When Tolkein Got Precious with Lewis

http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1990652005
When Tolkien got precious with Lewis

MIKE MERRITT AND JEREMY WATSON


FROM the cloistered world of Oxford they created two of the best-loved fantasy realms in English literature which themselves inspired blockbuster movies.

CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien were the closest of friends, one struggling to make his fantasy world of Middle Earth a literary reality, the other trying to convince friends his first book about Narnia deserved to be published.


But new research has revealed that their friendship was riven by the most bitter and personal of rows on everything from literature to religion and even their choice of spouse.

The fascinating revelations about their real relationship have been made by film-maker Norman Stone while researching a new drama-documentary on the life of Lewis. Stone, who made the award-winning movie about Lewis, Shadowlands, talked to mutual friends of the literary pair as well as examining documents in minute detail.

His portrayal of their frequent and occasionally destructive bickering comes on the eve of one of the most eagerly-awaited movies of the year, the £129m The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, and follows the astounding critical and commercial success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

But Stone's drama-documentary, to be broadcast in December this year, lays bare the sometimes unbearable tension between the two writers whose work would inspire Hollywood.

In CS Lewis, Beyond Narnia, Lewis and Tolkien are shown having a violent argument about The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Lewis wrote afterwards: "No harm in him, only needs a smack or so."

Tolkien disliked the first Narnia book, published in 1950, telling the author it had too many clashing elements and was pushing the Christianity "message" too far. He also apparently "hated" Lewis's allegorical fight between good and evil, with Jesus represented by Aslan the Lion.

"Some people may see it as trading insults," said Stone. "Initially, when Lewis turned to writing children's books, his publisher and other friends tried to dissuade him. They thought it would hurt his reputation as a writer of serious works on literature and ethics.

"Tolkien thought there were too many elements that clashed: a Father Christmas and an evil witch, talking animals and children. He did not like allegory and thought Lewis's book was too pushy in a Christian sense."

Tolkien helped change Lewis from an atheist to a Christian, but, according to the film, then became concerned about his embrace of Protestantism and evolving anti-Catholic stance.

And when Lewis met and married Joy Gresham, an American widow, this - says Stone - was yet another source of trouble. Gresham needed to go through a civil wedding to allow her to stay in the UK, and Tolkien felt she was taking Lewis away from his closest circle of friends.

A friend of both writers, Brian Sibley, confirmed to Stone their strained relationship. "They took no prisoners when it came to arguing about their work," he said.

When Lewis published his academic magnum opus, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century in 1954, Tolkien was irritated by Lewis calling Catholics "papists" and that he openly praised the 16th-century Presbyterian preacher John Calvin as "dazzling". Tolkien despaired that his friend would "become again a Northern Ireland Protestant".

Stone, who is married to TV presenter Sally Magnusson, is a successful director who won a Bafta and Emmy for Shadowlands, which examined the relationship between Lewis and his wife. The Glasgow-based film-maker has returned to the subject to examine other aspects of Lewis's life, in particular his relationship with Tolkien.

After serving in the trenches in the First World War, Lewis took a First in Greek and Latin Literature before accepting a senior post teaching English at Magdalene College, Oxford.

There he met Tolkien, the professor of Anglo-Saxon language and literature at Exeter College. They realised they were "kindred spirits" and Tolkien read his early Middle Earth stories - a precursor to the Lord of the Rings series - to his new friend. In return, Tolkien persuaded Lewis, then in his early 30s, to adopt Christianity and he became a prolific author of academic and religious works before writing children's literature.

Gresham was diagnosed with bone cancer in 1956 - the year Lewis completed his seventh Narnia book - and died four years later, aged just 45. Her husband followed her in 1963 just short of his 65th birthday.

The Narnia Chronicles have sold more than 100m copies. The Lord of the Rings series, first published in 1954, have sold more than 150m copies.

Stone said it was "fair to say that Tolkien and Lewis influenced each other as writers. I have made this new film because I wanted to tell the whole story of Lewis's life and I feel Lord of the Rings has created a new audience which will appreciate Lewis's work too."

The film is to be shown on the Hallmark cable TV channel although the BBC is negotiating to show it at the same time. It stars Midsomer Murders actor Anton Rogers as Lewis and Diane Venora, of Clint Eastwood's Bird, as Gresham.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, premieres at London's Royal Albert Hall in December. The cast includes Tilda Swinton, Liam Neeson, James McAvoy, Rupert Everett, Jim Broadbent, Ray Winstone and Dawn French.

Pop Fiction Makes Russia a Literary Gulag

http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1991042005
Pulp fiction makes Russia a literary gulag

MURDO MACLEOD


THE nation which gave the world Pushkin, Tolstoy, Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn, and which survived decades of creativity-suppressing Communism, now finds itself pilloried as a land of pulp fiction - a literary also-ran.

Publishing experts admit Russian literature is in a state of crisis and up-and-coming authors have been reduced to asking would-be readers to pay for books in advance in order to make sure they get published.


The crisis in Russian publishing has seen the country's own authors squeezed while publishing companies rely on cheap-and-cheerful detective and war novels and translations of foreign books.

The list of bestsellers at the online bookstore Ozon.ru, the nation's equivalent of Amazon, showed six of the top 10 and all of the top three were translations of foreign authors.

Would-be authors are resorting to desperate measures to get themselves into print. Some put appeals for buyers on websites, selling as-yet unpublished books on a subscription basis: once enough people have signed up for the latest volume, the book is printed and sent to the customers.

In a survey commissioned by Russia's National Library, 37% of Russians said they never read books, only 23% considered themselves active readers and 52% never bought books. The studies also showed readers prefer detective novels and Mills and Boon-style romantic books to the classics of Russian literature by such greats as Leo Tolstoy or Anton Chekhov.

While the rise of TV and the PlayStation generation are blamed for battering the book trade in the West, hard-pressed Russian authors point to a series of causes. They include the high cost of paper, Moscow's decision to levy VAT on books, poor distribution across the vast country, and the shaky post-Soviet economy which means many are more concerned with the bare necessities of life rather than reading.

In order to insure their companies against going under if a new book fails to sell, publishers are insisting new writers come up with the money in advance to finance the publication, or saying they will not touch new writers unless they have at least two books ready which they can serialise, so as to maximise profits.

In addition, rampant piracy means up-and-coming authors who do get published struggle to make a living from their books. Many companies go for the safe options of cheap detective potboilers and action adventure where gun-toting Russian Spetsnaz commandos cheerfully turn guns on Muslim terrorists in unnamed central Asian countries which seem to be clones of Chechnya.

Victor Sonkin, literature correspondent with the Moscow Times, said: "It is excruciatingly hard to establish anything new on the Russian market. A while ago, I toyed with the idea of setting up a small publishing house specialising in high-quality non-fiction.

"I felt that the relative lack of such books, compared with the West, was more than evident, so the demand should be quite high. But it turned out the cost of producing good books, without skimping on expenses for design, proofreading and paper, was almost prohibitive, and the investment return rate would be so slow as to scare off any potential Russian investor."

Alexei Gordin, the executive director of Azbuka Publishers, a leading publisher of fiction, said gloomily: "Young people now read almost no books or fiction."

A spokesman for the Russian National Library said the rot had set in during the 1990s in the anarchic post-Soviet period when people needed light relief as opposed to harrowing psychological reads. He said: "In the 1990s the prestige of education and the general cultural level of the population decreased, which led to the gradual disappearance of books from people's everyday lives."

Dr Andrei Rogatchevski, a specialist in Russian literature at Glasgow University, said: "Russian publishing is in a mess right now. One of the reasons is that towards the end of the Communist era the government restricted the supply of paper - some said for political reasons, to stop other opinions being published.

