Tongue in Cheek
By Matthew Tree
It was the tail end of the 1970s, I was nineteen, and my girlfriend was about to be thrown out of Britain by the immigration authorities because she carried a Spanish passport with an expired visa. Spain, unlike the Britain of the time, wasn’t yet in whatever the European Union was called back then. So, we got married, but didn’t tell our respective families because we didn’t believe in marriage as such and simply wanted a stamp on her passport. We got it, and that was supposed to be that.
Only it wasn’t: six months later, she told her sister that we were married, and her sister told everybody else in the family, and most of the village. I eventually found myself obliged to visit Catalonia for the first time to meet all my in-laws and their friends. Not that I knew what Catalonia was, assuming (as did almost everyone else in the world at the time) that it was a Spanish province, complete with the usual Spanish paraphernalia: flamenco, bullfights, sangria, and one language only: español. I was astonished to discover that all the people around me in this village just sixty kilometres outside Barcelona, couldn’t dance flamenco, loathed bullfighting, eschewed sangria, and instead of Spanish, were speaking a language I’d never heard or heard of before.
I was even more astonished to find that there was an extensive literature in this language, translations into it from dozens of others, and that it was spoken by around ten million people. As the plan was for me to stay in the village for six months, I decided to learn it. There were no Catalan classes for adults back then, but there was a book called ‘Teach Yourself Catalan’ by Alan Yates of Sheffield University. I studied a chapter of that every day and then practised it as much as possible. This total immersion in the language meant that when I eventually learned to speak in Catalan, I also found I was also thinking in Catalan.
I began writing - in English, naturally enough - when I was 14. I wrote a novel when I was 18, another one when I was 21, and yet another when I was 24. I also produced two volumes of short stories which collected enough rejection slips to almost completely cover the door of my room. I put them up because I knew that the rejection slips were justified: try as I might, I could not find my written voice. My style was off, or, rather, I didn’t have any style I could call my own. And I knew that without a style, without a written voice, I was never going to write anything worth reading.
Meanwhile, my wife and I separated, I moved back to London, but kept up my Catalan by reading. After four years, tired of being unemployed in Thatcher’s Britain, I moved back to Catalonia, this time to Barcelona. I went on writing in English, and those rejection slips kept on coming.
What was my problem? It took years for me to realize that I perceived British English as being encrusted with class indicators; I noticed that if I picked up a novel by almost any English author, the choice of vocabulary and the use of syntax would immediately indicate the social class of the narrator or even of the writer (it should be remembered that in England, class stratification is still a major issue). I didn’t want this kind of interference in my written language. I wanted something more akin to the flexibility and the malleability of American English, a tongue in which a university educated man like William Burroughs and an early school-leaver like Charles Bukowski could work convincingly in much the same linguistic register: something which was inconceivable in British English.
Then one night I discovered that in the bar across from my flat in Barcelona, a desktop publisher had organised a presentation of the first in a series of chapbooks written in Catalan. I went along, and the publisher and I got talking and he said, “Look, I don’t publish in English, but why don’t you try doing something in Catalan, if that’s the language you think in when you speak it?”
So, I sat down and wrote about the last interesting thing that had happened to me (a trip to Romania, a few months after the Ceausescus’ execution). With the very first line, the English class straitjacket fell to the floor, as did the shackles of social stratification: I felt as if just I’d downed the verbal equivalent of a glass of clean, cool water. The publisher liked the final text and the next thing I knew I was presenting it with a live reading at Barcelona’s Miró Foundation.
The rush of linguistic liberty and authorial confidence this provided led me to complete a novel in Catalan (published in 1996), and then a collection of stories which won an important award in 1999. After that I did a road book, using public transport to reach those corners of Catalonia I’d never been to before; it went into seven editions and was on the best-seller lists for several months. There followed diatribes about the monarchy and work, an autobiography, another novel, and essays on religion and racism, until by 2021 I had a back catalogue of fourteen titles (not to mention scripts for radio and TV, articles for various newspapers etc.). All in Catalan.
Around 2006, I had an idea for a novel set in England, with plenty of English characters in it. In other words, the story was crying out to be written in English. And I now found that the discipline of writing in a second language for a decade had finally allowed me to circumvent the stumbling blocks I’d been tripping over in English for so many years, and to write with the same freedom, the same flexibility that I had found with Catalan.
The novel - ‘Snug’ - came out in 2013 and got positive reviews and reader feedback. I have since written five more novels in English, one of which, ‘If Only’, appeared in 2021.
A new novel in English will be appearing later this year, four more are waiting their turn, and my agent has just written me a gushing email about my most recent book (which deals with the father I never knew because I hadn’t yet been born). The future, in other words, is still very much in the offing.
Matthew Tree was born at the tail end of 1958 in London. He moved to Barcelona in 1984, having taught himself Catalan. He has written and published 14 books in this language with mainstream publishers. In 2006, he started to write in his mother tongue again, in which he has published a collection of articles ('Barcelona, Catalonia. A View From The Inside') and two novels ('SNUG' and 'If Only').