My Wrestle With English

by HUGO JOHANSON

1

COMPAHATIVELY few persons write for publication in a language adopted after they have reached maturity. The dread of “ pen vaulting” from one language to another is particularly noticeable in members of the intelligentsia. An illuminating as well as an amusing example came to light in the November Atlantic Monthly, where Dr. Einstein’s discourse on the atomic bomb appeared under the rubric: “As told to Raymond Swing.” Seemingly the physicist in question had amassed during his twelve years here sufficient English and courage to converse with a ghost just in from the airwaves, but not enough self-confidence to approach us mortals in writing.

Since Dr. Einstein is well along in years and a shy, busy man to boot, his hesitancy to leap is understandable. On the other hand, the tardiness of transplanted professional authors is baffling. For instance, how many of the American literary expatriates who invaded France in the early twenties, remaining there in many instances until the late war sent them packing, have written bread-and-butter belles-lettres that didn’t have to be translated by the hostess?

It may be countered that they went there for a change of mental climate, not for a change of language. This is plausible: no one goes abroad because he is weary of expressing himself in English; but, is it possible to be one with the mental climate of the land of one’s choice without taking its form — that is, its language to one’s bosom?

I should say, no. Having had my say, I must confess that it isn’t based upon actual intimacy with emigre authors or uprooted intellectuals, but upon lone tribulations as a poor relation to them both. The kinship cannot be denied for I, too, came to the United State’s when well along in my unformative years, and during the following dozen of them I wrote nothing more profound in English than filling out an occasional laundry list. But, unlike my betters, I didn’t write anything in my native language either; in fact, I wasn’t an author at all. I was part of a social stratum where the closeness of the bunks and the bitterness of the gripings regulated the density of the neighborhood and the outlook.

Books kept me down. It is unlikely that anybody, unless he be a publisher’s reader, could have read so much and yet remained so unimproved as I was. Social workers blamed my good reading for my poor circumstances. As early as 1911, in Europe, a diakonissa from a seafarers’ rescue ark who came upon me in a lodging house as plain as sin, where I used to hole up between voyages and read myself full, endeavored to elevate me from my pallet of st raw and paper-backed fancy to her bulwarks of pine and faith. At my assurance that I was ready to turn over a new leaf, she threw in the tract and fled.

But long before that I lived on frontispiece for breakfast and finis for supper. At five, I was declared decadent and sent to school a year ahead of time for reading Boccaccio’s Decameron unexpurgated; at six. I sat at the back of the class and en joyed Strindberg on the sly; at seven, I played truant so that I might take up German and French in the switchyards by copying and translating the lettering on the Güterwagen and voitures de luxe which came over from the Continent on the Trelleborg-Sassnitz train ferries; au outcast at fourteen, I was sent to sea with a psalmbok so spick-and-span that it fetched me a bedraggled Also Sprach Zarathustra in trade.

In between the poisonous rarae ares, I devoured the pistoled and tomahawked fry that boys everywhere feed on; at times of dearth, I dimmed my facial expression from depraved eagerness to angelic nothingness and gained admittance to the waxed center tables of restricted parlors, upon which were arranged volumes of defeat and comeback, courtship and bliss, soil and sacrifice, doubt and piety, dialect and waggishness, authored by Scandinavian soul mates to Howells, Stockton, Egglestone, Garland, Mitchell, and Dunne.

Soon I could make out that, by and large, the republic’s divorcees were gay, the bachelors confirmed, the matrons comely, the men self-made, the pies home-made, the lies fabricated, the students gifted, the gamblers notorious, the chefs famous, the authors and lecturers noted, the recluses wealthy, the white trash poor, the travelers intrepid, the diplomats distinguished, the hold-up men desperate, the lawyers astute, the politicians slick, the statesmen august, the businessmen successful, the octogenarians spry, the cows contented, the masses seething, the physicians prominent, the singers captivating, the prospectors grizzled, the rumors ugly, the confessions true, the stories short, the tales tall, the hopes high, the fronts false, and the bootleggers alleged.

2

SINCE I was not a sought-after person, spoken English came unhurriedly my way, and then trnrn bypassed men with retarded diction and wandering minds, grateful for any kind of audience. Some words I understood the very first time I heard them, the speaker unwittingly helping me no end by habitually taking his time forming them. Slow curtain raisers, like “Well, let’s see now . . . ,” “Come to think of it . . . ,” and “As I was saying to myself only the other day . . . ,” quieted my fears of getting mired in the wordplay to come; the frequent betwecn-acts of “er” and “ah” provided me with welcome opportunities to review the dialogue so far; the ever recurring “says he,’ “says she, says I, never left me in doubt whose cue.it was; and the closing scene s grand finale, “Get me?” was not altogether an elegance of speech — it was also a homely reminder that, should I have missed something, a repetition of the entire performance would be gladly given.

