The Adventure of English

by Melvyn Bragg

Buh Wolf and Buh Rabbit, dem bin nabur. De dry drout come. Ebry ting stew up. Water scace. Buh Wolf dig one spring fuh git water. Buh Rabbit, him too lazy an too schemy fuh wuk fuh isself. Eh pen pon lib off tarruh people. Ebry day, wen Buh Wolf yent du watch um, eh slip to Buh Wolf spring, an eh fill him calabash long water an cah um to eh house fuh cook long and fuh drink. Buh Wolf see Buh Rabbit track, but eh couldn’t ketch um duh tief de water.

  One day eh meet Buh Rabbit in de big road, an ax um how eh mek out fuh water. Buh Rabbit say him no casion fuh hunt water: him lib off de jew on de grass. Buh Wolf quire: “Enty you blan tek water outer my spring?” Buh Rabbit say: “Me yent.” Buh Wolf say: “You yis, enty me see you track?” Buh Rabbit mek answer: “Yent me gwine to you spring. Mus be some udder rabbit. Me nebber been nigh you spring. Me dunno way you spring day.” Buh Wolf no question um no more; but eh know say eh bin Buh Rabbit fuh true, an eh fix plan fuh ketch um.

  It is worth an uncomfortable aside just to reiterate some of the odds against this classic of literature. The lash, the bondage, the total ownership and the quickly but deeply ingrained corruption that black was inferior, that the Negro, from nigrum in Latin for black, and nigger, from Latin via nègre in French for black, was not in the light of civilisation. Even Byron, that fine fighter for liberty, wrote: “the rest of the world — niggers and what not.” Another great literary man, Daniel Defoe, a century before had put Robinson Crusoe on an island. When Man Friday, the native, turned up, the first word he was taught by the white owner of the island was “Master.” And though Wordsworth in 1805 lauded Toussaint L’Ouverture, and though Wilberforce pushed through his reforms two years later, there is no little proof that the prejudice marches on. To answer that with wit, and later to answer that with words in music which hoovered up the young of the world of all ethnic groups, was one of the most unexpected pacts ever made between any people and a foreign and a dominating language.

  In a not dissimilar way, the African peoples who were transported to America used the Bible to their own advantage. They were part of a long tradition. In the fourteenth century John Ball had used the Bible to attack the monarch and the Catholic hierarchy. Wycliffe and Tyndale had used English to attack the excluding command language of Latin as the tongue of God. In the seventeenth-century civil wars, the anti-Royalists used the Bible to preach a levelling of political power, anti-monarchism, even egalitarianism. The Pilgrim Fathers had been guided to a new land and a new constitution through their interpretation of the Bible. For the African peoples captured and shipped over to America, the English Bible was full of hopes of peace, and above all promises of freedom.

  This is seen most clearly in the spirituals. When the black slaves of the south sang “Steal Away to Jesus” or “Come out of the Wilderness” they were singing about the longed-for next world, but they were also singing about this world, about the hope of escaping to the north and to freedom.

  Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus

  Steal away, steal away home

  I ain’t got long to stay here.

  My Lord, He calls me

  He calls me by the thunder

  The trumpet sounds within-a my soul

  I ain’t got long to stay here.

  Green trees are bending

  Po’ sinner stands a-trembling

  The trumpet sounds within-a my soul

  I ain’t got long to stay here.

  Oh, tell me how did you feel when you

  Come out the wilderness

  Come out the wilderness

  Come out the wilderness.

  How did you feel when you

  Come out the wilderness,

  Oh, praise the Lord.

  Oh, did you feel like fighting when you

  Come out the wilderness . . .

  Oh, will you walk the line when you . . .

  Oh, will you go to jail when you . . .

  Oh, will you fight for freedom when you . . .

  The Bible in English once again became the book of freedom.

  The Civil War which began on April 12, 1861, was to change all that and over time it did, though many believe there is still a distance to go. In 1865, the Confederation forces abandoned Charleston and the Union army marched in unopposed, led by the 55th Massachusetts Regiment, a regiment of black volunteers: they broke open the slave pens and inscribed Abolitionist mottoes on the walls.

  The Civil War gave us “hold the fort”; the phrase “on the grapevine” came from the southern states, where telegraph lines strung in the trees became so knotted that they looked like grapevines. And there was an undistinguished Union general, Ambrose Everett Burnside, who set a fashion for facial hair — “burnsides” they were first called, “sideburns” they became, and once, just a few decades ago, no cool youthful face was complete without them.

  After the Civil War four million slaves were freed, given full citizenship and the right to vote. But the south did not let go that easily and “Jim Crow” laws were introduced to restrict the rights of blacks. The Ku Klux Klan derived their name from the Greek word “kuklos,” meaning circle. They were formed after the Civil War. The Klan gave English the word “bulldozer,” originally “bull-dose,” meaning a dose large enough for a bull. It was a dose of whipping and it was administered to black people, often fatally. “Uppity” became part of the vocabulary of the south, to describe a black who did not know his place. It was not for at least a couple of generations, even more, that black and, white words began to mix freely. And it was deep into the twentieth century before the black vocabulary claimed its place in the dictionaries. Long before that it had hit the street, the clubs, the young and, through the entertainment industry, the wider world of English.

