Berlin Conversations, or, Why Make the Effort?

It was only after some minutes that I realized she wasn’t taking in anything I said. She evidently couldn’t understand my English, for I was talking much faster now, and not choosing my words. In spite of her tremendous devotional effort of concentration, I could see that she was noticing the way I parted my hair, and that my tie was worn shiny at the knot. She even flashed a furtive glance at my shoes. I pretended, however, not to be aware of all this [Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, 1939]

Minus the Nazis and the playful communists – though one can still find both, I am sure – Isherwood’s Berlin is very reminiscent of my own. Admittedly, I do not know any cabaret singers, prostitutes, or Jewish department-store owners. I do, however, encounter more than my fair share of middle-aged German ladies; a fair portion of young Germans – rich and effete as well as poor and intellectual – of various stylistic and sexual orientations; and the ubiquitous drudgery of trudging working-class existence. I have been poor here, and I have been better off. I have been in some sleazy holes, some shabby-chic Lokals, and to rather many refined establishments. I have gibbered through frozen cobble-stoned winters and baked in oppressive concrete summers. The Berlin stories hit home.

The above passage is perhaps the epitome of my affinity for Isherwood’s tales. British English is, now more than ever, a provincial dialect of the lingua franca that only a privileged few understand. There is another dialect – International English – that I am learning to speak, with some difficulty. It is, as any regular reader of my humble prose will admit, impossible for me to imagine a life without idiom, without metaphor. But International English is just that: a two-dimensional functional dirge, the linguistic equivalent of protein pills and vitamin supplements in lieu of nutrition by culinary means.

There are two aces up the sleeve of the colourful but misunderstood speaker. First, being English still goes a long way. For better or for worse, the English accent ratchets up one’s reputation a couple of notches in most of the Western world. Second, one can dress to reinforce this a priori impression. As per Isherwood’s example, the inattentive ear gives play to the wandering eye, and one must therefore make the effort to look the part. A top-hole accent matched to a refined appearance can make magisterial prose out of mere rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, and will leave your struggling interlocutor feeling like an intimate confidant.

In short, faced with a world that understands me not, I shall make the effort to look the part. Whatever I may say, I may then be confident that my befuddled companions at least have the right impression.

Straight Talking

According to Stephen Evans, my peer of some renown in Berlin, the Germans don’t do small talk. There’s not even a word for it. How much of your day is spent congenially warming the air with idle nothings? For many people, at work, at school, or with friends, that’s all there is. Imagine taking it away from them for a day. How would it feel for them to be left with the emptiness of their heads?

It takes some time to realise that there’s a good reason why your German interlocutor is knitting his brow over your insistence that it’s fairer weather today than yesterday, and looks to be changeable tomorrow. He wonders why you think he can comment on meteorological matters, or why you are particularly preoccupied by them. The conversation doesn’t go anywhere because he doesn’t understand ‘ice breakers’. There is no ice in Germany, so why not sail straight to the point? The Anglophone’s tendency to prevaricate comes from his own self-consciousness, rather than any interpersonal hurdles in reality. The trouble is, a  German’s tendency towards plain sailing only thickens the ice for the Anglo. And the thicker the ice, the more our German friend will think us strange and disingenuous. Of course, all this disappears once you’ve managed to get to know one another, but the route to friendship in this case bears a resemblance to a Victorian wedding night. With no prior knowledge about how things work, it takes a deal of fumbling and apologising before a beautiful union can be made.

In truth, both these cultures represent a thing lost. Conversation used to be an art. Small talk was a failure in artistry. The true conversationalist would engage seriously, but without emotional investment, with sensitivity to political and social taboos. A conversation would flow naturally from topic to topic, without passion, but with subtle betrayals of character that would allow for the slow appreciation of personality. The essential ingredient in this engagement of the courtois was French, and that is the missing link in Anglo-German relations at present. The lingua franca is now English, but no two peoples speak English in the same way, or are united by a common purpose. We are lost in incommensurate idioms. The monarchies and the courts of the eighteenth century were, if not directly related, then at least of a political piece. French was the order of the day from St. Petersburg to London, and it bound the courts in common.