"Whatever the reason, the effect was that the price of paper went up, and that means it costs a lot to get books printed and published. A typical print-run nowadays is about 10,000 copies, which is much smaller than it used to be. It is very difficult for some of the newer authors to even get into print."

But Rogatchevski insisted not all was bad in the world of Russian writing.

He said: "Not all of the so-called trash fiction and novels should be dismissed. Some of the authors do make an effort to reach back to the literary heritage and they are worth studying as literature.

"And there is a new range which rewrites some of the classics - such as Anna Karenina, Turgenev's Fathers And Children, and Dostoyevsky's The Idiot - and brings them up to date. They are very skilfully done and are good literature in their own right."

BRIDGET JONESKAYA

BRIDGET Jones's Diary has been transplanted to modern-day Moscow in the form of the Diary of Luisa Lozhkina, a 30-something Russian who dreams of finding the perfect man and whose life is a permanent battle against the horrors of cellulite and the temptation to have just one more glass of wine.

Lozhkina has the same obsessions as her London-based counterpart, but the Russian context sees her as the mother of a young son, and making her money on the edges of the law via the unauthorised renting out of expensive flats.

She and her friends agonise over the lack of decent men, diet, having the nicest mobile phone and their appearance - over far too many glasses of wine.

Written by Katya Metelitsa, the book was, just like its Western counterpart, serialised in the press. The chapters in the press were regarded as being so convincing that many readers believed it was about real people.

However, the Bridget "Joneskaya" books are criticised by some as being lowbrow and using a format borrowed from the West.

Lazy Guide to Net Culture

http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1963122005
Lazy Guide to Net Culture: iGod knows

STEWART KIRKPATRICK
skirkpatrick at scotsman dot com


If you want to appear like you're at the cutting edge of net culture but
can't be bothered to spend hours online, then never fear. Scotsman.com's
pathetic team of geeks, freaks and gimps will do the hard work for you.
While you sip wine, read a book or engage in normal social interaction, they
will burn out their retinas staring at badly designed web pages and dodge
creeps in chatrooms to prepare for you: Scotsman.com's lazy guide to net
culture.
The theological implications are staggering. I have discovered a website
where you can talk to God.
Or rather, I have discovered a website which claims it lets you talk to
God. Of course, most people who believe in God believe you can talk to
Him/Her without the aid of the web. The difference is that this site claims
he answers you. (Of course, most people who believe in God believe he
answers you but not in text, instantly, via a mocked up MP3 player screen.)
The service even has a natty name: iGod (see what they did there?).
Never one to shy away from spiritual discovery I set out to see whether or
not the Almighty really does communicate through the web. I typed in the
question: "What is the answer to life, the universe and everything?" This
was a trick on my part, if "God" was really a geek somewhere he/she would
have replied "42" (for those of you who don't understand why, may I refer
you to the works of Douglas Adams).
Instead "God" replied that the answer was in the Bible. A good start.
Then I decided to ask if Hibs would win their UEFA tussle with Dnipro
Dnopronouncablesk. He answered: "I think so." Given that it's 0-0 after the
first leg, He could be right.
I then remembered Albert Einstein's observation that God does not play dice.
(However, Einstein remained silent on the issue of the other games God might
play. Actually it might be difficult playing, say, Cluedo with Someone who
is omniscient.
Me: "Right that's the board set up. Do You want to start?"
God: "It was Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead pipe."
Me: "But you haven't rolled the dice yet."
God: "I don't play dice. Haven't you heard of Einstein?"
Me: "But you haven't got any clues yet."
God: "It was Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead pipe. I know. The
fatal blow struck at exactly the same time as the world's largest butterfly
emerged from its cocoon in Bolivia. At exactly the same time as a speck of
dust was crystallised in the magnetic field of Alpha Centauri. And at
exactly the same time as Bob from accounts suffered existential doubt after
reading your latest expense claim. I could detail for you every infinitely
brief event that happened at the moment that Colonel Mustard committed his
dreadful sin but it would take up your entire life and indeed all of
eternity so just trust me on this one, OK? And for the record, when we play
next, it will be Miss Scarlet in the Billiard Room with the revolver. This
will happen even though she has completely free will. Don't ask Me for an
explanation on how that works unless you've got a millennium or two to
spare. Which I know you don't.")
Anyway I asked "God" if he/she played dice and I received this answer: "I
like to play the Turing Game." Now this is "a participatory, collaborative
learning experience about issues of online identity". That rather suggests
that my iGod correspondent might not really be God but someone messing
around with online identity. I decided to investigate further.
I asked: "Why do we die?", He/She replied: "Just keep talking to me as long
as you can." That's a pretty lousy answer. I didn't expect the Ultimate
Truth to hedge His/Her bets.
I then asked how many fingers I was holding up? "One". WRONG! It was three.
"You're not God. Who are you?" I triumphantly replied. This was the cryptic
answer: "What was the question? I am a robot."
I felt this was a disappointing capitulation - even for a robot.
As for my very reasonable expenses claims at scotsman.com, when I submt them
they are often met with the phrases "Christ on a bike" and "Jumping Jesus on
a pogotstick".
Puzzled by these expressions, I turned to the web for explanation. The
internet being the internet, I was quickly able to find pictures of both
Christ on a bike (halfway down) and Jesus on a pogo stick
Pleasingly, I was able to find my favourite image of Jesus, which portrays
him not as a blond, blue-eyed distant figure but rather as a revolutionary,
in the style of Che Guevara. It communicates a lot more than my
shilly-shallying robot friend.

Not Cut Out for the Job

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050923/asp/opinion/story_5257876.asp
NOT CUT OUT FOR THE JOB
It is not at all unusual for an editor to tamper with a writer’s manuscript. Take some notable examples. Where would F. Scott Fitzgerald be without the scrupulous assistance of Max Perkins, or for that matter, the early Hemingway? A more recent case of highly significant editorial intervention happened with Bill Clinton’s autobiography, My Life, by Robert Gottlieb, formerly editor-in-chief of Alfred Knopf, who had turned Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 into a huge success.

What does editing mean in this day and age and why can’t we do it effectively here? In broad terms, editing means reshaping, revising and/or rewriting a manuscript, apart from fact-checking and making spellings, dates, foreign words and phrases and other nitty-gritty consistent throughout the manuscript. But this is too generalized a description of the things that need to be done before the manuscript is sent to press. If there is a rule-of-thumb formula, it is this: make it short and simple.

This is done by purging useless words and useless sentences. Thus editing today means not what you need to put in but what you can no longer take out. This isn’t easy; it requires years of experience, sensitivity to language, its nuances and its usage. Because we don’t have in-house editors to handle these delicate operations, editing here boils down to just fact-checking and making the manuscript consistent in all its details. It has often been suggested that manuscripts could be given out to outside experts but publishers are reluctant to do so because it costs time and money. Besides, past experience has not been entirely satisfactory. One reason could be that most free-lance editors have been desk editors in newspapers and magazines, work that is somewhat different from book-editing.

The big question often asked here is: if they can do it, why can’t we? There are two reasons. First, unlike in India, a good amount of academic talent in the West is still attracted to publishing simply because of its interest in books even though the job isn’t the most lucrative. But the intellectual stimulus both by way of easy accessibility to books at affordable prices and encounters with authors who make them, is fair compensation to many.

The first option for most here is the media, where opportunities and rewards are greater. Let’s face it: the new generation of the academically-qualified wants to move on, instead of getting stuck in straightening out other people’s writing; they rather strike out on their own after having learned ‘how to get published.’

But the biggest hurdle to editorial revisions come from the authors themselves. Take the memoirs of four celebrities — C.D. Deshmukh, P.V. Narasimha Rao, B.K. Nehru and Nirad C. Chaudhuri. All four could have been cut to half their size to make them twice as good. The editors tried to make minor cuts but there wasn’t a chance of their acceptance with clear instructions: ‘if there is a comma in the copy there will be a comma in the book.’ So, it was stet all the way through!

