Vintage Reading (21 page)

Did you know that Thomas Jefferson first coined “to belittle,” a word that became the subject of mockery among the educated classes on the other side of the Atlantic?

Or that “Salisbury steak,” a staple of cafeterias everywhere, is a holdover from World War I, when anything so German as a hamburger carried a tinge of treason?

Or that long before “prioritize” came along to reduce today’s defenders of the English pure to apoplexy, Americans were using “electrize” (meaning
to electrocute), “sloganize,” and “backwardize?” And that good ol’ everyday “burglarize” goes back only to 1871?

Did you know that the kind of crude cigar known as a “stogy” goes back to the “Conestoga,” the classic covered wagon of pioneer fame, which in turn derived from a valley in Lancaster County, Pa., named for an extinct band of Iroquois Indians?

Mencken, who owned what at the time was the best private linguistics library in the United States, is full of stuff like that. And in virtually every paragraph he exhibits the very insouciance he ascribes to American English itself. Here’s Mencken on dictionary-maker Noah Webster: “It was almost impossible for him to imagine himself in error, and most of his disquisitions were far more pontifical than argumentative in tone. He had no respect for dignity or authority ... When it came to whooping up his spelling-book he was completely shameless, and did not hesitate to demand encomiums from Washington, Jefferson and Franklin ...”

Don’t you wish they had written your high school history text that way?

Or listen to Mencken lace into Walt Whitman: “His early prose was dingy, cliche-laden journalese of the era, and after his discovery of Carlyle he indulged himself in a heavy imitation of the Scotsman’s gnarled and tortured style. Not many specimens of the popular speech ever got into his writings, either in prose or in verse. He is remembered for few besides ‘yawp’ and ‘gawk.’ His own inventions were mainly cacophonous miscegenations of roots and suffixes, e.g. ‘Scientism,’ ‘presidentiat,’ ‘venerealese’ ..., and not one of them has ever gained any currency.”

It was through intellectual panzer attacks like that, of course, that Mencken made his name; the
New York Times
once called him “the most powerful private citizen in America.” But this book owes as much to his delight in the linguistic exuberance of his compatriots as to his contempt for the philologists and “school ma’ams” of his generation. Indeed, if you want to feel irretrievably and proudly American read Mencken and realize how many words and expressions in daily use have their roots in our soil:

“Bum a ride,” or have your hair “styled” by a “beautician,” or “letter” in
a sport, or “research” a book, or “bulldoze” a house for a “superhighway,” or take a “lengthy” vacation, or endure a “hot spell,” or rummage at the “bargain counter” of a “department store,” or even claim “mileage” deductions on your income tax return, and you’re using Americanisms—“dyed-in-the-wool” Americanisms at that.

Mencken loved our language.
The American Language
is a work of high scholarship infused and enriched by that love.

____________

By Antoine de Saint Exupery
First published in 1943

If there were taboos against ridiculing grown-ups as there are against ethnic minorities,
The Little Prince
might never have been published. Adults are an absurd and unimaginative lot, one comes away from it convinced. One best avoids them. And, at all costs, one avoids growing up into one. Among representatives of the species we meet in Antoine de Saint Exupery’s classic are:

• An alcoholic who drinks to forget his shame over drinking.

• A king who expects instant obedience from his subjects, of whom he has none.

• A businessman who occupies himself by totting up his possessions, which consist of the stars in the sky; they are his, he explains, because it was he who first thought to own them.

• A man who wears a hat just so he can tip it in acknowledgement of admiring comments.

These characters inhabit small planets visited by the little prince in trips through the galaxy after leaving his own planet. Finally, reaching Earth, he meets the narrator, an aviator (like Saint Exupery himself) whose plane has broken down and crashed in the Sahara.

The narrator, we learn, once nourished hopes of becoming an artist. But as a child, he was discouraged by grown-ups who failed to see in the amoeboid shape he drew with a colored pencil what was so plain to him—a boa constrictor consuming an elephant. Advised to lay aside his drawings and turn instead to history, arithmetic and grammar, he’d done so. Now, his plane wrecked in the desert, he encounters the little prince, with his flowing scarf,
his love of sunsets, his haunting innocence.