Words beyond my ken, I left where they fell, to bob up again on some other stage where the ingenuity of the setting would give them away. As soon as I had a word down pat, I used it to think in. The upshot was a cogitative lingo, an unavoidable mess which cleared itself up in a couple of years, and a great short-cut no matter how tangled. I still think with an accent, though, inoffensive on the surface, yet strong enough to bar me forever from being included among the pure of thought.

After six weeks of odd jobs and catch-as-catch-can English, it was a revelation to hear a recruiting sergeant use words to the effect that in the U.S. Army earning and learning were synonymous. The era was that of Back to Normalcy I; the war hysteria was dying down; the taboo against enlisted men in eating places with white tablecloths was being reborn. During the next three years I returned and stayed out simultaneously.

At Fort Hamilton, New York, the day I enlisted, I went for the dry dust of the post library before I approached the wet hash in the mess hall. Not that the library was built alongside the beaten path: confirming Edmund Pearson s The agile bookworm eats, conceal’d from sight . . . it was housed on a shelf in a corner of the chaplain’s lecture hall, made doubly still and murky by the sign CONFIDENTIAL TALKS.

The aura of the locale had crept into the books. The Dean’s English, by G. Washington Moon, I got the hang of in less than a fortnight — pretty smart clip considering it was the first book I read in English and the last by Mr. Moon. Ian Mackren’s Reside the Ronnie Brier Bush was somewhat of a conundrum. lule the author furnished translations in the text for “ boast,” “ howking,” “grue,” “crusie,” “birse,” “speir,” “carritches,” “deived,’ “thole,

“prees,” “ettercap,’ “buke" — all dead give-aways to one weaned on Norse like myself he left gemkeeper” and “arglebargle” to be taken for granted, an omission which in its turn left me with the justified impression that the jewelers in Scotland were forever vomiting. Ringing Ballads I could read almost as fast as I could stomp to the rhythm of Rose Hartwick Thorpe’s metrical feet; and I was at the Attic summit of the Ponlcapog Papers (one hundred words high and capped with the fish dish oi Ireland — Cork soles) when I was shipped out to the Philippines, which, as far as I was concerned, meant the excellent bibliotheca of Fort Santiago, Manila.

Stimulated by it I came down with a bad touch of ambition and applied for admittance to the Army s English language school, conducted (or the purposi of making clean-cut Americans out of shapeless foreigners. The school board turned me down. “ Let’s wait till you get worse. Right now, you ettn be understood in a pinch,” it said with a Mississippian inflection. The evaluation brought me to my senses and gave me something to look forward to.

When out of bait, belittlers of the United States fall back upon the country’s lack of bookstores. My findings indicate a surplus of places vending reading matter, especially establishments in the your pick for a penny” price range. Down on my heels, I concluded hundreds of literary deals, the most extensive involving thirty-five cents in kind or one hour s work polishing ladies’ second-hand handbags at a St. Vincent de Paul’s salvage shop, in consideration for as many Yale Records and London Mercuries as I could tote away in a china barrel, the latter thrown in as lagniappe.

During the beggarly thirties the affinity between religious wood yards and profane bookmen was close. A morning’s forced exercise, on an empty stomach, of splitting eucalyptus wood promoted a longing for less knotty things — say, a back-pocket edition of romance or a bland novel, its plot drawn not from the seamy side of life, to prop up against the bowl of Spanish tripe one’s ultimate goal consisted of. The ordeal over, the Paymaster General peeled off four bit’s worth of coupons, good on the premises, and the spree was on. The canny went to the rummage counter to pick and choose from reconditioned drawers, odd socks, and baled fedoras; the shiftless — the multitude — streamed to t he NOTIONS, a department given mainly to “Read Books & the War Cry and partly to ocarinas, steadied hassocks, outof-plumb picture frames, and so on. Later, in the line outside the cook shack, more heads were buried in Beatrice Harraden’s Ships That Pass in the Night (a work as promptly dropped by one school of readers as pounced upon by another) than there were limbs in newly acquired finery.

It mustn’t be surmised, however, that the clotheshorses were non-readers. Some of them read abundantly (newspapers), some read fairly well (periodicals), none could be induced to pay for the privilege. Out-of-doors living-room readers by inclination, and scavengers and pilferers by necessity, their ready perception and swift movements enabled them to ferret out food for the mind from trash cans and park benches, unguarded newsstands and coat pockets.

