The Hindu : FEATURES / EDUCATION PLUS : Innovative project from Loyola

The Hindu : FEATURES / EDUCATION PLUS : Innovative project from Loyola

Men of letters and moral degeneracy

Hilaire Belloc once wrote: 'When I am dead, I hope it may be said / His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'  I don't think Belloc's books are widely read now, but his "sins" were far from scarlet.  His only fault, if at all, was his anti-Semitism.  But there are several writers whose books are widely read and whose sins are outrageous.

Francis Bacon, the father of the essay in English, had all the unworthy qualities of a Renaissance politician except debauchery.  As Lord Chancellor, he committed a number of shameful acts in order to please King James and the Duke of Buckingham.  He was finally found guilty of corruption and removed from the high position. Christopher Marlowe's case was worse: he was stabbed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab.  Alexander Pope, who criticised Bacon as "the meanest of mankind", did something which Bacon would have called underhand treachery: he took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire and then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow.

The profession of letters has always had a plentiful stock of libertines and lechers.  Oliver Goldsmith earned about 400 pounds a year.  But he needed three times as much for paying court to venal beauties and for gambling.  That this "genuine vagabond", as his biographers so affectionately describe him, was the most unskilful of all gamblers is beside the point.  The playwright Oscar Wilde, who is noted for his brilliant epigrams, was a sodomite.  Guy de Maupassant, the supreme exponent of the short story and one of my favourite writers, had only one foot in high society; the other foot was always in the gutter.  He kept a parrot which was trained to shriek rude greetings at women visitors!  And he died of syphilis. 

Andre Gide, author of the famous book, If It Die, and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, was a homosexual.  His book, Corydon, is an apologia for homosexuality.  Graham Greene was a pathological liar and a callous womanizer, if his biographers are to be believed.  His biography, Graham Greene: The Enemy Within, by Michael Sheldon, not only does justice to his lecherous escapades but gives the lie to the popular belief that he is a Catholic novelist.  Byron's case was worse: he was accused of incest.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge tops the list of illustrious drug addicts.  Edgar Allen Poe was a high-ranking alcoholic.  Dylan Thomas, who wrote some of the memorable lines in English poetry (e.g. 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age.') never parted company with Comdrade Bottle.  It was, in fact, his heavy drinking that brought about his untimely death at the age of 39.  DBC Pierre, whose novel, Vernon God Little, won the Man Booker Prize in 2003, was addicted not only to alcohol but to several other things.  He was known to his friends as "Dirty Pierre".  The list is endless.

Is moral degeneracy endemic to the profession of letters? I don't think so. I should like to believe that for every degenerate among creative writers, there are many who can be called paragons of honesty and uprightness.

The problem with the Fowlerian precepts

The King's English is one of my favourite books.  Written by H W Fowler and his younger brother, F G Fowler, and published in 1906, this epoch-making book has enjoyed a great deal of scholarly attention in the past 106 years.  "It took the world by storm", said The Times about the book, while paying tribute to H W Fowler on the occasion of his death.  This century-old book, which made Fowler a household name in all English-speaking countries, still makes stimulating reading.

A couple of weeks ago, I had occasion to thumb again the yellowing pages of the musty, old copy of The King's English in my college library.  The purpose was to pick up some Fowlerian rules for use in a guest-lecture I was expected to give.  The book was as good a read as it had always been on earlier occasions, but I was not sure whether I could use the Fowler brothers' hand-me-downs in my lecture.  I, therefore, turned to another favourite, Alan Warner's A Short Guide to English Style, and found it a better fit.

Why did the Fowlerian precepts disappoint me?  I will answer the question with reference to four of the Fowler brothers' "practical rules in the domain of vocabulary".

"Prefer the concrete word to the abstract" is one of the precepts.  On the face of it, it is sound advice because abstract words are, after all, enemies of precise expression.  But not quite sound, if you examine it carefully.  We often talk about our – and other people's – attitudes and feelings.  We will not be able to talk about them, if we decide to use only concrete words for joy and sorrow and love and anger.

"Prefer the single word to the circumlocution", say the Fowler brothers.  "No" is certainly preferable to the pedantic "The answer is in the negative."  But there are situations in which "No" would be considered blunt and therefore impolite.  Whether one should use the single word or the periphrasis depends on the context or the occasion.

