When Eastertide comes round again, Oh, then I'll have some money?
I'll save it up, and box and all I'll give it to my honey. . . .
And when my seven years' time is o'er Oh, then I'll marry Sally,
Ay, then we'll wed, and then we'll bed? But not in our alley!
Their broken-down, foul-smelling alley was a settle?ment, a home, the denizens of which were bound together by common poverty, shiftlessness, pugnacity, humour and a hatred of landlords and police. Yet no well-planned housing estate can ever compete with its spirit, which a Sally was always found to keep alive. From 1940 to '43 the German blitz levelled what remained of these alleys, and their sites are now occupied by large all-glass office blocks. The last of the Sallies found herself in a suburban life-box?one of hundreds built to the same design and set down in parallel rows?longing for a return to poverty, vice, dirt and even flying bombs.
Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued. The ties between these two male inventions get closer and closer. Originally marriage meant the sale of a woman by one man to another; now most women sell themselves, though they may have no intention of delivering the goods listed in the bill of sale.
Not only is the wife, on an average, five years younger than her husband, but she lives statistically longer. So money power passes progressively into the hands of women. Also, divorce legislation (forced on guilt-ridden legislators by nagging spouses) grossly favours the wife. A youthful rival figures in most divorce suits, and though ulie and the wife seldom act collusively, they share an old-fashioned insistence on the honourable state of mar?riage, which enriches both. Wild women will commit matrimony when things go hard for them, without the least thought of keeping their obligations. The entranced husbands never know what has hit them, nor do they profit by the experience.
The United States, though often described as a matri?archy in all but name, remains patriarchal. Matriarchy, to be effective, needs real women. When women organize themselves intellectually on masculine lines, they merely Htimulate the feminization of men, who, for terror of husband-hunting viragoes, are apt to seek refuge in the cul-de-sac of homosexuality.
Though men are more conventional than women and ('ear to infringe the Mosaic law (Deuteronomy xxii. 5) which forbids their wearing of women's clothes, women have no scruples about flouting the companion law: 'The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man . . . for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord. . . .' Even matrons now unblushingly wear blue jeans zipped in front.
The pseudo-patriarchal trend encourages women to respect legality, which they had hitherto found distasteful.. A real woman, giving evidence in a court of law, scorns factual truth. Should her sense of equity run counter to t he formal demands of justice, she will perjure herself in replies of cool and convincing honesty. When obliged to tixercise a vote, she scorns the male axiom that the majority is always right.
A few real women survive in the old royal sense among West African queens, who rule with a silver knot-of- wisdom sceptre and claim the moon-goddess Ngame as their remote ancestress. A 'knot of wisdom'?known in English as 'the true lover's knot'?is the sort that tightens more securely the harder you tug at either end. Symbolic?ally it means, 'My command can never be disobeyed!'
In civilized society royal women have neither thrones nor territorial queendoms, but the moon inspires them still, and they can wield formidable powers in times of emergency. Yet, since they avoid becoming public figures ?the personality cult is another male invention?their names pass into history far more seldom than those of notorious wild women. A remarkable exception was Elizabeth I of England, whom her poets addressed as Cynthia?'The Moon'?and whose cynical disparage?ment of herself as 'but a weak woman' concealed an unshaken faith in her royal wisdom. Elizabeth ruled through awe and love, was on playful terms with her ladies-in-waiting, inspired her male subjects to feats of heroism and flights of poetry never known before or since among the English, always said 'No' to a doubtful petition and then slept on it.
A real woman's main concern is her beauty, which she cultivates for her own pleasure?not to ensnare men. Though she despises fashion as a male financial business, she will not make herself conspicuous by a defiance of conventions. The materials, colours and cut of her clothes, her hair style and her jewels are all chosen to match a sense of personal uniqueness. She can dress in advance of fashion, yet seem to lead it; and to any irregular features she may have, she lends a lovely ugliness denied to common beauty queens. Perfect detachment from the artificial or second-hand keeps her face unclouded. She has no small talk on current topics, and will suddenly vanish from a party, however grand, as soon as it grows boring.