  In the 1880s and 1890s, segregated education was brought in in the south and the laws prompted a great black migration to the industrial cities of the north.

  That would be the natural end to this chapter save for the first American genius of literature, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who took his pen name from a counting cry of the Mississippi river boatmen: “Mark Twain.” It was used to signal two fathoms.

  He was a river pilot but the Civil War ended that occupation. He mined silver in Nevada, he was a newspaper reporter, a gold miner in California, a reporter again in San Francisco, a correspondent in the Sandwich Islands, in Europe and the East; he took to the lecture circuit and then became an author. Near the end of his life, he wrote: “I have been an author for twenty years, and an ass for fifty-five.” All along the way he had picked up language: “heap,” which he called “Injun-English” for very much; “strike it rich” and “you bet” from the prospectors and miners; and slang phrases like “dead broke,” “take it easy,” “get even,” “gilt edged” and “close call.” In his preface to Huckleberry Finn, he lists the varieties of speech that he uses — Missouri Negro, “the extremist form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect” and five varieties of Pike County dialect, all alchemised through and into a new English, but still based on Old English and rifted with Latin and French.

  The author whose active life in the world and range of tongues rather resembles him is Chaucer. Again, a man who had been out in the world of work and business, in new territories, negotiating what seem to be experiences wildly inappropriate for the modern literary man. And like Chaucer, Mark Twain stands out at the fountain-head of an English: in Chaucer’s case, London Middle English; in the case of Mark Twain, American southern English. And the vital thing for our story here is that this Mark Twain English was powerfully laced with black English. He wrote Huckleberry Finn in 1885. Like The Canterbury Tales, it has never been out of print.

  Mark Twain wrote that “a Southerner talks music.” This is Huck Finn describing life on the river:

  It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss whether they was made or only just happened — Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened: I judged it would have t
ook too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn’t say nothing against it because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they’d got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.

  This is one of the calmer moments. Even here, though, we are far away from the sober serious Bible’s truth English of the Pilgrims. This is different in sound and different in character. It is the language of the huckster, the trickster, the liar, the booster and the cheat, but equally of the naif and the dreamer. It is also, through Huck’s own words and through Jim, who is uneasy at the prospect that he might be sold down the river, the sound and the words of black English coming into great literature.

  The east coast establishment was not amused. Back in Concord, the cradle of the Revolution, the civilised members of the library committee banned Huckleberry Finn for its vernacular words. It was, they said, “the veriest trash, rough, coarse and inelegant; more suited to the slaves than to intelligent, respectable people.” It had not taken all that long for English in America to be used for conflict between states, between classes, between backgrounds, between individuals; just as it was back home. But English itself, like Ole Man River, just kept rolling along.

  As the sun sets on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn should have the last word on this almost incredible colonisation of a continent with what was once an isolated and minor dialect:

  . . . there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book, I wouldn’t a tackled it and ain’t agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.

  16

  Mastering the Language

  In the east of America English stiffened the sinews of the most cultivated public expression of an act of independence ever known and was conscripted to classicism for the new country which eventually became a potential empire. Further west, the language bucked and reared its way through spectacular landscapes and adventures and fights and fusion with British dialects, new sights and Native American languages of great complexity. In the south it provided a new link language between scores of African tongues. English in the old HQ, England itself, could seem tame by comparison. But that would be to underestimate the passion of thought and the melodrama of intellectual debate. Not only “true-born” Englishmen but equally true-born Irish and Scots men waded into battle: it was a battle for the ownership of the words both on the page and on the tongue.

  Broadly, as the Enlightenment spread — in select, rarefied but influential areas of life — so ideas of order, rationality and mastery grew stronger. The mid-seventeenth-century Civil War had shocked the body of Britain and words like “commonwealth,” “restoration,” “revolution” and “iconoclast” were for many scars of a time that must never return. The wheel of the country turned and so did the English language. It took on natural philosophy (science), previously the realm of Latin, and the great Isaac Newton, who wrote his Principia in Latin, chose to write his Opticks (1704) in English. Those governing the language wanted to bring order, stability, clarity and even permanence to what seemed to some an over-mighty subject.

  First, though, a digression which I think illustrates how deeply the idea of language as the key to all understanding had bitten in to the scholars and thinkers of the time. In the seventeenth century attempts grew to discover the “original” language, the language prior to the Tower of Babel as described in the book of Genesis, when all men spoke the same language. It was thought that this “Adamic” language had been spoken in the Garden of Eden and that its purity had illuminated all things and all thoughts perfectly. Lost by the sinful behaviour of Adam and Eve and become the Babel of tongues that followed the Fall, it was thought that it could be rediscovered, perhaps by the study of ancient Hebrew. It should be noted that this search went alongside the equally serious search of minds as fine as that of Newton to discover the essential secrets of matter through a study of alchemy. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the Royal Society commissioned one of its members, John Wilkins, to create a universal language. This was a highly regarded undertaking.