 Click to enlarge

Last time I looked, France still lay between England and Germany. There aren’t any courts any more, but we’re constantly told that we, the common people, are all of a piece these days. Maybe we should meet in the middle?

Save Standard English; or, Stop Being Mis-CHEEVY-ous!

One hears stories on the BBC, stories without a note of disapprobation mind you, about the ways in which the youth of today is bastardizing the English language without so much as a by your leave. It’s all most troubling. Apparently, the status of English as the new French is not the only route to its being sullied and abused. The bally natives can’t even get the thing right, apparently because they labour under the misconception that words ought to sound how they are spelled. Hence the pronunciation of ‘ate’ as 8, instead of ‘et’, which used to be how it was spelled, until someone made it deliciously ornate to ward off interlopers. The same is true of ‘says’, which the poor blighters are rhyming with ‘ways’ instead of ‘fez’. It will never do.

My pet peeve – you might have noted that I have a number of pet peeves; the apartment is a regular menagerie by now – is the insistence of the illiterate in pronouncing ‘aitch’ with an ‘h’ at the beginning. One might be forgiven for thinking that it is only English-speaking French people who go around putting aitches everywhere except where they are meant to be, but apparently the British have a great knack for it. I’m told it’s something to do with a rather silly neurosis about not appearing to be working class. That’s how Orwell identified his socially inferior comrades, don’t you know? He compelled the middle classes to join forces in an incoherent socialism, telling his stupefied readers that they had nothing to lose but their aitches. Well, more fool him for thinking that aitches were trifles. In the event, it turns out that the working classes fancied a bit of the capitalist pie after all, and figured that aitches were the only thing standing in their way. So, they put them every-bloody-where, including at the start of ‘aitch’, thereby ensuring that everyone can still readily identify them as the working classes they long not to be.

It's to the north, I believe

Those incorrigible scamps who dare to use polysyllables also tinker with the word ‘mischievous’, pronouncing a phantom ‘i’ before the ‘o’. I suppose it’s either a sick joke or that they are borrowing the ‘i’ from American aluminium, which apparently has one going spare. And all the while the politically correct linguists keep repeating that there’s no right or wrong; that this is how language evolves; each to his own, and so on. Well, I’m all for regional diversity: England has a great range of daft accents and dialects that help us to know where we are, and they are a wonderful source of pride and passion, as well as an endless mine for television comedians and advertisers. But, we’ve all always known that there was a correct way to speak that served for job interviews, meeting the vicar or the bank manager, and for generally being understood when outside one’s own village. To be ‘bidialectal’ was to be English. However, if we go around saying that anyone can talk any old way they please, it’s all the same to us, and sorry even for breathing, then before you know it we’ll be a barbarian backwater. Americans, instead of assuming that we’re all touched with genius and related to the Queen, will laud it over us for our inferior articulations, and laugh at our cute incompetency with the language we invented.

Save Standard English. It’s the only damn thing we have left!

Keeping Good Company

     ‘My idea of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.’
     ‘You are mistaken,’ said he gently, ‘that is not good company; that is the best…’

(Jane Austen, Persuasion, 1818).

Good company, which Mr. Elliot reduced to the requirements of ‘birth, education, and manners’ is nigh impossible to find. Fortunately, I am blessed by constantly being in the best company, but to understand me correctly requires an explication of Austen’s prose. There is nothing worse, I humbly aver, than people being clever. Intelligence ought to come with modesty, pertinent interventions, and humility. Clever people flaunt their superiority at any opportunity, lacing it with facetiousness and pedantic corrections. Clever people delight in the tripping up of others. Clever people know a variety of stratagems for penetrating the most fortified of hen houses.

So what did ‘clever’ mean? Our old friend Samuel Johnson first defined the word as ‘dextrous, skilful’; his second definition was ‘just, fit, proper, commodious’; and finally, ‘well-shaped, handsome’. Austen’s ‘clever’ company was, therefore, not so much vulpine as perfectly adapted to polite company, in both mental fitness, social appropriateness, and aesthetic appeal. Were such people ‘well-informed’, they would be devastatingly interesting. Their ‘great deal of conversation’ would not be mere artfulness around ladies, but a supreme engagement with the world and the like minds around them. The best company is sympathetic, challenging, and fair.

