The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  The journalistic contribution thus obscures the old meaning, while providing “the needy with a useful and quite posh-looking alternative to ‘this is where I/we came in’ and other tattered phrases.” Similarly with jejune. On its journey from meaning “scanty, arid” to meaning “immature, callow,” jejune has acquired an extra vowel and an acute accent, plus italicization as a Gallicism. Kingsley quotes the following beauty: “Although the actual arguments are a little jéjeune, the staging of mass scenes are [sic] impressive.” We watch such developments (in this case the gradual “deportation of an English word into French”) as we would watch the progress of a virus; like babesiosis and fog fever, such viruses afflict cattle and buffalo and wildebeest; they are the maladies of the herd.

  Kingsley’s favorite dictionary was the Concise Oxford. “It’s all you really need,” he used to say, patting it or even stroking it. And the Concise Oxford, I see, has come to toe the line on infamous, déjà vu, and jejune, giving the new meanings pride of place. Kingsley would have offered no objection (though he did secretly pine for an extra dictionary “label”: namely, illit., to go with colloq. and derog. and the rest). Usage is irreversible. Once the integrity of a word is lost, no amount of grumbling and harrumphing can possibly restore it. The battle against illiteracies and barbarisms, and pedantries and genteelisms, is not a public battle. It takes place within the soul of every individual who cares about words.

  Rather bluffly, perhaps, Kingsley draws up the battle lines as a conflict between Berks and Wankers:

  Berks are careless, coarse, crass, gross and of what anybody would agree is a lower social class than one’s own. They speak in a slipshod way with dropped Hs, intruded glottal stops, and many mistakes in grammar. Left to them the English language would die of impurity, like late Latin.

  Wankers are prissy, fussy, priggish, prim and of what they would probably misrepresent as a higher social class than one’s own. They speak in an over-precise way with much pedantic insistence on letters not generally sounded, especially Hs. Left to them the language would die of purity, like medieval Latin.

  These are richly symmetrical paragraphs. Still, they need a little renovation. The class system, nowadays, has been more or less replaced by the age system (with the young and youngish as the aristocrats); and I for one can’t help seeing the slipshod/pedantic opposition in generational terms. So for berks and wankers I would substitute something like punks and fogies. Kingsley was in his seventies when he completed The King’s English (and it was published posthumously). But those who remember him as a reactionary—or, if you prefer, as an apoplectic diehard—will be astonished to discover how unfogyish he is. With remarkably few exceptions, he takes the sensible and centrist course. He is also deeply but unobtrusively learned. As a result, this is not a confining book but a liberating one. All users of the language—no matter how green, no matter how gray—will be palpably strengthened by The King’s English.

  Let us get the fogy stuff out of the way, because there isn’t much of it. For instance, Amis is surely taking on a lost cause with the five-syllable homogeneous (the population at large is quite happy with the “incorrect” homogenous); no one rhymes the closing syllable, or syllables, of Perseus and Odysseus with Zeus; no one says alas with a long second a, and to pronounce medieval “medd-eeval” (he prefers “meddy-eeval”) is hardly “an infallible sign of fundamental illiteracy”; no one stresses peremptory on the first syllable, and few of us do the same for controversy (“only a berk stresses the second”); on the question of using nouns as verbs, authored and critiqued are regrettable, true, but only a wanker would now object, as Amis does, to funded.

  Elsewhere, he is a pragmatist, and not infrequently an iconoclast. The split-infinitive taboo is ridiculed as a “superstition,” an “imaginary rule”; similarly, you may end a sentence with a preposition (and you may start a sentence with Arabic numerals). Amis is being rather more radical when he bluntly states that “the gerund”—a verbal noun with a possessive attached to it—“is on the way out,” so that excuse my butting in has been supplanted by excuse me butting in. This contravenes strict grammar, but a rule “serves no purpose if nobody obeys it.” More broadly, “the aim of language is to ensure that the speaker [or the writer] is understood, and all ideas of correctness or authenticity must be subordinate to it.”

  The battle—the internal campaign—is in essence directed against the false quantity, in its nontechnical sense. I mean those rhymes, chimes, repetitions, obscurities, dishonesties, vaguenesses, clichés, “shreds of battered facetiousness,” and “shopworn novelties” (past its sell-by date, Marxism lite, no-brainer, and all other herd words and herd phrases): anything, in brief, that makes the careful reader “pause without profit.” Naturally the other side of this circumspection is the acceptance, indeed the embrace, of positive linguistic change. Perhaps the most stirring passage in the book is the article on the word gay:

  The use of this word as an adjective or noun applied to a homosexual has received unusually prolonged execration. The “new” meaning has been generally current for years. Gay lib had made the revised Roget by 1987 and the word itself was listed in the 1988 COD under sense 5 as a homosexual….And yet in this very spring of 1995 some old curmudgeon is still frothing on about it in the public print and demanding the word “back” for proper heterosexual use….Once a word is not only current but accepted…no power on earth can throw it out….The word gay is cheerful and hopeful, half a world away from the dismal clinical and punitive associations of homosexual.

  An “old curmudgeon”: toward the end of his life, Kingsley was monotonously so described. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines curmudgeon as “a grasping and miserly churl.” Whereas all careful readers of The King’s English (and of his novels) will find themselves responding to a spirit of reckless generosity.

  My 1998 paperback of this book is festooned with praise from various pens. These snippets have a warmed and excitable quality; they are also unusually perceptive. Candia McWilliam says that The King’s English is a work of reference that “may be read like a novel, from start to finish.” And David Sexton accurately recognizes “a late flowering of Amis’s greatest gift as a novelist, his ability to draw out the implications of a whole life from a tiny detail of speech or behaviour.” Both these writers have identified the unique charm of this “Guide to Modern Usage”: its satirical expansiveness.

  All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father’s peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on defamatory. And here is an example from “Pidgin Latin”:

  In origin…the French language is a simplified and corrupt form of Latin once current between Roman troops or colonists or traders on the one hand and the local peasantry on the other….One easily imagines dialogues between a scrounging legionary, perhaps a Vandal or a Parthian by origin, and a willing but benighted yokel.

  LEGIONARY (in vile Latin): I want water. Bring me water. Aquam.

  YOKEL: Ugh?

  L: Aquam! Say aquam, you bloody fool. Go on—aquam.

  Y: O? (To be spelt eau when they get to the writing stage centuries later.)

  L: Bring it to the high cliff. The high cliff. Altum.

  L: Ugh?

  L: Altum! Say altum, you bumpkin. Go on—altum.

  L: O? (To be spelt haut when, etc.)

  “A terrific book,” wrote another reviewer, Sebastian Faulks. The prose “has that tense, sly quality of his very best fiction…a marvellous and quite unexpected bonus from beyond the grave.” Mr. Faulks couldn’t be expected to know how true this was. Two months before he died, Kingsley had a heavy fall after a good lunch (“At my age,” as he used to say, “lunch is dinner”) and banged his head on a stone step. Thereafter, by degrees, he became a pitiable and painfully disconcerting madcap. He kept trying, he tried and he tried, but he couldn’t write; he couldn’t read, or be read to; and his speech was like a mixture of The Cat in the Hat and Finnega
ns Wake. Aged seventy-three, he had just finished a book on the King’s English; and now English was a language the King no longer had. His fate was a brutal reminder. We are all of us held together by words; and when words go, nothing much remains.

  Plans for Kingsley’s memorial service were quite far advanced when the typescript of the present book (then hardly more than a family rumor) was delivered to my door. I picked it up with a trepidation that the first few pages briskly dispersed. Here it was again, my father’s voice—funny, resilient, erudite, with touches of very delicate feeling (see the entries under “Brave” and “Gender”), and, throughout, sublimely articulate. In truth, The King’s English contains more concentrated artistic thrust than any of the five novels that followed his masterpiece of 1986, The Old Devils. The reason for this is, I think, clear enough. Love of life, like all human talents, weakens with age. But love of language, in his case, never did begin to fade.

  The Guardian 2011

  Postscript. I suppose it’s just as well that Kingsley was never exposed to the idiolect of Donald Trump—an adventure playground for any proscriptive linguist. But he would have been ready for bigly.*2 This is from the entry headed “Single-handedly”: “Some illiteracies are presented in the name of literacy, or at least of regularity and common sense….Those who like to make words longer and more polysyllabic have not noticed or do not care that single-handed is already an adverb as well as an adjective….There are plenty of other adverbs vulnerable to creative illiteracy through not ending in -ly…. When can we expect to see quitely? Altogetherly? What nextly?” I passed on to my father the fact that I heard the great Jessica Lange—who was thanking her team at an awards ceremony—use the phrase lastly but not leastly (and I told him about the New York dentist who says Open widely). What does Donald say when you ask him how he is? Goodly? Or perhaps (this is after all a man of some culture) Finely. Or perhaps the neologism Wellly.

  *1 This piece was also the introduction to a paperback reissue of The King’s English in the same year.

  *2 Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, gruelingly, has put it about that the nominee is in fact saying big-league (a useful variant on his tawdry big-time), though big-league in its adverbial application is unknown to the lexicographers’ database. And why in that case does he stress it as a trochee (tum-ti) and not as a spondee (tum-tum). Anyway, it sounds like bigly, even though the credulous may accept that -gue is silently “understood.”

  Twin Peaks 2

  Bellow’s Lettres

  Saul Bellow There Is Simply Too Much to Think About

  “The flies wait hungrily in the air,” writes Saul Bellow (in a description of Shawneetown in southern Illinois), “sheets of flies that make a noise like the tearing of tissue paper.” Go and tear some tissue paper in two—slowly: it sounds just like the sullen purr of bristling vermin. But how, you wonder, did Bellow know what torn tissue paper sounded like in the first place? And then you wonder what this minutely vigilant detail is doing in Holiday magazine (in 1957), rather than in the work in progress, Henderson the Rain King (1959). It or something even better is probably in Henderson. For Bellow’s fictional and nonfictional voices intertwine and cross-pollinate. This is from a film review of 1962: “There she is, stout and old, a sinking, squarish frame of bones.” Two decades later the image would effloresce in the story-novella “Cousins”:

  I remembered Riva as a full-figured, dark-haired, plump, straight-legged woman. Now all the geometry of her figure had changed. She had come down in the knees like the jack of a car, to a diamond posture.

  In 1958 a Gore Vidal play was adapted into the famous western The Left Handed Gun (which starred his friend Paul Newman); and it has often been said that when writers of fiction turn to discursive prose “they write left-handed.” In other words, think pieces, reportage, travelogues, lectures, and memoirs are in some sense strained, inauthentic, ventriloquial. In Vidal’s case, literary opinion appears to be arranging a curious destiny. It is in the essays (or in those written before September 11, 2001) that he feels right-handed. His historical novels, firmly tethered to reality, have their place. But the products of Vidal’s untrammeled fancy—for instance Myra Breckinridge and Myron—feel strictly southpaw. Bellow, by contrast, is congenitally ambidextrous.

  He is also a rampant instinctivist. In this respect Bellow is quite unlike, say, Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike, to take two artist-critics of high distinction. In his voluminous Lectures Nabokov is idiosyncratic and often verbally festive, but he is always a sober and serious professional: a pedagogue. And Updike, in his equally voluminous collections of reviews, makes it clear that critics, unlike novelists, are somehow “on duty”: they have to wear their Sunday best, and can never come as they are. Bellow comes as he is. He is closer to D. H. Lawrence, and closer still to V. S. Pritchett. “Let the academics weigh up, be exhaustive or build their superstructures,” Pritchett writes: “The artist lives as much by his pride in his own emphases as by what he ignores; humility is a disgrace.” This is Bellow’s way of going at everything. No tuxedo and cummerbund, no gowns and tasseled mortarboards. Whatever the genre, Bellow’s sensorium, it turns out, is whole and indivisible.