  In his book An Essay Toward a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), Wilkins argued that since the minds of everyone functioned in the same way and had a similar “apprehension of things,” there was no reason to believe there could not be one universal language. This language would not only make international co-operation on every level simpler than ever before, it would also “prove the shortest and plainest way for the attainment of real knowledge, that have yet been offered to the world.”

  Wilkins’ solution was complicated and worked by symbols. Of one symbol which “doth signifie the Genus of Space,” he wrote, “the acute angle on the left side to the top, doth denote the first Difference, which is Time. The other affix signifies the ninth species under this Difference, which is Everness. The Loop at the end of this affix denotes the word to be used adverbially: so that the sense of it must be the same which we express by the phrase, For ever and ever.” “For ever and ever” in this symbol form did not catch on. Despite being recommended by John Locke, favourably mentioned by Newton, admired by Erasmus Darwin and the anthropologist Lord Monboddo and later much praised by Roget of the Thesaurus, it did not meet with the acceptance of the public. Its recorded use remains only in two laborious letters between friends of Wilkins who were also members of the Royal Society. Wilkins, who became a bishop, delivered a treatment of the alphabet and of phonetics considered authoritative for many generations after his death and recently his work has been rediscovered by those involved in the study of symbolic logic and semantics. Yet, as a language for the page, despite its brilliant shot at universality, it failed to make it.

  Nevertheless it shows how powerful a key to the better and firmer understanding of life language was now thought to be, not only by poets and dramatists and religious translators but by those who wished to master the universe of learning. A century later, for instance, Lavoisier in France used a “non-natural” language which did work and was used and has been used ever since in the area of chemical notation.

  John Locke, in his most influential Essay on Human Understanding (1690), took on this idea that a clarification of language would reap the greatest benefits to mankind. “I desire it may be considered and carefully examined,” he wrote, “whether the Disputes of the world, are not merely verbal, and about the signification of words; and whether . . . reduced . . . to determined collections of the simple ideas they do or should stand for, those disputes would not end of themselves and immediately vanish . . .”

  It is a prime example of rational idealism. Did Locke, a man of such supreme intelligence, really believe that by getting the language clear and the arguments stripped to basic simplicities then “disputes would . . . end of themselves?” Clearly he did. It seems to me that there is what can only be called blind faith at the heart of what seems pure reason. For, looking back on the civil wars of the seventeenth century, which so many did for generations afterwards, he would have had to discount a battalion of human grievances, power struggles, religious resentments, repressed regional and national furies and viscerally held ideologies to believe that even the most forceful word purge would have ended such a disruption. It is a fascination in this story, though, that men of Locke’s calibre did think that in effect language ruled and that they could and should make it rule everything. And that once the language was “pure” and set, all would be well.

  There appeared to be a growing and general confidence in the state of English. Printing presses were no longer licensed and they had spread and proliferated throughout Britain. Grub Street had arrived with its newspapers and its coffee houses. And the greatest intellectual institution of them all (which had com
missioned John Wilkins) stepped in much more influentially to argue that the English prose of its natural philosophers (the word “scientist” was not invented until the nineteenth century) should be stripped of ornamentation and emotive language. A writer must “convey a sense of his own fallibility . . . he never concludes but upon resolution to alter his mind upon contrary evidence . . . he gives his reasons without passion . . .” Rhetoric, the ancient craft of persuasion, was to be abandoned; in this enlightened new world, words were for dispassionate truth. Everything should aspire to be as clear and regular as clockwork, the great Newtonian image of the time, the solar system as a clockwork machine overseen, in Newton’s belief, by the Great Clockmaker, God.

  In 1652, the first coffee house opened in England. The Lloyds Coffee House arrived in 1688 and lingered on to become for some time the world’s biggest insurance company. Coffee houses were known as “penny universities”; a penny was the charge for admission and a cup of coffee and if you wanted a touch of privilege you could toss a coin into an artfully placed tin and give a tip — To Insure Prompt Service. Grub Street lived in and out of coffee houses and its demand was for writers, quickly known as hacks. This came originally from hacking, “a person hired to do routine work,” extended to horses for hire, then “broken-down nags,” then “drudge.” By 1749, it is registered as “one who writes anything for hire,” “hackneyed,” “trite.” The greed for essays, opinions, for verse, fiction and books of an indecent character, seemed unappeasable, and the term “hack,” often rather proudly assumed now that journalism is so established, had then no great cachet. Henry Fielding wrote:

  How unhappy’s the fate

  To live by one’s pate

  And be forced to write hackney for bread.