Occasional Prose (11 page)

To get back, though, for a moment to Manufacturers Hanover—no prior knowledge of the circumstances, of Allende’s murder, U.S. investments, the blood bath, would be required by a newspaper reader of Greene’s quoted remarks in order to understand that something was rotten in Chile. His language inadvertently made that clear. In South Vietnam (when I was there in 1967), I noticed the same kind of thing. If I had dropped straight from Mars, I thought, into one of the daily press briefings, I would have known from the periphrastic, circumspect way our spokesmen expressed themselves that an indefensible action of some sort was going on in that country. As with Greene, just about everything they said, or, rather, “stated,” was in a kind of bumbling code that quickly translated itself into plain English: e.g., for “success,” read “failure.” The purpose of language, somebody—probably French—said, is to conceal thought. I don’t agree with the aphorism, yet the American language, as spoken today, often bears it out with comical results: the attempt to conceal an underlying thought or feeling produces almost total transparence. As when Nixon, in his letter to Senator Sam Ervin last summer about why he was not going to hand over the tapes to the Committee, said they might be subject to misinterpretation by persons “with other views”; he might as well have made an announcement that he had decided they were extremely damaging. That letter was the first confirmation of John Dean’s testimony to come from what we could call a reliable independent source.

Of course there are people who have become so practiced in evasion, euphemism, circumlocution, and all the forms of lying that they would not know
how
to tell the truth if an occasion favoring truth-telling should arise. Their syntax, so twisted, crippled, and deformed by these habits, is incapable of directness, and the occasional forthright statement—“I love America,” “I am not a crook”—though grammatically sound as a bell, has to be construed as meaning the opposite: “I hate America,” “I am a crook.”

But this is pathology, and though many or even perhaps most public officials and corporation heads are afflicted by it, I don’t think it extends yet to the population at large. In the population at large, though, you find warning symptoms of a deteriorated faculty of expression: the inarticulateness of the very young and the long-winded prosiness of the middle-aged and old. On the one hand, “I went, like, to a party”; on the other, “Thursday evening I attended a function.” The common speech of the people, on which Wordsworth hoped to base a new
ars poetica
, is riddled with such curious faults. Between the two examples I have just quoted there is only a generational gap; both seek to avoid direct statement. The continual “like ... like”—“I went, like, to a party and we smoked, like, pot”—is the sidewise, slithering, crab-gaited, youth approach, whereas the elderly widow who “attended a function” is putting her own strange distance from “Thursday I went to a party.”

Enough has been said—and for years—about “funeral director,” “passed away,” “senior citizen,” “home” for “house,” “wealthy” for “rich.” Such linguistic vulgarities, contrary to what is thought, are not restricted to emotive fields, like death and old age, where fear is being held at a distance, or, like the home and money, where reverence is duly paid. “I got my car fixed”—not really a sentimental matter—now turns into “I took my car to be repaired.” In rural areas, women talk of their “hose,” and “what a lovely gown”; in cities there is “panty hose.” Pedantic neologisms issuing from psychiatry are fuzzing up the atmosphere: “He is highly motivated.” No matter how many times I hear that, I can never understand what it means. “He has high motives”? No. “He has a lot of drive”? Closer. Maybe “He likes the work he is doing.” And “relate”—which is youth jargon: “I found I couldn’t relate to Physics 1B.” “He is an achiever” (or “an under-achiever”) at least is clear. It means he does well (or badly) in school, including sports and “activities.”

Take the still new adverb “hopefully.” People who care for language, including myself, wince every time they hear it. It floats around in the sentence, attached to nothing in particular. “Hopefully the dollar will go up.” There it certainly does not modify the verb, as a good adverb should unless there is an adjective somewhere to cling to. If it modified the verb, it would be “the dollar will go hopefully up.” Yet it is not a grammatical howler, so far as I can see; it is a parenthesis thrown in, on the pattern of “incidentally,” which is not a desirable form either, but, being useful, has got itself accepted. (I myself prefer “by the way” or simple parenthesis marks, as in this sentence.) It must have come to us from German “hoffentlich,” normally translated as “it is to be hoped”; perhaps we are indebted to German businessmen, who introduced it along with Volkswagens and Mercedes. What is melancholy about the suddenly universal “hopefully” is that it seems to point to a contrary state of mind, that is, to an absence of hope. The speaker really fears the dollar will go down still further, and if you tell me “Hopefully we’ll meet in a better world,” I can pretty well understand that we won’t. Its free-floating position in the sentence emphasizes that insecurity, that lack of ground for hope. It is an irony that this pathetic invading adverb should be sweeping the country at what may be the lowest point in our history.

Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity. Americans are slow tedious talkers, and universal semi-education has made them worse. Only the poorer blacks and a few rural whites are still able to express themselves vividly and to find the word they want without too protracted a search. Maybe this is because they never finished school. Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do. In fact, it is almost a comfort and I could wish the poor might stay untaught forever, for their own sakes and for the preservation of the language, if the price did not include other kinds of deprivation. Poor blacks, some rural whites and a few gifted talkers are the only people I have heard in recent times use the language with relish. They are the only ones to enjoy talking artistically, for its own sake. Senator Sam Ervin’s popularity on radio and television was based, I think, in large part, on his unabashed relish for the language; being old and rural, he sounded like a poor man. His relish for the language, sometimes positively syllabic (“eleemosynary,” you could hear his tongue taste those vowels), seemed to be deeply related to his determination to get the truth of Watergate out and to his confidence that this could be done—slowly and painfully, like a tooth-extraction before the days of Novocain.

Senator Ervin was not always grammatical, but that enhanced the pleasure one had in him, because his grammar did not so much err as revert to older modes (“ain’t,” “it don’t”) and showed no disrespect for the forms of speech, that is, for the sinews of thought. By contrast, there was Jeb Stuart Magruder, a graduate of Williams College. Since I don’t have on hand a transcript of his testimony, I will construct a characteristic but imaginary sentence: “Mr. Haldeman indicated to me that between he and I we had a problem.” And here is a real exchange between him and Senator Ervin. They were talking about the “climate” prevailing in the White House. Ervin: “... I just could not understand why people got so fearful.” Magruder: “I would characterize that at least my reaction was stronger after three years of working here than it had been before.” More genuine Magruder: “We agreed, Mr. Liddy and I, that he would terminate from the committee all activities.” “In November of 1971 it was indicated to me that the project was not going to get off the ground and subsequently G. Gordon Liddy came into the picture after that.” Finally, “I think from my own personal standpoint, I did lose some respect for the legal process because I did not see it working as I hoped it would when I came here.”

I put the verb “indicate” in my imaginary sentence because it came up over and over in Magruder’s testimony. The choice of the word raised interesting questions. When he said “he indicated to me” did he mean simply “he told me”? Let us look at a few examples. “John Dean indicated to me that I would not be indicted.” “We indicated to Mr. Stans the problem we had with money.” [Haldeman] “indicated that I should get back to Washington directly.” “As I recall, we all indicated that we should remove any documents that could be damaging, whether they related at all to the Watergate or not.” Of Hugh Sloan and his perjured testimony to the grand jury: “So I indicated at the meeting that I thought he had a problem and might have to do something about it. He said, you mean commit perjury? I said you might have to do something like that to solve your problem and very honestly was doing that in good faith to Mr. Sloan to assist him at that time.”

The last extract tells the story. “Indicate” means something less and more than “told.” Sloan’s “you mean commit perjury?” points to the terrible difference between the two. Sloan, an honest accountant (as his conduct before the Ervin committee had already made clear), who insisted on having things named by their names, and the devious operator Magruder, still posing to the Committee as a bashful penitent freshman. Even when pressed by Sloan, he will not assent to “perjury” as the right name for what he has in mind. “... something like that,” he says. So must we conclude that “indicate” in that crowd meant “tip off”? Possibly, but it is hard to see how, in some of the circumstances, this was done. When John Dean let Magruder know that he was not going to be indicted, what form of words did he use? Or did he wigwag the message? And when Haldeman indicated to him, by long-distance telephone, that he should get back to Washington right away, how did he put it, so that Magruder would understand the order without being told it was one? Did he say “The weather is beautiful in Washington at this time of year, Jeb. The forecast for tomorrow is sunny and mild”? From Magruder’s parlance alone, you would get the feeling of secretive men conscious of bugging devices everywhere. It was not surprising to learn that Liddy in California, the morning after the break-in, warned Magruder to find a safe phone. Nor, finally, that Nixon was tapping
himself
. And if all essential communications were coded, in this involute fashion, “indicated,” never stated (“indicateur,” in French, is the common slang word for “informer,” “police spy”), no wonder there has been so much contradiction in the Watergate testimony as to who said what; they were all bent on not saying anything to each other that could be pinned down to a concrete meaning. Imprecision was the rule, and the cover-up did not begin June 18 but had been practiced on a daily basis in the ordinary transmission of messages. Indeed, what we call talk for them consisted almost exclusively of messages. This was true no doubt even of banter.