You may keep your clever people. I will take the best.

Speaking in Tongues

Our Hollywood brethren have broadcast the myth that the essential qualifications for manliness can be boiled down to the bicep and the grunt, and the influence of this stalks our streets all too evidently, its knuckles knocking the sidewalks. It has been particularly effective in the English-speaking world, where the idea of intelligent writing has been reduced to such choice phrases as ‘Gr8 2 c u’. I shudder. Helping all this along is the prevailing Anglophone cultural arrogance that usually makes us unilingual. We readily dismiss the majority of the globe’s people since they are unable to speak English. And this is our loss.

I confess to being a victim of the aforementioned arrogance. At school, French was introduced at age 11, but the tuition was pitched at the least able, and the least able was unfortunately illiterate in English. Not much hope there. German began at 13, with similar ineffectiveness. The education system being what it was, nobody was compelled to continue with these foreign tongues after the age of 14. Even then, there was no clear idea put forward for why learning these languages might be an advantage. Since then, moves have been afoot to steer certain people away from language learning altogether because it is ‘not useful’. To that end, we might well dispense with school completely, and send young boys of a particular station down the mines at age 12.

Not if I can help it.

I am attempting to correct my own shortcomings, which I greatly regret, and doubtless another spell in Germany won’t do me any harm. For those youngsters currently progressing through school, certainly our first priority is to improve their English. But we should dare also to push them to engage with the other, for in teaching them to speak in tongues, we shall improve their brains. And if we improve their brains, we may make better men (and women) of them.

Going Deutsch

(Monday Night)

When I awoke this morning I did not expect this evening to be writing to you from a bus. Yet here I sit, squeezed into another inadequate Greyhound seat, listening to the aggregate of mumblings of unhappy people. Why am I on a bus? Well, dear Readers, it is high time I prepared you all for a shift in mood on Being Manly. Having spent the majority of time writing to you from Boston and Montreal, with a little London thrown in for good measure, and a small dose of New York, yours truly is moving to Berlin (again). It was not a looked-for move, but it is not an unwelcome one. Berlin was something of a rite of passage for me when I lived there previously, allowing me the time and freedom to find many things, not the least of which was a sense of sartorial independence and a burgeoning writerly voice. This time I hope for the maturation of many things, professional and personal, including the thoughts I commit to these pages.

But why am I on a bus? Mrs. VB, being afflicted with a non-European passport, cannot just up-sticks and move. Uncharacteristically for German matters bureaucratic, her relevant paperwork has been somewhat slow in coming forward, and thus we are on a last-ditch run to the German Embassy in Ottawa to apply for a visa. It is a most unceremonious journey, the end of which is to surrender a passport to German officials. We only hope it returns post-haste.

Somewhere in today’s shenanigans is a moral pertinent to our theme. For while I am perennially reminded that “the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley”, I am also persuaded that the best mice and men have always responded philosophically, perhaps stoically, and with imaginative alternatives to their often-ruined intentions. Today I planned to make progress with some serious literature auf Deutsch; to digest a couple of scholarly articles; and to ice a couple of increasingly creaking knees. Instead, the knees got a thorough workout as we raced around town making last-minute preparations; the articles are in hitherto unimagined insalubrious surroundings, inside a bag inside a bus; and the German learning can simply wait bis Morgen. Needs must as the Devil drives, or at least, so says this mouse.

(Tuesday night)

I am on a bus. Mrs. VB is ohne Reisepass. It seems Germany will welcome us with open arms. I shall give much thought to being manly in old Europe, and trust that you will join me in the endeavour.

E-pistolary E-tiquette

My dear Readers,

Ah, the online world. I loathe it, but cannot live without it. Walking around on the earth, one gets a sense that society hangs by a thread of civility, and that it is ready to crumble at a cross word. Being interpersonally polite keeps everyone in check, on a virtuous circle of humanity and so forth, don’t you agree? The ethereal world knows no such bounds. Have you ever looked at a comments board on youtube? Ever received an email from a person who is not old enough to remember email being invented? Do you indulge in ‘text messages’? I shudder at the thought. The horrors of this angry, invective and illiterate world rather terrify me. I suppose there is no hope of improving it, but I might share with you a notion or two.

