by D J Enright
Things don’t change; our perception of them often does. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’: a relativist slogan, not Shakespearian wisdom, merely Hamlet’s polite way of disagreeing with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Here is Baudelaire in Mon coeur mis à nu, 1863: ‘Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors. War, crime, rapine, shamelessness, torture, the crimes of princes, the crimes of nations, the crimes of individuals, a delirium of universal atrocity. And it is with this revolting aperitif that the civilized man starts his morning meal every day. Everything, in this world, reeks of crime: the paper, the walls and the face of man. I cannot comprehend how clean hands could touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust.’ Compare this with a congratulatory headline in The Times, 8 March 2002: ‘We’re a nation of newspaper addicts.’
‘Those who ne’er deigned their Bible to peruse/ Would think it hard to be denied their News,’ wrote Crabbe, ‘And such this mental food, as we may call/ Something to all men, and to some men all.’ Enough to poison our minds. How much longer, as communications proliferate and our resistance weakens further, can we rely on what Wordsworth in his reflections on the ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’ identified as ‘certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind’? (To begin with, ‘certain’ often insinuates a degree of uncertainty.)
At least I have cancelled the Sunday paper, much to that day’s advantage.
Dozing off, I remember a childhood accident on my bike, speeding downhill against traffic lights, when the brakes had failed. I was lucky. And now I think of a young granddaughter, an intrepid cyclist. Next I see a child on a bike approaching a lamppost at speed, thudding into it – and being catapulted to the top of the lamppost, where she (rather than he) performs a triumphant comic dance. A last-ditch effort of will there, and I jerk awake. A few moments later, reverie would have drifted into dream, and a far less cheerful outcome.
No letters for a whole week. (Not counting charities, that is, and offers to release cash tied up in my property on the tacit assumption that in return I shall die before long.) What does this mean? Perhaps it means that I haven’t written any letters for a month.
For lack of anything better to do, I copy-edit a book published earlier in the year, a rather good book by an American professor of English. But oh dear – ‘obselete’, ‘wimper’, ‘Scandanavian’, ‘Cartusian’, ‘Huysman’. And tut, tut – an extended family produces lots of cousins ‘for my sister, my brother, and I’. I think passingly of billing the publisher.
Some poor devil had come to think of himself as a book. More tattered every year, he had to admit, jacket torn, spine creaking, dried up and yellowing inside. Sad, but only to be expected. At least no one had burnt or pulped him. One day it struck him that he was going out of print, and certainly wouldn’t be reissued. Ah well, that too was in the nature of things; and just possibly he would live on residually, in a few libraries, on a few private shelves. For a while. All paper is flesh and one book drives out another.
Kafka was less literal (so to speak), but more insistent in his outcry: it wasn’t that he had what is called a flair for writing or a way with words; rather, ‘I am made of literature, I am nothing else, and cannot be anything else.’
‘You’re mentioned in this book,’ I told Claire (granddaughter and intrepid cyclist, then aged six and three-quarter years), showing a copy of Play Resumed. She looked herself up in the index – she knows her way about books – and leafed through to page 8. Didn’t seem thrilled by what she read. ‘You’ve been immortalized,’ I quipped feebly, inviting trouble. ‘But who’ll buy the book?’ she asked.
*
In Mandarin, I gather, the film The Full Monty carries the title ‘Six Naked Pigs’. Not inevitably a gross slur, given the Chinese fondness for pork. Peter Farb (Word Play, 1974) has pointed out that when Charlie Chan, Earl Derr Biggers’s Chinese-Hawaiian detective, says ‘Honourable inspector is welcome to humble abode’, the ‘subtle suggestion of esteem’ in the Chinese form – conveyed by the specific grammar used – has been converted into ‘unsubtle’ (i.e. clunking) words such as ‘honourable’ and ‘humble’. (Still, Chan had to speak English if the books were to sell. And one wonders just how subtle in suggestion the Chinese locutions remain after centuries of use.) When Chan addresses an arrogant, racist Bostonian: ‘Humbly asking pardon to mention it, I detect in your eyes slight flame of hostility. Quench it, if you will be so kind’ (The House Without a Key, 1925), for all I can tell he has contrived a pretty effective way, both imploring and (more tellingly) deploring, of blending Oriental honorifics and dishonorifics in makeshift English. Those who are addressed in pidgin often come off better than those speaking it to them. A Chinese notable (Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen?) was asked by his well-meaning British neighbour at a formal dinner: ‘You likee soupee?’ At the end of the meal, the Chinese gentleman stood up and delivered a speech in flawless English. As he resumed his seat, he murmured to his neighbour: ‘You likee speechee?’ A case of pidgin pitched against pidgin.