RAVI VYAS

The Good Writer's Life

http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5286586-110738,00.html


The uses of invention
The novelist and Nobel laureate VS Naipaul has said that fiction is dead, vanquished by our need for facts. But, argues Jay McInerney, imaginative storytelling has the power to reveal underlying truths in a turbulent world

Jay McInerney
Saturday September 17, 2005

Guardian

First, a disclaimer: the following is a work of non-fiction. As such, it is unlikely to be as vivid, or textured, or as faithful to the author's deepest convictions and emotions as his own fiction, as linguistically adventurous or as revealing about the way it feels to live now as the latest novels by Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith. I write novels. In fact, I just finished one, which is one reason I was alarmed to hear VS Naipaul declaring recently, in an interview with the New York Times, that the novel was dead. Which would make me, I guess, a necrophiliac. Naipaul essentially argues - stop me if you've heard this one before - that non-fiction is better suited than fiction to dealing with the big issues and capturing the way we live now. An accompanying essay, "Truth is Stronger than Fiction", expanded on the theme, and concluded with a lament: "It's safe to say that no novels have yet engaged with the post-September 11 era in any meaningful way." To which we might ask, just for starters, where is the movie, or the big non-fiction tome that has done so.
We've been hearing about the death of the novel ever since the day after Don Quixote was published. Twenty years ago, it was common knowledge in American publishing circles that the novel was over. Even as he complimented me on my first novel, which he had just purchased for publication, Jason Epstein, then vice-president of Random House, told me over a lavish lunch that the novel had probably outlived its audience and that people my own age didn't seem to be interested in literary fiction. He was trying to prepare me for the obscurity that was my probable fate.

When I was in college in the 1970s, it was Tom Wolfe who was banging on about the death of the novel, flogging something called the New Journalism and insisting that fiction couldn't reflect the accelerating grimace of contemporary reality. And in fact, for a while, the televised horrors of Vietnam, coupled with those of the riots in Memphis and Watts, the primal screaming of rock bands and anti-war protesters ... the visceral flux of the late 60s and early 70s made the argument feel almost plausible. Truman Capote abandoned fiction to explore motiveless murder in the heartland, inventing something called the non-fiction novel in the process; and Norman Mailer seemed to throw in the towel fiction-wise during this period. Armies of the Night, his bid for the nonfiction novel title, documented his own march on the Pentagon. New Journalists such as Wolfe and Gay Talese and Hunter S Thompson, by purloining certain novelistic techniques and artiste attitude, seemed for a while to be doing a better job of corralling the zeitgeist than Updike and Bellow. (Although I'd argue that the artistic landmark of that era, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is a novel by any other name.) The British novel was feeling more than a little moribund at the time, as Bill Buford complained in an essay in the first issue of Granta in 1979. Four years later, the "20 Best Young British Novelists Under Forty" issue gathered Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift - Team Lazarus - inside one cover.

The shameless Mr Wolfe belatedly concluded that the novel was a far more capacious and versatile and resilient form than he imagined it to be because long after he declared it dead he trashed his own case by writing Bonfire of the Vanities, a novel that managed to say far more about that era in America than any contemporary slab of non-fiction. Sherman McCoy became a representative figure and phrases like "Masters of the Universe" and "Social X rays" entered the collective vocabulary. Wolfe created a myth for the era - a narrative that shaped the way we viewed the period and seemed far more vivid and sexy than the thousands of essays and articles about "the 80s".

"If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative," Naipaul told editor Rachel Donadio in the New York Times Book Review. "And it's okay, but it's of no account. If you're a romantic writer, you write novels about men and women falling in love, etc, give a little narrative here and there. But again, it's of no account." Hereby we dispose of Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Great Expectations and the majority of novels in the canon. What is of account, he claims, are non-fictional explorations of "the Islamic question", the clash of belief and unbelief, of east and west. Readers of Naipaul's last couple of novels - a fairly exclusive club, I should imagine - probably won't be surprised to learn that he's grown tired of the genre; even Tolstoy came to distrust fiction at the end, but personally I trust Tolstoy the novelist rather than Tolstoy the cranky, sclerotic polemicist. The only reason we listen to Naipaul is because he wrote A House for Mr Biswas and A Bend in the River. If the novel doesn't matter any more then his opinion wouldn't seem to count for more than my doorman's opinion.

In her essay, Donadio cites a recent American interview with McEwan in which he discusses the impact of September 11 as evidence of the waning influence of fiction. "'For a while I did find it wearisome to confront invented characters,' McEwan said. 'I wanted to be told about the world. I wanted to be informed. I felt that we had gone through great changes and now was the time to just go back to school, as it were, and start to learn.'" The phrase "for a while" seems crucial here.

Almost everyone I know had the reaction that McEwan describes to the events of 9/11 (and those of July 7, I would imagine, have provoked similar emotions and responses). Most novelists I know went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. I certainly did. For a while the idea of "invented characters" and alternate realities seemed trivial and frivolous and suddenly, horribly outdated. For a while. I abandoned the novel I was working on and didn't even think about writing fiction for the next six months. In fact, I was so traumatised and my attention span was shot to such an extent that for months I was incapable of reading a novel, or anything much longer than a standard article in the New York Times, even though I was fortunate enough not to have lost any close friends in the attack.

I worked as a volunteer for a couple of months, feeding the national guardsmen and the rescue workers near Ground Zero, listening to the rumours and the strange paranoid lore of the place: tales of Arabs lurking with cameras, of implausible and horrific objects in the rubble. I worked the night shift, darkness seeming more appropriate to the sombre spirit of the enterprise, to the necropolis beyond the police barricades. When I was at home I obsessively watched the news coverage of the fallout of those events. A doctor friend wrote me a prescription for Cipro in case of an anthrax attack. I drank - even more than usual. Lying awake at night with the acrid electric-fire smell from Ground Zero in my nostrils, I contemplated a change in careers. Since I was working in a soup kitchen I thought about going to culinary school - feeding people would always be important. Watching the ironworkers and crane operators working in the rubble, watching my carpenter friend unscrew the base plate from a lamppost and hotwire a coffee maker, I realised that beyond being able to tie a good Windsor knot or fix a Martini I had no practical skills. Almost anything seemed more vital than being a novelist.

The novel I had sold to my publisher, Knopf, on the basis of a first chapter in the spring of 2000, started off with a terrorist bombing at the New York premiere party for a Hollywood movie. As I recall my plan, the bombing was a kind of set-piece which set the plot in motion; I had determined that the culprit would be revealed to be a Muslim fanatic who was deeply offended by western cultural imperialism and the decadence of American capitalism in general and Hollywood entertainment products in particular. The bomber was going to be, at best, a secondary character, an immigrant driven mad in part by the apathy and drossy splendour of a society which occupied the foreground - my usual suspects, as it were. Or something like that. If it all sounds a little creepy now, you will understand why I abandoned that particular novel although it seems to me I might have dropped the idea even before September 11 - like so many things about that time the details are blurry. Weirdly, I'd forgotten about this or suppressed it right up until the moment I embarked on this essay.

