by D J Enright
That splinter of ice in the writer’s heart, remarked on by Graham Greene – in old age it melts into tears.
The ‘scholarship boy’ (of old, but perhaps still now): ‘He has been equipped for hurdle-jumping; so he merely thinks of getting on, but somehow not in the world’s way … He has left his class, at least in spirit, by being in certain ways unusual; and he is still unusual in another class, too tense and overwound’: Richard Hoggart.
Permanently in irksome debt, morally speaking, to his origins, the scholarship boy doesn’t have to do well, he has to do brilliantly, making sure to become a top professor at Oxford or Cambridge, one of the best writers around, a great inventor, a celebrated surgeon, a senior politician (not that he thinks much of politicians). He must be offered a peerage (which naturally he will decline), and above all he needs to make a lot of money – not because he reveres money, for he certainly doesn’t, but because it is the objective proof of success, and he can give it to his parents (who are long since dead). In short, he can never do sufficiently well, never be ‘usual’ enough.
(I had never suggested to my mother that she should read anything of mine, nor had she shown any interest in that disreputable side of my life. But when The Terrible Shears came out in 1975, I proposed tentatively that she might care to take a quick look through the book since it was about our family way back in the twenties and thirties. My mother was now in her eighty-fifth year. She took the book, grimacing faintly as if it might blow up in her face. Some days later she handed the book back, a stiff, displeased look on her face, a look I hadn’t seen for a long time. I had broken an unspoken but fundamental rule: never speak of personal matters, keep yourself to yourself. Eventually she said: ‘You have a good memory’: which wasn’t meant as praise. Still, I was getting off lightly. ‘It is dedicated to you,’ I mumbled. ‘See?’ This placated her somewhat, I think, for she sighed gently and accepted the book.)
There’s something very satisfying about Montaigne’s reports on the doings of Fortune, especially if one doesn’t expect to get far on merit alone. That whimsical goddess cares naught for the pains of hurdle-jumping, or effortfully making good, or justifying oneself. Take Jason Phereus, given up by his doctors because of a tumour on his breast, who rushed recklessly into battle and was pierced through the body at exactly the right spot, lancing the tumour and thus saving his life. Or the city wall of Arona mined by Captain Renzo: blown into the air, the wall fell back on to its foundations settling all in one piece, and leaving the besieged citizens alive and no worse off than they had been. And the story of the painter, Protogenes, who had almost finished a portrait of an exhausted dog, but couldn’t get its foaming slaver right. Exasperated, he threw a sponge at it saturated with various paints, intending to blot everything out. Guided by Fortune, the sponge landed on the dog’s mouth and achieved the very effect Protogenes had been striving after.
All this without any scholarships being required.
This week’s horoscope: ‘You are straining at the leash and eager to get started. But what on and for what purpose?’ You tell me, you’re the expert. Solar and lunar activity in Scorpio, you say, will give me all the get-up-and-go I need. But still no indication of where to go, apart from the suggestion that I could do worse than invest in a last-minute holiday. Last-minute? Horoscopes never fail to impress, in one way or another. And since they have to accommodate twelve signs and untold thousands of readers, they can’t be too specific and they have to be mercifully short. Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
Inflation in academe! Robert Nisbet records the mushrooming titles of a political scientist holding offices at two universities: Allison W. Scott Distinguished Service Research Professor and Director of the Miriam Angston Butler Institute for Political Analysis at the University of Renown (obviously) and Elmer Crittenden Distinguished Professor and Director of the Mark J. Smith Center for the Study of Political Dynamics at Urban University Graduate Center. When the gentleman retired from these universities, ‘Emeritus’ was added to each title. Then he took a post at a third university, which furnished him with a titled chair and an institute directorship. ‘It is said that editors and typesetters cringed when articles were submitted by this political scientist, for he was meticulous about title and did not take kindly to omission of a word.’
On the wrapper of Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary, Robert Nisbet is described as Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus, Columbia University. (‘For the present, the lamented state of the humanities,’ says the professor, ‘brings to mind Nietzsche’s statement, “When you see something slipping, push it.”’) Is there really a University of Renown? Nisbet may have altered names and titles to fend off costly litigation and the possible expunction of his current Emeritus.