John Mitchell had his own code, personalized, initialed JNM, like a monogram on a City Hall mobster’s shirt sleeve. It was less bureaucratic than Magruder’s, not so stamped by office routines. The expression “White House horror stories,” for instance, was to be understood as an allusion to Charles Colson. Another favorite phrase, “in hindsight,” mystified me. It cannot be code, but it is not English. What he means is “looking back,” or, more starchy, “in the light of my present knowledge.” You cannot say “in hindsight,” any more than you can say “in foresight.” For fun, I looked the noun up in the big
Oxford English Dictionary
. The original sense was the backsight of a rifle, and the word was first used by Mayne Reid in 1851 in a work called
Scalp Hunting
: “When you squint through her hindsights.” The second reference for the word, still in the primary sense, is Farmer’s
Americanisms
, 1889. The mystery is cleared up. You can see John Mitchell squinting through the backsight of his rifle at the Watergate affair, putting a bead on that wild Indian, Colson, on Jeb Magruder. That peculiar expression (not used by any other witness) is his enigmatic signature, hence, after all, a kind of code. Will it find its way into the
OED
?

Of course if he liked that word so much, if the picture gave him such dour satisfaction, he could have said “through hindsight.” His lazy mind did not think it out. In lighting on the wrong preposition, he was a typical American of today. The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate. As you know from experience in learning a foreign language, they are the hardest part to get right. You may have a pretty good vocabulary and have mastered the verb forms, the subjunctive, even genders, but you are still horribly uncertain about “de” and “à,” “en” and “dans,” “zu” and “nach,” “aus” and “auf.” Whether to say “Je pense de vous,” or “Je pense à vous” (sometimes an almost imperceptible difference), “zu Hause,” “nach Hause,” “zu Bett,” “im Bett”? They cannot be learned by mastering general rules; memorizing sentences containing them may be helpful but is no sure guide to a new sentence; the application of logic is useless, for their peculiarity is to defy logic, to be capricious. If you are like me, you will never really get hold of them in all their aberrant motion; even if you have spoken the language for fifteen years, doubt remains.

This means that they are the quintessential feature of a language; unlike nouns, verbs, and adjectives, they cannot be exchanged against their opposite numbers in a second or third language. In short, they are stubbornly idiomatic, from
idios
(“one’s own, private, peculiar”). Though I said, just now, that logic is useless to a foreigner who is seeking to master them, they do express the inner logic of a particular language—a logic that is, precisely, different from the alien logic one is uselessly trying to apply. They are a birthright.

It is obvious that America, with its doors so long open to new citizens, would have a hard time maintaining the purity of those little particles of speech. Yet in fact our prepositions held out quite valiantly throughout the nineteenth century and through the first decades of the twentieth. I would date the deterioration from the forties; at least I first became aware of it in 1945–46 when I went to teach in a college and discovered from my students’ papers that many of those young people did not have any idea what preposition was called for in a given circumstance. “Tolstoy in his progenitors and his disciples,” one student wrote. To change “progenitors” to “predecessors” and “disciples” to “followers” only took a little practice in mind-reading—yes, the student agreed happily, that was what he had been trying to say, he guessed. But that “in”! Impossible to penetrate the thought process that had been working there. Some relation between Tolstoy and those who preceded him as well as those who followed him was adumbrated but remained inexpressible.