For a while, quite a while, fiction did seem inadequate to the moment. McEwan was speaking for all of us. But even in the immediate aftermath, it seems to me, it was novelists like McEwan and Updike and Amis who wrote most memorably about that day. And eventually, of course McEwan returned to fiction, as a writer and presumably as a reader. The New York Times essay cites his Saturday as "a possible exception" to the proposition that novelists have failed to engage the "post 9/11 era". "But, although it demonstrates a fine-tuned awareness of the range of human responses to terrorism and violence, the backdrop of the geopolitical situation remains just that, a backdrop." Or is it? For American readers, in particular, the home invasion at the end of the book might be seen as emblematic of the violation we felt in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

Anyone who read the American reviews of Saturday without actually bothering to read the novel might have formed the impression that the book was very much about 9/11, that the flaming airplane illuminating the pre-dawn sky at the beginning of the novel was a major plot element. The reason this aspect was highlighted and even exaggerated seems painfully obvious. The fact is that we are waiting for our major novelists to weigh in and make sense of the world for us after the events of September 11 2001 and July 7 2005. It is to the novel, ultimately, that we turn to confirm our own senses and emotions, to create narratives that reveal to us how we feel now and how we live now, to reveal emotional truths that approach the condition of music. We desperately want to have a novelist such as McEwan or DeLillo or Roth process the experience for us. It's starting to happen. And it will continue to happen, I feel certain, for years to come.

When I told Mailer that my new novel took place in the autumn of 2001 he shook his head sceptically. "Wait 10 years," he said. "It will take that long for you to make sense of it." But I couldn't wait that long. As a novelist who considers New York his proper subject, I didn't see how I could avoid confronting the most important and traumatic event in the history of the city, unless I wanted to write historical novels. I almost abandoned the book several times, and often wondered whether it wasn't foolish to create a fictional universe that encompassed the actual event - whether my invention wouldn't be overwhelmed and overshadowed by the actual catastrophe. At the very least, certain forms of irony and social satire in which I'd trafficked no longer seemed useful. I felt as if I was starting over and I wasn't sure I could. Even though I couldn't imagine how I was going to write about that day, I didn't see how I could possibly write about anything else. It shouldn't be surprising that the novelists are taking their time, and have just begun to weigh in on the events of September 11.

Perhaps the most eagerly awaited American novel of the year was Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, narrated by a precocious nine-year-old whose father was killed in the World Trade Center attacks. Foer's deeply impressive and rapturously received debut, Everything is Illuminated, was that relatively rare phenomenon that pops up just regularly enough to disprove the notion that fiction doesn't matter anymore - a literary novel that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and made the author into a major culture star. The culture still seems to require precocious first novelists - Benjamin Kunkel is this year's version on this side of the ocean. In America we tend to over-celebrate them, and then we tend to kill them, figuratively speaking, in part because we expect so much from them after their brilliant beginnings. (I've been there.) We want them to tell us what we need to know to live.

The critical response to Foer's second novel would almost certainly have been coloured by schadenfreude regardless of its merits; I couldn't help being glad that it was him rather than me getting smacked around by the reviewers even as I scrupulously avoided reading the book until my own was locked up in galleys. I think I can be fairly objective and say that if Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is not the novel that will define New York at that moment, it is more memorable and psychologically acute than most of the journalism generated by September 11. The young narrator, Oskar Schell, often sounds more like a mouthpiece than an actual child and inevitably becomes too cute not to hate. Maybe that's going too far, though Foer recently spoke of himself in an interview as "the most hated writer in America" (the rumour of his purchase of a $7 million townhouse in Brooklyn - who even knew you could spend that much in Brooklyn? - didn't win him any new friends among his putative peers) and you can understand his bewilderment: both of his books betray a sensibility that could only be called sweet; he tries so damn hard through the instrument of his young narrator to be adorable and lovable.

As with his previous book there is a parallel old world narrative - Oskar's grandparents are survivors of the firebombing of Dresden. But that tragedy and the attack on the World Trade Center don't really illuminate each other, and young Oskar's quest to discover the meaning of a key he finds concealed among his father's possessions feels random and pointless. But there are moments of linguistic brilliance and of powerful emotion for which we can only be grateful, as when Oskar describes how he printed out the frames of a video of bodies falling from the World Trade Center from a Portuguese website (because those images were pretty thoroughly suppressed and censored in the US) and examines them endlessly, hoping to definitively identify his father, who was on the roof of the building. "There's one body that could be him. It's dressed like he was and when I magnify it until the pixels are so big that it stops looking like a person, sometimes I can see glasses. Or I think I can. But I know I probably can't. It's just me wanting it to be him."

Nick McDonnell is yet another literary wunderkind who has dared to engage the subject of September 11 in his second novel, The Third Brother. McDonnell made his debut in 2002 with Twelve, a terse, minimal coming-of-age novel about privileged and jaded Manhattan youth. The Third Brother is at once more ambitious and less even, but the long middle section in which the protagonist makes his way from the upper reaches of Manhattan down to the tip of the island in search of his brother on September 11 is one of the best and most vivid evocations of that day in Manhattan that I've read. Two early reviews, both in the New York Times, have come close to calling McDonnell's use of 9/11 gratuitous, showing, if nothing else, just how charged this subject will continue to be in the States and especially in New York. Some of Foer's reviewers also raised the issue of exploitation, as if the question were not so much "can novelists do justice to this subject?" as "should they attempt it?". Novelist Frederic Beigbeder heard this when he published Windows on the World in France. "A lot of the French reviewers questioned whether this was appropriate and one said it was obscene," Beigbeder told me recently. The book alternates between a highly detailed and suspenseful minute-by-minute account of a father trapped with his two sons in the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, and discursive autobiographical chapters, in which the author meditates on many subjects, including the meaning of the attacks and his motives for writing about them - as if the author felt the need to justify himself and hedge his bets.

Charges of tastelessness have featured in some of the responses to the American publication of Chris Cleave's thriller Incendiary, which takes the form of an open letter to Osama bin Laden written by an East End London mother who loses her husband and son in a fictional terrorist attack on the Arsenal stadium. I found the book seriously addictive in the manner of a good disaster yarn, although ultimately the descriptions of London becoming a police state seemed kind of ludicrous, entertaining but counter-intuitive, the more so in light of the actual response to the events of 9/11 as well as the bombings of July 7.

Just in case I had any doubts about whether fiction was uniquely suited to conveying certain kinds of emotional truth and metaphoric equivalents for our recent trauma, Patrick McGrath has reassured me with "Ground Zero", a novella in a collection called Ghost Town, which is one of the most compelling and successful fictional treatments of 9/11 I have encountered. McGrath's story is narrated by a New York psychiatrist who was out of town when the planes struck and who is almost ghoulishly eager to stake a claim on the collective trauma of her fellow citizens upon her return. The story centres on her treatment of a patient who falls in love with a prostitute who lost a lover in the towers and is haunted by his ghost. The psychiatrist is gradually and retroactively driven mad by the events she failed to witness as she becomes increasingly obsessed with her patient's relationship to the prostitute. She is, at the beginning of the story, the kind of liberal humanist and moral relativist who believes that bad behaviour is the result of bad upbringing and unresolved childhood traumas but who gradually comes to believe in the existence of evil as a result of the attacks - even as her patient decides to seize life in the form of a troubled prostitute. McGrath told me he's working on another novel that deals with the events of September 11. "What we can do, what the novelist can do, is to talk about how people have internalised trauma."

A concluding anecdote: on Friday, September 15, 2001, I was walking in Central Park with a friend. Having just come from Ground Zero, I was amazed to find a baseball game in progress on the Great Lawn, Frisbees being thrown, and couples cuddling on blankets. Suddenly, I almost literally bumped into the novelist Jonathan Franzen, who was also walking with a friend. We greeted each other and talked briefly, each of us saying where we had been, how we had heard, what we had seen in the early hours of Tuesday. I can't remember whether I congratulated him on the publication of his novel, The Corrections, or whether I decided that it would be more tasteful not to mention it. I'd been invited to the book party, which was to have taken place that week. Later, after we'd said goodbye, I said to my friend: "Poor bastard. No one's going to be reading novels this year."

I'm pleased to be able to eat my words here. In the days and months after 9/11, even as CNN replayed the images of the towers falling and the newer images of bombs falling in Afghanistan, and the New York Times published the obituaries of the dead, Franzen's big serious panoramic novel entry in the great American novel sweepstakes somehow generated tremendous critical interest and found hundreds of thousands of readers. If he hasn't read it yet, I hereby commend it to the attention of Naipaul.

· The Good Life by Jay McInerney will be published by Bloomsbury next year

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

White Skin Black Mask

http://www.transitionmagazine.com/online/whiteskin.htm
Transition Online

WHITE SKIN, BLACK MASK

For those who came in late…



Kai Friese

Four hundred years ago a man washed up on a remote Bangalla beach, sole survivor of a pirate raid. Rescued by friendly pygmies, he swore on the skull of his father's killer "to devote my life to the destruction of piracy, cruelty and injustice.... My sons shall follow me." His sons, and their sons, did follow -- and were thought to be the same man . . . immortal. "The Ghost Who Walks," the "Man Who Cannot Die." Now the 21st Phantom, nemesis of evildoers everywhere . . . he fights alone.



Some thirty-five years ago, the Indian publishing firm of Bennett and Coleman introduced the Phantom comic books that would fill the misspent afternoons of my boyhood. The first four frames were usually given over to the terse phrases and fragments of the perennial recap that was soon consigned to memory as I raced wide-eyed through my purple-clad hero's latest adventures: thwarting gangsters, rescuing women, keeping the jungles of Africa safe.

It was a quieter, gentler time. I lived in a somnolent neighborhood of Delhi called Bengali Market (after its largest establishment, Bhimsen's Bengal Sweets). My father drove home at noon on weekdays for a lunchtime siesta. And my friends and I belonged to a cargo cult.

Those were the days of import substitution. The products of phoren that washed up on our shores were worshiped as much for their packaging as their contents, and we sniffed the suitcases of foreign-returned relatives like shipwrecked enologists. The material culture of middle-class Indians was built on a modest range of overseas products that had been marooned and indigenized as the government's import restrictions took hold. A car was an Amby -- the Ambassador, a 1950s Morris Oxford replicated by Hindustan Motors; a television was a black-and-white Telerad of East German design; a camera was an Agfa Isoly; a chocolate was a Cadbury's Dairy Milk. As for fizzy drinks, well, Coke was it (though even that would be banned in 1977, to be replaced by the state-sponsored Double Seven).

And a comic book was a Phantom.

Of course we hoarded, borrowed, or rented Superman, Batman, even Aquaman, when we could. But the Phantom was a more dependable hero, always there when you needed one -- and cheap, at one and a half rupees. There were none of the cruel advertisements for unobtainable goods -- Schwinn Bikes and Hostess Twinkies, Incredible Sea Monkeys and Amazing Inflatable Raquel Welch Dolls. The Phantom had matte covers and reassuringly crappy production values. He was a castaway on our side of the pond, a Third World kind of guy.

We were dimly aware, I suppose, that under the dark suit and mask there lurked a white man. And there was that mysterious Anglo credit -- "Lee Falk" -- atop each comic. But the author's signature was inconspicuous. We did not know him. What we did know was the Phantom's circumstance: darkest Africa, with its big game, its witch doctors and naked black tribes. We had seen these images in Hindi films: Helen the Anglo-Indian vamp dancing provocatively around a captive savage (blackfaced, chained, and caged) in the famous cabaret sequence from Intequam. At school, we learned to sing "Black Sambo." And in the sweet shops of Old Delhi you could buy habshi halwa, "nigger toffee" -- a dark confection of caramelized milk. All this was cargo, too, though we didn't know it then.

A final memory drifts in: the parents are away, so I can read a Phantom with my dinner. Our servant, Narain Singh, hovers by the table. He is a compact man, a Garkwali from the hills of the North. I've grown up on his tales of forests and man-eating leopards; of the time he was possessed by spirits and cured by a tantric; of how he ran away to the city and taught himself to read by deciphering billboards. Now he wants to know why I'm reading picture books, so I tell him about my hero in the jungles of Bangalla. I tell him that when I grow up I'm going to be like Phantom.

I was a child on the cusp of self-consciousness, and I knew immediately that I would always remember Narain's indulgent grin with a flush of embarrassment.


* * *
Only Connect
-- E. M. Forster

The sign says, "Be young, have fun, drink Pepsi." But I'm thirty-five and I don't own a purple suit. I'm none-too-gainfully employed as a journalist, while Narain Singh enjoys his alcoholic retirement. And India has been liberated, or at least economically liberalized. Bengali Market is now a sea of neon where Bhimsen competes with Baskin-Robbins. We have our MTV. We have Baywatch and its deflatable dolls. In short, the currents of cultural and commercial transmission have been charted.

Surfing the Internet one night, I am rewarded with this jetsam: "Phantom has many Web sites -- New Jungle Saying." Old jungle sayings were a hokey leitmotif of the comic: "Phantom rough with roughnecks -- Old Jungle Saying" or "Phantom quick like lightning -- Old Jungle Saying." The site has a list of them, and more Phantom links than I can count. So I go back in time to a site called Deepwoods, which presents a plotted history on purple wallpaper. And I'm in for a surprise. The Phantom began life in 1936 as an urban American playboy named Jimmy Wells who stalked criminals by night in a mask and costume -- a precursor of Bruce Wayne. But then something happened. As Lee Falk tells it: "In the middle of the first story I suddenly got the other idea. I moved the Phantom to the jungle and decided to keep him there."

"The other idea" probably cost the Phantom his place as an icon of the American Century. Before long, Superman (1938), Batman (1939), and other costumed crusaders stepped into his briefs as international policemen of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. But the Ghost Who Walks had chosen the well-trodden path of an older empire.

Falk traces the Phantom's origins to his own "great interest as a kid in hero stories, the myths and legends -- Greek, Roman, Scandinavian, the Songs of Roland, El Cid in Spain, King Arthur." And yet Falk himself was a college boy, a literature major at the University of Illinois who admired Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Although he would live to be the world's oldest active comic strip author, he had lifelong ambitions as a playwright; in the 1970s, he even tried his hand at Phantom novels. It's tempting to see a tragic flaw here. Perhaps a literary hubris diverted him from the big idea that would have tapped right into the American collective unconscious: the local hero with a double life. (On the other hand, Jerry Siegel sold the rights to Superman for a mere $300.)

Falk found his fortune in the outlying colonies. After modest success as a newspaper strip in America, Phantom was soon syndicated in Australia (1939) and New Zealand (1949). He made appearances in Italy (L'Uomo Mascherato, 1936), Spain (El Hombre Enmascarado, 1941), and Sweden (Fantomet, 1951), although he was never much of a success in England. In the 1940s the Illustrated Weekly, another Bennett and Coleman publication, began to publish the strip in India.

I must confess I felt a pang of resentment at the discovery that I had shared the Phantom with all these foreign kids. Until, that is, I found myself gaping at the monitor with a wild surmise. It was a Phantom recap from 1939.

For those who came in late:

Four hundred years ago, a man was washed up on a remote Bengal shore. He'd seen his father killed and his ship scuttled by Singh Pirates. He swore an oath on the skull of his father's murderer "to devote my life to the destruction of piracy, greed and cruelty . . . " He was the first Phantom, and the eldest male of each succeeding generation of his family carried on.... As the unbroken line continued through the centuries the Orient believed that it was always the same man!
"Bengal shore!" "Singh Pirates!" I could hardly believe my Oriental eyes. And there was more. In 1944, Phantom even fought the Imperial Japanese Army when they "invaded his jungle lair in Bengali."

Now it can be told: the Phantom came of age in the jungles of Darkest India.


