The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage

A Writer All Through

Mr. Derbyshire is the author of the novel Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream.

The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage, by Kingsley Amis (St. Martin's, 270 pp., $23.95)

Kingsley Amis: A Biography, by Eric Jacobs (St. Martin's, 392 pp., $26.95)

AH, USAGE. A couple of years ago I tried out one of those computerized style checkers. It promptly told me off for starting a sentence with "but." A few minutes' research confirmed what I felt sure of anyway: that Chaucer, Shakespeare, and God (insofar as He permitted His thoughts to be set in English by the translators of the King James Bible) all started sentences with "but" -- and I have never used the wretched style checker since.

There you have the beauty of usage, as against other elements of language like grammar or spelling: it offers so much latitude for one to develop one's own opinions. Those of Sir Kingsley Amis (1922 - 95) are now on offer in The King's English, a collection of the British novelist's thoughts, arranged alphabetically, on the use of words.

Some of the book will be baffling, perhaps incomprehensible, to an American reader, but not as much as you might think. Sir Kingsley was an Americanophile, and his book treats American usages with proper respect. Of Follett's Modern American Usage he says: "In its vigorous fashion it shows . . . how little good U.S. linguistic behaviour has come to differ from its British counterpart" -- an observation that startled me at first, but which on reflection I think wise.

Everyone has his favorite points for attention in a book like this. One of mine is the use of "data" with a plural verb form, a schoolmarmism found even in otherwise reliable publications like, well, NATIONAL REVIEW. "Data" may indeed derive from a Latin plural; but if it's Latin you're using, be so good as to print the word in italics. Out of italics, "data" is an English noun of the aggregative type -- like "rice" or "sand" -- and takes the singular ("the rice is cooked"). On this, and most other points, Amis is sound. As a person who crosses his sevens, however, I was dismayed by his severity toward this tiny mannerism: "gross affectation."

Sir Kingsley was an instance of several things, perhaps most famously of the angry young lefty who matures into a conservative curmudgeon. In Eric Jacobs's workmanlike biography, this rightward drift is said to have begun with Sir Kingsley's experiences teaching English literature in the postwar British university system, which was being democratized and expanded with, as he saw it, negative results. I think there was more to it than that. Sir Kingsley's abiding hatred was of snobbery, the arrogance of unearned rank. He had no objection to genuine elites -- elites of merit -- but detested both the conservative, class-based, pre-war British establishment and the bogus elites of talentless, and exclusively left-wing, self- promoters who began to infest not only academe but also the arts and the media from 1960 onward.

Eventually Sir Kingsley came to believe that the academicization of English literature was a mistake. He posed the rhetorical question: Since first being taught as a university course (at Oxford in 1894), had English literature got better or worse? He especially deplored the American tendency to judge a work of fiction in terms of "significance" and "importance." "In literature," he declared, "'importance' is not important; only good writing is." He thought modernism a complete dead end, Virginia Woolf a crashing bore, Ulysses unreadable (although he admired Joyce's earlier stories). He said of contemporary poetry: "[It] is written to impress other poets or would-be poets, not to please the ordinary reader."

Like all sensible people, Sir Kingsley regarded "political correctness" with utter derision, and he cheerfully confessed to politically impure thoughts. He even wrote novels around such thoughts. The main character in Stanley and the Women (1985) wrestles with a question every man has pondered at some time or another: Are women all mad? Similarly, when asked in an interview whether he was anti-Semitic, Sir Kingsley replied: "Very, very mildly." Urged to elaborate, he added: "Well, when I'm watching the credits roll at the end of a TV program, I say to myself 'Oh, there's another one."' Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.

"He never pretends to like anything," testified Amis's second wife. His tastes seem to have solidified early in his life, and did not change. Whole continents of human experience and endeavor were uninteresting to him: all of sport, most of the visual arts, religion (of which he was, however, respectful, describing himself as "an unwilling unbeliever"), modern languages, travel, opera, dance, science, nature. Fair enough; there is a kind of stubborn integrity in that. Yet I cannot help feeling that there is a lack of imagination, too -- a failure to properly engage with life, possibly carried forward from the narrowness of his upper-lower-middle-class origins, or, as Mr. Jacobs suggests, from his cosseting as an only child. Doctor Johnson set himself to learning Italian at the age of 73; that, I think, is a more admirable spirit. But never mind: