by D J Enright
God gave his only begotten son … Yes, but why such a fuss about it? God could beget other sons, as many as required. In a poem entitled ‘Easter’ Sisson puts his lugubrious finger on the truly momentous thing: ‘What is astonishing is that he came here at all/ Where no one ever came voluntarily before.’ That’s more like it.
On the subject of what we call emotional blackmail: Gide tells of a small boy whose pious Protestant parents were forever drumming into him the meaning of the Crucifixion. Just think, they hung Jesus on a cross and hammered nails through his hands – all done for you – hammered nails through his poor hands! At last the boy rebelled: ‘They had to, else he wouldn’t have stayed up there.’
Samuel Butler opined that if Christ could be said to have died for him, it was in the same sort of way as the London and North Western Railway had been made for him. He was very glad that the railway was made, but did not suppose the builders had him in mind at the time. ‘The debt of my gratitude is divided among so many that the amount due from each one is practically nil.’
‘No mention of God for long enough. They keep him up their sleeve for as long as they can, vicars, they know it puts people off’: ‘A Lady of Letters’, Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. My copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1981) informs us that the word ‘God’ probably comes from an Aryan root gheu, to invoke, adding that ‘it is in no way connected with good’. Nice to have an authoritative ruling.
That God doesn’t exist, or died some while back, is no excuse. ‘God is the only being who, to reign, wouldn’t even need to exist’: Baudelaire. Recently a disabled British schoolboy in Lourdes on pilgrimage was hit by a bus and died. After enumerating various unfairnesses visited on the faithful – ‘Many of those who now lie rotting away/ Had faith in you’ – Brecht’s ‘Hymn to God’ concludes
Many of us say you are not – and a good thing too.
But how could that thing not be which can play such a trick?
If so much lives by you and could not die without you –
Tell me how far does it matter that you don’t exist?
When told by the chaplain that they were in God’s hands, Mother Courage hoped things were not as desperate as that.
It’s difficult to escape religion altogether. Admitted to hospital, a woman was answering the mandatory questionnaire. Asked about her religion, she replied, ‘None’. After a moment’s hesitation the nurse wrote down ‘Nun’. Strangely affecting is a story attributed to Groucho Marx, about a man saying grace in a low voice, and someone at the table interrupting him: ‘I can’t hear you.’ The man said, ‘I’m not talking to you.’
A rather splendid knock-down argument comes from Pascal: ‘We must be born guilty or God would be unjust.’ God is his own interpreter, and he will make it plain.
Letters to the Editor. A Corkonian notes that a weather forecast for the Republic of Ireland speaks of ‘freshening southerly winds with ales in exposed parts later’. (‘Hardy lot those Irish, drinking outdoors in such wet and windy weather.’) Someone else reports that his photocard driving licence, recently issued by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, gives his place of birth as ‘Untied Kingdom’. Goethe’s remark comes to mind again: When he saw a misprint he always thought something new had been invented.
So many writers, so many great writers, and lots of them with foreign names! A TLS proof hints at how to shorten the roll-call: ‘Nietzolstoy’. God preserve us, it’s almost always a mistake to take the name of God, in vain or otherwise. Even as one of those ‘vacant metaphors’ that ‘rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic’, as George Steiner has it. General Wesley Clark surmised that for President Milošević, facing the vast air power deployed against him ‘must be like fighting God’ (press report, 12 May 1999). Since General Clark was Supreme Allied Commander at the time, this might seem a somewhat presumptuous declaration. Not, God forbid, that the General likened himself to the Almighty exactly, or only by implication. For God had appointed his son as supreme commander during that hectic if short-lived strife in heaven: ‘the glory may be thine/ Of ending this great war, since none but thou/ Can end it.’
Rattling about like old rags … The modern rag trade calls on the ancient vocabulary of religion: ‘Long the Holy Grail of fashion, the perfect pair of jeans is finally attainable.’ See also a reference in The Times to the Perrier Award as ‘stand-up comedy’s Holy Grail’, the same organ’s greeting of the newly appointed rugby coach for the British Lions with the headline ‘Guide us O thou Great Redeemer’, and a BBC journalist’s description of the Heineken Cup as Rugby Union’s ‘Holy Grail’. The Grail is mass-produced these days.
