Occasional Prose (12 page)

That prepositions point out relationships between members of a sentence is plain. In classical languages much of this work was done by declension of the noun. I have always liked the notion I came upon long ago in a Greek grammar that the declension was a visual thing for the Greeks. The noun was pictured as standing straight up (nominative), lying on its side (ablative), leaning (dative); I forget what the genitive position was. This innocent clarity of vision, an exercise of both the imaginative and the analytical faculties, has much to do with the beauty of Greek literature and also, I would guess, with the perspicuousness of Greek philosophy and Greek political thought. One thinks of Socrates: the fanciful stories and myths he invented, to lay bare, finally, a relation or sequence admitted by the hearer to be ineluctable. Also his idea that knowledge is an act of recovery from the storehouse of the mind; teaching was merely prompting the pupil to recognize something he had known all along, though he had not known he knew it, till Socrates showed him. The slave boy in the
Meno
. A thought, when fully grasped, should induce a feeling of recognition. This implies, of course, that our common universe, on close examination, makes sense, that there are connections, if only in the brain.

One reason for the loss of clarity in our current speaking and writing must be the fact that the classical languages are no longer taught in schools. In fact, the loss of control over prepositions—the articulate parts of speech—seems to have coincided with the disappearance of Latin as a “subject” in public high schools. Up through the war, at least in New England, in the mill towns (not just in Boston), Latin was still taught—Greek sometimes too—by vigorous unmarried old ladies. When they died or retired, it went. In New England, in former days, the teaching of Latin was considered indispensable to a truly civic education; it was thought to form democratic habits of mind. Whether it did or not, the dropping of it from the program of free universal education certainly deepened the chasm between classes. And whatever it did or did not do toward conserving democratic habits, Latin surely promoted clear, analytic thinking and helped us in our language to distinguish the relations between members of a sentence.

Some of this training in logic and economy has been delegated to mathematics. In the college I speak of, where I taught literature back in the mid-forties, many of my best students were math and physics majors. They had no particular gift for literature, but they knew how to follow a sequence of thought, and if I had asked it of them, they could probably have taken a sentence apart and put it back together. It was usually a relief to read their papers. Unfortunately, today’s readers and writers cannot all be math and physics majors.

The disappearance of classics is obviously not the only factor in the atrophying of the power to communicate. On the grade-school level, there used to be parsing and diagramming of sentences. I wonder whether that still exists, and very much doubt it. In my schools, we had to do it every day. Some who were bored by parsing did not mind diagramming. We also had to memorize poetry, but that too has gone, I suppose.

Yet if Latin is no longer given and English is not taught as rigorously as it once was, that is not enough to account for the dimensions of what has happened. The public was startled and shocked by the language-murder committed before television cameras during the Watergate hearings by White House and Cabinet functionaries with college degrees. It is true that the mixture of euphemism, circumlocution, and a kind of insolent barbarity of phrasing gave an insight into a new mentality that could take an ordinary citizen aback. But the grammar, the clichés? Where had the public been during the last few decades—in a cloister?—that it could have been troubled by “at that point in time”? It cannot have been paying attention to its own speech or its neighbor’s. Most people sound like Jeb Magruder. Ninety percent of the letters I get from Americans—strangers, I mean—are at best half-literate. And these are from citizens who read books (that is why they are writing to me), from sub-editors working on magazines and in publisher’s offices, from college professors who have drafted questionnaires, from agents who want to sign me up for lecture tours, who have an idea for a movie. If this sample of the population is a culture-conscious minority, what must the majority write like?