* * *

Geographers in Afric-Maps
With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps.
-- Jonathan Swift

The jungle was stirring; the natives, as always, were restless. By the time the Illustrated Weekly began to print Phantom, the end of the Empire was at hand; the sun was setting in the East. And back at Phantom HQ, otherwise known as King Features Syndicate (a division of the Hearst Corporation), the editors made a number of changes to accommodate the sensibilities of their burgeoning Indian readership. Bengal had become first Bengali, and then Bangalla. To avoid any confusion with Hinduism's favorite hero, the Phantom's enemy Rama became Ramalu. The Pirate Singh Brotherhood, whose name was -- however inadvertently -- guaranteed to offend both the Rajput and Sikh communities, became the Singa Pirates. Until, finally, only one diminutive trace of our hero's original landfall remained: the Phantom's pygmy friends, the Bandar, whose tribal name Falk had lifted from the Jungle Book. They were still the Bandar log, the monkey people. After all, there are no pygmies in India.

But even as the Phantom was obliged to quit India, he had a long history in Africa. One of the earliest Phantom comics, "The Plant God of the Massau," had the Ghost Who Walks tangling with African witch doctors who tricked a credulous tribe into feeding a fake man-eating plant. Falk's conflation of India and Africa was fitting: until Vasco da Gama caught the monsoon current to Cochin in 1498, Europe had never been able to distinguish Africa from India Tertia. Even Marco Polo located Abyssinia in "Middle India." More important, perhaps, Falk was being true to the literary conventions of Western fiction in avoiding geographical specificity. As Edward Said notes in Culture and Imperialism, "The prototypical modern realistic novel is Robinson Crusoe, and certainly not accidentally is it about a European who creates a fiefdom for himself on a distant, non-European island." In the grand tradition of the Occidental imagination, Falk treated "the Dark Continent" as the ultimate blank space on which to inscribe the Phantom legend. As for history, he was following H. R. Trevor Roper, who as late as 1963 could assert that "there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness."

Carefully preserved in a catacomb within the Phantom's Skull Cave in Denkali -- wherever that is -- are several ancient leather-bound volumes. These are the Chronicles, set down by each of the twenty-one Phantoms in turn. Several extracts have been published as Phantom comics, and in one of them -- "Phantom and the Discovery of New World" -- we learn that the first Phantom's father, Kit Walker, was Columbus's cabin boy on the voyage to the so-called Indies. In fact, he preceded the conquistadors to the American mainland, which he explored with his native guide, Caribo. Between Kit's American landfall and Falk's farewell to the Bengal shore, it's clear that the Phantom's space-time is coterminous with European colonialism. It's no accident that Falk's imaginary geography recapitulates the disorientations of colonial discovery and loss.

Falk was only nineteen when he began to publish, hardly a man of the world. In fact he was something of a cabin boy himself -- he tells how he invented a story to impress his agent's publicity department:

I wrote that I was a world traveler, that I had met with the magicians of the East and had been initiated into all their mysteries etc. -- in reality I'd just been in Missouri and Illinois. . . But when I came to New York . . . I began to know foreign correspondents . . . and they soon read about Lee Falk, world traveler, in King's publicity releases. They began to tell me about that little restaurant in Venice, or that great bistro in Paris, expecting me to regale them with stories of my own favorite hangouts abroad. Naturally I had to bluff my way through these sessions, so I began to travel in order to catch up with my own autobiography!

Falk says he was ultimately able to make good on his youthful bluster: he traveled extensively in Europe, China, Japan, India, and South America. But Africa remained terra incognita.

At least the compliment was mutual -- the Phantom never found a significant African readership. Yet even without the prodding of African readers, the 1970s witnessed a number of refinements in Falk's treatment of the Phantom's home. "On the Jungle's edge -- great changes," begins one story. "Ancient waterhole becomes country-club pool -- mud huts become shining cities." Decolonization was catching up with the Deepwoods once more. Soon Bangalla was a republic (capital: Mawitaan) and the Phantom was a personal friend of its president, Dr. Lamanda Luaga. There were new clichés, of course -- most notably the brutal General Bababu's perennial attempts to stage a military coup -- but Falk was clearly feeling the heat of political correctness. "My only politics is up with democracy and down with dictatorships," he said in one interview. "Down with human rights violations. Down with torture."

Eventually, Phantom was surrounded by a circle of fleshed-out African friends who replaced the namelessly numberless tribesmen over whom he had once presided. Apart from his long-standing sidekick Guran, the Bandar chief, there was now Old Man Mozz -- half Uncle Tom, half griot; the Angela Davis-esque teacher Miss Tagama; and a Colonel Worubu, who took over as head of Bangalla's "Jungle Patrol" from the waspish Colonel Weeks.

Whether Lee Falk found this new Africa liberating or constraining, he found many pretexts for adventures in different geographic locations. It turned out the Phantom had ancestral property in Europe (a ruined medieval castle) and in America (an isolated mesa), not to mention a globe-trotting girlfriend named Diana who worked for the United Nations. Falk also developed numerous stories around the faintly Asiatic despots of the Misty Mountains "beyond" Bangalla. And through the Chronicles, he was able to take the Phantom's twenty-one avatars to a mind-boggling range of historic places. My favorite is Phantom III, who played Juliet at the Globe Theatre and married Shakespeare's niece. In a 1990 comic, Phantom V even hazarded a return to his old Indian tropics to tackle the Thuggee cult.

A survey of the Chronicles also reveals a new dimension to Falk's adventurism. Yes! the Phantom has more than a touch of the tar brush. Phantom IV marries the Arab Princess Pura; the ninth takes a Mongol bride, Princess Vhatta; the eleventh, a Maharaja's daughter; and the thirteenth, the daughter of an Indian chief. So our twenty-first Phantom is not quite white as a ghost. But I can't do fractions. You tell me: is he Amerindian or Eurasian? Zambo or zombie? Quadroon or quintessence? Gook or spook?


* * *

And what, for that matter, are we, Phantom's true descendants, the ghost readers? Mimic men? "Indian in blood and color, but not in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect"? The specter of Thomas Macaulay did cross my mind as I bought a cinema ticket and settled down to watch the latest attraction at Delhi's Anupam cineplex. It was, of course, The Phantom, starring Billy Zane in the title role, with Kristy Swanson (the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as Diana. Halfway through the film I thought I heard a shudder of recognition rustle through the audience. Billy the caveman was trying to impress Buffy. "I was born right here in the cave and educated in America," he said. Perhaps I shuddered a bit myself. But it was more of a reflex. I remembered Narain Singh's grin.

As the movie progressed I realized that Phantom had relocated once more. The only black men in the story were American. The natives of Bangalla were now distinctly Oriental, and in a brief cartographic frame the Phantom's lair was shown to be somewhere off the coast of Phuket. Like Apocalypse Now, The Phantom was shot on location in the Philippines, the cinematic Indochina Tertia. Hollywood has its own persistent vision of the jungle's dark heart: "Saigon. Shit! I'm still in Saigon."

Roger Ebert gave The Phantom three-and-a-half stars. "One of the best-looking movies in any genre I have ever seen . . . smashingly entertaining . . . It's in love with a period when there were islands not on any map." Well, call me Ishmael if he's not muffing his Melville. The line he's thinking of describes Queequeg's home, "Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are." And I think Moby-Dick was a work of fiction. The Phantom is a terrible movie; it forgets that Falk was in love with colonial fiction, not colonies.

The mimic men are alive and well, and they live to the west and north. They live in the unending flow of travel writing, filmmaking, and reporting that dishes up the Empire, revisited at leisure. The perennial recaps: recapitulating what? "Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by your gear, alone on a tropical beach…" -- it's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, but it might be Club Méditerranée.

Falk was a better mimic -- old Jungle Saying. His genius was to encapsulate so much of the colonial canon in a comic strip. Phantom starts out as Robinson Crusoe, but he's also Kim and Mowgli. He's Leo, the immortal he of H. Rider Haggard's She. He's Tarzan of the Bandar, and the embodiment of Kipling's If. Hell, he's Bronislaw Malinowski. Falk himself once said that Phantom was "Tarzan with a college degree."