Can it be that, like Milton (the justifier of his ways), God spoke a form of what, in the fullness of time and after a number of backslidings, became the more or less universal language of our earthly world?
According to Dante, the first human to speak in words was Eve, when conversing with the serpent. He found it worrying that ‘an act so noble for the human race’ came from the lips of a woman rather than those of a man. But, as Umberto Eco points out, presumably Adam made some sort of sounds when naming the animals, and also when showing his satisfaction at the sight of Eve. (Sounds more refined, we trust, than animal grunts.) Possibly Dante meant that the conversation Eve had with the serpent was the first dialogue recorded in Genesis. The sad implication here is that Adam was not only naked and unashamed but also tongue-tied at home. Or couldn’t get a word in.
If anything, Eco says, we know that it was God who first spoke in Genesis while creating the world: ‘And God said, Let there be light’ and so forth. And God spoke to Adam, forbidding him to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. What form did his utterance take? Tradition has imagined ‘a sort of language of interior illumination’ wherein God expressed himself by thunderclaps and lightning (cf. Cowper: He ‘rides upon the storm’); that is, he spoke in a loud voice and his eyes flashed.
Wouldn’t the first language, this gift from God to Adam, have been Hebrew? (A reader of The Times informs us that his great-grandmother devoted her declining years to learning Hebrew on the grounds that it was the most likely language to be spoken in heaven, and she would need it to get around.) But no, that first language was lost after the Babel débâcle. Eco mentions ‘the naïve belief that one’s own tongue is the only existing and perfect one’. ‘Naïve’ derives from nativus, native; it is native to us to believe our native language the perfect – or least imperfect – one. ‘The words were all before them, which to choose./ Their tongues now turned to English,/ With its colonies of twangs./ And they were down to earth’: thus a naïve chauvinist’s view of post-Edenic discourse.
Naïve isn’t the word for Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, who claimed in 1641 that the German language ‘speaks in the language of nature … thunders with the heavens, flashes lightning with the quick moving clouds, radiates with the hail, whispers with the wind’ and so on. Moreover German roars like the lion, snarls like the bear, bleats like the sheep, grunts like the pig, honks like the goose, chirps like the sparrow, barks like the dog, miaows like the cat, hisses like the snake … All of which would have helped Adam immensely in naming the animals, since he could express ‘in a manner conforming to their nature, each and every innate property and inherent sound’. Totally and immediately germane, in fact.
The Egyptians used to believe they were the most ancient of all the races in the world. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, one of their kings sought to determine the question by experiment. He took two newly born infants from their parents and gave them to a shepherd to be brought up among his flocks, commanding that no one should speak a word in their presence. They lived in a secluded cottage, and the shepherd fed them and looked after their needs in silence. One day, some two years into the experiment, as the shepherd entered the cottage, both children ran up to him, their hands outstretched, and uttered the word ‘becos’. Inquiries showed that this was the Phrygian for ‘bread’. The Egypt
ians were forced to concede that the Phrygians were more ancient than they.
In Nice, in 1943, the playwright Tristan Bernard (author, incidentally, of L’Anglais tel qu’on le parle) met the child Gabriel Josipovici, and learnt that the first word he had uttered was ‘ish’: ‘man’. Bernard smote his forehead and exclaimed (in French), ‘I knew it! Living proof that Hebrew is the original language!’ (See ‘Nice, 1943’, London Magazine, August/September 1999.)
‘… their love letters chart their agonies and ecstasies so intimately, it feels like eavesdropping to read them’: promotional material for a public reading in the King’s Head Theatre, Islington. The theatre boasts an induction coil, perhaps the sort of device used in surveillance, which makes eavesdropping easier for those hard of hearing.
