At sixteen, The Rubaiyat ruled my life. Now at eighty two I see it makes good poetry but bad sense. Re reading The Old Man and Me forty years after its first publication, my Moving Finger has re-writ, or rather, edited my novel with I hope, all my Piety and Wit. From today's prospect, I was able to cancel a word or half a line throughout, understanding what I didn't then that in this novel, speech read is preferable to speech spoken. The latter is full of 'um', 'oh', and 'ah' - dead foliage that smother the text. I eliminated most but not all of them. Some were too stubbornly embedded in the text. Words such as the all purpose 'just' that runs around this book as in 'you just want to', 'just a moment', 'just in time', 'just the wrong way.' I cut some of the beginnings of sentences that use such weakening qualifications as "well" and "I'm afraid" followed by I, you, he, she, it. I cut 'perfectly', and 'definitely'.' These being eliminated I felt released the core of the text to glow. I wanted the two protagonists to express themselves through exchanges that are brisk, crisp, direct and unadorned, sometimes to the point, often around it, even at times, soul to soul.

My first-person narrator, a young American girl, speaks a jumble of jargon du jour, collegespeak, popular Madison Avenue mocking metaphors and basic black musiciantalk. Jazz great, Miles Davis, who I had loosely based a character on, after he read the book, had only one comment. "Watch out for slang," he said. "It dates fast." I had occasion to recall that in the '70's when a frined said the narrator's slang was dated. Again in the '80's, when another reader thought is was "period" (i.e. quaint). Now in the new millennium, it is historic. The way we talked way back when we dug things, made the scene, went to Happenings and all that jazz. When cigarettes were not props but had a life of their own, like those of Bette Davis, indicators of mood, gestures denoting anything from seduction to boredom. Smoking round the clock was universally acceptable. In the novel, one Bright Young Thing with a long cigarette-holder smokes during the meal and no body leaves the dining room. Cigarettes and slang stay, I decided, dead weight vegetation goes.

Indicentally, the other protagonist, Englishman C. D. McKee, the narrator's worthy opponent, described as "too distinguished to do anything," speaks a brand of standard educated English which never went through the dated or period cycle but was and is historic.

My specific aim in writing this novel was to present an anti-heroine in response to all the anti-heroines so popular of the day, beginning with Kingsley Amis' Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim, John Osborne's Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger and all the anti-heroes who followed in their wake. Loosely bound together as Angry Young Men, they hit out at everything phony, pompous priggish, prudish and pretentious. Their anger was exhilarating. To their delight, and to his later embarrassment, Somerset Maygham called them "scum." Creating the female counterpart I knew would be tricky as in those days when relationships between men and women were at an all time low, females were depicted as passive and put upon. (Then came the '70's - Gloria Steinem and her MS magazine, Germaine Greer and her Female Eunuch, Carmen Callil and her all-female publishing house Virago. And nothing was ever the same again.) Back in the '60's I was aware that my anti-heroine might scare people off. But I did it anyway. And it was fun. After all, Cyril Connelly had advised me about my private life, "Make up your mind, you can either be a monster. or a doormat, I opted for the former.

My Angry Young Woman hates everything English - Soho, Mayfair, the West End and countryhouses. She is a girl with a plan, with lots of opinions, operating on a short fuse. Almost everything about English people annoys her, her irritation at tiems boiling up to fury even as her adversary's irony slides down into sarcasm.

But what I hope I had going for me is that Bad Girls are more interesting than Good ones. The Bible has an infatuation with them - Delilah, Bathsheba, Jezebel, Salmoe and then some. It does them proud. The 19th century Bad Girls - Hedda Gabler, Becky Sharp and Scarlett O'Hara live on in iconic glory. My narrator who plans to kill the Englishman because he has the money, is throughly bad.

The time frame is 1962, with England not-yet-but-on-the-verge-of Swinging London was not the Mecca for tourists it has become. It was however regrouping itself from '51 on for its cultural explosion, its fashions of Carnaby Street, its playwrights' invasion of Broadway, to say nothing of the Liverpool sound of The Beatles and the Glaswegian sound of James Bond.

But in the '60's, all good Americians skipped bombed-out London and rushed to Paris. I myself went straight from New York to Paris where I stayed happily for a while surrounded by neew Americian friends. I didn't have any in London and it occurs to me now that this feeling of isolation rubbed off onto the novel. Then too, America at the end of WW II was the richest country in the world. However much of its money wnet to rebuilding Germany and Japan, the defeated enemy and none to brave England. Which, as ny novel also reflects didn't make Americians very popular with the English.

Short digression - It didn't work the other way around! The English coming to America were unequivocally ecstatic about everything in the New World and Americians quick to return the compliment, rolled out the red carpet.

Another point: in the '60's, publishers were giving writers the freedom to be explicit about sex, its cravings, its orgasms, its masturbations. I took advantage of this. Sexual matters combined with self-interest activate my tow leading characters who while they think they are guided by reason, in reality only use their logic to justify their passion.

Perhaps, not surprisingly, I have also written a romance. At least according ot Brewer's Dictionary of Phrases & Fable, which decrees, "The modern application of the word 'romance' pertains to a story containing incidents more or less removed from the ordinary evenets of life." That seems to describe my story too as the contenders fight, flee, reconniter, re-engage and fight on with fresh energy to the end - to justify their out of control passions.

Elaine posed for photographer Richard Avedon for the cover of the original publication of The Old Man & Me.