When I was at school they used to teach letter-writing skills. These could be usefully employed today, I think. An email, after all, is merely a letter by another name. Start an email with ‘Dear…’ and end it appropriately, depending on the level of formality. If you’re writing to a professional of any stamp, don’t assume a first-name basis, but wait instead for the tone of his/her reply and proceed from there. This might involve finding out if the recipient of your message has any professional qualifications. People who are doctors, professors, and so on, tend not to care for unsolicited epistles that begin ‘Hi John’. If it looks like its heading to first-name terms, you might want to consider ‘Dear John (if I may)’ as a way of politely introducing a less formal correspondence. Sentences should be sentences, with the grammar and punctuation of a person able to function in his own language.

I’m pleased to note that the comments I receive from you on these pages generally do you a great credit, being of a thoughtful and literate kind (I wouldn’t publish them otherwise). So much of what is said online needn’t have been written. If one really has nothing to say, one might consider ‘keeping schtum’.

Back in the day when I used to own a cellular telephone, I confess I occasionally sent a text message. These were the heady days of youth. Least said, soonest mended. Still, when I did put my thumbs to work in this most unnatural fashion my messages were, like my letters, written in full sentences with the correct punctuation. I could not, even then, sully myself with what has become the accepted derogation of the English language. In most cases, if one must communicate so much, I suggest a telephone conversation would be better. It is more personable; more human. So many texts neither say nor mean anything. So why bother?

Wondering what you make of all this, and having gone on too long anyway, I remain

Your humble servant,

VB.

The Devil Is in the Details

I have spent the last six weeks editing a book. Publishing in the digital age isn’t what it was. The days of turning in a physical manuscript and waiting for the proofs seem long-since gone. To be an author/editor is also, now, to be a copy editor and type setter. My eyes are addled by the constant scrutiny, searching earnestly for rogue commas and inadvertent spaces; watching out for the differences between Em spaces and En spaces; burning the occasional ‘which’ that should be a that, which follows a genuine rule you know; juggling leading (line spacing), and font sizing, headings and subheadings, headers, footers and the like. I’ve also been unifying spelling and punctuation. When you have fifteen people writing in English who hail from half-a-dozen different countries it is quite apparent that English is not one language but many. Also references: there are really only four main styles of academic referencing, but most academics write in an idiosyncratic combination of all four. Making one out of four is a devilish business. And of course there are mistakes, and often not of the obvious variety. Would you be able to spot that a quote from Cicero is mistakenly attributed to ‘On Ends’ when really it came from ‘On Duties’? Well, to my surprise, I did.

Now, forget page counts and word counts. When you consciously set about eyeballing every facet of a document (you can hit the show/hide button in MS Word to make every key stroke appear on the page, including spaces and carriage returns) the relevant number becomes the character count. There are, at present, 707,000 characters in this book. I am, understandably I think, bleary eyed. But I am also satisfied.

Why? Because this stuff is important. Too many people these days cannot form basic sentences in their native language (I am reasonably convinced that the problem is worst for English speakers). Spelling has gone out of the window; punctuation is like some mysterious black art; grammar, so far as many people are concerned, is merely your mother’s mother. Mistakes are passed over unnoticed. The beautiful, slippery, taut but paradoxically flexible vagaries of grammatical rule are jettisoned in favour of expediency, laziness, and an altogether unengaged approach to discourse. I maintain, however, that these things are the pillars of politeness. They afford us grace in our interlocutions. They hold us together by a common bond. They pour meaning into belonging, and grant that feeling an esteem, appreciated most, perhaps, when we see it abused. And yet our language, when used properly, also allows us to transcend its strictures, and therein lies its power, its authority, and dare I say it, its cool. But rules can only be broken when rules are known. Otherwise transgression is simple ignorance, and in simple ignorance there is no power, and no authority. There is no cool.

The Devil is in the details. We should do well to pay them mind. Our language is, after all, a precious inheritance.