Vernon Scannell and I swap misconceptions, visual and auditory. He noticed a reference in the Radio Times to ‘the Bonker Prizewinning writer’. In Southfields Library, my eyes fell on a book with the title Cold is the Gravy, a piece of stark social realism, I supposed, somewhat outmoded: a closer look revealed it to be a thriller, Cold is the Grave; a newspaper referred to ‘Tony Blair’s sex change’ (no, just that boring old sea change). Vernon mentions his surprise and excitement on hearing a Radio 3 announcement that Haydn’s Piano Sonata in E Minor was about to be played by Captain Scott; turning to the Radio Times, he was sadly let down to find that the pianist was Kathryn Stott. My mishearings tend to the crudely sensational: ‘a tax on parsnips’ (payslips); ‘we can expect a number of murders in the media world’ (merely mergers, alas); ‘returning from holiday, Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, was battered to death’ (back at his desk).
Creative misunderstanding. ‘The very deaf, as I am, hear the most astonishing things all around them, which have not, in fact, been said. This enlivens my replies until, through mishearing, a new level of communication is reached’: Henry Green, in the course of an interview for The Paris Review, 1958.
In his early years Peter Vansittart was an avid reader, not unduly bothered as to whether or not he truly understood what he was reading. The author of The Scarlet Pimpernel, could ‘Baroness’ be her Christian name? The expression ‘Master of the Horse’ intrigued him – was there only one horse? – and a chapter heading, ‘Louis Napoleon flees from Ham’, came alive when he thought of school meals. It may have struck him – and he so young – that getting things right could be more hazardous than getting them wrong: when a question was asked in class and he came up with the correct answer, ‘Jesus’, the master misheard it as ‘Jeeves’, and he was beaten for irreverence.
During that same interview Henry Green was asked what he thought of the idea that his work was ‘too subtle’ for American readers.
INTERVIEWER: How about subtle?
MR GREEN: I don’t follow. Suttee, as I understand it, is the suicide – now forbidden – of a Hindu wife on her husband’s flaming bier. I don’t want my wife to do that when my time comes – and with great respect, as I know her, she won’t …
INTERVIEWER: I’m sorry, you misheard me; I said, ‘subtle’ – that the message was too subtle.
MR GREEN: Oh, subtle. How dull!
Vernon Scannell passes on two howlers remembered from his days as a prep-school teacher. In a test on figures of speech, a definition of ‘simile’: ‘like a laugh but you don’t make any noise’; and in a general knowledge test, a rather common and innocent confusion: ‘an octopus is a sea creature with eight testicles’. An academic of my aquaintance (no names, no pack-drill) reports a rare locution in an essay criticizing William Blake: ‘hippocracy’. Possibly a pious student’s scandalized reaction to the hellish proverb, ‘The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.’ In The Times Philip Howard picks out the best of the season’s howlers: ‘the streets of Pompeii were full of red hot saliva’, and ‘born of the Virgin Mary, deceived of the Holy Ghost’. Not so subtle was the mobilization officer interviewing a promising recruit in 1942. Asked what languages he knew, the recruit said that besides speaking several languages he could read hieroglyphics. ‘What are hieroglyphics?’ asked the officer. ‘The language of the Pharaohs, sir.’ The recruit was accordingly posted to a Field Security Section in the Faeroe Islands. This brings to mind the GCSE bloomer (frequently cited: does this make it more likely to be authentic or less?): ‘Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics.’
Other GCSE specimens demonstrate this desperate grasping after words heard only once before, or misheard. ‘Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines’; ‘Voltaire invented electricity’ (a brilliant inference, worth half marks); ‘Shakespeare’s plays are all written in Islamic pentameters’; ‘Bach practised on an old spinster which he kept up in the attic’; ‘Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.’ Interesting to see which words young people are unfamiliar with, and even more interesting to see which they are familiar with.
‘Cervantes wrote Donkey Hote’: much can be forgiven when foreign words are in question. Even a yuppie computer’s insistence on rendering ‘Keeper of the Quaich’ (an honour in the world of whisky, ‘quaich’ being a Scottish drinking-cup) as ‘Keeper of the Quiche’. Less forgivable in the circumstances was the person responsible for a newspaper advertisement for Brittany Ferries: ‘Bistros and brassieres line up and welcome you to a continental way of life.’ It’s hardly an improvement if you happen to know that in France a ‘brasserie’ (stirring the brew with ‘les bras’, the arms) is a pub, a ‘brassière’ is a baby’s vest with long sleeves, while what we call a bra is, in their more majestic expression, a ‘soutien-gorge’.
