Earthly Powers (88 page)

       "What is truth?" somebody called, one who from his vocal resonance must have been a member of the faculty. Val stood and cried, and it was strange to me, who had never seen him show evidence of knowledge of the works of Shakespeare, to hear words of Shakespeare from his lips, bearded or otherwise: "This above all: to thine own self be true." And he rolled out, terrible as a prophet, by way of the aisle, applauded and even cheered.

       "We'll go out the back way," Professor Korzeniowski said. And we did, by way of the stage wings. "That finished," he said, "not quite, well, the way we would have wished." I noted the Spenserian music of the semivowels. "Wrigley," he said, as we tripped over electric cables in the neardark of the wings, "is near the end of his year with us. Having no interest in tenure he feels free to shock. He has shocked and will shock more before he goes. The sequence of poems he is writing and reads aloud to his creative writing class. Shocking. Just now he was shocking. Of course, he is popular with the students. Popularity is a siren singing on a rock. It is never a thing to be aimed for, not in my opinion." And then, as we came into sunlight by way of a door, he looked many things at me: confused, apologetic, embarrassed, reproachful. I had claimed to be popular and now that was my sin. It was Val, the unpopular, who was popular. Professor Korzeniowski had been dragged from the Bower of Bliss to preside over my unpopularity. He had better get rid of me. "You will find your nephew," he said, and pointed, "in the Wilmore Wertmueller Building. He is not unpopular." Beyond the little congeries of low blocks that made up the college the endless flat Indiana landskip basked. There was a faint smell of tomato ketchup on the mild May wind. A tomato processing factory stood a mile off.

       A misshapen lad with glasses and an eager open mouth limped up to us. Under his arm he had Sapir and Bloomfield, others. "Pardon me, sir," he said, "I was interested in the common possession of a species of sigmatismus demonstrated by yourself and by Professor Wrigley. You said thorrow and he said thine own thelf. Is this typical of British educated speech?"

       "Sod off," I said with a clear sibilance. He did not understand the expression. I relented. "Read Professor Sodoff on the phenomenon." He thanked me.

       John, Professor John Campion, was lecturing to a small group on what I took to be some aspects of linguistic anthropology or anthropological linguistics. "The linguistic specialist," he said, "is scared of the semantic element in his subject. Phonemes and morphemes cause him no difficulty, but once you start studying meaning you're into culture. And what is culture? A. L. Kroeber said it was 'that larger whole which is the common property of all groups of men and which distinctively sets off mankind from all other animals.' This is what anthropology studies. Linguists, says Kroeber, equate culture with the lexical element of their subject, but, as Professor Borghese put it, they prefer the study of forms because, once they let meaning in, the laboratory door is torn from its hinges and life comes rampaging like a gang of louts.

       "We can see the problem of meaning only when we look at it in an anthropological context. Let's take what Professor Eugene A. Nida recently said in his work on linguistics and ethnology, where he examines the translation tasks of the Bible-bearing missionary, traditionally the pioneer in anthropological enquiry. There was a particular problem facing a missionary who wanted to translate the phrase bill of divorcement, as it appears in the Gospel of Saint Mark, ten, four, into the language of the Totonacs of Mexico. Now when the Totonacs want a divorce they pay the town secretary to strike their names from the civil register. If divorce is by mutual consent, the fee is small; if only one party wants a divorce, the fee's a good deal higher. But the whole thing is regarded as legal, and the Totonac word for divorce has, as its root meaning, erasure 0f name. If you translated bill of divorcement literally as something like a letter stating that a man is leaving his wife—well, the Totonacs would be disgusted by the whole concept of a religion that permitted such an abomination. When the Totonacs had read out to them another passage in Mark—fourteen, thirteen—the one about a man carrying a pitcher of water, well, they were both amused and disgusted. Water-carrying to them is woman's work, and, to quote Nida, 'they were astonished at the man's ignorance of propriety.' With some African languages the problems are hair-raising. One man rendered into one East African dialect the term Holy Spirit into a word meaning something like (I quote) 'a spirit, probably an evil one, which has acquired a tabu by contact with some other spirit undoubtedly evil.'