If she plays games, it will be for fun, not competition; nnd if up against a win-at-all-costs opponent in tennis or golf, she will take care to lose handsomely?as one who competes only against herself. If she drinks, it will be because she likes the taste; and if she smokes, it will be for the same reason, not to steady her nerve.
She misses real men?men who would recognize her potentiality and agree that our world, despite its appear?ance of rational organization, is a wholly haphazard one, clunking on noisily to its fate along a random course once defined as 'progress'. And that a calamitous collapse must come before a new start can be made?from the point where the sex war was first declared and woman's con?servative instinct as the guiding force of humankind repudiated. Because womanhood remains incomplete without a child, most real women marry?preferring simple, affectionate husbands who cannot understand litem. This is not a renunciation of real love, since they ttflree with the thirteenth-century Countess of Narbonne: 'Conjugal affection has absolutely nothing in common with love. We say "absolutely", and with all consideration, that, love cannot exist between husband and wife.'
Man's biological function is to do; woman's is to be. This difference is not a contrast of mere activity with more passivity. 'To be' is indeed a full-time occupation. A renl woman has no leisure in the modern economic sense ?leisure as a consumer's relaxed insistence on commercial entertainment?but is always thinking, taking stock of herself, setting a stage on which actors can perform. If she jmints or writes, this will be for her own private amuse?ment, not to satisfy ambition; and if forced to earn her livelihood in this way, she repudiates the public personage forced on her by dealers and critics.
A real woman is content to dress with a difference, to limko her home unmistakably her own, to illuminate any company she enters, to cook by instinct, not by the cookery book. This is her evidence of being, the proof of which lies in her sense of certitude. She is no feminist; feminism, like all 'isms', implies an intellectual approach to a sub?ject; and reality can be understood only by transcending the intellect.
Mental institutions on both sides of the Atlantic house hundreds of young, beautiful, silently brooding girls, victims of the sex war?defeated before they could come to terms with life. Their tragedy has been brilliantly described in The Ha-Ha, a novel by Jennifer Dawson, whose heroine is almost a real woman, because: 'she never just plays a game with herself or other people, and refuses to learn the rules of society?meaning the worthy, useful, ordinary women who are so busy finding husbands and houses and good income brackets that they just haven't time to be conscious of themselves, and who see the world as an inventory, a container of so many things, and other people as so many tin-openers to undo it for them.'
The friendly and intelligent staff of the mental institu?tion cannot persuade her that she should realign herself with the orderly outside male world. Being not quite real enough to escape defeat by pretending conformity, she loses all pride in her appearance, ceases to concentrate on any self-imposed task; and when at last she desperately breaks out, the police, we foresee, cannot fail to fetch her back for sedation and still closer surveillance.
A real woman somehow avoids suicide, or virtual suicide, or the mental institution; but is always painful
ly aware of having been born out of her true epoch; con?sidered as either the past, or as the long-distant future. A sense of humour saves her from defeat. 'This is not worthy of me,' she will remind herself ten times a day, 'but to preserve my inner self I must once more act an alien part.'
None of her women neighbours, idly content with money and what it will buy, feel any need for drastic change in the man-woman relationship; she treats them politely, and has patience. If she ever comes across a real iiinii, the thin thread of human hope that eventually the world will make practical sense again?cannot yet have mapped.
Moral Principles in Translation
Though often having both translated, and been myself translated, I cannot claim to be a professional linguist: but Hi least to feel thoroughly at home in English; and to tinve picked up the main languages that formed it, more or less in the historic order of their appearance. That is to May I learnt, or rather absorbed, German as a child from my mother, whose family was Saxon; and from three long summer holidays spent on my grandfather's palate near Munich. Neither my accent nor my voca?bulary has lost or gained much since I was eleven years old; and in conversation with Germans, idiomatic phrases float up unsought from the back of my mind. But I never learned to read the language in those days; so that flow, if anyone writes me a German letter, I repeat the Words aloud to myself and take them in through the ear. At Oxford, ten years later, Anglo-Saxon formed part of my Knglish Literature course, and I found it easily Understandable as a Germanic dialect.