The planet of this little prince was one he’d shared with three volcanoes (one of them extinct), occasional growths of baobab tree roots (which must be uprooted lest they grow and split the planet into pieces), a few caterpillars and a single flower. This flower was coquettish, willful and not entirely likable—a flower with perhaps the most complex personality in all of literature.

Spurned by the flower, the little prince had left his own world and begun his planet-hopping travels. On Earth, he’d met a fox who’d reminded him of the eternal verities of life that grown-ups have forgotten and are too busy to relearn. They “set out on their way in express trains,” the little prince says of adults, “but they do not know what they are looking for. Then they rush about, and get excited, and turn round and round.”

None of this, I hasten to add, is silly. It is far more serious, for example, than the stock quotations from Wall Street you find in the newspaper. Children will instantly grasp its significance. Even adults inclined to say, like the starowning businessman, “I don’t amuse myself with balderdash,” will catch on. To fail to be moved by
The Little Prince
is to be a lump of asphalt.

But please, whatever you do, don’t let the Adult Anti-Defamation Commission get its imagination-starved mitts on it. Just as kings and presidents invoke the spectre of The Enemy around which to unite the masses, Saint Exupery rallies his readers against adults. Or rather, against the constellation of traits that usually emerge once past childhood and make us into the literalminded, pompous and vain creatures we are. Indeed, the author goes so far as to apologize to his readers for dedicating the book to his friend, a grown-up, then actually corrects the dedication to read: “To Leon Werth—when he was a little boy.”

The Little Prince
is a book to read when you can’t recall the last time you drew pictures in the sand, played ping-pong with a porpoise, raced the minute hand to 12 or floated in a raft to the moon.

____________

By Henry Adams
First published in 1918, after a private printing in 1906

Nephew of a Harvard president, grandson of a U.S. president and great-grandson of another, Henry Adams was the son of the American ambassador to England, Charles Francis Adams. At the age of 23, he served his father in London as personal secretary and watched up close as Adams senior, in a heroic bout of Civil War diplomacy, kept England neutral despite its sympathies for the South. Adams emerged later as among the most distinguished historians of his time. He was a world traveler and world figure, counting much of America’s and Britain’s intellectual elite among his friends and acquaintances.

And yet, in
The Education of Henry Adams
, Adams comes across as almost pathologically diffident. If you didn’t know better, you might conclude he knew nothing and learned less, that his life was directionless, his judgment unerringly wrong. You might so conclude, that is, until you remembered that Adams forever wound up in the company of the 19th century’s literary, intellectual, and political giants; and that
The Education
was first circulated privately to only about 100 intimates—none of whom needed the slightest reminder of his achievements.

Adams’ diffidence served a rhetorical purpose—to argue that by upbringing, schooling, travel, early life experiences, and training, his “education”—as well as those of his whole generation —left him unprepared for the complex world into which he was thrust. Adams’ great-grandfather, John Adams, succeeded George Washington as president in 1797. Adams himself lived to see World War I; he finished
The Education
about when Einstein was polishing up his theory of relativity, when bicycles, automobiles, and telephones were everywhere, and with world affairs descending into
chaos. This new world, Adams says on every page, was one for which his education left him unfit.

Adams’ account includes perfect little sketches of key 19th century figures, like Swinburne, Garibaldi, the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner, and Adams’ close friend John Hay, secretary of state under McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt and author of the Open Door policy to China. Similarly evocative are portraits of Chicago, Berlin, London, Paris, Rome: “In 1860 the lights and shadows were still medieval, and medieval Rome was alive; the shadows breathed and glowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses. No sand-blast of science had yet skinned off the epidermis of history, thought and feeling. The pictures were uncleaned, the churches unrestored, the ruins unexcavated.”

But all this merely establishes context for Adams’ confusion at finding himself in a coal-fired age of dynamos, ocean steamers, and an imperially-minded America. Even seemingly innocuous bits of travelogue serve his point: “Rome,” he concludes, “was the worst spot on earth to teach 19th century youth what to do with a 20th century world.”

