Scything Rustics and Other Failures

The Last Station, 2009, is a superb film in many, many respects and I will enjoy watching it, d.v., with intervals betwixt, several more times before my demise. As people know, it is a narrative on the final phase of the life of Leo Tolstoy and, instead of Russia, it was set in three parts of Germany, to wit, the remaining  green areas of Sachsen-Anhalt, Brandenburg and Thüringen. However, the picture is another victim of the frequent failure of the film industry to take into account the realities of various aspects of agriculture. Not only do we have the so oft-idealised peasants, beloved of scene setters, trolloping across the set and conveying minimal credibility as to their functions in life, but we are treated to an aerial view of other rustics scything bang in the midst of something green rather than from the edge of the field. And far more ridiculous, they are standing stock still, flailing their scythes purposelessly over the same spot for as long as the shot lasts. Maybe production budget targets demanding the minimising of compensation payable to the real farmer for the loss of his crop were to blame for that particular hoot.

Film companies employ historical and other specialist advisers; yet one hears that when their advice is delivered, the huddle response is often a resounding ‘Overruled!’ For a viewer such as I am, it is often the lacking elements of verisimilitude which stick in my mind the longest after I have watched a film – the failures inherent in those ‘overruleds’ which ‘spoil the ship for that ha’pworth of tar’. 

NAZI Germany: Hester Vaizey guides Venusian and Martian readers

Hester Vaizey reviews two new works about NAZI Germany in the book review section of the Spectator Magazine for about 20 May 2011. One of the books is Giles Milton’s Wolfram: the boy who went to war. I wonder for whom she imagines she was writing that review. I would guess that parts of it would have been suitably pitched for twelve-year old British readers in the 1950s and 1960s, youngsters whose parents would have talked endlessly, as did my own, about ‘the Germans’ and bombing. 
   I quote from her discourse: ‘There was no single uniform experience of Nazism.’ Maybe the next quotation would be more fit for fifteen-year-olds since the first word could be a challenge, ‘rhetoric and reality were not the same thing’, but then we revert again to what is suitable for history fledglings. ‘Milton’s account reveals that Germans, too, experienced real suffering in wartime, whether it was separation from loved ones, chronic food shortages or the Allied bombing.’ My word, Milton must, in her estimation, be some mighty scholar! Yet there is more, as she sees it, by way of a revolution in interpretation of German experience between 1933 and 1945, ‘Milton’s close analysis of the experiences of Germans demonstrates that they too could be victims of the war.’ Gosh..., indeed, remarkably close analysis must have been required to turn our understanding upside down after such a fashion!  

    I suggest that you read the whole review for yourself. Those quotations do not constitute the extent of her approach to the book: she sees other similar break-through revelations for our understanding. I went to the comments section of the page, but found that everyone else was too embarrassed to express their views on that startling review. 

     Such a piece, which I fear may be the anorexic end of a coming wedge, is another landmark along a declining path in copy editorship at the Spectator. The rot began to inch in a couple of years ago with increasingly frequent inattention to aberrant spelling and usage, and now, it seems, it is creeping to judgement on and acceptance of material appropriate to what is a highly literate and aware readership. As readers, we have long been accustomed in the book reviews to incisive insight, teasing paradox and other clever tricks, not to mention assumption of a wealth of deep background knowledge. Ms. Vaizey, buck up! The readership of the Speccie has never noticeably been an element of any intellectual Lumpenproletariat. And poor Giles Milton deserves and could expect a bit better of your Cantabrigian fastnesses. 

tempus fugit

My ‘cover’ has been ‘blown’ – as Americans teach one to say – and that twice in the course of the last twenty-four years. In my first summer in Okinawa, a senior colleague thought I might like to accompany him in visiting a high school to observe teaching practice performed by one of our students. I very readily accepted and we arrived, met the principal and vice principal, and generated very productive small talk arising from my colleague’s having himself been a pupil at that very school in that trauma-ridden post-war era.

We then ascended the stairs on our way to the classroom during the five-minute period between lessons. A foreigner was something of a rarity in a school in 1987, and one lively, likely lad called out ‘Robinson Crusoe’. Inspiration for the remark could only have derived from my dark brown beard which might have been as long as an inch. It was not a malicious or vicious, nor yet a xenophobic remark, but derived from the education and humour of which he was possessed.