I'Yench had been taught me at school by the hard way of irregular verbs and gender rhymes, such as bijou, miUou, pou, chou, genou, hibou, joujou; but at a period When we were on bad terms with France?the Entente Cordiule not having yet been cemented. The French ttlflNter, an Englishman, although lavish with impositions If written work showed carelessness, never dared make UN distort our mouths or lips for the correct pronuncia?tion of tu, du, pu, emu, or train, bain, metropolitain, or frililies d'automne?he would have lost all control over the class. ... I am still self-conscious about talking what Chaucer called 'French of Paris' as opposed to 'French after the school of Stratford-atte-Bow'; and though my frequent visits to France, Belgium and Switzerland must add up to several years of residence, I seldom play the Parisian except over a telephone: for intelligibility. French remains a foreign language, not only because it was forced on me, but because I cannot think in the French way, and have a guilty sense of play-acting if drawn into complicated discussions with academicians or Left Bank intellectuals. Nor, apparently, can they think as I do, since fewer of my books have been translated into French than even into Hebrew, Finnish and Magyar. Nevertheless, I do feel at home with the language spoken by our Norman-French ancestors. Since they owned extensive domains in Southern France, it came close to the langue d'oc, or Provengal; and so does Mallorquin, the domestic language of Majorca, which has been my home for thirty-five years.
From the age of seven to nineteen I studied Latin, never rebelling against its discipline?perhaps because my father persuaded me that every gentleman must be a Latin scholar?and came to respect it as the most sober, economical and unambiguous of languages. Latin first made me conscious of the translation problem. German and English, even French and English, have close syntactical resemblances, but Latin taught me to think in a fascinatingly different way: with ablative absolutes, gerunds, and intricate Chinese boxes of clauses piling up to the resonant verbal finish. In the Latin Com?position hour, each English sentence had to be recast Ciceronically. I can still write Latin hexameters or elegiac couplets on almost any subject at the drop of a hat; and (every second June) prepare a Latin oration, to be delivered at the Oxford Encaenia, in a sufficiently correct draft for two kind-hearted classical dons to polish. . . . Mr Charles Chaplin, who was being awarded an-honorary doctorate on the 1961 occasion, told me afterwards how deeply he regretted never having had Latin included in his rough East End schooling. 'It is the backbone of English,' he said vehemently. And, indeed, in early Saxon times Latin was our sole literary language, and taught King Alfred, who translated Boethius and Bede from it, the art of clear expression.
At school I also learned Greek: which is too extensive a language to read without a dictionary even by those who have won first-class honours in Classics at Oxford or Cambridge, which I never did; and demands taste as well as precision from its students. Not every important Greek writer?important in the sense of providing reliable historic information or neat philosophical theories?is a good writer of Greek. . . . Incidentally, attempts have been made to remove St James's Epistle from the New Testament canon?on the ground that he wrote rather too well. But St James was an educated Temple priest, not a Galilean fisherman or Syrian tentmaker, and Alexandrian Greek will have been his second language.
My early affection for Greek allows me to distinguish good writing from bad; and I am more aware of its poetic potentialities than of Castilian Spanish, which I have read daily since emigrating to Spain in 1929. It seems, that unless driven by circumstances to adopt the customs of a foreign nation and break all contact with one's own, none but a born mimic can achieve full command of its idioms after his early 'teens. Besides, Mallorquin is the domestic language of Majorca; Spanish the official.