‘If you wish to avoid suspicion, do not tie up your shoes in a melon field or adjust your hat under a plum tree.’ This Chinese proverb cited by Claud Cockburn (I, Claud … ) is couched in such exquisite English that its authenticity is called into question. You likee Chinese proverb?
According to a version of events given by Peter Farb, in July 1945 the Allies issued an ultimatum to Japan requiring the country to surrender, and the Japanese Prime Minister replied that his cabinet would mokusatsu the ultimatum, apparently meaning that it would ‘consider’ the matter. But the word has another, very different meaning – ‘take no notice of – and the translators at Japan’s overseas broadcasting agency read it in that sense. Consequently atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima, 6 August 1945, and Nagasaki, 9 August.
Less fatefully, in January 1999, a local government officer in Washington explained that he would need to be niggardly in his dealings with a certain fund. A black aide stormed out, complaints flooded in, and the officer resigned. The word itself (but everything is relative, we hear) is beyond reproach, of Scandinavian origin and related to ‘niggling’. It was later argued that, even so, the officer should be punished for failing to see that the word was easily confused with a certain other one. It seems unfair – if not especially rare – that someone should suffer from the ignorance of other people. And the black Mayor of Washington later gave the officer a different job. If you wish to avoid suspicion, do not stray outside Basic English.
In Sisson’s amusing poem, ‘The Mirabel Sea’: ‘I wept intransitively, there was no one! Who could be the object of my tears.’ (Idle tears, then?) Compare a malapropism in a letter in the Sunday Times, 1988, cited by R.W. Burchfield: ‘One, a head of English, could not explain the function of an intransigent verb and advised me to “forget it”.’ In other poems of his, Sisson’s shedding of tears tends to be both transitive and intransigent.
‘Toilet Paper: 100 per cent Recycled.’ – ‘Ugh!’ she cries in horror and disgust, and disbelief. ‘But,’ I start, and then realize what she’s thinking.
All this technology around – and yet they can’t get the perforations to match in two-ply toilet paper.
‘Spending a penny’ was always more than a euphemism. The expression came from the old public lavatories with their penny-in-the-slot locks. It continues domestically: Thames Water informs its customers that every flushing of the toilet costs a (new) penny.
Letters to the Editor. A woman complains that her word-processing software won’t tolerate a sentence more than three lines long, no matter how clearly expressed and immaculately punctuated. It questions her grammar, obliges her to use bullet-points unnecessarily, and offers to help when it notices she is writing a personal letter. All too plainly it considers her ignorant and incompetent.
A man discovers that his new computer has a hyperactive asterisk. Whenever he leaves the room briefly, on his return he finds
a page completely filled with asterisks. Computers are officious – they spent their early years in offices – but those asterisks suggest they may not be altogether lacking in delicacy and decorum.
My one and only relationship with a computer didn’t last long. With undue frequency and relish, it reminded me that it was registered to an incomparably more imposing concern and hence (the implication was) used to better things. Several times it turned sinister, informing me that I was engaged in an (unspecified) illegal activity. Before long it would be commenting on my sweaty fingertips or bad breath. One of us had to go. I am not surprised to hear of an online centre to help those suffering from Net addiction, and also a guide to polite behaviour online. For instance, ‘DON’T WRITE IN CAPITALS – it looks as if you are SHOUTING, which is rude.’ Point taken, but don’t shout at me, it’s rude.
‘My daughter’s PC has been unable to load several programs and a window has appeared saying “The Aliens are coming”. Is this a virus?’ Dear reader, to be on the safe side the first thing you should do is look out of the window. In the event that you see something out of the ordinary, don’t SHOUT at it.
Before its keyboard proved too much for arthritic fingers, I used an Olympia Splendid, a pernickety but reasonably well-behaved electronic typewriter. At least until the day it broke free from my control as I was striving to make a small correction on the page (a review of Richard Hoggart’s Between Two Worlds). The platen suddenly whirled round, the paper shot upwards and then stopped, and these words rattled out at a speed well beyond me in my heyday, correctly spelt and perfectly spaced, though not by me: ‘Let’s get to know each other. I’m’ – at this point I recovered my wits sufficiently to stop the machine by switching off the power. Now I wish I hadn’t, I wish I’d had the courage to let the message run its course. ‘I’m …’ Or do I?
‘Half Price Memory’: PC ad
What do you want for half the price,
Half the nasty, half the nice?
At your age passion’s best aborted,
The full-strength fact can’t be afforded.
‘Was £99.99. Now £49.99’,
Joys indistinct, griefs anodyne.
A temperate tear, a low-pitched laugh,
Suffice to form the better half.
Yet who can tell what you may access,
Some small beauty spot, some large abscess?
Let the trained conscience known to Nietzsche
Be your memories’ tender teacher,
So they kiss you while they bite –
Then you’ll know the price is right.
Wittgenstein had what look like grave reservations about Shakespeare’s —greatness. He could ‘nie etwas mit ihm anfangen’: never get to grips with him. (Cf. Kraus, unable to think of anything to say about the Führer: ‘Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein’, 1933.) ‘It could be put like this too …’ What is conspicuous (relatively speaking) in the little I have seen of Wittgenstein on the subject of Shakespeare is his unenthusiastic avoidance of comprehensible complaint, and a scrupulous – or/and fastidious, courteous, diffident – hedging of barely implicit bets. George Steiner, who (tiptoeing on thin ice) seems to some extent (‘And yet …’) to share in this nagging discontent, hints at a possible reason for Wittgenstein’s reservations: how confident was his English, and could he have been ‘resorting, consciously or not, to the masterly Schlegel-Tieck versions so essential to the central European literacy of his upbringing’? But what reasons does Steiner have for his own misgivings?
You sometimes find in the highest circles what looks much like the hope ‘for eminence from the heresies of paradox’ (Samuel Johnson, also on Shakespeare) which is common among those in rather low circles who are ‘able to add nothing to truth’.
Early years. That there was no incentive to think (indeed, there was a tacit resistance) acted as an incentive to think, the only one. Not always deeply, good heavens no!, or to much effect, or even sensibly (that least of all). But still …
Curious encomia in a publishing conglomerate’s spring list: ‘mundane and magical’ (having it both ways), ‘traumatic’ (a mundanely magical word), ‘stunning’ (recurrent and irritating; books stun only by falling on your head), ‘cruel wit’ (you wouldn’t want a book to be merely witty, or solely cruel), ‘wickedly funny’ (very popular, this playing off adverb against adjective; cf. a film review in The Times: ‘viciously funny’), ‘menacing’ (pick up a book and you take your life in your hands: brave you!), ‘compulsive’ (a step up or down from ‘compelling’), ‘unputdownable’ (readers are a weak-willed race), ‘mesmerizing’ (that explains a lot), ‘subversive’, even ‘treacherous’, ‘irreverent’ (alternatively ‘irreverant’), ‘perceptive’ (suggesting there is little to be said about the book), and ‘literate’ (suggesting there is nothing at all to be said). To which one could add this more elaborate eulogy of The Times ‘book of the week’: ‘Forget the graphic sex, this is an author with a deranged, subversive grip on literary form and an envious skill for describing harsh landscape sparingly and beautifully.’ (‘Envious’: near enough is good enough; cf. a BBC newsreader describing the chaotic scene at a derailment as ‘incredulous’.)
Back to the spring lists. In terminology more commonly met in the thriller section, we are told regarding a scholarly book that ‘… the Native American languages were in some cases literally beaten into extinction by brutal teachers of English’. One item stands out: ‘Fast and funny, gruesome and depraved, the serial-killer novel to end all serial-killer novels. Literally.’ Literally, eh? That’ll be the day.
More about this mighty intensifier. On the occasion of Murray Walker’s retirement as Formula One television commentator, the sports diarist of The Times, Simon Barnes, recalled a favourite observation by the man whose verbal thrills and spills enlivened many an arid Grand (or Grorn) Prix: ‘And THAT is the Achilles heel of the McLaren and it is LITERALLY the heel because it’s the GEARBOX …’
I notice from a reprint of Alison Lurie’s Real People that a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement praised it on first publication because ‘in the most literal sense, it defies criticism’. It most literally (an intensification of an intensifier, in that something is either literal or it is not) defies? No, it defies criticism, which is a figure of speech, so that’s OK. Defying criticism makes the critic’s task easier. (That Real People defies criticism, the reviewer continued, ‘in itself, is a pleasure’.) Or, it makes the critic’s task impossible, and he is obliged to return the review copy to the commissioning periodical, explaining that the book has literally defied him. Which is no pleasure.
I thought the book quite pleasurable, but I could still criticize it, for all its defiance. (For instance, the story is somewhat predictable, except – predictably? – it ends abruptly, without finishing, and needs to be four or five pages longer.) But I won’t, since I’m not being paid to do so.
*
Then there is – surprisingly common – the dangling or unattached participle. Robert Burchfield cites Lord Belstead speaking of Lord Whitelaw on BBC Radio in January 1988: ‘Being unique, I am not going in any way to imitate him’, and Richard Ingrams in 1987 writing of the house in which he grew up: ‘Now demolished, I can call it to mind in almost perfect detail.’ (Lord Belstead ‘did not intend to imply that he was himself unique’, and ‘obviously Mr Ingrams had not been demolished’.)
People look baffled should you draw their attention to a dangling participle, and slightly anxious, as though they had omitted to adjust their dress. When, stumblingly, you seek to explain matters, they grow ratty: the intention is plain enough, no one would ever suppose it meant what (or so you say, and who are you to say?) it may signify grammatically, what does grammar count for anyway?
Have just come across a splendid specimen in Barbara Skelton’s Weep No More: ‘Dining alone in Ajaccio, a cockroach actually ran across the plate.’ That should cure us of dangling participles – if anything could.
There we can just about make out w
hat is going on, even though, from what we know of her, Miss Skelton was less likely than a cockroach to be dining alone. More ambiguous is a news item arising from comments on organic food made by Sir John Krebs, head of the Food Standards Agency. Harry Hadaway of the Soil Association, the organization responsible for certifying organic food and farmers, responded thus: ‘As a historic supporter of genetically modified foods we feel Sir John continues not to represent the wishes of the British consumer …’ Likewise ‘As an investor in one of Dresdner RCM’s unit trusts, we are writing regarding a proposed change in Dresdner Bank AG’s ownership.’ To the mistrustful eye it might seem as though rejecting the most obviously sensible ‘rules’ of grammar helps to obfuscate dodgy issues.
It can be a question, not of mere ambiguity or obfuscation, but of downright misrepresentation. Reviewing two biographies of Primo Levi (Times Literary Supplement, 21 June 2002), Clive James notes of the author of one of them that ‘like many another in the new generation of serious literati he somehow dodged remedial English on the way to his honours degree’. The biographer reports that at school Levi had a friend named Giorgio: ‘Phlegmatic, lazy, sensitive and generous, Levi called him “Giorgione” …’ The context suggests that the adjectives apply to Giorgio, while the word order indicates that they apply to Levi. Also, apropos of Natalia Ginzburg, the biographer states: ‘Born to an exemplary anti-Fascist family, her father was arrested in Turin in 1934.’ ‘Unless there were exemplary anti-Fascist families before the advent of Fascism,’ James observes, ‘it was she, and not her father, who was born to the exemplary anti-Fascist family.’ Such defects are all the worse in that Levi, a master of Italian prose, had learned to write ‘at a time when a mistake was a mistake and not a sign of free expression’.
As I am writing this down there comes a letter from a professional philosopher who claims that ‘As one of the shamefully discarded OUP poets’ – see later in this book – ‘I thought you might be interested to learn of my enclosed tilt against that great literary institution: I have opened a shop-cum-gallery of Oxford shame, right under (and up) their noses at 12 Broad Street.’