I have plenty of evidence that it was not always so. I have read logs kept by ship’s captains describing the sea, the weather, the ports and islands visited. These old skippers were not Melvilles, but they could write clear and plain. Nor can I conclude that most of them had had advantages, a superior education. Maybe they had not even had parsing in their village schools. I have gone through a mass of papers found in a barrel in a Massachusetts house. The family were storekeepers, and many of the papers are commercial: inventories, records of the dollar they “gave” for a pig, what five bolts of calico cost this winter, what they paid the servant. But they also kept letters. A member of the family would go to New York on the steamboat and report back on the harbor, the streets, the dwellings, the inhabitants, the strangers he met in the boarding-house, the sermons he heard preached. In good sober English, neat legible handwriting, and with a certain power of description, especially where the sermons were concerned. I have read my great-great-uncle’s journal, which he started when he was a student at Dartmouth College before the Civil War and continued into his old age, out in the Middle West, where he went into the real-estate business. He was certainly not an interesting man; in his youth he went through a religious period that brought on paroxysms of conventional feelings; he too was a great church-attender and carefully wrote down a description of each preacher—height, estimated weight, complexion, voice—a detailed account of the sermon and his own responses to it. When old, he was interested mainly in figures—the temperature outside, snow measurement, wind velocity, his wife’s weight, which he recorded in the journal once a week. Yet, except for an occasional spelling lapse (he was a college drop-out), the journal is written in very acceptable, if colorless English. No clichés; he was a cliché himself, you could say, but his mild pen gave no offense. Today, one of his descendants cannot write a letter to the telephone company asking for service to be suspended without tying himself into knots so convolute that it would take a Houdini to arrange his escape from the opening clause.

Now it is possible that this breakdown in communication will soon be felt throughout the world. The Americans may only have pioneered it, as they have done with computers, the electrified kitchen, and pollution. If it is an effect of modern civilization which is being noticed first in America, then the causes must be larger than any merely local and parochial phenomena, such as the American character with its tendency to pomposity, the dropping of Latin, the permissive approach to the teaching of English. Indeed, those last may be more effects than causes of a world-wide revolution that will end in the dethronement or abdication of the word.

That of course is the gospel Marshall McLuhan has been preaching, although he speaks of the obsolescence of print rather than of the word itself. But if print is condemned, the word, it seems to me, will not survive long. It would be easier to reinstitute Latin in the schools and have everybody parsing and diagramming than to revert to an archaic age where words were carried by chant and gesture. Whatever can be said in favor of television as a “warm” or “hot” medium, it cannot reproduce the conditions of the Homeric world in your living-room. It cannot act as a preserver and transmitter of meaning. Far more than print, it lacks memory, and memory, of course, was a highly developed faculty in pre-literate civilizations, almost like an extra organ of the body. It still is among primitive peoples. Contemporary man’s memory is not improving now that he looks at TV in the evening instead of reading a book or the newspaper. It is getting worse, and television itself is partly responsible for that. Not just the distraction caused by the intrusion of the commercials but also the flickering of the image, the mechanical failure obliging you to turn the dial, the necessity of concentrating on a small square area—all this makes nearly anything seen on television far more unmemorable than something seen on a movie screen, in a darkened house, surrounded by the silent presences of other movie-goers. And if certain pictures first seen on TV retain their peculiar ghostly black-and-white vividness, that is because usually you have seen them afterwards in the newspaper: Kent State, the shooting of Oswald. Nor will tape-recorders insure permanence; in the public domain we are seeing that demonstrated. Future generations may develop an aural memory, but the very popularity of taping today shows that modern people do
not
remember what they hear, and feel the need to have it played back. The same, in the visual field, can be said of the camera; few tourists today remember what they see.

The decay of language must be part of a whole syndrome in which formerly healthy human faculties—speech, sight, hearing, taste, locomotion, even touch—have been to some degree vitiated by technological advance. This is more evident with the eye, the ear, the feet, the tongue as an organ of taste, the fingers—who but a professional can feel a stone, a piece of material, or tell leather from plastic? Smell seems to be an exception; this sense may have
developed
with modern civilization, despite air pollution. In the Middle Ages people were less sensitive to bad smells, I think; nowadays Americans profess to have very delicate nostrils, which are offended, when abroad, by the stench of bad drains, Venetian canals, B.O. And the recent work of Saul Bellow shows the primacy he accords to his nose—what Mr. Sammler has against women, more than the way they talk, is the way they smell.

