Living with a Dead Language Read online

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Ann Patty

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Excerpt from “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond” from Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Copyright 1931, © 1959, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

  “That it will never come again” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.

  Excerpts from “Burnt Norton” and “East Coker” from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company; copyright © renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1940 by T. S. Eliot; copyright © renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  Plaque from a tomb erected by the soldier Aurelius Achilles for his young son Valentinus; Roman, third century; marble. Columbarium plaque for the freedman Gaius Nonius Salvius; Roman, first-early third century; marble. Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York.

  Drawings here and here by Bernard Greenwald

  ISBN 9781101980224 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9781101980248 (e-book)

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ARGUMENTUM

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For my brother, David Terence Crowder

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  All translations from the Latin were done by me. I have not tried to render the Latin into poetic English. While my translations do not demonstrate the beauty of the Latin, they are, as much as I was able, faithful to the literal meanings.

  After five years of study, I am at best an amateur Latinist. Any errors of scholarship are mine alone and should not be attributed to my teachers.

  ARGUMENTUM

  What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,

  Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity

  And the wisdom of age? . . .

  The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,

  The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets

  —T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”

  Why on earth would you want to learn Latin at your age?” incredulous friends ask.

  I have a short answer and a longer answer. The short answer is because I love words and grammar. The longer answer is, I hope, more interesting and is why I wrote this book.

  Hebetude, in the stanza above, comes from the Latin hebetudo, from the verb hebeo, meaning “to be dull, sluggish, inactive.” The American Heritage Dictionary, my lexicographic bible for this book, defines hebetude as dullness of mind, mental lethargy.

  For thirty-five years, I’d been driven, constantly challenged, not only by my work as a New York editor and publisher, but also by class, competition, men, sex, motherhood, illness, and loss; by everything that is life in New York City.

  At fifty-eight, I stopped working and retreated to the well-earned “autumnal serenity” of my country house in upstate New York. But I was not serene. I was filled with anxiety. What was I to do with myself? How was I to fill the days, the weeks, the months, the years? I was lost in the woods.

  My mother was the same age, fifty-eight, when the last of my siblings moved away from home, and I had watched this once industrious, gregarious, lively woman sink into depression, drink, and a feeling of uselessness. She’d lost her metier of running a family of six, and she hadn’t the energy to pursue another. “I’m done,” she’d say, again and again. I believe she willed herself to die at age sixty-six.

  Why did I take up Latin at this late age? I did so not only to fight off hebetude but also to avoid becoming my mother. I had no idea, when I began my studies, that rather than dead secrets, I would discover vital constructs that would illuminate my past as well as my present, and enliven my future. That I would conjure the dead language of my mother to life.

  CHAPTER 1

  Rem tene, verba sequentur.

  Grasp the topic, the words will follow.

  —Cato the Elder

  Verba tene, res sequentur.

  Grasp the words, the topic will follow.

  —Umberto Eco

  It began with benevolence. I was in the seventh grade and my oldest brother, Terry, was home for Thanksgiving. He was in his freshman year in college at UC Berkeley, a short fifteen miles away on the map, but worlds distant from our home on Elysian Fields Drive in East Oakland. Along with such exotica as sautéed mushrooms, espresso coffee, and romaine lettuce, Terry brought home books and words. I don’t remember the context in which he used benevolence, but I don’t think I had ever heard such a sonorous four-syllable word used in speech before. I wanted that word, and ran off to my room to write it down and look up its meaning in the dictionary. I loved how it extended the concept of kindness into a worldview.

  I began collecting words. By ninth grade, I was using my new words in conversation whenever I could. This did not delight my classmates, and forced me to drop the phony stupid-girl act I had adopted in a futile quest for popularity. (In the midsixties, it was the height of uncool at my school to be smart. I still remember being mortified when a friend in eighth grade started telling everyone I got straight A’s on my report card.) I decided to become an intellectual, an important-sounding, polysyllabic concept.

  Books and words were in short supply in our household. Neither of my parents had gone to college, though my mother was an avid worker of crossword puzzles and often bragged that she was so good at them because she’d studied Latin all during her Catholic education. She’d even won the Latin medal when she graduated from high school. Latin, for her, was the expression of her intelligence. But her engagement with words was solitary, and she did not use Latin words or phrases around us, nor explain how they helped her solve the crossword clues.