Finally (though it may take a college degree to see this), the Phantom was also Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz. Kit Walker has his Skull Cave; Kurtz has a hut surrounded with skulls. Kit has his oath "to destroy piracy, greed and cruelty"; Kurtz has his own -- "Exterminate all the brutes!" They are, of course, mirror images: one just and balanced, thc other insanely cruel, but both reflections of the feral white man with a mission civilizatrix.

Mission accomplished or not, it may be time for the Phantom to move on. Never mind cruelty and greed, he's having a tough time dealing with piracy. In my youth there was a brand of sugar cigarettes that we would clench with milktoothed insouciance. They were unauthorized "Phantom Cigarettes," and the pack was adorned with his likeness. But Phantom had many lawyers; one fine day the face on the cigarette pack suddenly acquired a Van-dyke and shades. That was then. These days even Phantom's local publishers tout a Sanskritized alternative, Mahabali Shaka: "dweller of the Kosima Wilds, the invincible man who is adored like a god by the primitives." Time was, Phantom, Inc., would have taken on such privateering. Today they are instead contemplating a strategic retreat from the jungle. A new series from Marvel Comics entitled Phantom 2040 follows the adventures of a twenty-first century Phantom, returned to an American " Metropia."

In an essay recalling Conrad's book, James Clifford writes a passage that might be a valediction for Phantom:

Worn by thumbing and cut loose from its covers -- which may symbolize the context of its original publication -- the written text must resist decay as it travels through space and time. After sixty years -- a human lifetime -- the moment of disintegration has come. The author's creation faces oblivion, but a reader stitches the pages lovingly back together. Then the book is abandoned to its death somewhere on a strange continent, its nautical content run aground in the absence of context -- and once more a reader to the rescue.

One of these days some Comp. Lit. type, probably a bright young castaway born right here in India and educated in America, will come to the Phantom's rescue -- only to write a dissertation. I can see it now: "Phantoms, Pygmies, and Other Mythical Beasts." Or "White Skin, Black Mask." Or, more likely, "Purple Prose: The Jungle Chronotope from Heart of Darkness to the Phantom."

But I have enjoyed too many Phantoms to take him seriously. I know that superheroes are inescapably ironic. And I prefer Lee Falk's whimsical self-invention as a "world traveler" to the ponderous self-fabulations of a nomadic Clifford or an "exilic" Said. In any case, Falk is already beyond reproach. On the morning of March 13, 1999, the old man gave up the ghost. I think he deserves a decent burial, not a postmodern postmortem. The Ghost Who Walks? He'll find a ghost who writes. But Mistah Falk -- he dead.

Lost for Words

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspx?story_id=2111975
Dictionary skirmishes
Eric Korn
14 September 2005


LOST FOR WORDS
The hidden history of The Oxford English Dictionary
Lynda Mugglestone

273pp. | Yale University Press. £19.95 (US $30). | 0 300 10699 8








Luck does not always come to the undeserving. Lynda Mugglestone, editor of the Oxford History of the English Language and author of the invitingly subtitled Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the untrodden forest (2002), speaks of “a chance finding” of a set of vigorously corrected proof sheets from the first fascicle of the first edition of the OED, to be precise “Abandon– Anglosaxon”. (Quite a few of the sections have similarly hortatory or sententious titles.) But they were chance-found by a rare intelligence which was not daunted by the unordered mass of fossil lexicography that further digging yielded (in the Bodleian’s Murray Papers and the Oxford University Press’s dictionary archive). This massive unwiped palimpsest of correction and counter-correction, these raw data, in many diverse hands, not all easily legible, lay just beneath the surface alluvium for more than a century, but to Professor Mugglestone they unlocked a whole archaeological horizon; fifty years of struggle, of changing priorities, of continual frontier wars, as the Dictionary went endlessly over budget, hugely oversize, and half a century behind schedule. Rude reality, or as rude as it gets in Oxford, came to affect the straightforward methodology with which James Murray had begun the project: to include rather than exclude, to produce a complete inventory of the language. Mugglestone’s account of the dictionary wars, or rather the endless skirmishes that never became anything as definite as a war, in Lost for Words, is enlightening, and hugely entertaining.

She deals extensively with scientific terminology, with neologisms and nonce-words, with foreign words incompletely nativized, and especially with the principles, conscious and unconscious, by which Murray and his contributors and critics selected, as selection became more and more an economic necessity. One pleasing critical insight in particular informs Lynda Mugglestone’s work. Lexicographers define their terms, as all good disputants should. All their terms. The progress of the battle of real word versus nonce-word, native versus naturalized or exotic, is thus regularly and refreshingly illuminated by tracking the definitions of these very words as they appear in the Dictionary. More important even than the meaning attributed to the words native and naturalized (as opposed to foreign), nonce-word, and so on, was the intended purpose of the dictionary, which was endlessly discussed. Samuel Johnson had started with the purpose of stabilizing the language at what he considered its peak of elegance and correctness, and ending the natural processes of change. By the end of his work, this ambition was chastened; though whimsical omissions continue throughout the alphabet, the task of recording historical change had its effect on him. The century after Johnson was one of the great ages of natural
history: natural philosophers turned from philosophy, scientists, not yet called scientists, learned the virtues of observation unfreighted with theory. The London Philological Society, based in University College London, understood that the study of language “on historical principles” meant that words used by any section (or almost any section) of the community had a place in the grand index, or inventory of words. This was clear to Franz Passow in 1819, when he declared that “every word should be made to tell its own story”; to Richard Chevenix Trench, lecturing to a largely like-minded audience at the Philological Society on the deficiencies of dictionaries in 1857; and to James Murray, teaching in a school in Mill Hill twenty years later, but it was far from clear to the non-philological public. When the launch of the Dictionary came to public notice, they communicated with Murray as though he were a call centre for sociolinguistic complaints. The public, or at least the clerisy, rushed to denounce their favourite hate words, confident that Murray’s job was to keep out lexicographical riff-raff: low-bred, incorrectly formed, commercial, or un-English vocabulary. They wrote with the sublime confidence of the deeply ignorant. Of course actual usage was important, the more advanced complainers granted, but only usage, naturally, by writers of correct English. The Dictionary would be the equivalent of an Academy, said many, curbing unwarranted changes. (This was Johnson’s fancy also, before reality taught him better: change was bad, and so it must and could be stopped.) Murray’s breezy tolerance must have shocked his correspondents. Whisky or whiskey, asked one. “When in a hurry you may save a fraction of time by writing whisky, and when lingering over it you may prolong it to whiskey . . . in matters of taste there is liberty of the subject.” “No wise person would wish to impose his or her taste on others”, he remarked urbanely, gracefully ignoring the fact that this was what all his acolytes wanted to do. “I am not the editor of the English language”, he remarked, for once goaded out of urbanity. For Henry Alford, author of A Plea for the Queen’s English, editing the English language was precisely his intention. Sheep and goats were driven hither and yon; usage gave no authority. “Different to” was very common of late but was to be avoided. And evince was, for some reason, “one of the most odious words in all this catalogue of vulgarities”. Mugglestone has also taken account of Mrs Oliver Bunce’s anonymous and oft reprinted Don’t: A manual of Mistakes and Improprieties More or Less prevalent in conduct or speech (1883). An early member of the Philological Society, which was supposedly committed to objectivity, thought that their task was that of the sharp-eyed gamekeeper “who nails up rows of dead vermin on a barn door”. The pesky corpses included some collateral damage: innocent passer-by words that excited the trigger-happy Bunce included solidarity, egoism, acerbity, donate and banalities. R. Heald, who wrote (as “Anglophil”) The Queen’s (?) English Up to Date: An exposition of the prevailing grammatical errors of the day, had a fine lack of concern for convenience: twins was a collective noun like tongs and tweezers, and the use of the false singular “twin” was a solecism. This would leave a geminated person at some disadvantage in describing his situation (“I have an identical brother who is a member of the same pair of twins as I am”). The venom of the prescriptivists, the strident Canutism of their desire to see language as a temple instead of a torrent, is still astonishing. Men of the calibre of W. W. Skeat and Benjamin Jowett, masters of languages that were stationary, because dead, sought to treat English as though it were equally fixed: a sort of Neo-Anglo-Saxon.