This is an intellectual autobiography, an account of what Adams came to think and how he came to think it. His public life is well represented. His sometimes wearisome notions of history as a dynamic force get full vent. But his personal life intrudes hardly at all. Wholly absent are the two decades of his life before 1892. During that period, he wrote two novels (under a pseudonym); married; bore the death of his father and the suicide of his wife by cyanide poisoning; commissioned the distinguished sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens to make a monument to his wife that now stands in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington; and wrote his monumental nine-volume history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations. All this gets but the sketchiest mention. “What one did—or did not do—with one’s education, after getting it,” Adams insists, “need trouble the inquirer in no way; it is a personal matter only which would confuse him.”

So
The Education
is a curious amalgam. While outwardly autobiographical, it leaves long periods of the author’s life untouched. While offering insight
into 19th century international diplomacy, it cites the historical record itself only obliquely, leaving one scurrying to other sources. While revealing the play of Adams’ mind, it hides almost the whole of his heart.

To the modern reader, its importance lies in making more comprehensible the great middle period of the American experiment. No longer will the reader see the Revolutionary, Civil, Spanish-American, and First World Wars as merely violent exclamation points, connected only by sodden text in a history book. It is as if Henry Adams had taken a needle and, through his own life and that of his family, stitched a continuous thread between the nation’s beginnings in the 18th century and its coming of age in the 20th.

A Romance of Many Dimensions

____________

By Edwin A. Abbott
First published in 1884

You and I live in three dimensions. The would-be author of
Flatland
, identified in the original edition only as “A square,” lives in two. His tale — a lively, provocative blend of science fiction, pure mathematics and social satire—recounts his discovery of the third dimension, and his fate at the hands of fellow Flatlanders for daring to tell about it.

Flatland
could so easily have been just another clever idea amateurishly executed, like a sophomore’s strained efforts at “creative” writing; instead, it’s a virtuoso performance. Imagined details of its world are worked out with great clarity and precision. The range of human social experience upon which it comments is astounding.

The basics: In Flatland, the universe is a thin disc of limitless extent. We, in Spaceland, can look down upon the otherwise quite human triangles, squares, and hexagons who inhabit it. But confined to their pancake of a world, Flatlanders themselves can’t see one another, though they can infer presences.

In Flatland’s pecking order, status rises with the number of one’s sides. Thus, triangles are lowly, pentagons higher, and infinitely-sided circles highest of all, forming a priestly caste. The author is a Square, a professional or gentleman. Equilateral Triangles are sturdy yeomen. Below them lies an underclass of brutish Isosceles Triangles, some, of greater “irregularity” than others, being scarcely civilized at all. And the lowest of the low, subject to special rules of behavior, and not polygons at all but merely straight lines with
heads and tails? Why, women, of course.

How do Flatlanders, restricted to their paper-thin plane of existence and able to discern only edges and lines, recognize one another? In just one example of an imaginative device doing double duty as technical expedient and social commentary, they have available three means—Hearing, Feeling and Sight Recognition—their reliance on each depends on their social station. Thus, “feeling” roughly corresponds to the crude physicality often attributed to peasant cultures, while “sight recognition” is the lofty pursuit of the upper classes.

Author Edwin A. Abbott’s ironies are so gentle, and seem to arise so organically from his world, it’s as if he were slyly saying, “Oh, does that conjure up some conceit or frailty of your own society? Well, now, what a coincidence...” He exhibits almost Machiavellian clearsightedness about how societies are constituted, neither lacking compassion for the oppressed nor becoming overwrought about them.

Thus, in Abbot’s world, Isosceles Triangles of the lowest orders occasionally beget better endowed Equilateral Triangles. Not surprisingly, this occasions rejoicing among them—but satisfaction, too, among the aristocracy; for here is a safe, slow means of upward mobility that neither weakens their control nor diminishes their privileges—“most useful barrier against revolution.”