The competition was brutal, well-nigh killing on the feet. “He reads the most who travels the fastest,”an elderly wanderer, benched by lumbago, told me as together we watched, in Union Square, San Francisco, a limber colleague making off with a gigantic Fortune, which by rights of proximity and the law of Newton should have fallen to us. I tried to console him by pointing out that in the Public Library we could catch up with what had just eluded us: there, the manners were democratic, in some instances elegant. “Democratic, maybe — elegant, hell!” he exploded. He had been through the whole confounded network, from cellar to attic, he said, and he hadn’t found a single spitbox located where a soul could get at it. “They keep the Nation chained in a binder,” he added, nailing down his analysis.

I often made use of the San Francisco Public Library, and, no matter if just off a Feather River Route freight, always dressed in my best — moccasin-type loungers, half-soled with likely pieces of discarded All-Knob-Super-Grip-Power-Traction auto tires; pin-stripe overalls with hickory shirt and polkadot leather bow tie to match; iron-weaved bandanna touching up the breast pocket with a flash of color; straightened-out hat in hand behind my back. Today, I can remember no cuspidors, misplaced or otherwise, only the endless kindness and thoughtfulness with which the members of the startled staff treated me. Classifying me as one of the many in quest of a roof to nap underneath, their efforts to keep me from careening in my seat were moving.

Usually I went there to reread The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” It was a strangely fitting place for a bookish onetime foremastman to appreciate Conrad in, the timid taps of the female crew dispatched in my direction by the observant lady mate, bringing out the relentless impact of a prose equal to the South Atlantic seas it dealt with. I delighted in one of the little wakers. As ten o’clock at night and closing time grew near, she used to peer into my cupped hands and whisper, ever so zephyr-like, “Good morning, Mister.”

3

IN the summer of 1936, I turned to writing. Much boded well for such a venture: I had come into a cubicle of my own and been trusted with an overage typewriter. What drawbacks I could put my fingers on at the time were easily overcome. As the kitchen table was the base for my colony of zebra finches, I drafted the bed for a desk. In lieu of my chair, which I had lent to a wedding reception across the hall, where it had collapsed in the ensuing brawl, I sat down on the fireless cooker and conceived ten thousand words more or less, as rapidly as I could peck. I basted the many pages cleverly into the shape of a child’s copybook and mailed it to a monthly of parts.

A few days later, I received a telegram — the editor was “considering.” The guarded message ended, “Can you mail documents showing where you have been?” Poorly documented, I sent him, together with other grim and grimy strictures, a letter of credit made out in my favor by the Registry for Homeless Men and “good for two meals a day at the Community Kitchen.” That made him bite for good.

My narrative was published in due time. It didn’t come up to my expectations. I didn’t mind that it had been cut down to about five thousand words (I had been so informed), but it seemed queer that the handsomest words were among those deleted, and furthermore, many of the words left in had been denuded and wronged until not quite themselves. Not possessing a dictionary or knowing a person who went in for such things, I set out for the Public Library to gather data for a scholarly protest. I entered it, head high as behooved a literatus; I slunk out via the back stairway.

An hour’s wrestling with the Oxford New English Dictionary had taken the yeast out of me. I had had too many vocables in my cask. One word leading to another, I had brewed still more on the spur of the moment until, unable to bung them up, I had let them brim over. My grammar was selfish: taken in here and let out there, it suited nobody but myself; and my spelling was on a par with the average college sophomore’s. I remembered that the publication hadn’t sent me and author’s proof to correct. Up to its neck in the billowy foam of my draught, it must have been deadly afraid of any backwash.

Reduced to small beer, I fell afoul of an assorted set of misgivings. In most respects, I suppose, they were of the kind transplanted professional authors would be beset with. Did bilingualism conduce to Tower of Babel prose? I fretted. Would the sands of time run out faster than a perfect command of English could come in? The latter was a tormenting question to a man who took no stock in the inanity that the flood tide of life begins when hair and agility ebb.

And how about the qualities of the English language? Of course, I didn’t have to ask myself whether English was a melodious idiom or not. Americans winced when Englishmen spoke, Englishmen shuddered as violently when Americans sounded off, and foreigners reacted to the verbal disturbances of the peace by either dialectic division by fining them heavily in the form of upped prices. The phonetic values of it simply didn’t matter to me — I didn’t intend to lecture, nobody could tell me anything, and I didn’t pluck an Aeolian harp myself. But, how much was gospel in the Continental belief that English carried weight only when snarled, “Hands up!” or abbreviated into “C.O.D.”?

As for my breast-fed tongue, did I owe any allegiance to it? Might it not be my true medium? As a boy I had been good at invective. When mellowed by a fresh lipful of snuff my teacher used to say that he saw in me the makings of a pamphleteer.

I didn’t answer the questions — the call of the fireless cooker quenched my reasoning powers for the time being. Later, being able to afford a more philosophical seat (a broken-in Morris chair, equipped with an adjustable headrest), I granted my language debts to the old country a perpetual moratorium and relegated the Tower of Babel curse to where it rightly belonged — the ill-humored Old Testament. The sands of time I invited to peter out as they pleased, the struggle for a perfect command of English I relaxed because a successful ending of it would have left me with, to borrow from Nietzsche, “the melanancholia of everything completed!”

The mere ability to write English with a modicum of confidence and effortlessness is today the limit of my ambitions. I have any number of unlikely words in my cosmos (obsolete, rare, dialectical, poetical, Biblical, and foreign), but I am short of the words which one born and bred to the language would use instinctively. Rooting them out exhausts me. On Sundays I mix concrete for relaxation and pin money.

The qualities of a language seldom tally when the native and the denizen compare notes. The findings of both parties are motivated by entirely selfish reasons, among which the commonest and loudest is that of incommodity. In other words, when some particular quality incommodes us, we put it down as a defect of the language. I spend hours, sometimes days, looking for words which English is getting along without.

Any degree of consanguinity is sketchily expressed in English. It has no popular word for the intimate circle a child’s brothers and sisters compose (Swedish syskon). While “siblings” does connote “one’s brothers and sisters,” it is unknown to most Americans; in my Webster it is tucked away in the doghouse (lower section). Should I wish to stress that the grandmother about whom I may be writing is my mother’s mother and not my father’s, I must either write “my maternal grandmother” or, still worse, “my grandmother on my mother’s side.” Either expression strikes me as lumbersome when compared with my childhood’s mormor for mother’s mother, and farmor for father’s mother. And I do feel frustrated not being permitted to use far morsfarfarsmorbror for my paternal grandmother’s paternal grandfather’s mother’s brother.

The English-speaking uncle is another befogged personality. Unless broken down and labeled piecemeal (“my father’s sister’s husband” or “my father’s brother,” and so forth), he is, Uncle Remus excepted, mighty colorless. Whenever I hear a “niece” mentioned, I hope wildly that she is that romantic creature — an illegitimate daughter of an ecclesiastic (O.E.D.). So far, she has always turned out to be lawfully begotten, though by whom is anybody’s guess: possibly by the speaker’s brother-in-law. Nephews are no better off, affinitatively speaking; and aunts may be dear to us and, then again, not. (Shaks.) In either case, they remain aunts.

4

As a rule I muff the issue when attempting to suffix the feminine noun. In my ignorance I once drew upon “traitress,” a word of long standing, for precedent when terming a female deserter “desertress.” I was hooted down. Perhaps by now the chair-borne wordmongers have activated desertress, but only a few months ago the more literate press wrote up WAC’s on the loose as “women deserters.” Other stillborn words of mine are: reporteress, calumniatress, commentatress. Yet, according to Webster, alive are: fabricatress, literatrice, authoress, poetess, poctastress. To add to the hurrah’s nest in my head, I find that an archdeaconess is the wife of an archdeacon, while a deaconess is strictly in the religious line.

Presumably a recognized author may -ess and -ette to his heart’s content. Danker lights of my own candle power may well follow the prevalent trend of making two words do for one. Excess baggage most often handled are “woman doctor” instead of “doctoress,” and “woman schoolteacher” instead of “teacheress.” Somehow it pleases me that the teachcresses, especially those wedded to the betterment of English, haven’t a one-word appellation for their calling, distinctive enough to set them apart from their male co-workers. It strengthens my belief in the peasant saying that the more one teaches, the less one can be taught. Certainly those who haven’t much wisdom to ladle out—janitresscs, butcherettes, drum majorettes, and Southern California pastorettes — take readily to having their nounal forms appended.

I have harmed English in my day, but my gravest sin against it I committed on the black occasion I used “dean and deaness” for “Dean of Men and Dean of Women ” in a chance event of mine. On the back of the subsequent rejection slip was penciled: “English too clipped! By ‘dean & deaness,’do you by any chance mean university people or are you alluding to some elderly fellow and his wife? Call again when caught up with the current language. The Ed.” I called by return mail, letting on that, together with a bevy of dictionaries, I was dead serious about “dean & deaness” being respective heads of certain collegiate bodies or chapters. Too righteous to tussle and too smart to waste postage on me, the editor didn’t answer.