The production of the Dictionary was begun by James Murray for the Clarendon Press in 1879 with a prospective completion in ten years and in four volumes. It was finished in 1928, three editors later, in ten volumes, forty years late. The operation had some of the qualities of a majestic slo-mo calamity, like some cursed civil engineering project where the geology turns out not to be stable, the main span is so many thousand metres, not feet, and the new partners want it to serve a different city entirely. The Delegates of the Press, in a sort of leisurely panic, began to pressure the lexicographers. Are all those obscure, foreign, or obsolete words really part of the English Language? Does every nonce-word, poetic invention, or trade name really form part of the fabric of English? Murray, whose original stance was that the Dictionary should be a complete inventory of the language’s word-hoard, found himself asking the weaselling, practical questions the officers of the Press required: does this refugee earn asylum in our volumes? More tersely, as in the margin of an entry for “loosening-bar” (“a stiff iron bar used . . . to loosen”): “Worth the space?”.

The notion that a place had to be earned must have caused Murray considerable anguish at first, but he hardened his resolve. In a particularly entertaining chapter, “Lost Words”, Lynda Mugglestone illustrates the various kinds of losing distinguished in the Dictionary’s large entry, the various losses, from the inevitable loss of completeness to the entirely accidental loss of bondmaid, for which Murray apologized in a sackcloth-and-ashes reply to a puzzled reader, to the deliberate loss of an embarrassing object or person, as demanded by movie directors and gangsters, and as applied with equal unceremoniousness by Murray to words considered too indecent to appear in a respectable household volume. She quotes with relish an absurd letter from a surgeon about condom: “a contrivance used by fornicators, to save themselves from a well-deserved clap”: he thought it “too utterly obscene” for inclusion; “clap” in the relevant sense is described, inaccurately, as “obsolete in polite use”. Murray was obliged to compromise, but for the taboo words the research was done, the literary citations were chosen and edited and then hidden away along with the obscene tetragrammata, for a more liberal future. “The loss of cunt occurred”, Murray remarked, “after wide consultation and much discussion.” A slow-developing sense of urgency further meant that a late addition to a page proof, if accepted, must be justified by the removal of another word to make room, and nonce-words often suffered: when glossomachicall (verbally quarrelsome) was approved, glossocracy had to go. There was less discussion over the loss of glouglou, grogging, governmentless and grigginess, the last of these defined as “pertaining to a small eel” which seems potentially useful, if only as a term of abuse. Lunching, limeade and landscaping were all pruned. The boundary between acceptable and dispensable trembled like a geological fault. Corruption, moral corruption crept in: the status of the utterer became important. Accentedest was listed for removal on the grounds that the source was the novelist Rhoda Broughton, known to be a hasty writer. But Murray remembered that censuring and censoring were alike against the spirit of his historical lexicography, and in this case at least, he stood firm. Accentedest survived, as did many less cogent locutions that had a correct author to back them, like Emerson’s fringent and Coleridge’s literata.

The years of the making of the Dictionary were also the years of the most frenzied neologizing by scientists: the number of good botanical and zoological genera certainly reaches six figures, and the number of organic compounds named according to the rules is, though technically finite, very large indeed. The luckiest lexicographer would not pick the right research horse every time. Radium, named in 1899, was passed over in 1904 (perhaps as just a flash in the pan) and had to wait for the 1933 Supplement. (Even a modest dictionary today would be expected to include all the chemical elements – except perhaps masurium, which turned out not to exist, and praseodymium, deservedly obscure.) Radioactivity, by the luck of the alphabet, and X-rays (1896 in English) were accepted, and managed to catch their appropriate volumes.

This salutary, scholarly and entertaining book will not make future dictionaries free of cultural or social discrimination, but may make us all more aware of our prejudices. When someone asks if you are mobled, smile and point to the telephone in your pocket: it was only Polonius (not named for the element polonium) who called the word vile. And if Lynda Mugglestone finds herself some day an entry in the online OED (“a rock devoid of necromantic power”), let her accept that immortality.

Democratic Lessons

DEEPENING DEMOCRACY
Challenges of Governance and Globalization in India
by Madhu Purnima kishwar, Oxford University Press, 2005

Extract from a Review in Far Eastern Economic Review:
Melana Zyla Vickers, Far Eastern Economic Review, July August 2005

A reader looking for India answers that go beyond tinkering with government and the familiar “private-public partnership” argument would be better off picking up Deepening Democracy by Madhu Kishwar...What makes Ms. Kishwar’s book so readable is her powerful writing and her fantastic, grassroots reporting…Whether Ms. Kishwar is talking about [the dominance of] English or about cycle rickshaws, she succeeds in poking such holes in the status quo that her propositions for change cannot be ignored. Her proposals would be good medicine not only for India but for economies across Asia and the globe.


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'One does not have to agree with Madhu Kishwar to that she is one of India's most independent-minded scholars, unrestrained by political and academic Her distinctive take on the Indian around a spirited rejection of the Statism that informs the opposition to globalization among most political formations in India, and a defiant plea to decentralize Indian politics to take advantage of the possibilities that globalization opens up for advantage of the possibilities that globalization opens up for Indain’s poor.
Ashis Nandy
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi

A Note on the Book

As India prepares to enter an era that promises more wealth, equity, and prosperity to its citizens, this volume brings together essays by noted scholar-activist Madhu Purnima Kishwar on enduring issues such as rights, governance, and the impact of globalization on the average Indian citizen.


The volume covers a range of issues from a glimpse of the License-Permit-Raid Raj as it affects the livelihood of the self-employed poor, to a critique of India's farm and economic policies. It further discusses the new divides being created by the country's language policy to the causes and possible remedies for ethnic conflicts in India.

A common thread running through all essays is how most of India's contemporary problems arise out of malgovernance, the choice of inappropriate policies, and a lack of accountability in government that adversely affects the people of India, depresses their incomes and makes it difficult for ordinary hard working citizens to earn a simple livelihood without payoffs and suffering numerous humiliations. Kishwar argues that the poor need economic freedom far more urgently than the rich and builds a case for a bottom-up agenda of economic reforms.

Challenging the critics of globalization, the volume demonstrates how, if India participates actively and intelligently in the WTO, this will open far-reaching opportunities for the farm sector as well as its industries.


While acknowledging that the current trade regime is biased in favour of powerful industrialized nations, Kishwar points to entrenched assumptions and positions taken by those she calls the Anti-Globalization Brigade who claim that liberalization and globalization are intrinsically anti-Third World and anti-poor. Written in a lucid and engaging style, this book will draw a wide readership among scholars across disciplines, in addition to activists, journalists, policy makers, bureaucrats, and the lay reader.

Madhu Purnima Kishwar is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi as well as founder-editor of Manushi. Her books include Religion at the Service of Nationalism and Other Essays (OOP, 1998), Off the Beaten Track Essays on Gender Justice for Indian Women (OUP, 2001), Gandhi and Women (Manushi Prakashan, 1985).

Price Rs. 595 ( hardcover) For your copy of the book or for the subscription of Manushi, write to us at: Email: info@manushi-india.org or manushi@csdsdelhi.org
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