Changing language

It's funny about the show business. The way one drifts into it and sticks, I mean.

P.G. Wodehouse, A Damsel in Distress

P.G. Wodehouse

Reading P.G. Wodehouse's 1919 novel A Damsel in Distress recently I noticed two things: how the story itself does not seem dated yet how some of the language Wodehouse uses does seem dated.

It has been more than a century since the novel was published, and culture and technology have changed quite a bit in that time. Some of this is noticeable in this novel, but not much, simply because Wodehouse rarely lets technology or culture creep into his fiction. The story could have been published a hundred years ago or it could be a novel published last week. It just doesn't feel old. Wodehouse always seemed to create his own timeless, unchanging world in his stories. Once you step into that world, it doesn't matter what year it is.

Meanwhile I was struck by changes in language usage. Did you catch the phrase "the show business" in the quotation above? Today we would say simply "show business," yet in1919 Wodehouse wrote "the show business." He does this twice on the same page.

Meanwhile, on the same page we find business man, not businessman.

Some words have hyphens that have since disappeared: to-day and wall-paper, for example.

Some of the language differences that seem odd to American readers may simply be because the novel was originally published in England, and British usage and spellings are often different from what Americans are used to even now. Consider that in this novel Wodehouse uses despatch and irruption, rather than dispatch and eruption. 

To read Shakespeare or, even to a greater extreme, Chaucer is to realize instantly that language, like culture and technology, changes radically with time. Yet that is apparent even when reading P.G. Wodehouse.

Missing punctuation

Cormac McCarthy

Novelist Cormac McCarthy once explained to Oprah Winfrey why he doesn't use quotation marks in his books. "If you write properly, you shouldn't have to punctuate. ... I believe in periods and capitals and the occasional comma, and that's it."

So why do I find this statement so annoying? Partly it's the phrase "if you write properly," which sounds like a slam against the 99 percent of the world's writers who do use punctuation. We could make a long list of great writers who have used quotation marks — not to mention dashes and question marks, both of which I have already used in this blog post.

I would agree that exclamation points are usually unnecessary, but most punctuation serves the valuable purpose of making it clear to readers what the writer is trying to say. So if it helps both the writer and the reader, how can it be a bad idea? And who is Cormac McCarthy to define what proper writing is?

McCarthy is hardly the only writer to omit quotation marks. In the short story collection We Live in Water that I reviewed here a few days ago, Jess Walter sometimes uses them in his stories, but usually not. Often he uses a dash to start a quotation. The end of the paragraph signals the end. Sometimes quotes are in italics. In the story "Anything Helps," he uses nothing at all, giving us passages like this (italics mine):

I know that, he says.

Next time I'll call the police.

He begins backing away. Won't be a next time.

You said that last spring.

Backing away: I know. I'm sorry.

You can figure out where the quotation marks belong, what's speech and what's description. But why should you have to figure it out? Punctuation would have made it easier for everyone. Cormac McCarthy might call that proper writing. I call it a gimmick.

More annoying than missing punctuation, and also illustrated by those lines from Jess Walter, is the failure of so many writers to make it clear who's saying what. After the initial "he says," readers must keep track in their minds whose turn it is to speak. After three paragraphs or so, that becomes more difficult to do. One more "he says" or "she says" in a conversation would made everything clearer, with or without quotation marks.

Classic Wodehouse

A Damsel in Distress (1919) contains all the elements so common in P.G. Wodehouse novels: a doddering lord of the manor, a domineering aunt, thwarted young lovers, domestic help quick to manipulate the lives of their employers and two of the author's favorite passions, golf and musical comedy. Yet somehow Wodehouse mixes all these familiar ingredients into a highly original and always entertaining novel. one of his best.

Maud remains passionate about an American man she met in Wales the year before, but Caroline, her aunt,  demands she marry her son, Reggie, who is actually in love with Miss Faraday, the secretary who is helping Maud's father, Lord Marshmorton, with the family history. Lord Marshmorton, however, cares only about his roses.

Meanwhile George Bevan, a successful composer of Broadway musicals (one of which is playing in London) instantly falls in love with Maud when he comes to her aid on a London street. He tracks her back to her family estate, where she is being held a virtual prisoner. Her family mistakes George for the American from Wales, while Maud views him as a nice guy who might act as messenger between her and the man she loves. The confusion results in many chapters of sparkling comedy and finally a conclusion that is as romantic as anything Wodehouse ever wrote.

And yes, as usual, Wodehouse writes sentences that make you want to read them again and again, then go back later and read them again. Here's just one example: "Between ourselves, laddie, and meaning no disrespect to the dear soul, when the mater is moved and begins to talk, she uses up most of the language." Fortunately she left enough for Wodehouse to work his magic.