  The only interest my father showed in words was in trying to rid us of certain verbal tics that annoyed him: Whenever one of us (too frequently) said, “Ya’know?” he would say, “No, I don’t know.” Whenever we said, “That’s true,” he would say, “No. True lives across the st
reet.” True being the name of the doctor’s wife in the pink ranch opposite our house.

  After benevolence, I was always on the alert for new words that came my way, and I’d add them to my growing list of words and their definitions. I’d test myself against the “It Pays to Enrich Your Word Power” pages in the monthly Reader’s Digest. Soon I knew all the words on offer there.

  During high school I spent most of my spare time reading, writing bad poetry, and discussing books (often recommended by Terry) with my best friend, Shannon. Words had become my other best friend: I spent hours following strings of synonyms through the dictionary. I became obsessed with suffixes, especially with words ending in -id. I loved the -id words: languid, pellucid, insipid, intrepid. They have an interior, intense quality; the -id ending carries the scent of moral or esthetic indulgence, whether good or bad. It forces the tongue to execute a dental stop to finish the word, as if it’s entitled. Even before I knew Freud’s id, and what it meant, I seemed to have intuited it in many -id words. Each seemed a quiddity (!) of a state of being, complete in itself. After several years, my collection of -id words was large enough to construct the House of Ids.

  The house above is not the original house, but one that has continued to expand over the years, with each new -id addition. I’ve gone as long as seven years between new -ids, but inevitably, much to my delight, I encounter a new one. At one point, I had to make rules: adjectives only (thus excluding the lovely noun caryatid and the exciting verbid); no scientific/chemical/geometric terms such as ootid, nitid, ovoid, and rhomboid. Since void was not only an adjective but also a noun and a verb, it was given pride of place—the central base of the house. The word walls protected me from the void, which, even when I was young, seemed to yap at my heels. I built words around it.

  Soon after I built the first House of Ids, I began constructing walls of -itys, -iles, -ines, and -asms, but those lists led nowhere compelling: It was becoming too big a collection, a word neighborhood organized by suffix, perhaps not the most useful of endeavors.

  Most, if not all, -id adjectives have cousin nouns ending in -or, though some had no remaining noun in usage (What is morbor? Or frigor? Or putror?). In fact, I later learned, many come from Latin adjectives ending in -idus (morbidus, frigidus, putridus) with the -us dropped. They were Latinate, to be sure, but as I had never learned Latin, I didn’t really know what Latinate meant. Dictionaries defined it as “a style derived from Latin,” but that was unhelpful. Without knowing Latin, how could I know its style?

  At my public junior high in Oakland, we were required to take a semester of Latin in the seventh grade; the second semester the girls were rewarded with homemaking (where we learned to make cotton aprons, bacon-and-cheese rollups, and three-layer gelatin salad) and the boys with woodshop (where they learned to make boxes and leaf-shaped trivets).

  Latin class was held in a “portable”—a beige wooden trailer of a classroom, one of several that stood in a double row at the back of the school, housing the overflow of the baby boom. The room was dark, stuffy, and usually overheated. Our teacher, Mr. Abayta, was Basque, a small, dark man, always formally dressed in a well-worn suit and tie. Not a typical Californian, he was known throughout the school for having bad breath, and each semester some rascally student or another would leave a large bottle of mouthwash on his desk. He was considered the weirdest, most boring teacher in the school, which I understand now was because of the combination of his old-world, dowdy appearance, his coming from a region that none of us had ever heard of, and his subject: Latin.

  The only thing I remember learning in that class was the first declension:

  agricola

  agricolae

  agricolae

  agricolarum

  agricolae

  agricolis

  agricolam

  agricolas

  agricola

  agricolis

  The class was rowdy and unengaged, and our tests were laughably easy. One consisted of the above written on the blackboard, and a new root word, puella, written on the test sheet, so we merely had to add the endings to the new root word. In other words, all you had to do was memorize the suffixes. Perhaps that is what had started me on the House of Ids.

  I’m sure I inherited my lifelong love of reading from my Indiana grandfather, Elias. He had read Latin—he even had some Latin books in his library, consisting of six glass-fronted bookshelves in the “music room,” which also held my grandmother’s piano, long unused due to her arthritis. It was a dark room, with tattered green blinds always closed, musty with the smell, I would later recognize, of old clothbound books. I slept on a cot there when we visited.

