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On The Arts: The English language is the best of all worlds
Sunday, June 06, 1999 By Barry Paris, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Having just watched and reviewed "The Winslow Boy," about a 1908 incident in which a 14-year-old cadet is accused of stealing a 5-shilling money order and expelled from the Royal Navy Academy, I'm struck again by the power and beauty of dialogue.
Barry Paris is a Post-Gazette movie critic and the author of several books.
A courtroom drama without the courtroom, the movie, gorgeously directed and co-written by David Mamet, boasts a language that crackles with brittle honesty. In an age of special effects in less-than-special movies, the dialogue washed over me like a cleansing rain.
So, let's take a respite from propriety (ever so briefly) to make a politically and linguistically incorrect declaration that English is the greatest creative-literary language in the world.
I've spent years gathering the evidence. If it please the court, I offer Exhibit A -- French. I adore French. Only cretins and Germans do NOT adore French. But it is absurd.
Two examples suffice:
1) Once in Luxembourg, for want of any other movie house in that odd duchy, I went to see "El Dorado," subtitled in French. Enter John Wayne through the swinging doors of the bar. He looks around and growls, "Howdy!" Up pops the subtitle "Enchant !" -- a mot too bon for the occasion.
2) My 550-page "Louise Brooks" biography for Knopf was 650 pages in Belfond's French translation (same size print and paper). Beautiful, yes, but de trop for economy -- too much.
My 450-page "Audrey Hepburn" book for Putnam, on the other hand, was about 350 pages in the unabridged Japanese version. We don't honestly know Japanese, but we fret for the nuances -- too little.
Hungarian is delicious, but the servings can kill you. The word for "credits" is K sz netnyilv n t s. And it has 17 case endings -- 34, if you count plural. Up the Danube a ways, Bohemian words mesmerize you but often lack vowels, as in the impossible phrase "Strc prst skrz krk" ("stick a finger in your throat"). The Surgeon General has determined that Czech is hazardous to your larynx.
Italian? So lovely, it can't be harsh enough when you need it. German? So harsh, it can't be lovely.
Creole eschews the letter R. I need R's. Hawaiian has a total of only seven consonants. I need more. Quechuan and Icelandic have even weirder and more eccentric drawbacks. I've studied 'em all, been defeated by many, and saved my most beloved "foreign" language for last.
Mae West wrote the dialogue for her last film, "Sextette," in which she plays an unlikely femme fatale (at 80) and Tony Curtis plays her Russian lover. "My darling Marlo," he coos, "remember the songs I used to sing to you in my native tongue?"
"I don't remember the songs," she replies, "but I remember the native tongue."
Russian is my favorite nonnative tongue, and the world's second-greatest literary one. For depth, crude power and economy, you want Russian. I fancied myself fluent in it years ago, when I was the designated spokesman for an American tour group at a formal Soviet dinner in Moscow. After a great many welcome speeches and a great quantity of vodka, my turn came to deliver some carefully prepared diplomatic remarks.
It was the middle of a freezing January. I was quite eloquent until a passing reference to Moscow as the only city where people could swim (plivat) outdoors every day of the year. I now know that plavat is the word for swim and that plivat means "to spit." I didn't know it then as, slain by a phoneme, I leaned down for my friend Natalya to explain the roar of laughter. She suppressed a hoot and whispered one word in my ear: nyekulturno -- literally, "uncultured" or "not done," far more explanatory than the dozen English words needed to flesh out its subtleties: "You just made a fool of yourself with a vulgar faux pas." Like Mrs. Malaprop's praise for reaching "the pineapple of success."
I have spoken and written Russian more warily ever since.
In the end, we love all native tongues, all beautiful in their own right and charm. But all bow, in the end, to the language of Shakespeare -- even though some bow backwards, with their rear ends, like Stella Adler:
"Shakespeare never just says, 'Be merciful.' He says it 10,000 ways. 'The quality of mercy is not strained, it dropeth as the gentle rain.' He goes on and on until I finally know what mercy is because he talks so much. It is poetry. The modern play says, 'Please -- have mercy!' That's all. It is less embroidered. It is less."
That modern-Elizabethan contrast is illustrated by a Manhattan theater joke. I can't do justice to it in a family newspaper, but here goes: A panhandler hits up a dapper man coming out of Lincoln Center. "Sir," says the gentleman, raising a didactic index finger, "'Neither a lender nor a borrower be' -- William Shakespeare." The panhandler replies, " 'Go [expletive] yourself, you cheap [expletive]' -- David Mamet."
In English you can have it both ways, as Louise Brooks did in a drunken letter to a lover: "If I ever bore you, it'll be with a knife.". On a good day, I can amuse, annoy or reveal more to you about the human condition in 10 well-selected words than George Lucas and his overpaid elves can muster with $158 million worth of computer visuals. It may take me eight hours to select them, for which my editors all want to kill me, but if I'm inspired, you'll remember my words longer than George's F/X.
It's nice to slip into some good-over-evil fantasy for two hours, forget your troubles and the evils of a cruel world. But you can distract yourself just as well or better by experiencing something that could help you improve that cruel world, or at least understand it a little better. Something that might not leave you thinking, "God, I'm back in depressing reality now," but "God! Maybe that might work for our sewage battle in Beltzhoover or the national ban on handguns or my threadbare relationship with my son."
Fantasy and violence-based "action" entertainment is inferior to intellectual action and its nonviolent alternatives. Your kids won't choose it over "Star Wars XXVII: The Phantom Dentist," but if YOU did, they'd go along. ("The Winslow Boy" is G-rated, by the way.) It is unnerving to find myself preaching Quayle-esque "family values," but you and yours would do better to stop on the way home for a $10 round of milkshakes and free gab session than for a $39.95 set of Battle Droids.
Personal and social solutions begin with ideas, which begin with words, not Ewoks. Support your local English teacher more than your local Toys R Us outlet. Get down on your metaphorical knees, and be thankful for this most exhilarating vernacular on the rare occasions when people -- from Shakespeare to Mamet -- take full advantage of it.
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