       "It's not only a matter of lexis. Linguistic structures tell us a great deal about What is laughingly called the primitive mind, which usually turns out to be less primitive than that of many a full-blooded meat-and-potatoes American. I'm delighted to welcome here today my uncle, the distinguished novelist Kenneth Toomey—" All turned to look in amiability and wonder: none had been present, thank God, at my lecture. "—He, who spent some time in Malaya, will confirm the existence in the Malay language, as also in the Chinese, of a feature called the numerical coefficient. The Malay word for one is satu, the Malay word for a house is rumah, but you don't translate one house as satu rumah. It has to be sa-buah rumah, where the buah literally means a fruit but is used here to signify something bulky. Biji literally means a seed, but one egg is translated as sa-biji telor, biji being the right numerical coefficient for a small smooth object. According to Benjamin Lee Whorf, the Navaho Indians have an even subtler system of classification. The Navaho world of inanimate objects is split into long things and round things, and these affect the verb stems of the language. You need one verb stem for a round thing and another for a long.

       "Then there's the question of tricks played with linguistic structure in accordance with ritual and other cultural traditions. As I have one uncle here in this room already, it seems appropriate that I should invoke the spirit of another, now alas dead, to demonstrate how even in British English the ludic element, as we may call it, can be used for a quite serious purpose." I had not noticed the black box which, I now observed, contained a record player that John began to operate. He put on a disc and, from the loudspeaker set above the blackboard, there came out scratchily the voice of my brother Tom speaking cockney back slang. I remembered the act well: Tom was being a pert cunning spadger in a dry goods shop, calling his assistant for some delo nocab for the delo woc and telling him to trosh taiwy her on the araremed ragus. It was a strange moment, it brought tears. John explained. "Here you have a reversal of letters rather than phonemes, deliberately mystifying, but only to the customer in a shop whom the assistants wish to cheat. The delo nocab is old bacon, and the delo woc is the old cow. She is to be shortweighted on the Demerara sugar. And so on. Now consider what happens in southern Mindoro in the Philippines. There the jungle people known as the Hanunoo have to learn phonemic substitution as a prescribed skill of courtship. If the courter belongs to a particular social level, there is a certain relaxation of the taboo on endogamy. The courted is closely related to the courter but he has to pretend that she does not know this. Hence there is a pattern of disguise—blanket over the head, unusual mode of speaking. Barang becomes rabang and katagbuq is deformed to kabugtaq."

       And so on. It was well done. Here was a bright young man, blond and big, his manner informal but his subject matter under rigorous control, the handsomeness in which I saw so much of Hortense qualified only slightly by the wideeyed dementia of the academic. After his lesson we went together to the office he shared with a certain Professor Bucolo, an African specialist who had a day off. We drank coffee among the crammed bookshelves and the small trophies of anthropological exploration. John had not as yet been far: he had stayed on a Nipissing reservation and examined some folk customs on the Isthmus of TehuantePec. His professorship was provisional, he would be some time attaining tenure, he was still at work on his doctoral thesis. "It was strange and moving," I said, "to hear the voice of poor Tom, not only here in Indiana but in the course of an academic lecture."

       "Oh, you know what they're like at Choate. Very anglophile. One of the staff had a complete set of the Tommy Toomey records. He's supposed to represent a great dead culture."

       "Yes," I said. "Comedy without cruelty. The tones of a kind of helpless amiability. A lost empire. That bastard Val Wrigley once said that Tom was a saint. Why didn't you warn me Wrigley was here?"

       "I'd no idea you knew each other. In what way is he a bastard?"

       "He reviled me for lack of loyalty to various things. After my talk, that is. The students applauded. I think," I said, "I'll skip tonight's party in my honour."

       "Don't, please. They'll find a way of blaming me. It was I who suggested you for this year's Berger Memorial Lecture."

       "Nepotism the other way round. Is there a word for it?"

