' ll await her at door. We' ll have no guets but her :

        '...  I choose  Autumn, pine forest and sad sunshine; 
             I give up writing poetry 
                             and do not torture myself anymore 
             Do me a favour, my solemn- faced and wise wife
             Say to me, 
                        ' Burn a fire ! Hang the mosquito-net' 
              I am now the voluntary slave who is fully contended ! 
             Tomorrow morning  
                          we' ll wake up early 
                                           set out to grow vegetables.


             Outside the hedge 
                       near the farm gate
                            TRESSPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED 
             All languages of the world.


           SAIGON SOUTH VIETNAM
          FEBRUARY, 1965


           thephong






                                          *****************************

                             

                             DAI NAM VAN HIEN BOOKS
                                           PO BOX 1123
                                           SAIGON, SOUTH VIETNAM



                                           FIRST PUBLISHED 
                                           BY DAI NAM VAN HIEN BOOKS, 1966
                                           SECOND EDITION, 1968
                                                         THIS EDITION, FEBRUARY, 1972


                                            COPYRIGHT BY THÊ PHONG, 1966, 1988, 1972
                                            MIMEOGRAPHED IN SAIGON, SOUTH VIETNAM 


                                            THIS EDITION, MARCH, 2014 
                                             IN HOCHIMINH CITY


                                             ****************************