Number one: the ‘I or me?’ business. People often get this wrong in speech (I have heard well-known novelists and also professors of literature get this wrong), but it’s rare to see it in published prose. Here is a quote from Bill McKibben’s would-be green bible, The End of Nature: ‘A ten-minute walk brings the dog and I to the waterfall.’ Now, take out the ‘the dog and’ bit – lose the dog – and silently rehearse that sentence: ‘A ten-minute walk brings I to the waterfall’? Whether it’s the dog and I, or John and I, or the other board members and I, put the ‘I’ first for a moment, and your ear will guide you. Ditto, obviously, with ‘John and me met up with Mary’…Personally I find this less irksome than ‘Mary met up with John and I’, which is not only an illiteracy but also an attempted genteelism.
Some people think that ‘myself’ is there to help them out. ‘John and myself met up with’, ‘brings the dog and myself’: it may not be an illiteracy, but it certainly sounds like one. Myself is just a crap word, that’s all, though some constructions – notably reflexive verbs – force it on you. The other day, as Elena was lamenting one of her supposed character flaws, she said, ‘I hate me’; and I thought that was a definite improvement.
Number two: the ‘who or whom?’ business. This is very slightly trickier. ‘John, whom I know to be an honourable man’ is right; ‘John, whom I know is an honourable man’ is wrong. Here’s what you do: you mentally recast the subclauses as main clauses – ‘I know him to be an honourable man’, ‘I know he is an honourable man’ – and your ear will guide you: ‘him’ demands ‘whom’, and ‘he’ demands ‘who’…In conversational prose be wary of whom. In the closing pages of Herzog, Bellow writes, ‘Whom was I kidding?’ This is grammatically correct; it also leaves the sentence up on one stilt. ‘Whom the fuck d’you think you’re looking at?’ Or even worse, ‘At whom the fuck d’you think you’re looking?’ Never worry about ending a sentence with a preposition. ‘That rule’, Churchill famously said, ‘is the kind of pedantry up with which I will not put.’
These are rather menial exercises; but having established a relationship with your mind’s ear (your aural imagination), you can then go on to cultivate it. I spend a large fraction of my working day saying whole sentences again and again in my head. What I’m doing is probing for dissonances, for false quantities. And I never get them all, no, you never get them all…
The thing is, literature differs from the other arts in one glaring particular. Not everybody can paint or sculpt, not everybody can act or sing. But everybody can write. So you’re in the position of a trainee pilot in a world where everybody – from the age of four or five – can fly an aeroplane.
Words lead a double life, and so far as I can see what this means is that you have to become something of an expert on them – an expert on words; and I spend another large fraction of my day looking them up. I find it stabilising and also salutary. Every time I do it I feel a grey cell being born – while no doubt a billion are blindly dying off. Check the exact definition, check the origin. That word is then more firmly yours.
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…For a whole decade I was brimful of foreboding about my destined mood. That decade was my fifties (your fifties are spent coping with the negative eureka of your forties: no, you are not an exception to the rule of time). Is it going to be a fair mood or a foul mood? Well, guess who took care of that. Mr Christopher Hitchens, that’s who. I’m not even sure how he did it. But he did it.
If your destined mood is your final mood, which it would seem to be, then it is part of your preparation for death. During this period, as you lie dying, there may be physical hardships and humiliations to get through; so long as you’re good and old, though (seventy-something will just about do), it’s philosophically straightforward. Remember. Time is a river that carries you away; but you are the river.
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By now of course ‘my mind’s eye’ is categorically unusable. Not, or not only, because it belongs to someone else. Immature writers imitate, said Eliot, and mature writers steal: you can pocket the odd phrase, but only if you then do something with it, something ‘mature’. The rightful owner is Shakespeare – so you’d get caught, and quickly, too. This is the Plagiarist’s Dilemma: your writers have to be worth stealing from, and their stuff is famous for that reason…
You can’t use ‘the mind’s eye’ because you’d be violating a master law of writing, which is: Never use a form of words which is in any sense ready made. A form of words like stifling heat or biting cold or healthy scepticism or yawning gap; adjective and noun, long-married couples who ought by now to be sick of the sight of each other. And the same goes for shopworn novelties: rapidly ageing newlyweds of the kind we’ll be looking at in twenty pages or so, when we turn to the matter of Decorum.
For now, I’ll leave you with a quote, which (conveniently) offends on both counts: ‘In business, I don’t actively make decisions based on my religious beliefs, but those beliefs are there – big time.’ Donald J. Trump, Crippled America: How To Make America Great Again (2015). In this instance, Trump is also peddling a consummate untruth (for targeted electoral gain). But let other pens dwell on that.
*1 In January 2000, as I mentioned, Vonnegut sleepily upended an ashtray overflowing with