"Prefer the short word to the long" is the third rule.  I do like short words, but, as a writer, I have often found long words more effective than short words in the expression of emotional ideas.  "Stupendous" and "magnificent" are much more powerful than "large" and "grand".

The last rule is: "Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance."  In other words, avoid Latin derivations where native words can serve the purpose.  It is a lame-duck rule, as Michael Beresford points out in his Modern English.  Even at the time of publication of The King's English, the distinction between the Anglo-Saxon element and the Latin element had ceased to be of any importance.  And now, in the context of what David Crystal calls "World Englishes", the cry for Saxon English or the pedigree of English words would only be a voice in the wilderness.

"Break any of those rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous", said George Orwell, author of Animal Farm, four decades later.  He was a very sensible man.

What English has done to other languages

I hadn’t heard about International Mother Tongue Day until 2004 when I took part in a Mother Tongue Day celebration at which, however, no light was thrown on the significance of observing February 21 as Mother Tongue Day.  Later, I learnt that, in the year 1999, UNESCO had declared February 21 as International Mother Language Day in response to a request from Bangladesh.  On February 21, 1952, in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), the police opened fire on a mass-rally demanding the declaration of their mother tongue, Bangla, as a state language of Pakistan, and a few young men who took part in the rally died of gunshot wounds.  Bangladesh still observes the day as Martyrs’ Day.  Incidentally, the love and respect that these language martyrs had aroused for their mother tongue, Bangla, laid the foundation for the war of liberation in Bangladesh.

One has the right to use one’s language and one has the right to maintain and develop one’s culture.  These are inalienable personal rights, according to UNESCO’s Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights.  But there are millions of people all over the world who have “lost” their mother tongues by opting to study, right from their childhood, through the medium of English, the language of opportunities, and by opting for, in addition, a dominant language other than their mother-tongue.  This has led to the marginalization of thousands of languages, particularly tribal languages, all over the world.  It is for this reason that language right activists call English a “killer language”.

How serious is this problem?  Here are some facts.  Alawa, in northern Australia, has only about 20 fluent speakers left.  Achumavi, in northern California, has just 10 elderly speakers.  There was only one speaker of Eyak in the year 2004 and he was 84 years old at the time!  Jiwali has no native speakers at all; the last native speaker died in 1986.  Manx as a native language became extinct in 1900 on the Isle of Man.

In the South Asian region, a number of languages are likely to become extinct in the near future.  In India, according to the 1961 census, there are only 98 speakers of Agariya and 17 speakers of Andamanese.  In Pakistan, there are only 250 speakers of Khowar.  In Bangladesh, Kumi is spoken by just 2000 people.  In Nepal, Kumal and Byangsi have only 1000 speakers each. 

In my own state, Andhra Pradesh, the study of the mother tongue, Telugu, has been made compulsory only recently. Until then, the tendency had been to avoid Telugu even as a Part I language in schools and colleges.  In English-medium schools, English was the medium of instruction and Hindi was the Part I language for hundreds of young people.  This was true of all the other southern states. (Tamil Nadu, which did not opt for the three-language formula, is perhaps an exception.)  Even though the study of the mother tongue has been made compulsory, people are by and large indifferent to the mother tongue. Mother tongue illiteracy is, therefore, an alarming problem.  At the global level, it is even more alarming.  According to a prediction by Krauss, a linguist, this century will see either the death or the doom of 90% of mankind’s languages.  They will be alive only in language documents and on the web. 

“Linguistic genocide”, “linguicide”, “language death” – the obiturial terminology is frightening.

Plain, evocative -- and non-vegetarian!

'Patient Pursuit of the Possible' was the title of the introductory chapter of a PhD thesis that came to me for editing last month.  I replaced that alliterative but vague title with a plain one: 'Introduction to the Study'.  The title of the last chapter ('Paradigm Shift') was extravagantly grand.  I put a circle round it and wrote 'Conclusion'.  The titles were elegant phrases, borrowed from J S Bruner in the case of the first one, and Thomas Kuhn in the case of the second.  But the problem with them was that they didn't fit in: they didn't indicate the central idea of the respective chapters.