‘Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark! What discord follows.’ The more there is of something, whatever it may be, the more words, adjectives and epithets are needed to distinguish between the indistinguishable.
There used to be an expression, ‘conspicuous consumption’. This has disappeared, what it represents having become normal and therefore no longer conspicuous.
A solemnly worded catalogue arrives, offering (among much else) a hand-held satellite system that will tell you where you are on the planet to within fifty metres (as they say, you can never find a policeman when you want one); a revolutionary cushion which helps you get up from a seated position and also helps you get down to a seated position (six settings adjustable to your weight); a neck massager for use in the car (‘like having a personal masseur with you on every trip’: NB, not for use while driving); Paul McKenna’s hypnotherapy tapes, to help you give up smoking, lose weight, eliminate stress, sleep better (also not to be used while driving); a Life Hammer for slicing seat-belts and smashing windows in the event of a car crash; a Shower Companion which pipes in radio programmes and features a digital voice memo function to record any important thoughts you may have while soaping yourself; a variety of devices to chase off moles, cats and mice by emitting powerful (though harmless) blasts of ultrasonic sound; ‘Nature’s answer to lost virility’: a combination of four herbs found in the Amazon rain forest, ‘which are traditionally believed to be supportive of male sexual organs and systems’; Wonder Shape Breast Enhancers (pair), silicone gel in a cell, whereby you can bring about, without recourse to implants or surgery, either increased fullness of bust or of cleavage or both simultaneously.
A subsequent catalogue, ‘Bright Ideas for Christmas’, more relaxed in manner, presents a Celestial Ball programmed to answer ‘the most pressing questions about living and loving in the new millennium’ (you just prod it, whereupon thunderclaps and heavenly harps are heard, followed by the Voice of the Future solemnly pronouncing your destiny); a mask, suitable for adults or children, which makes you look like an alien, while an Alien Voice Simulator makes you sound like one; a moulded latex Bog Monster for attachment to the underside of a lavatory seat, ready to rear up ‘in all its hideous glory’ when the seat is lifted; and, for those moments when pressure in the office gets too much, an Executive Stress Shooter empowering you to fire harmless soft foam rings at a hyperactive phone, irritating colleagues or a stuffy MD, accompanied by flashing lights and arcade-style sound effects (there is no NB warning against use by employees desiring to keep their jobs or Christmas bonuses).
There’ll always be something for the man or woman who has everything – except a brain.
Haven’t come across ‘miniscule’ or ‘dessicated’ for ages, which shows that battles can still be won (or drawn). ‘Guttural’ (from Latin guttur, throat) is lost to us, I fear, supplanted by ‘gutteral’, probably inspired by the noise of water going down the drain (‘gutter’ from Latin gutta, drop), and perhaps, though less common, ‘idiosyncrasy’ replaced by ‘idiosyncracy’. Rife is the faulty grammar of ‘between you and I’ and the newspaper headline ‘Work comes second for Tony and I’; rather touching, though: the speaker or writer knows that politeness require
s one to put oneself last, but fails to notice that ‘I’ (now banished to the end of the phrase) ought to be ‘me’. He or she would never say or write ‘between I and you’. A pamphlet of devotional verses brought by the postman includes this stanza:
A rainbow, says our gracious God,
when it glows across the sky,
just reaffirms a Covenant
that’s made ’twixt you and I.
At least God has the excuse that, while he didn’t need to be polite but was, he did need to rhyme.
‘Whom’ lies mortally wounded (‘Argentina, who England will face in their second group match …’: The Times), but may be called back to life when ‘who’ sounds blatantly offbeat, as in ‘To who it concerns’, while the homophonic accident, ‘the man whose lost his job’, is rare as yet (unlike that all too common ‘your’ for ‘you’re’).
On the pronunciation front, ‘harass’ has surrendered to ‘harass’, the word more frequently heard on television than any other: it would appear that these days practically everyone is being harassed by someone or something. Matthew Arnold had no doubt where the stress should lie:
Too fast we live, too much are tried,
Too harassed to attain
Wordsworth’s sweet calm, or Goethe’s wide
And luminous view to gain.
But Arnold was a poet, and hence unacknowledged as a legislator.
The ousting of ‘miniscule’ – I spoke too soon. A review in The Times (no less) of Derwent May’s Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement (no less) alludes to the ‘miniscule payment’ to contributors of ten pence per word (no less?). (Later on, mention is made of a debate in the correspondence columns regarding ‘the morality of Nabakov’ sic.)
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A third leader in The Times informs us that ‘the first line of The Waste Land – “April is the cruellest month” – is probably more quoted than Keats’s sugary “Oh, to be in England/ Now that April’s there.”’ And there were we, thinking that this home thought from abroad (more hideous sentimentality?) was Browning’s.
And the same paper, a fortnight later, draws a comparison between Helmut Kohl, the German Chancellor, and Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, favouring the latter as a victim of merely a single act of folly, ‘who in a moment of drunken madness fells his wife’. Nothing so brutal: in the novel he merely sells her to a sailor.
Alluding to the title of Thomas Wolfe’s novel, a writer in the Times Literary Supplement quoted the pertinent line from Lycidas as ‘Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt in truth.’ A striking image: truth as both harsh solvent and gentle softener. But Milton’s words were ‘melt in ruth’. An American reader spotted the slip: he remembered the line, he said, because he was courting a girl called Ruth when the novel came out, and he thought that Milton’s advice made good sense.
A couple of months later, the same periodical referred to the American poet, Edna St Vincent Millais. No correction forthcoming. (Nag, nag, nag.)
Ultrasound scan. Sturdy woman doctor, Chinese, is digging urgently into my left side. ‘You do know,’ I venture timorously, ‘that my left kidney has been removed?’ ‘Oh,’ says she, ‘so that’s why I couldn’t find it! They might have told me.’
As our GP taps me here and there with her little hammer, as she gently twists my lower limbs, and then makes out a hospital chit for hip X-rays, I am tempted to quote Coleridge: ‘It is a small thing that the patient knows of his own state; yet some things he does know better than his physician.’ I don’t, of course. She is a sensitive, solicitous, determined young woman, never hesitating to track down and tackle some grand cloistered consultant, and I don’t wish to be a petulant old man whose ‘moi’ is playing up. I muse silently on Montaigne’s saying, that he would rather be an expert on himself than on Cicero. (There’s a sturdy, prepossessing ‘moi’ for all to see.)
A few days later and the X-rays prove unnecessary, the pains and disability having moved to other joints. Also I was caught up in more sombre thoughts. Montaigne noted that ‘he who recalls the ills he has endured, those that have threatened him, the trifling incidents which have moved him from one state to another, is prepared thereby for future mutations and the recognition of his condition’.
One of the wisdoms we gain from experience lies in recalling — a singularly taxing procedure – how often we have been wrong in our judgements. The doctor would have been justified in counter-claiming that the patient knows one or two little things, the physician many big ones. But she belongs to that rare breed who do not ‘act the professor’ by talking too much – or by saying nothing. Once, in hospital for a routine check-up, I came to in a ward with a catheter between my legs. No one told me why or what, though an Indian lady of tragic mien in a long black robe, gliding past, murmured that she was sorry. (I would have supposed I was hallucinating except that my wife was there and vouched for the incident.) The next morning a senior doctor made the rounds, chatting with everybody in the ward but me. ‘Hey, aren’t you going to spare me a word?’ I asked as he was leaving. He halted briefly: ‘Good morning.’ I imagine I was the sole property of a surgeon (it turned out that he had removed a bladder tumour) who was engaged elsewhere. With the help of brisk, kindly nurses I made a reasonably rapid recovery.
An old grey-faced man a few beds away, in a dreadful state, couldn’t or wouldn’t say a word to his wordless wife when she visited, a trial to the nurses hunting for the bloodstained pyjama trousers he had hidden, he moaned throughout the night.
A tall black orderly on the ward, standing upright, silent, staring into space, as if he had just arrived from a far-off country, speaking to no one, no one speaking to him, he appeared to have no duties.