Round and round

Charles Todd's 2014 Bess Crawford novel An Unwilling Accomplice has an intriguing beginning and an equally intriguing ending, even if the long midsection of the book gets a bit tedious.

The Great War is winding down in 1918 when Bess, a nurse stationed near the front in France, is assigned to accompany a wounded soldier who is being presented a medal by the king at Buckingham Palace. That night Sergeant Wilkins asks Bess to give him some time alone with friends, then slips away in the night. Not only does he become a deserter, but Scotland Yard soon suspects him of murder.

Bess finds herself an unwilling accomplice to these crimes. To restore her good name, she sets out to try to track down Wilkins herself. She is accompanied most of the way by Simon Brandon, an officer attached to her father and a regular in this series of novels. He gets more to do than usual this time, allowing the relationship between the pair to develop a bit, but any reader hoping for romance to develop will be disappointed yet again.

The hunt for Wilkins becomes tedious because Bess and Simon seem to go around in circles, then back and forth a lot. There's a wounded man called the Major who may or may not be Wilkins. Then there's a couple of women who may or may not be hiding a wounded soldier in their home. Lacking official standing in the case — although as an officer in wartime it would seem Simon should have more clout than he displays — the pair stumble around a lot trying to discover what's really going on, instead of simply asking direct questions. It's also hard to understand how, with the war still going on in France, both Bess and Simon have so much free time to track down a killer in England.

The ending rewards the patient reader, however, making this, if not one of the best Bess Crawford mysteries, at least a worthy addition.

Dorothy and Jack

Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis were made for each other, not as lovers but as friends. Gina Dalfonzo explores this friendship in Dorothy and Jack (2020).

They had much in common. Both were educated at Oxford. Both were prominent British writers in the middle of the 20th century, known both for their scholarly works and their popular works. Both were significant Christian apologists. Both could argue their positions with a brutal combination of wit, intellectual acuteness and dogged determination. Both had secrets. She had an illegitimate son raised by someone else. He lived for much of his life with a cranky older woman, the mother of an army buddy, and her daughter.

Their friendship was relatively brief — from the time she sent him a fan letter in 1942 until her death in 1957 — and they met in person only a handful of times, Dorothy and Jack found in each other someone with whom they could communicate as equals and someone who always understood what they were saying. They didn't always agree, and Dalfonzo offers examples, but they didn't seem to take the other's criticism too seriously. Argument was something each was good at and enjoyed. Dalfonzo tells us that unlike so many correspondents, Dorothy and Jack liked to cover serious subjects early in their letters, then turn to lighter, more personal matters.

The author views their relationship as a model for friendships between men and women. There is no suggestion that the two were ever attracted to each other in a romantic or sexual way. The friendship with Sayers, however, may have made Lewis more open to Joy Davidman, whom he later married. She was a similar kind of woman: outspoken, witty and his intellectual equal.

Each of the two friends influenced the other's writing, as Dalfonzo shows us. And each greatly appreciated the other's writing. That is except for Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Lewis made it no secret that he did not like mysteries, not even hers.

Perfectly oblivious

My father loved Bowery Boys movies, and so do I. I try to catch them on TCM whenever I can, and most recently watched Loose in London (1953). As a kid I loved the character Sach (Huntz Hall), the funniest member of the gang, but as an adult I have come to better appreciate Slip Mahoney (Leo Gorcey), the pint-sized leader who, in trying to prove he's smarter than everyone else, misuses language in delightful ways.

In Loose in London, Satch learns he may be heir to an English fortune, and the Boys (Gorcey was born in 1917, so you can see how much of a boy he was by 1953) travel to London to discover what he may inherit. 

There are no laugh tracks in movies to tell you what's supposed to be funny, thank goodness, so some of Slip's slips can slip past you before you can catch them, but here are a few that I caught:

"Gullible's Travels"

"no time for sediment"

"It's perfectly oblivious what happened."

"oxygenarian"

"British Umpire"

"one of England's most famous earmarks"

"halls of ivory"

"filament of your imagination"

All this was just for laughs, of course, but many of us have used words we don't fully understand in order to make a good impression. And then it backfires on us, just as it does with Slip Mahoney.

In 1979 Peter Bowler published a book ostensibly (should I look that up?) designed to aid people who want to sound smart without looking stupid. It's called The Superior Person's Book of Words and has been reprinted several times. Here we find choice words such as temulency (drunkenness), sciolism (superficial knowledge), formicate (to swarm) and tremellose (shaking like jelly).

Some words, formicate for instance, might be fun to use because others may think they mean something else. (Try telling someone, "Students are formicating in the hall," and see what happens.) Turdiform actually means shaped like a thrush. Stupefying may sound like a compliment, but it actually means "inducing stupor." Lucifugous may suggest Lucifer, but it means "avoiding daylight."