  Elias was a tall, slender, taciturn man with a full head of upright white hair, turquoise eyes, and one gold-rimmed front tooth. He was startlingly handsome, but cold. He was well respected in his tiny Indiana town, held an MA degree from Marion University, and had been a schoolteacher for a few years before he became the youngest councilman of the town and, soon after, a banker. “He once brought someone to give a talk at the town hall,” my dad told me, “and no one but Elias had any idea what the man was talking about.” My father did not get along with Elias. He found his father’s learned pursuits to be a waste of time. My father was focused on earning money. Though extremely bright, he seemed to have no interest in the life of the mind.

  I saw little of Elias on our summer visits. Every night he’d come home from his job at the bank, change into his farm clothes, and go out behind the barn to spend time with his hogs before dinner. He still favored the outhouse over the indoor bathroom, and washed at the slop sink in the mudroom rather than in the bathroom of the house. After dinner, he’d retire to his Lloyd Loom chair in the living room and read while the rest of us watched the tiny ovoid television in the corner.

  I remember only one conversation with him. It was about books. I was fifteen, lying on the high and uncomfortable “Indian” horsehair couch next to Grandpa’s chair. We were both reading. I was totally absorbed in The Gallery by John Horne Burns, which Terry had passed on to me. It consisted of linked stories about an American GI experiencing louche postwar Naples—the Galleria he frequented comprised bars, brothels, and not a few homosexuals, an entirely new concept to me. I was riveted. After a while, Elias put down his own book and asked if he could have a look at mine. It didn’t take him long to scan a few pages and pronounce the book trash. He was aghast at the language and subject matter. He told me I should not read such books, and went on to recommend I seek morally uplifting literature, such as Quo Vadis, and anything by Booth Tarkington. He then returned to his own book.

  Many years later, I finally read Quo Vadis. And it is indeed a moral tale dramatizing the powerful lure of the Christian spirit in decadent Rome. A fierce warrior falls obsessively in love with a young Christian woman, and finally follows her god as the way into her pants, at least from my cynical reading. That book was among the regrettably few I took from my grandfather’s effects after he died: I did not take his small Latin text of The Aeneid (an id!). I could not then imagine I’d ever read it. I did take three novels by Booth Tarkington, A Hoosier Chronicle by Meredith Nicholson, and a couple of old texts on personal hygiene. The People’s Common Sense Medical Adviser warned against the sin of onanism, which might lead to dereliction, madness, drug abuse, and premature death. It didn’t say anything about logophilia.

  I was pleasantly surprised, when I finally read Alice Adams and The Magnificent Ambersons, to see what a fine writer Booth Tarkington was: a sharp, sophisticated chronicler of class, a bit of Edith Wharton in the Midwest. My grandfather had surprised me, thirty years after his death.

  Through my studies in comparative literature at UC Berkeley, I becam
e fluent in French and discovered how the study of a foreign language increased one’s understanding of the grammar, syntax, and worldview of one’s native tongue—not to mention ramping up one’s interest in etymology. Just before I graduated, I met two women at a party in Sausalito who were book editors in New York. The clichéd lightbulb illuminated above my head. I should move to New York and get a job editing books. That’s what I knew and loved: books and language, my lifelines out of boredom and emptiness.

  I decided to follow those lifelines to Manhattan, where I found a job in paperback publishing. After a few driven years, I had worked my way up from starving editorial assistant to associate editor to senior editor. By the time I was twenty-seven years old, I had discovered V. C. Andrews, one of the most successful paperback writers of the 1980s, as well as a string of other best sellers. I parlayed that success into a hardcover imprint, the Poseidon Press, which allowed me to publish both commercial and literary titles.

  In my early New York years, I still kept company with the majority of American English speakers who confound the verbs to lay and to lie, and don’t distinguish less from fewer, or the objective from the nominative case (e.g., the all-too-common, ear-offending “between you and I”).

  My first husband, a midwestern aristo who was educated at private schools and Yale, shamed those misuses out of me. He was, as my mother perspicaciously declared, my graduate school. After I’d mastered usage, like most autodidacts I took up the cause of the Grammar Police, often to the point of obnoxiousness.

  Words were my way to becoming who I wanted to be, both in my own mind and in the world. I read those classics not included in my education and continued to hone my grammar and syntactical skills. Whenever I came across a word I didn’t know, I looked it up and added it to the word lists I still kept in the back of my journals. After ten years in publishing, I seldom ran across a word I didn’t know, but I was always glad when I did, especially when it was le mot juste.