Seen early one morning, the orderly, upright, stock-still, expressionless, hugging the sick old man, quiet now, close to his chest, not a word passing between them. So that was what he was there for.
‘I remember the ludicrous effect produced on my mind by the first sentence of an autobiography, which, happily for the writer, was as meagre in incident as it is well possible for the life of an individual to be – “The eventful life which I am about to record …”’: Coleridge speaking. I remember an autobiography offered to Chatto and the covering letter in which the writer, more modest perhaps, conjectured that an account of his uneventful life would appeal to those many readers to whom, also, nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened. This singular preamble captured my errant attention and, pushing aside yet another commentary on the work of Virginia Woolf, I took up the manuscript. The author was right about his life. Its one outstanding event was an embarrassing outbreak of acne during adolescence, to which, perhaps reluctantly, he felt honour-bound to devote several pages. Sadly – for it is not often that a manuscript chimes with its author’s description of it – we could not convince ourselves that a sufficient market existed for the book, whether among those interested in acne or those interested in the total absence of interest.
Is your life meagre in incidents? Are you deficient in disaster? Do you crave a thrilling mission? Then ‘Immerse yourself in a great disaster’, or embark on an ‘Undersea mission that could turn you into a wreck’. A reviewer of two computer games involving the Titanic awards the first a feelgood factor of nine out of ten and the second seven out of ten. So that’s what ‘feelgood’ signifies – a demotic euphemism for ‘decadent’ befitting our day and age.
‘Praise the lord Jesus for the opportunity of writing to you.’ Another letter from Uganda, in another beautifully neat hand. Esther is a girl of eighteen, with five siblings under the age of thirteen. Her father is dead of AIDS, and her mother is seriously ill with the disease. She must therefore prepare herself to take care of the other children, and wishes to complete her teacher-training course. ‘When I get my certificate, chances of getting a job employment are at times bright.’ I guess I’ll send a small sum, nothing like the £248 she requires. If you are given something to write about, you should think of paying for it once in a whi
le.
A press report now has it that in many cases this is a scam and the girls never see the money. At least, unlike well-established domestic charities, they don’t send ballpoint pens ‘to help you reply quickly’ or make changes to your will. By coincidence, my current horoscope warns me against giving time or money to causes I know little about or people I cannot be sure are truly deserving. ‘This is not selfish, it’s sensible.’
(A year later Esther writes again, rather more brusquely: ‘Dear Enright …’ She has been advised by the chief education officer to enrol in a computer training course for six months, which costs £150. ‘I will be very grateful when you sponsor me.’ What next? A doctorate in economics, training as a neurosurgeon?)
The lovely illusions that attend our days! For long I had believed the brand name of Marks & Spencer’s clothing to be St Martin, after the fourth-century soldier who divided his cloak with a naked beggar, and became Bishop of Tours. Hence, I assumed, a discreet hint that cast-off trousers, shirts or coats should be donated to Oxfam. (The beggar turned out to be Christ.) Eventually it was borne in on me that the M&S saint was Michael, ‘of celestial armies prince’ who on Judgement Day weighs the souls of the risen dead in his scales. The childish disillusions that ensue!
We still need hyphens, preferably in the right places. In The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, R. W. Burchfield observes that there is a world of difference between ‘thirty-odd people’ and ‘thirty odd people’, and lists such fallacious (if entertaining) end-of-line breaks as ‘berib-boned’, ‘pain-staking’ and ‘fru-ity’. Typesetters are not always punctilious in this respect, while the proliferation of pushy computers has compounded the confusion.
A letter to The Times of 25 August 1999 cited ‘pronoun-cement’ appearing in that paper, while another letter of the same date awarded the prize for ghoulish ineptitude to ‘brains-canner’. Subsequent correspondents, however, praised their computers for showing initiative in the shape of ‘bed-raggled’ and for adding usefully to our word-hoard with ‘not-ables’, a neologism so well defining ‘a class of persons to be found occupying senior positions in many organizations’. (There is no respectable way of hyphenating this word: ‘no-tables’ is cryptic and ‘nota-bles’ inscrutable.)