The wisest of us will, in most cases, use words we know our audience will understand, because both speech and writing are all about communication, not confusion. The worst case is to use words our audience understands but we don't.

Maybe I should have looked up ostensibly? I should have said supposedly.

Soft centers

Jess Walter writes tough stories with soft centers. In We Live in Water, his 2013 collection of stories (written before Beautiful Ruins gave him prominence in the literary world), he chooses characters, mostly men, who have lived hard lives and made lots of mistakes. If their lives are a mess, it's mostly their own fault.

Oren Dressens, in the title story, takes his little boy to a showdown with a hood whom he has both stolen from and cuckolded. Years later the son returns to the scene to try to discover what happened to his father.

In Helpless Little Things, a grifter uses innocent-looking homeless young people to beg for money for Greenpeace, which then goes into his own pocket.

Walter explores a nightmarish future in Don't Eat Cat. In The New Frontier, one of the best stories in the collection, two men go to Las Vegas to rescue the stepsister of one of them from a life of prostitution. The smarter one narrates the story, which turns out to be as hilarious as it is poignant.

Another excellent tale, Thief, tells of a father who knows one of his three kids is stealing coins from the family's vacation fund, kept in a big jar. But which one? He sets a trap to try to discover the answer.

Anything Helps is the story of a panhandler with the least likely reason for begging you can imagine.

Some of the 13 stories in the book don't hit the mark, but most of them do.

Another form of self-expression

People forget you can also express yourself by what you choose to admire and support. I've had so much pleasure from beautiful and challenging things created by other people, things I could never make or do.

Mary Anne Schwalbe, quoted in The End of Your Life Book Club

The above lines, spoken by Mary Anne Schwalbe near the end of her life, should be an inspiration to many. We tend to equate self-expression with creativity, but she reminds us that one can express oneself just by going to a museum to admire art. One need not have to actually create art. Nor does one have to write a book or do an interpretive dance or build a rock garden or play the piano or make one's own clothes. To admire such things done by other people says something about you as well. You are the kind of person who notices such things and enjoys such things. These things created by others can be an expression of your own taste, your own sense of beauty.

Her inclusion of the word support adds another dimension to her comment. The people and causes we support also says something about us. This is what I believe in, it says. This is what I value. This is where my heart is.

Some people can afford to contribute large sums of money, which is a way to get noticed. These are the people most likely to get buildings named after them and get their names in newspapers. Contribute ten bucks to the American Cancer Society and who's going to notice?

That's probably why we don't usually consider admiration and support as forms of self-expression. If nobody notices, what does it do for our self-esteem? And self-esteem is often what we think of when we think of self-expression. We want to express ourselves, but we also want other people to notice, then admire and support us.

Yet perhaps the noblest kind of self-expression is the kind that keeps the self in the background. It expresses something about us even if nobody notices.

Live first, then write

Live a large and active life. Meet different kinds of people. Put yourself in unfamiliar situations. Expose yourself to diverse experiences that challenge you. All of this will make your writing more interesting.

Thrity Umrigar

Thrity Umrigar

The above advice for would-be writers, found at the end of the paperback edition of Thrity Umrigar's novel The Space Between Us, is something you don't find in most books for writers, yet it strikes me as very wise and sensible. Writers need something to write about, preferably something original and creative, and that can be hard to find when sitting all day behind a desk or writing table. One needs to experience the world before trying to write about it.

Many writers tend to be introverts who are perfectly content spending their days alone writing or, for a break, reading. Yet novelists need to actually listen to the voices of real people talking before they invent dialogue. They need to see places and things before describing them. Not everyone talks like newscasters, announcers and actors on television. Not everyone says the same things or believes the same things. Fiction, even science fiction or fantasy, needs to be based to some extent on reality.

Those who write nonfiction need even more to experience the real world. One of the more valid criticisms of national media is that reporters and commentators tend to interview only those people who think the same way they do, ignoring anyone with a different point of view. Their writing suffers as a result.

Beginning writers usually can't make a living from their writing, which can actually be an advantage. It forces them to work at another job, which usually means getting out and encountering other people. Full-time writers can afford to sit and write all day, but the best of them don't do that. They write for perhaps half a day, usually mornings, then spend the rest of their days living a more normal life. Those who write on historical topics may be able to afford to spend their days in an enclosed space, but most writers benefit from getting out with other people.

Elizabeth George, the mystery writer, lives in the United States but sets her fiction in England. She has said she likes to begin a writing project by going to England, seeing different locales (locating a good spot to discover a body, for example) and listening to people talk. Only then does she discover her story. Other writers invent the story first, then do the research. Either way it seems important to get out from behind that keyboard and experience life.