When used as link pins, “of" and “in” come hard to me. Usually I forget to shove them in, and when confused or nettled I pull them out ruthlessly. No matter how I manipulate them, I wreck the English train of thought. To me, Board of Trade looks right as Trade Board, and Chamber of Commerce as Commerce Chamber. I was overly democratic the time I had down some queenly ladies in waiting as “call ladies.” and I bent over backwards the day I asked a meat market attendant if he had feet of pig.

My perverse tendency to foreshorten is inborn. It stems from my initial tongue, which is telescopic in the inward direction only. The classic example is of course privatdambadrum. (ladies’ private bathroom). Picked at random are a few less okristliga (unchristian-like) words: parlemorknappsken (motherof-pearl button sheen); dödsdägelvingben (wing bone of an angel of death); and sjuhundrasjuttiosjutusensjuhundrasjuttiosju (seven hundred and seventyseven thousand, seven hundred and seventy-seven).

To have on tungspetsen (the tip of the tongue) one word for several and to suspect hyphens of being minus signs are troublesome inhibit ions when trying to cope with a spendthrift language. It is obvious that I cannot ever expect to make head or tail of the solid-word form, the two-word form, and the use of the hyphen in English, when those “in the know” — dictionaries, philologists, editors, authors, teachers, printers know too many possibilities and nary a rule. According to one dictionary, biliary calculus is “gallstone,” while its next cousin, nephrite, is “kidney stone.” A second “authority” prides itself by reversing the word form; a third prescribes hyphens; a fourth compromises; none relieves my acute quandary. And is it “Sunday school” (Mark Twain), or “Sunday-school” (the New Century), or “Sundayschool” (myself)? I am bound to be wrong, but so is someone else.

Supposedly, a hyphen bridges words; as I see it, it divorces two words which are hankering to unite and propagate a sleek issue, enriched with the combined traits of the parents. Where a hyphen ought to fuse and shape, it invariably retards and mincemeats. The hemming and hawing and pausing characteristic of people speaking English is not necessarily a sign of profound thinking or even, as their detractors put it, labored thinking: it is the reflex action of average souls about to hurdle a hyphen.

The native users of English are incommoded by its spelling. The prevalence of spelling bees (never grammar bees or euphony bees or composition bees) indicates what they think they have to guard against. I didn’t hear of spelling bees until I came to the United States, and then I thought they were substitute honey bees. In the old country the children either spelled faultlessly as a matter of fact or else they sat down painfully as a matter of course. I still flinch hindmost when I recollect the yearly sermon of my school’s traveling inspector, a bishop of hellish mien and prophetic delivery. It ran: “Correct spelling is a chore, correct speech is a skilled trade, correct composition is a profession. Act, advance, arrive, or take the consequences! The Allfather’s eyes are upon you, and Herr Svenson is still in his prime. Selah.”

I learned to spell my native language twice, before and after a spelling reform. Perhaps that’s why spelling has been the least deterring factor in my English language life. Pitted against the other languages I have tackled, English spelling is simplicity itself. Not cluttered up by the letters ü, ä, ä, ö, and practically undefiled by accents, it strikes me as handsome and clean.

Now and then I have been waylaid by reformers with phonetic spelling as their instrument of orthographic salvation. Drawing upon my own experience, I opine that phonetic spelling does not benefit a foreigner past the age of thirty, taking up English, primarily because he must master phonetic notation and spoken English before he tries his hand at conventional spelling. Phonetic notat ion is an extremely delicate art. If used as the base for phonetic spelling, it must be learned so nicely that the learner’s pronunciation of English does not differ in the slightest degree from the “standard” pronunciation, an almost impossible undertaking, first, because a person of mature age cannot learn to pronounce a foreign language faultlessly, and second, because there is no standard pronunciation of the English language. It goes without saying t hat phonetic spelling founded upon phonetic notation taught by a Manxman would seem highly erratic to a Bronxman, and vice versa.

English spelling may be eccentric, but its eccentricities are much more uniformly accepted and recorded than some other aspects of the language; it may appear antiquated to the hustling and bustling breed which perforce must use polish on patina, but to me it manages to present a lively language in a dignified and monumental manner.

My years in this country have netted me what I have sought a nearness with the English language. The best I can say of it is that it is one of my late loves. In common with whatever else I love, it is unfettered by constitutional amendments, royal decrees, ecclesiastical bulls, monied pressure groups, esthetic cliques, and moronic avalanches.