As for the second occasion, last Saturday evening, I suggested to a friend, a visiting American anthropologist, who has a liking for such things that we might spend an hour at a Japanese-style sauna in Naha. We were almost certainly likely to meet a number of my valued acquaintances to whom I wanted to introduce him. Indeed there were several of the expected friends awaiting the bodily and spiritual benefits to be derived from profuse perspiration. Among those whom I had never seen before were a father, his two small sons who may have been twins or closely born siblings, aged three of four, and his six- or seven-year-old daughter (allowed at that age in the male area). The daughter caught sight of me at close quarters and raised her hand to her mouth to whisper concealingly into her father’s ear, and certainly with a tinge of sparkling-eyed excitement in her countenance. I had no idea exactly what she was saying, but, smilingly and in an exaggerated, amateur dramatic manner, I rehearsed her gesture. In response, she acknowledged me in a happy but slightly confused way - I had, after all, caught her in the act of whispering something she did not want me to hear. We moved on, but later I found the four in a covey in one of the sauna rooms. The father and the daughter were reminded of their earlier perception and this time the word was audible – San-ta-kuraw-zu. She had met Father Christmas off duty, just about in the nude and so certainly in the flesh, and was plainly delighted. My beard is now patchily white, and though only about three or four millimetres long it definitely identified me as the one who takes on late December moonlighting duties.  

Linguistic change and capitulation in British English

Originally drafted in October 2008 and published in summary form on the letters page of the Daily Telegraph

Sir, I've been reading an online article published in your columns on the Lambeth Conference, and even within your conservative pages, I find, indeed unexpectedly, source for linguistic disappointment.

   Though it is nothing new, British English is being colonised by features of American English which seem to me probably to be generated by pressure from immigrants to the US seeking a convenient means of standardising and simplifying forms of expression.  

Whereas we used to be accustomed to 'deliver a lecture', 'make a speech', 'celebrate a mass', 'grant an interview' and so on, those and other collocations are now each being, as the cliché has it, dumbed down, or rounded down to present but one verbal common denominator, i.e., 'give a lecture', 'give a speech' and most lamentably 'give a mass' as the BBC apparently understood it when reporting one of the activities in which Benedict XVI was generously busying himself while in Lourdes.

   Your once religious, now religion, correspondent Martin Beckford informed us on 18 July 2008 in his article ‘Anglican Communion: More than one in four bishops to boycott Lambeth Conference’ that one Gene Robinson was ‘giving a sermon at St Mary's Church, Putney’. Hitherto it had been my unquestioning and simple belief that the clergy preached or delivered sermons.

Post-modernism stresses national, group and individual identity as one defining mark of our era, so why do our television and newspaper journalists so readily capitulate to a form of English other than their own? Why are they eager to sacrifice some of the aesthetically pleasing and defining elements of our form? Change cannot be resisted in language and is necessary, but why the headlong iconoclasm? Perhaps we may soon read or hear of a woman ‘giving a baby’, thereby to fall in with the term ‘give birth’, and thus avoid that moribund but still taxing word ‘deliver’. 

Was Queen Victoria a Papistical Fifth Columnist?

Jeremy Brock, whether ill-informed or over-ruled by producers, directors or editors of the film Mrs Brown, puts these words into Queen Victoria's mouth, 'Should the good Lord see fit to spare my son, I will order a mass [l.c. in the scenario as published on the Internet] to be celebrated [thank the same good Lord the verb is not 'given'] at St. George's. The people must share with their Queen her prayers and hopes for their future King.'

Here we find ourselves in the second half of the nineteenth century when the Oxford or Tractarian Movement was growing stronger and stronger in its influence, and generating an even more powerful counter-surge of evangelical reaction. The situation was taken so seriously that a Parliamentary Commission was set up to report on the extent and legality of ritualising tendencies in the Church of England. That report was duly published, and reprinted some decades ago by the Irish University Press. Various High Church clergy were investigated as to their legal culpability in performing Popish rituals in Anglican churches. In that controversy Queen Victoria was firmly on the side of the Evangelicals, then usually called the Low Church party, and, so, was opposed to Catholicising tendencies in the Church of England. Thus, when during the course of the drama, the health and survival of the future Edward VII were in question, we are led to let flee a loud, spontaneous guffaw at the notion of the Queen ordering a Mass, something which would have been entirely alien to her instincts.  She would have been more likely to order a Service of Thanksgiving, which would have been devoid of a Eucharistic element.