Don't read this

I sometimes think Mom had a secret plan to encourage us to read beyond our level. She would announce that certain books were a little old for us. Nothing made us read them faster.

Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club

Is there a greater motivator in the world than reverse psychology?

Mary Anne Schwalbe

Tell someone to do something or to not do something, and they will feel compelled to do just the opposite. Vax mandates may be an example of this. There would have been no truck convoy in Canada if Covid vaccination had only been a strong recommendation.

Book bans and movie boycotts almost always backfire. Everyone, including those who otherwise would have had no interest in them, wants to read the scandalous book and watch the forbidden movie if someone tells them they shouldn't. What's all the excitement about? If the censors can read this or see this, why can't I? My wife was probably in her thirties or forties when her father suggested she should avoid reading a certain Nelson Demille novel because of its strong content. Of course, she had to read it immediately. Otherwise she almost certainly would have never opened the book.

Years ago I reviewed some books about male problems and psychology and I announced at the very beginning that this column was for men only. Then in the last paragraph I addressed my female readers, saying that I knew they would stick with me to the end. Later women laughed when they told me they had read the whole thing. I probably had more readers than usual that day simply by trying to eliminate half of them.

Perhaps teachers should give their students not one summer reading list but two. "Here is a list of books I want you to read over the summer," they might say. "Here is another list of books you should avoid if you see them. You are just not mature enough for them yet." Guess which books the kids would be most likely to read. And like Will Schwalbe and his siblings, they would actually read some challenging books.

Writing in the shower

Write in the shower. Get away from what I call "the tyranny of the blank screen."

Thrity Umrigar

Thrity Umrigar

It's rare to find advice for writers at the end of a novel. An interview with the author, yes. Discussion questions, yes. The author's biography, certainly. But advice for would-be writers? Not likely. Yet that's what Thrity Umrigar generously gives us at the end of the paperback edition of The Space Between Us. What's more, it's excellent advice.

Of course, giving advice to would-be writers is something the India-born writer does every workday at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where she has taught writing for a number of years. Here she offers 15 suggestions that those who imagine themselves to be writers might find useful. I won't go through them all now, but I will comment on the one above because it is one of my favorites. I do some of my best writing in the shower. Or while shaving, driving, cooking dinner or washing the dishes after dinner.

This is similar to my own advice for locating something that's lost: Stop looking for it. By putting it out of my mind, I will often find the missing item simply by going about my daily life. Or it will suddenly occur to me where it is likely to be hiding. This happened to me just yesterday. For days I had been looking for some papers I need for my taxes. Last evening while preparing to go to bed and not thinking about those papers at all, it suddenly occurred to me where I had left them.

So it goes with writing. A blank screen or a blank space after your last sentence can be intimidating. The harder we try to find the next sentence, the harder it becomes to think of anything useful. We seem to have nothing at all to say. So we need to do something else, something that requires little mental effort, like taking a shower or washing dishes. Charles Dickens used to take long walks through London at night.

Ideas can come while thinking about something else or while not thinking at all.  Sometimes I imagine myself telling someone else about what I'm writing or trying to write. So often I will find myself going off in a direction that hadn't occurred to me before. Some of my own best ideas come to me, unbidden, at such times.

The only trouble is, it is hard to write down these ideas, before we forget them, while taking a shower, driving a car or taking a long walk after dark.

Space exploration

However close we may feel we are to another person, there will always be space between us, sometimes seemingly space enough for stars and planets to move. And so we have the theme of Thrity Umrigar's magnificent 2007 novel The Space Between Us.

Umrigar, who grew up in a middle-class home in Bombay where servants did most of the housework, returns to such a home in her story. Bhima, modeled after a woman who worked for the author's parents, is a 65-year-old servant who has worked for Sera Dubash for many years. At one time Bhima had middle-class aspirations of her own, but her husband was maimed in an industrial accident, turned to drink and then abandoned her, taking their son with him. Now she lives in a slum with her granddaughter, whom she has raised since the death of her daughter from AIDS.

Bhima still hopes for a better life for Mina, the granddaughter, who attends college thanks to Sera's generosity. When the girl becomes pregnant, unwilling to reveal who the father is, Sera offers to arrange for an abortion before the pregnancy shows and brings shame on Mina and Bhima.

All this helps illustrate how close Sera and Bhima have grown over the years and how much they depend upon each other. Yet because of class and religious differences, a vast space still separates them. Bhima, for example, may not sit on Sera's fine furniture or drink out of any of her cups. However close they may be in some ways, it always remains clear they can never be equals. Sera's kindness to Mina, which might help narrow that gap, leads instead to a crisis with the opposite effect.

Umrigar, now an Ohioan, writes with grace and power, qualities she bestows on Bhima, as memorable a character as you will find.