With speech, though, it is not clear how or why machines should have affected it; we have not yet invented a machine that will do our talking for us. And as for writing, have the typewriter, the ball-point, the felt pen really done more than lame our handwriting? True, thanks to the telephone, ordinary people write less than they did and those who write—or dictate—are mainly located in offices. Hence the householder, obliged to write a letter, copies the language of the business communications he receives or that of the social column of his local paper: “I attended a function,” “I was present at the interment.” Lack of practice in writing probably has as a side-effect an impairment or loss of control of speech.

Yet there must be something beyond that. I would guess that our incompetence with words had to do with consciousness-lowering. A reduced consciousness of what is happening, of sights and sounds and textures, is first of all imposed on us by present-day conditions: driving in a car you see less than when you walk; living in a city, in an air-conditioned apartment, you hear less than your ancestors did—no cock’s crow, bird song, rustling of leaves, roar of waterfall. The chief noises you hear are sirens and the refrigerator. But aside from these deprivations (felt as such if felt at all) there are sights and noises you
will
not to see or hear, sensations you
will
not to notice—TV commercials, crowding, ugly bodies, ugly clothes, traffic jams, your neighbor’s rock or his classical music. You simply turn them off, and this soon becomes an automatic matter. Your switch is always in the down position. If you want to change that, you find you have to sign up for consciousness-raising sessions or turn on with drugs.

But language is a consciousness-raiser. The problem there is that the power of using and understanding language, like all power, carries responsibilities with it. You consent to having it or you don’t. And most people today would rather not have it. You can’t exactly blame them. If they agreed to use and understand language clearly, this would only exacerbate all those aches and pains of contemporary civilization by putting them into
words
. It is true that this can give relief but not on a daily basis. Better the primal scream than intelligible words that lead nowhere. Better delegate language to experts and specialists, i.e., intellectuals.

Language on occasion may be a substitute for action (in mourning, for instance) but in the long run if it is not linked to action it becomes insupportable. “Don’t just keep talking.
Do
something!” This explains, I think, the current dislike felt for intellectuals by the silent majority which Agnew knew how to play on. They are grudged the power of articulate speech which has been delegated to them in a world that has become unspeakable, where action is required, but none is forthcoming. Of course our intellectuals are some of the worst sinners against language; the fall-out in academic circles is asphyxiating, and some of this must be the result of specialization, the loss of touch with common everyday utterance implied by the delegation of powers. One of the amusing sidelights of Watergate was the discovery that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Krogh, and a few others considered themselves an intellectual elite. Haldeman was proud of his language skills, and Ehrlichman showed an open intellectual contempt for the workhorse politicians of the Senate. If the public came to understand, from their jargon, that these were brains-trusters, this would help explain the absence of grief at their departure.

In any case, it is impossible to believe that the misuse and abuse of English on the part of ninety percent of the population are not to some extent voluntary. The numerous handbooks on correct usage, though they sell, I believe, have about as much “relevant impact” as Emily Post’s or Amy Vanderbilt’s etiquette manuals, which sell too. I think people must read all these books for entertainment.

George Orwell foresaw the dangers for a free society of cant, jargon, and euphemism. He was thinking mainly of official and party hypocrisy, which a courageous writer could unmask while pointing to the right way by his own steadfast plain-spoken example. What he missed, I think—perhaps he came too early—was the element of consent in the public. A general will to confusion. He analyzed the phenomenon of double-think but saw it as something inculcated in the enslaved masses by training and repetition. That is not happening to us—unless you count the indoctrination practiced by advertising—and exposure (Orwell’s remedy) of verbal manipulation and malpractice has no effect. How many times has Nixon been exposed as a liar? And nobody cared, except the exposers. Nixon, for most, is just a fact, and words, his own or anybody else’s, do not affect him. What has brought him down, if he is brought down, is a delightful turn of technology—the tapes.