It is difficult to find a title that is fitting as well as evocative.  The Grapes of Wrath, the title of a novel by John Steinbeck, is at once both.  In the closing scene of the novel, it is raining heavily, and Rose of Sharon, who has just been delivered of a still-born baby, is being carried along the high road by Pa and Uncle John.  They see a barn and take her inside. They find an old man lying there with a boy bending over him.  The boy says, "He ain't ate for days – reckon he’ll die unless he gets soup or milk."  Rose of Sharon lies down by the old man, undoes her dress and pulls his head down to her breast.  "You got to", she says and her face lights up with a mysterious smile.  The title, taken from 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' is itself a reference to Revelation.  Rose of Sharon, who gives life to the old man, is the Beloved of the Song of Songs "whose breasts are like unto a cluster of grapes", the Beloved who says: "Take, eat: this is My Body…"

If It Die, the title of an autobiographical fragment by Andre Gide, is reminiscent of St John's Gospel ("Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit) as well as Rousseau's Confessions.  Here are a few other titles that are evocative: A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Power and the Glory, The Sound and the Fury, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The God of Small Things.

A good number of literary masterpieces have very simple titles.  Tolstoy's tour de force, which is recognized as the greatest novel in world literature, has a plain title: War and Peace.  Dr Zhivago is plainer than that.  Animal Farm and 1984, the titles of Orwell's famous novels, are matter-of-fact.  Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer are some of the most fascinating books in world literature, but their titles are colourless.  But the books urge you to raise the old Shakespearian question: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet." 

Some books are a real feast, but their titles turn my vegetarian stomach.  But I'm developing a stronger stomach, particularly after reading Chicken Soup for the Soul.  In any case, I'd prefer such books to those whose titles are as pleasing as vegetarian food but the content revolting.

An autobiography that makes amends

For decades I had nursed a prejudice against Sir Winston Churchill.  The prejudice was largely due to what Churchill had said in the House of Commons during the debate on the Indian Independence Bill.  "Liberty is man's birthright", he began on a noble note, but descended soon to the depths of insensitivity: "However, to pass on the reins of the government to the Congress at this juncture is to hand over the destiny of hungry millions into the hands of rascals, rogues and freebooters… India will take a thousand years to know the periphery of the philosophy of politics.  Today we hand over the government to men of straw of whom no trace will be found in a few years."

My prejudice remained as deep-rooted as before even after I had read about Churchill's attempt to make amends for his insensitive remarks by praising one of those "men of straw".  "When you write to your Prime Minister, Mr Nehru", he said to the Indian High Commissioner in Ottawa, "tell him I think he is one of the greatest men in contemporary history.  He has accomplished two things that men can accomplish: he has conquered prejudice, and he has conquered fear."

What this penitential note didn't achieve, his book did.  Churchill's autobiography, which I read 82 years after the book had been published in 1930, showed him in a new light.  Emerging from the pages of My Early Life is a deeply sensitive and cultured young man whose battles to educate himself don't fail to strike a chord with the reader.

"Menaced with education" is Churchill's description of his initial contact with formal education.  The first bitter blow came from a governess with sinister looks, and the next, a literal one this time, from the headmaster of a boarding school where he had been sent.  Fortunately for Winston, he had already discovered the joys of reading, and he turned to books to seek relief from the distress caused by Greek and Latin which his masters taught with the "large resources of compulsion" at their disposal.  Then he went to another school where he was taught everything he liked – history,   French, poetry, riding, and swimming.  He was detained in the Fourth Form for as long as possible, and he was happy about it: it helped him master the English language!  "I got into my bones", he says, "the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence -- which is a noble thing."

After Sandhurst, Winston, 22 now, began his army career in India.  Having plenty of spare time on his hands in Bangalore, he spent about five hours a day reading the great classics on history, economics, and philosophy.  He devoured the eight volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and went on to Macaulay and learnt all the Lays of Ancient Rome by heart.  It was followed by Macaulay's History and Essays, Plato's Republic, Darwin's Origin of Species, Malthus's  On Population…

Churchill was well known as a master of words.  My Early Life vouches for it.  What it also vouches for is the fact that he was a self-educated man.