More willing than most organs to admit to its follies, the Guardian was prompt to correct a homophonic-type error in an item about unexploded bombs: ‘… as soon as our engineers figured out how to diffuse one lot, a more sophisticated version dropped from the skies’. Excusable if mortifying was the misplaced zeal of the woman police constable who, alerted by radio to a fax and phone gone missing, arrested a passer-by carrying a saxophone. Was it a hazy, unhappy thought of ‘pie in the sky’ that inspired George W. Bush’s avowal that ‘The future will be better tomorrow’? Excitement (or conceivably wit) may have sparked off an Olympic Games commentator of some years back: ‘That bronze medal is worth its weight in gold!’ And mischief could be responsible for a notice displayed at Spey Bay Golf Club: ‘Any persons (except players) caught collecting golf balls on this course will be prosecuted and have their balls removed.’ I see that my last book (no, my most recent), Signs and Wonders, crops up in a note in a reissue of the Oxford Book of Death as Science and Wonders. May do sales some good.
But then, we don’t bother much with words. They mean what we want them to, or we license them to mean equivocally (as in a newspaper headline: ‘Shell’s £4 bn investment plans will increase lead in new fuels’), or they mean next to nothing, they just have a snazzy ring to them. A driving school does business under the name ‘Impact School of Motoring’ as well as running a coach-hire service; a travel company specializing in ‘Summer Sun’ and ‘Winter Sun’ holidays is pleased to call itself ‘Eclipse’.
Only today my eyes fell on the words ‘Robin Day’, and for a moment I thought how nice, this much loved bird had been commemorated, along the lines perhaps of the American Groundhog Day. (The context must have dissolved into a mist.) Who knows what murky half-thoughts or blurred atavistic memories were infiltrating somebody’s mind when The Church of England Newspaper reported that the Archbishop of York, visiting a new refectory at Walsingham, ‘unveiled a plague on the building’, or a mail order catalogue offered ‘Calvary twill trousers’. When Vernon Scannell gave a reading at a posh girls’ school in Malvern, one of his poems made reference to Golgotha. None of them had heard of it, so he suggested that they might recognize it in its Latin form, Calvary. The young ladies gazed back at him with refined perplexity. ‘Then one of them lifted a tentative finger. I said, “Ah, good! You kno
w Calvary.” She said, “It means soldiers on horseback.”’ It is less easy to smile over the response of a friend’s ten-year-old son to a question asking what we call ‘the period between the ages of about 11 and 15 when the body rapidly changes and develops’. The answer came: purgatory.
In The Times, mark you, Matthew Parris tells us that he finds the television programme Big Brother ‘by turns teasing, titivating and gripping’. Ah well, tits in both. More interestingly, the Independent recently announced that in villages west of Amiens ‘horses have been winnowing in a panicky way’. The Times again: apropos of ‘Nasty’ Nick Bateman, lately a contestant in Big Brother, we read that ‘pampering to the former stockbroker’s fifteen minutes of fame’, publishers are offering big advances for a ‘lightning’ biography of him. Was Pamparus another seedy uncle of Cressida’s, perhaps? From the same ‘paper of record’ we gather that David Trimble won ‘the Noble Peace Prize’.
Highly comical, no doubt. Less so was an examination board’s error in simple arithmetic. Pupils sitting a business studies paper were asked to answer ‘all nine questions’: there were eleven of them. Who is to examine the examiners?
In a front page story about Mo Mowlam’s intention to quit Parliament, a Downing Street spokesman denies that the Prime Minister had been irritated by her popularity with the party and the public or other lapses from etiquette. ‘Such allegations are wholly salacious and 24-carat rubbish.’ Salaciousness is not something one would readily associate with Dr Mowlam or indeed with Mr Blair. Possibly an error in transmission, and ‘fallacious’ was meant. As also an advert in the West Briton: ‘Competent chef required by quality restaurant … No time wasters or pre-Madonnas.’