       So I went. There were drinks and a buffet supper at the house of the college president, Dr. Ovid F. Pargeter. It was a terribly new house and terribly clean. Engravings of Greek antiquities were set on the salmonpink walls at exactly ruled distances from each other. The furniture was Scandinavian. Outside the windows open to the warm evening air there stretched on all sides terribly flat Indiana. I have a memory of flashing glass, in hands and on noses. The faculty wives mostly knew my work: their glasses flashed flirtatious admiration. I was old enough to be a kind of classic, though not of Dr. Ovid F. Pargeter's kind. There was a word for the sort of devotion that led more or less straight from the baptismal font to an adult life of close specialisation. Dr. Pargeter had been named for the obstetrician who had presided over his difficult birth in Dayton, Ohio. Pargeter pre had never even head of Publius Ovidius Naso (43 B.C.-? A.D.17), and now here was his son, risen to academic heights through his famed editorship of the A mores.

       "What would the word be?" I asked him. "Eponymy?"

       "That properly refers to the derivation of place-names from personal ones I would say, Mr Toomey."

       My nephew John brought Professor Bucolo to be introduced, a small swarthy man who had also risen: in his instance from Mulberry Street, Manhattan, to a study of primitive African taboos. He held two books. One was my own; New Roads to God. He wished me to autograph it.

       "Heavens," I said. "I thought this was long dead and buried."

       'There are copies around," Professor Bucolo said."Thank you," as I signed it. 'I have nothing of comparable weight to offer in exchange, but I hope you'll accept this in token of my esteem." And he handed me, already floridly em purpled with his signature, a little pamphlet entitled Language and Culture Among the Oina People: Notes for a Survey.

       "Who," I asked, "are the Oma people?"

       "One of these days," the professor said, "I hope to make a more direct and prolonged contact than has so far been possible. There is the question of obtaining an adequate endowment. This is based mainly on what I learned on a brief visit to Kilwa Kivinje. There were five members of the Oma tribe recovering from a disease somewhat like yaws in the missionary hospital run by a certain Father Alessandri, a Frenchman despite his name. You may," he said with cunning insight, "find things here useful for seasoning your fiction. Like the fact that the Oma people cannot count beyond two. Ok, fa, rup. One, two, many."

       "We're the same," John said, "when we count in Latin. Unilateral, bilateral, multilateral."

       "This book of yours," Professor Bucolo said, weighing it in his right hand, "has an interesting chapter on the adaptation of Christianity to the needs of socalled primitive peoples. For my part, I consider such notions as it contains somewhat implausible. Christianity cannot be adapted without danger of loss of its essential principles."

       "As I say in the introduction," I said, "these ideas aren't mine. I present myself as a kind of popularising editor." A drinking faculty member lowered his glass and flashed his glasses in my direction on that word popularising. I was glad to see that Val Wrigley was not around. I gathered he was running an informal beery poetry reading session in his own quarters. "But the ideas propounded were formulated by genuine Christian churchmen."

       "Including mainly," John said, "Uncle Carlo. I can hear his voice. Did you see Life magazine?"

       "I saw it."

       "When," John said, "I saw Uncle Carlo all those years back, he put an idea for a book in my head. He seems good at that sort of thing."

       "His mother, your grandmother, was good at it too, rest her soul. What book?"

       "When I told him I wanted to study anthropology he said I ought to make my life's work a big book on the religious impulse. A kind of Golden Bough? I said. As well written, he said. I was stupidly surprised, I didn't think a bishop would have read it, but of course he had. He knew all about the Hanged God and Attis and Osiris. The idea was that I should show man's universal helplessness without a redeemer. Anthropology as Christian propaganda? I said. Then he started shouting, you know his way. Just look for the truth, he yelled. And then he dragged out a three-gallon carboy of the local wine. The search for a man who was really God, he yelled."

       "Who," I said, "is God Manning?"

       "A poor wandering demented preacher creature," Professor Bucolo said. "He gets in among students in coffee shops and sells them a demented pamphlet of his about the way and the other thing. Some of the kids swear by him for a time. Then they forget when a wandering yogiman or bald bogus Buddhist comes along. The religious impulse can be very dangerous. It damages, sometimes permanently. But most of these kids are healthy and young and pagan."

       John looked at his wristwatch. Bucolo grinned. "She's late," John said.