Authors Electric

  ‘You have been a grate riter…’ So begins the message on a card from my granddaughter which I've kept and treasure. She made it quite a long time ago to welcome me on a visit to her and her parents. The greeting didn’t then go on to analyse my opus or offer any exegetical criticism, constructive or otherwise, so back then I couldn’t really ask her to elucidate her choice of tense, but I found it interesting. ‘You have been’ doesn’t have the negative implications of   ‘You were’. ‘You were’ means you’re no longer whatever it is, as in ‘You were a grate riter but now you’re crap’. However, ‘have been’ still does give you the feeling that it needs to be qualified in some way. You expect it to be followed by ‘but’, as in ‘You have been a grate riter but you need to pay more attention to your use of the imperfect subjunctive’. Playing with tenses is great (or grate). There’s a very active sequence in Flaubert’s Salammbô where leaders of the mercenary armies get together and o...