So I am lucky to have been educated in the main linguistic components of English: Latin; Anglo-Saxon by way of German; Norman-French by way of Mallorquin and French; Greek (which provides most of our scientific vocabulary); and Spanish, from which we have borrowed more than from any other vernacular except French. My interest in English is both loyal and practical. Since the age of fifteen I have been dedicated to one sole pursuit: that of poetry. And the writing of English poetry de?mands that one should know the language in depth as well as in breadth. A poem's emotional force depends on the strength and virtue of its component words; and the longer a word has been turned over by countless tongues and pens, and smoothed with use, the more powerfully will it strike home. This metaphor is, I suppose, suggested by the Old Testament account of how Israel's leading poet, King David, when he went out to fight Goliath, chose smooth pebbles from the brook as sling bolts. . . . Notice that this stark sentence?David when he went out to fight Goliath chose smooth pebbles from the brook as sling bolts?owes nothing to Norman-French. 'Thought' is an Anglo-Saxon word; 'fancy' and 'imagination' are of Romance origin. The thoughtful depth of English seems to be mainly Anglo-Saxon; the imaginative breadth, Romance. But since the language has been constantly changing down the centuries, and at various social levels, a poet should know the history of each word he uses. So, to a lesser degree, should all translators.
For some years I earned my livelihood by writing historical novels. There are two different methods. One is to enliven a chunk of ancient history by making the characters speak and behave in modern style. The central event in an early-Tudor novel published a few years ago was the Field of the Cloth of Gold, at which the heroine, a maid of honour to King Henry, remarked brightly to her chivalrous hero: 'I do hate parties, darling, don't you?' This fancy-dress foolery started, I suppose, with Mark Twain's A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. The alternative method is suddenly to be possessed by a ghost with a grievance against historians, to relive his life, and re-think his thoughts in the language that he himself used.
I wrote once:
To bring the dead to life Is no great magic. Few are wholly dead: Blow on a dead man's embers And a live flame will start.
Let his forgotten griefs be now, And now his withered hopes; Subdue your pen to his handwriting Until it prove as natural To sign his name as yours.
Limp as he limped, Swear by the oaths he swore; If he wore black, affect the same; If he had gouty fingers, Be yours gouty too.
Assemble tokens intimate of him? A seal, a cloak, a pen; Around these elements then build A home familiar to The greedy revenant.
The theme of my novel Wife to Mr Milton came suddenly with the realization that Milton was what we now call a 'trichomaniac
' (meaning, that he had an obsession about hair?his own, and women's). This discovery gave me the key to his lamentable marriage with Marie Powell of Forest Hill, truly a ghost with a grievance. Yet to keep any hint of modern psychology or sociology from intruding, I wrote the book in pure mid-seventeenth-century style, avoiding all words of later occurrence than 1651, the year in which she died. The language had to vary greatly from character to charac?ter?Marie Powell's main associates being Royalists and rural; John Milton's Roundhead and urban. Worse, she wore a dark blue favour, he a light blue?-miscegenation between the Senior Universities can be dangerous in the extreme. . . . Here is Marie, accompanied by her humour?less and ambitious poet, in London at the beginning of the Civil War:
One early morning I went out with my husband to the Artillery Garden, where he performed military exercises in a company of volunteers from his 'Ward' banded together by their common religious interest. He told me, as he went, that he was a pikeman, not a musketeer, and that pikes are more honourable arms than muskets, in respect not only of their antiquity, but also of the colours flying upon their heads; and because with them is the Captain's proper station, the musketeers being posted at the flanks. He himself, he said, stood in the most honourable post of any Gentleman of the Pike, namely in the hindmost rank of bringers-up, or Tergo- ductores, upon the right hand; which also had the advantage of security. Then with his sixteen-foot pike, which he carried with him, he showed me, as he went, the several postures of the pike?the trail, the port, the shoulder, the advance, the cheek?and discoursed upon the use of each posture, heedless of the jests of the citizens and the winks of their wives whom we passed in the street.
I also wrote two novels about Sergeant Roger Lamb, a self-educated Dubliner, who fought with the 9th and 23rd British Infantry regiments in the American War of Independence. His language had a totally different rhythm and flavour. Here he reports on events leading to the outbreak of war: