On old English trail

RAMESH KUMAR

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of present day English usage and longing for a change. That’s when my nephew – another book aficionado like me - dropped in with a copy of The Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes, the old Sir Arthur Conan Doyle classic and left the 1,000-page paperback for me to browse. Before he could ignite his car on the driveway, I was on a different journey. Needless to say, it was a pleasant one.

“Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore, it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales,” tells the ace detective to his inseparable friend, Watson in The Adventures of Copper Beeches. Very simple construction and interesting insight into the human psyche. Though the collection I am browsing through is written in late 19th century and early 20th century, I am still able to relate and rejoice. Simple pleasure of reading simple English. Not the convoluted versions.

I longingly look at my compact bookshelves: there is Homer’s The Iliad; also Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment; Ben Johnson’s Three Comedies; Ernst Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea; Irving Wallace’s The Sunday Gentleman; several others including the complete works of my all-time favourite Frederick Forsythe (1970s), John Grisham (1990s), Dan Brown (2000s) and of course John G Ballard’s science fiction and the one and only Arthur C Clarke.

“How old are you?” the old man asked the bird. “Is this your first trip?” The bird looked at him when he spoke. He was too tired even to examine the line and he teered on it as his delicate feet gripped it fast.” This is a small piece of text that had been underlined sometime in 1982 when I had read this book. For whatever, this text has appealed to me and hence the underscoring. I tried to recollect why I did what I had done, but I could not. Maybe the dialogue between the old man and the unspeakable bird appeared funny to me. Perhaps his genuine concern for the weary bird did appeal to me. Whatever, the fact of the matter is that I liked it.
Incidentally, when I re-read this passage, I tried to visualize the scene in my mindscreen and see the fat old man and the bird seated nearby. Writers those days made the reader to live in a dream world. A lot was left to the imagination of the reader. Yes, there were no distractions in the form of television sets, multiplexes or the all-intrusive smart phones. Want to fantasize? Grab a book and reach for a corner. That’s what my grandfather used to tell me.

Even today my skeptical daughter asks me sweetly: “Are you sure you read all these books in the bookshelf? The emphasis is on the word “all”. She simply could not digest the fact that someone can spare time to “read” such lengthy novels. For the Gen Y, even the mobile texts or Short Message Services (SMSes) are too long. Nonetheless she had presented a set of classics from Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy bought out of her pocket money when she was in high school a couple of years ago.

Then the trouble started. She began to pester me daily with the inevitable question of when I would finish her presents. I was compelled to push aside those compelling ones to accommodate her wishes. Except one. Johnson’s Three Comedies became untouchable. I simply could not gather courage or strength to go beyond the twentieth line of Act One. Why? “With adoration, thee, and every relic of sacred treasure in this blessed room. Well did wise poets by the glorious name title that age which they would have the best…” were the last Johnson lines I had read in my life. I was taught in school that he was the closest rival to Shakespeare. No way. The point is that there were dull writers even in those days.



This appeared in OMAN TRIBUNE, March 26, 2010