  Inherent in this approach is a candid opposition to the ivory tower. Although he taught literature throughout his adult life, Bellow was always and increasingly suspicious of the universities—long before ideological jumpiness had turned them into what he privately called “anti-free-speech centers.” (His short essay “The University as Villain” is dated 1956.) He is infuriated, maddened, by the sort of commentator who wants to tell you what Ahab’s harpoon may or may not “symbolize.” In “Deep Readers of the World, Beware!” (1959) he imagines a classroom conversation:

  “Why, sir,” the student wonders, “does Achilles drag the body of Hector around the walls of Troy?…Well, you see, sir, the Iliad is full of circles—shields, chariot wheels, and other round figures. And you know what Plato said about circles. The Greeks were all made for geometry.” “Bless your crew-cut head,” the professor replies, “for such a beautiful thought….Your approach is both deep and serious. Still, I always believed that Achilles did it because he was so angry.”

  Critics should cleave to the human element, and not just laminate the text with additional obscurities. The essential didactic task, Bellow implies, is to instill the readerly habits of enthusiasm, gratitude, and awe.

  Accusing novelists of egotism is like deploring the tendency of champion boxers to turn violent. And Bellow, naturally and enlighteningly, relies on his own evolution to establish core principles. “Everything is to be viewed as though for the first time.” Assume “a certain psychic unity” with your readers (“Others are in essence like me and I am basically like them”). Accept George Santayana’s definition of that discredited word piety: “reverence for the sources of one’s being.” Cherish your personal history, therefore, but never seek out experience, or “Experience,” as grist: some writers are proud of their “special efforts in the fields of sex, drunkenness,” and poverty (“I have even been envied my good luck in having grown up during the Depression”); but “willed” worldliness is a false lead. Resist “the heavy influences”—Flaubert, Marx, et cetera, and what Bellow, citing Thoreau, calls “the savage strength of the many.” The imagination has its “eternal naïveté”—and that is something the writer cannot afford to lose.

  Bellow’s nonfiction has the same strengths as his stories and novels: a dynamic responsiveness to character, place, and time (or era). All are on display in the marvelous vignette “A Talk with the Yellow Kid” (1956). The Kid is an octogenarian Chicago swindler: all his life he has “sold nonexistent property, concessions he did not own, and air-spun schemes to greedy men.” Bellow is altogether at ease in this company, but he has the deeper confidence to acknowledge the Kid’s elusive mystery: “It is not always easy to know where he is coming from,” because “long practice in insincerity gives him an advantage.” And you wonder, what other highbrow writer, or in
deed lowbrow writer, has such a reflexive grasp of the street, the machine, the law courts, the rackets? But then Bellow is abnormally alive to social gradations everywhere, in Spain (1948), in Israel (1967), in Paris (1983), in Tuscany (1992). This is from “In the Days of Mr. Roosevelt,” the days being those between the crash and the war:

  The blight hadn’t yet carried off the elms and under them drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper, and turned on their radios….They had rolled down the windows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners. You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the president’s words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it.

  That relay, that gentle gauntlet of car radios, perfectly encapsulates what FDR had to give to America and Americans: continuity in troubled times.

  There Is Simply Too Much to Think About is a slightly pruned, and then greatly expanded, version of It All Adds Up, Bellow’s nonfiction compendium of 1994. “Distraction,” “noise,” “crisis chatter”: persistent enough in the earlier book, these themes have now become pervasive. “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” This bothered Wordsworth around 1802, and it bothered Ruskin in 1865 (“No reading is possible for a people with its mind in this state”); meanwhile, unsurprisingly, things have not quieted down. “The world is too much with us, and there has never been so much world,” Bellow writes in 1959. In 1975 he goes further: “To say that the world is too much with us is meaningless for there is no longer any us. The world is everything.” And there is no escape, even in rural Vermont: “What is happening everywhere is, one way or another, known to everyone. Shadowy world tides wash human nerve endings in the remotest corners of the earth.” Yes; but “it is apparently in the nature of the creature to resist the world’s triumph,” the triumph of “turbulence and agitation”—and Bellow’s corpus is graphic proof of that defiance.